Leftovers

• Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] R&B singer D'Angelo, 51, dies after battle with cancer

  He garnered enormous praise for his debut disc "Brown Sugar" released in 1995, as well as his album "Voodoo," released in 2000.

  He then won the Grammys for best R&B album and best male R&B performance for his song, "Untitled (How Does It Feel)," that almost overshadowed his album. He filmed the video shirtless, throwing his fans into a tizzy.

  D'Angelo was partnered to R&B singer Angie Stone in the 1990s, with whom he also produced many songs. They had a son together, the artist Swayvo Twain, born Michael Archer Jr.

• The Guardian UK ☛ Experience: I am the air guitar world champion

  The air guitar community is like a family. Our motto is “Make air, not war”. It sounds silly, but it’s a real philosophy. People come from all over the world, and everyone is supportive and encouraging. Before you go on stage, every competitor comes and hugs you. Then for 60 seconds you’re allowed to be free, silly, the biggest rock star in the world.

• Phil Gyford ☛ My first months in cyberspace

  In early 1995 I was 23 and living in a terraced house in Bristol with four friends, about 18 months after leaving university. I’d given up on trying to be an illustrator, had a bit of freelance work making models for Aardman Animations, and would soon be the only one of my friends not to have permanent work. I was increasingly interested in technology and this brand new thing: Internet.

  The previous year I’d discovered Wired magazine, then only available at a handful of shops imported from the US. On the rare occasions the mainstream media mentioned the [Internet] it was explained as something like, “an international network of computers”, and Wired was a revelation to me, bringing together lots of things I was interested in. There are other people who get this!

• Sean Conner ☛ I don't think it's news to anyone out there that one should avoid Network Solutions for domain registration and probably for anything else as well

  The rest of my domains have been transfered away from Network Solutions. The process wasn't hard. It wasn't even really tedious, it just took a bunch of waiting.

• Sean Conner ☛ So account deletion at Network Solutions is a bit more nuanced than I was led to believe

  So they move up from “clown show” to “annoying to use.”

• Manuel Moreale ☛ On concrete examples

  The reason why I almost always use made-up examples in my blog posts is because the example itself is not important. It’s just a tool to illustrate a broader point. But using an actual example carries the risk of distracting people into thinking that the topic of the example itself is what matters. And that’s very rarely the case here on my blog. This is because I’m more interested in what I can only describe as meta-problems: I’m not interested in the topic that’s being discussed; I’m more interested in how we can make sure the discussion itself can happen and be productive, regardless of what’s being discussed.

• TPM Media LLC ☛ What Made Blogging Different?

  Whether I like it or not, the first line of my obituary will probably be that I was the founding editor of Gawker.com, the flagship site of Gawker Media, a sprawling blog network that was put out of business by Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan in 2016. Nick Denton and I started Gawker in 2002 and I left in late 2003 to go to New York Magazine, so I missed some of Gawker’s greatest hits and biggest misses, but the early ‘00s were what I now think of as the heyday of blogging. (Talking Points Memo was started in 2000.)

• Ben Werdmuller ☛ What Made Blogging Different?

  Blogging was a different medium - and there's still a need for it more than ever.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Putting the www back in URLs

  But I think we lost something when we parted ways with our www friend. I only realised recently that its removal coincided with the consolidation of the web into a few large players. We lost the www, but we also lost the web as a concept. Rather than a mesh of interconnected nodes spanning the globe, we now have a few gigaton silos.

• Daniel Estévez ☛ 10 years of blogging

  Since I started the blog, I have tried to publish at least one post every month, and I have managed. Sometimes I have forced myself to write something just to be up to the mark, but more often than not the posts have been something I really wanted to write down and release to the world regardless of a monthly tally. I plan to continue blogging in the same way, and no doubt that the contents will keep evolving over time, as we all evolve as persons during our lifetime. Who knows what the future will bring.

• Science

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Ex-OSTP director: Trump funding cuts are ‘assault’ on public research investment

    For Prabhakar, R&D spending has been a frequent topic in public remarks. During her time leading OSTP, Prabhakar similarly spoke about how a lack of public research funding for AI stands in the way of the technology reaching its potential, and, before the end of the Biden administration, warned of potential R&D cuts under the then-incoming president. On Wednesday, she reiterated those positions, and indicated damage has already been done.

    “Even if we magically reversed all the destruction today, we still are going to have many, many, many years of impact down the road,” Prabhakar said.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Time crystals could power future quantum computers

    "Perpetual motion is possible in the quantum realm so long as it is not disturbed by external energy input, such as by observing it. That is why a time crystal had never before been connected to any external system," Mäkinen says. "But we did just that and showed, also for the first time, that you can adjust the crystal's properties using this method."

    The physicists used radio waves to pump magnons into a helium-3 superfluid cooled to near-absolute zero. Magnons are quasiparticles, i.e. groups of particles behaving as if they were individual particles instead. When the team turned off the pump, the magnons formed a time crystal that stayed in motion for unprecedentedly long, lasting up to 108 cycles or several minutes before fading down to a level the researchers could no longer observe.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ World’s first linked time crystal could supercharge quantum computers

    Time crystals were first proposed by Frank Wilczek, the 2012 Nobel Laureate in Physics. He proposed quantum systems like a group of particles that could construct themselves in time instead of space.

    Wilczek had called them time crystals, defining them by their lowest possible energy state, which perpetually repeats movements without external energy input.

• Career/Education

  • The Indiana Capital Chronicle ☛ Most Indiana kids who need after-school programs can’t access them, new report finds

    After-school programs range from academic tutoring and STEM clubs to sports, arts and mentoring activities that give students a “safe, structured” place to spend time after the school day ends.

  • California State University Northridge ☛ Bewitching books to read this October

    These 15 books are sure to help you dive into the autumn mood. From light hearted romance to dark vampiric love, these are the perfect books to light a candle and cozy up with. Please check trigger and content warnings before reading.

  • The Nation ☛ Why Did UChicago Destroy the Humanities?

    For most of its history, the university as an institution was a public good. But thanks in part to the good old boys in the UChicago economics department, it is now little more than a generator of real and human capital alike. An education is no longer primarily about the perpetuation of human knowledge, but rather an investment one makes (with increasingly diminishing returns) in order to secure higher wages. Meanwhile, university administrators continue to make things worse for students and researchers by cutting majors, recklessly expanding the student population, threatening to teach languages via ChatGPT, and immiserating an army of underpaid adjuncts.

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ CNI at EDUCAUSE Annual Conference

    CNI Executive Director Kate Zwaard will speak on how CNI’s work fosters collaborations that are critical for navigating the challenges facing research, scholarship, and higher education; provide an overview of current CNI initiatives; and explore, as well as solicit feedback on, CNI’s possible future programmatic priorities, such as cybersecurity, infrastructure, and accessibility.

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ VCF Midwest was even better than I expected

    Earlier this year, I inherited a bunch of old Macs and computer parts, including the PowerBook 520 pictured above. And, for the past three years I've been trying to visit VCF Midwest up in Chicago, where there's this odd blend of old computers, radio, broadcast gear... Honestly, it's hard to pin down exactly what it is.

    And I also had no idea how overwhelming the two-day event would be. Overwhelmingly awesome, that is.

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Designing Libraries Conference – Selected Videos Available

    University of Rochester, host of the recent Designing Libraries XII Conference, has made videos of 3 sessions available. They are: [...]

  • Calvin University ☛ KnightCite

    KnightCite now uses APA 7 and MLA 9.

• Hardware

  • University of Toronto ☛ NVMe SSDs and the question of how fast they can flush writes to flash

    Also, apparently the real bottleneck in writing to the actual flash is finding erased blocks or, if you're unlucky, having to wait for blocks to be erased. Actual writes to the flash chips may be able to go at something close to the PCIe 3.0 (or better) bandwidth, which would help explain the Tom's Hardware large write figures (cf).

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-13 [Older] 'No smoking' in Southeast Asia: A region quits tobacco

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] India's cough syrup tragedy shows huge drug safety gaps

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] Joe Biden begins radiation treatment for prostate cancer

  • Vox ☛ US farmers are struggling to sell soybeans. Here’s how to think about the trade war.

    When delicate diplomatic relationships like these become strained — like, say, when the head of a major soy-producing country starts a trade war for no reason — export-dependent industries suffer. That’s the position that US soybean farmers now find themselves in. Beijing placed steep tariffs on American soybeans this year in retaliation for President Donald Trump’s aggressive tariffs, vaporizing US soy sales to China. The total value of American soy exports from the first half of this year are down nearly a quarter from 2024, and, according to the most recent US Department of Agriculture data, Chinese traders have placed zero orders for US soy from the current harvest year, which started September 1. (By this time last year, they’d already ordered millions of tons.)

  • Futurism ☛ Popular Meal Replacement Drink Contains So Much Lead That Doctors Are Aghast

    But these dietary supplements have an extraordinarily dirty secret. A new analysis from the watchdog group Consumer Reports found many popular protein powders contain unsafe levels of lead — with over two-thirds of the 23 products tested containing more of the toxic metal in a single serving than the daily safe level for consumption, based on the group’s own safety’s standards.

  • Mandy Brown ☛ We were angry

    Calls for healing and for reparation are the same call: to heal a wound is to account for the wounding. And anger is the appropriate response when that accountability is withheld. Anger, like love, can be useful: it is a shield against further harm, a defense against erasure. It is a weapon that tears down the curtains of myth and sentiment. It is the refusal to be forgotten, even as each new generation tries so hard to forget.

• Proprietary

  • Dark Reading ☛ Supply Chain Risks Lurking in VS Code Marketplaces

    Organizations have accidentally exposed secrets across Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) marketplaces, posing significant risks not just to the organizations themselves but also to the greater software supply chain.

  • Wiz Inc ☛ Supply Chain Risk in VSCode Extension Marketplaces

    Each leaked secret is a result of publisher error. However, after reporting this issue via Microsoft's Security Response Center (MSRC), Wiz has been collaborating with Microsoft on platform level improvements to provide guardrails against future secrets leakage in the VSCode Marketplace. Together, we've also launched a notification campaign to alert impacted publishers and help them address these vulnerabilities.

  • Wired ☛ Why the F5 Hack Created an ‘Imminent Threat’ for Thousands of Networks

    F5, a Seattle-based maker of networking software, disclosed the breach on Wednesday. F5 said a “sophisticated” threat group working for an undisclosed nation-state government had surreptitiously and persistently dwelled in its network over a “long term.” Security researchers who have responded to similar intrusions in the past took the language to mean the hackers were inside the F5 network for years.

  • Dark Reading ☛ F5 BIG-IP Environment Breached by Nation-State Actor

    Application security giant F5 disclosed a data breach this week in which a nation-state threat actor gained persistent, long-term access to the company's product development environment and engineering knowledge management platforms for its flagship BIG-IP application delivery and security products, before exfiltrating data.

  • The Record ☛ CISA warns of ‘significant’ threat to federal networks after nation-state hackers stole F5 source code, undisclosed bug info

    “A nation-state cyber threat actor poses an imminent risk, with the potential to exploit vulnerabilities in F5 products to gain unauthorized access to embedded credentials and Application Programming Interface (API) keys,” the agency said.

  • The Register UK ☛ Cisco faces Senate scrutiny over firewall flaws

    Cassidy's letter [PDF] to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins demands clarity around the company's knowledge of and response to the critical flaws – namely CVE-2025-20333 and CVE-2025-20362 – that prompted the US government to issue an emergency patching directive for federal civilian agencies.

  • The Record ☛ Cisco must share more information about effects of severe bugs on businesses, senator says

    U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy wrote to Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins about CVE-2025-30333 and CVE-2025-20362, vulnerabilities that caused alarm three weeks ago when federal civilian agencies were given just one day to address them.

    Cassidy, chairman of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, noted reports that “at least one federal agency has already been breached as a result of this vulnerability.”

  • ESI Media Inc ☛ Activision Blizzard Battle.net workers unionise [Ed: Microsoft rebellion]

    The newly organised units include the engineers, designers and support staff who maintain Battle.net — the platform powering esports competitions for Overwatch 2, Hearthstone and StarCraft II. Workers voted either through union authorisation cards or an online portal, with representation split between CWA Local 9510 in Irvine, California and CWA Local 6215 in Austin, Texas.

  • The Gamer ☛ Game Dev Union Asks For More Scrutiny On Saudi-Led Buyout Of EA In Fear Of Mass Layoffs

    Last month it was announced that EA, one of the biggest companies in the gaming industry would be acquired for a sum of $55 billion. As expected, this created ripples across the entire industry, given how wide EA's reach is, and how many studios it owns. For instance, Bioware employees are already worried for their jobs as the consortium the Saudi PIF, along with Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners.

    Given the magnitude of this deal, US government officials have already questioned the deal due to its links with the PIF. It seems developers within the industry are also worried about the possibility of mass layoffs that could come with it. The Communications Workers of America union has asked for more scrutiny on the deal.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Python in Plain English ☛ The Death of the Internet: How AI Slop Is Drowning Human Creativity

      AI-generated “slop” is flooding the web. It looks human-made but isn’t. From fake news sites to AI-written research papers, synthetic content is slowly replacing creativity, accuracy, and trust. Kurzgesagt’s new video “The Death of the Internet — The AI Slop Crisis” breaks down how this happened and what we can still do about it.

    • SBS ☛ Kathryn lost her banking job to a chatbot. She just confronted her CBA bosses

      "Not all the jobs that were offered back were the same job that these people were made redundant from," Sullivan said on Wednesday at the bank's annual general meeting at the Gabba in Brisbane.

    • Futurism ☛ People Are Using OpenAI's Sora to Mock the Dead

      Besides blatantly copyright-infringing videos of SpongeBob SquarePants cooking up blue crystals or entire episodes of South Park, users found that it’s never been easier to generate photorealistic AI slop videos puppeting the likenesses of deceased celebrities to mock them years or decades after their deaths.

      It’s a disappointing new low, infiltrating an already heavily slop-derived online hellscape.

    • Futurism ☛ It Sounds Like OpenAI Really, Really Messed Up With Hollywood

      All that blatant disregard for copyright has seemingly put Hollywood agencies and studios on the back foot. Major talent agencies told the Hollywood Reporter that OpenAI had been “purposely misleading” them in behind-the-scenes communications.

      According to THR‘s reporting, the company told some rightsholders that they’d have to opt out of having their work appearing on the app, while telling others the opposite.

    • Hollywood Reporter ☛ How Sam Altman Played Hollywood With OpenAI's Sora 2

      No one knew what was going on. It was late September, just days before OpenAI rolled out a new social media app for its video generator, Sora, and whispers were swirling of changes that would undercut Hollywood. A major talent agency, which learned of the upcoming news through the grapevine, wondered why its C-suite hadn’t heard from the Sam Altman-led start-up yet, according to an agency exec involved with the talks. The talent firm reached out.

      The first round of talks between the two sides was contentious. OpenAI was “purposely misleading,” says this agency exec who was part of the heated back-and-forth. The tech giant personnel leading the discussions took an upbeat tone, repeatedly talking up an opt-in regime that would protect the agency’s clients against the misuse of their intellectual property and likenesses.

    • Task And Purpose ☛ Army promotion boards will use AI to 'augment' selection process

      But the Army hopes the algorithms it’s developing can screen for soldiers who meet prerequisites for promotion, like certain schooling and job history, so time isn’t wasted on a soldier who is not going to be eligible for promotion.

    • 404 Media ☛ Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors

      The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, says that it’s seeing a significant decline in human traffic to the online encyclopedia because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking through to the site.

      The Wikimedia Foundation said that this poses a risk to the long term sustainability of Wikipedia.

    • 404 Media ☛ Reddit's AI Suggests Users Try Heroin

      AI-generated Reddit Answers are giving bad advice in medical subreddits and moderators can’t opt out.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The AI that we’ll have after AI

      At $45b/year (an inflated number, remember!) it's going to take them a long time to recoup the hundreds of billions of dollars they've spent so far. But they don't have a long time: the massive GPUs that power AI's "foundation models" and cost six- or seven-figures each burn out remarkably quickly. The companies that buy these GPUs claim they'll last five years (and depreciate them over that schedule); however, this is accounting fraud, because in reality, these GPUs have a duty-cycle that's more like two to three years: [...]

    • The New Stack ☛ How Faster Coding Shifts the Bottleneck to Debugging

      Here’s a hint: Generating code isn’t the biggest barrier to developer productivity, and evaluating the quality of code that AI generates is a bigger factor than most expect.

    • BoingBoing ☛ OpenAI losing 3x what it makes. Will porn save it?

      OpenAI is valued at $500bn and has committed to spending more than $1tn on datacenters and GPUs and what-have-you in pursuit of all the things AI is good for. But it currently tallies only $13bn in annual recurring revenue and is losing about three times what it already spends, writes Thomas Claburn: "ChatGPT is so popular that almost no one will pay for it."

    "Firstly, nobody used AI very much — 1% of student web-browsing was AI, 0.44% of the general public study. Secondly, the AI users were not very nice people: [...]" ☛ https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/10/15/ai-is-not-popular-and-ai-users-are-unpleasant-asshats/ | Source: Pivot to AI

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI is not popular, and AI users are unpleasant asshats

      Firstly, nobody used AI very much — 1% of student web-browsing was AI, 0.44% of the general public study. Secondly, the AI users were not very nice people: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • EFF ☛ No One Should Be Forced to Conform to the Views of the State

      Should you have to think twice before posting a protest flyer to your Instagram story? Or feel pressure to delete that bald JD Vance meme that you shared? Now imagine that you could get kicked out of the country—potentially losing your job or education—based on the Trump administration’s dislike of your views on social media.

      That threat to free expression and dissent is happening now, but we won’t let it stand.

    • Vox ☛ Instagram’s new PG-13 Teen Accounts take a page from TV history

      These developments dovetail nicely with the argument that Derek Thompson made a few days before Instagram’s announcement: “Everything is television.” Citing an FTC filing, he points out that only 7 percent of users’ time on Instagram involves consuming content from people you know. Meanwhile, podcasts are on Netflix, and AI can create an infinite circuit of slop to tap your consciousness into. “Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation,” writes Thompson.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Walrus ☛ The Cyberattack That Stole 280,000 Identities—and Showed How Easily We Can Be Duped

      They never got the chance. Just three weeks after the proposal was submitted, [crackers] struck. But not to sabotage infrastructure. Instead, they made off with the personal data of at least 280,000 customers: emails, phone numbers, home addresses, bank details—enough for determined malcontents to impersonate individuals and wreak havoc. Then came the shakedown. The company insists it didn’t pay, and some of the plundered information was posted online. A few weeks after the attack was made public, a Nova Scotia couple, and clients of the utility, logged into their bank account and found $30,000 gone.

    • Threat Source ☛ Ransomware attacks and how victims respond

      Consequently, I am endlessly academically fascinated at stress responses and how humans… well… human during moments of adversity. A ransomware attack most certainly qualifies as adverse, and my sympathies are with you if you’ve ever had to endure one. But there’s a science to both the personal response, and the business response and its impacts writ large.

    • [Old] The United Kingdom ☛ The experiences and impacts of ransomware attacks on individuals and organisations - GOV.UK

      Ransomware is a type of cyber crime - more specifically, it is a type of malware deployed by cyber criminals to block access to a user’s computer systems, or to encrypt data and files to prevent access, and/or facilitate theft of data held on systems or devices. Offenders demand that victims pay a ransom (often in cryptocurrency) to regain access to the computer or data or to prevent data being leaked online. Ransomware is viewed by the National Crime Agency as the greatest serious and organised cyber crime threat, the largest cyber security threat, and also poses a risk to the UK’s national security It is viewed as one of the most harmful cyber threats due to the associated financial losses, theft of potentially sensitive data and intellectual property, as well as significant service disruption. It can impact individuals, businesses and also public sector organisations (see NSA 2024 - Cyber Crime - National Crime Agency).

    • IT Wire ☛ Attacks on Australia’s critical infrastructure double

      The figure was cited in the ASD’s just released Annual Cyber Threat Report for 2024-25. It identified healthcare as being critical infrastructure particularly badly impacted by cybercrime, saying: “Malicious cyber actors were successful in 95 percent of all healthcare and social assistance sector incidents that ASD’s ACSC [Australian Cyber Security Centre] responded to in FY2024–25, in comparison to nearly 52 percent of incidents across all sectors.

    • The Record ☛ PowerSchool [cracker] sentenced to 4 years in prison

      Personal data, including Social Security numbers, special education status and medical conditions for more than 60 million students and 9 million teachers, were exposed in the hack, which became public in January.

    • Security Week ☛ Four-Year Prison Sentence for PowerSchool [Cracker]

      PowerSchool in May confirmed paying a ransom to prevent the data leak and ensure data erasure, but the attackers did not delete the stolen information and started extorting school districts in the US and Canada.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Capita Ransomware Fine Marks UK’s Largest Breach Penalty

      Capita has been handed a record ransomware fine of £14 million by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) after a 2023 cyberattack exposed the personal data of 6.6 million people. The Capita ransomware fine marks the largest penalty ever issued by the ICO for a ransomware-related breach and highlights serious shortcomings in the company’s cybersecurity defences.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Pivot to AI ☛ It’s trivial to prompt-inject Github’s AI Copilot Chat

    Mayraz then put the command inside a comment in the pull request. Then it’s not visible to the user — but Copilot Chat can read it just fine, and act on it.

    Next, Mayraz made Copilot Chat suggest the user should install an evil software package. That worked too.

• Security

  • Bloomberg ☛ 2025-10-08 [Older] Salesforce Tells Clients It Won’t Pay Hackers for Extortion

  • ABC ☛ 2025-10-08 [Older] Qantas says ‘legal protections in place’ as ScatteredLAPSUS$Hunters group threatens to release personal data

  • Security Affairs ☛ 2025-10-08 [Older] DragonForce, LockBit, and Qilin, a new triad aims to dominate the ransomware landscape

  • 2025-10-09 [Older] Major hospitals hit by cyberattacks, patient data sold on hacker forums

  • HackRead ☛ 2025-10-09 [Older] SonicWall Says All Firewall Backups Were Accessed by Hackers

  • J D Supra LLC ☛ 2025-10-09 [Older] Missing Risk Analysis Cost NY CPA Firm $175K—But Not the Big Group Whose Data Was Breached in 2019

  • 2025-10-10 [Older] Telstra Denies Scattered Spider Data Breach Claims Amid Ransom Threats

  • 2025-10-10 [Older] Don’t breathe that sigh of relief just yet: BreachForums is gone, but the Salesforce leak site isn’t

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Vishnu Haridas ☛ On Storing TOTP in Password Managers

      After a recent conversation on Twitter, I discovered that many people store their TOTP (Time-based OTPs) alongside their passwords in password managers.

      My argument is that this practice undermines the very essence of two-factor authentication (2FA) and is essentially "1FA" in disguise.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] EU delays 'chat control' law over privacy concerns

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft adds always-listening, always-watching Copilot

      While voice-control is a boon for accessibility, we'd have to wonder if there are that many people out there who really want to interact with their PCs in this way. Imagine the increase in volume in open-plan offices, or some jerk saying: "Hey Copilot, format C, goodbye," as they walk past a victim's cubicle. We jest, of course, and at least the feature is opt-in.

    • Wired ☛ How ByteDance Made China’s Most Popular AI Chatbot

      Doubao offers users a little bit of everything—it’s like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and more in a single app. It can chat via text, audio, and video; it can generate images, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts, and five-second videos; it allows anyone to customize an AI agent for specific scenarios and host it on Doubao’s platform for others to use. One of the most important things about the app, however, is that it’s deeply integrated with Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, allowing it to both attract users from the video platform and send traffic back to it.

    • Android Police ☛ Google confirms Ask Photos snub for Texas and Illinois users

      It's worth noting Ask Photos isn't enabled by default. It requires five different conditions to be met to become available. These are: [...]

    • Houston Chronicle ☛ Pixel 10 Ask Photos skips Texas and Illinois with no reason

      Legal experts say that without answers from Google, it’s a puzzle as to why the feature has been withheld. But they also say both states have strict rules about how data is used, stored and retained, and Google allegedly has run afoul of Texas’ statutes in the past. In June, Google paid $1.375 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by the Texas Attorney General’s Office regarding the company’s collection of “biometric identifiers, including voiceprints and records of face geometry.”

    • EDRI ☛ Meta must respect users’ choice

      Bits of Freedom sued Meta for breaching the Digital Services Act (DSA), a key European legislation designed to give users more autonomy and control over the large online platforms. One of the core elements of the DSA is that users must have greater influence over the content they encounter online.

    • The Register UK ☛ Larry Ellison's latest craze: Vectorizing all the customers

      No, Larry, not nearly cynical enough. A real cynic might be able to imagine what Oracle could do with all that customer data once it is mangled through a massive predictive machine. Might Oracle want to figure out how to maximize revenue and margin from each customer? Might it want to identify which customers would cough up more license fees after a friendly software audit? The possibilities are endless.

    • Wired ☛ When Face Recognition Doesn’t Know Your Face Is a Face

      As more staff members at the DMV were called to help, Gardiner says she started to believe the rejected photos were being caused by her facial difference. The camera system didn’t seem to work for her, she says. “It was humiliating and weird. Here’s this machine telling me that I don’t have a human face,” Gardiner says.

  • Confidentiality

    • ITV ☛ 2025-10-07 [Older] U.K.: Two arrested over cyber attack which stole thousands of nursery children’s data

    • 2025-10-07 [Older] Harris Health discloses insider-wrongdoing breach that went on for a decade

    • 2025-10-07 [Older] California hospitals can escape fines if workers expose patient info

    • 2025-10-07 [Older] Developing: Salesforce data leak site being seized? Looks like it.

    • 2025-10-08 [Older] US law firm with major political clients hacked in spying spree linked to China

    • 2025-10-09 [Older] California’s New Delete Request Tool Impacts Data Brokers and Residents

    • 2025-10-09 [Older] California Sets 30 Day Deadline for Data Breach Notifications

    • 2025-10-09 [Older] BreachForums Seized — Again!

    • 2025-10-09 [Older] Policyholder Plot Twist: Cyber Insurer Sues Policyholder’s Cyber Pros

    • 2025-10-10 [Older] Watsonville Community Hospital had a data breach — or two. It would be helpful to know which.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] Iran jails 2 French citizens on 'spying' charges

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] Israeli gymnasts excluded from worlds after CAS rejects appeals

  • Papers Please ☛ USCIS still wants to stalk US residents and visitors on social media

    Doubling down on its attack on anonymity and disregarding comments from the Identity Project and more than a thousand other organizations and individuals, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has renewed its request for blanket authorization to require applicants for US visas, visa-free entry, residency, or citizenship to disclose every social media platform and identifier they have used in the last five years.

    Today the Identity Project and Restore The Fourth (RT4) filed comments opposing this USCIS proposal for dragnet social media surveillance of foreign visitors and residents and the US citizens with whom they communicate and associate on social media.

    USCIS made no significant changes in response to the first round of public comments and ignored most of the issues we and others raised, including the ways that social media surveillance would impact First Amendment rights of assembly and association.

  • The Atlantic ☛ If the Voting Rights Act Falls

    The Supreme Court appears ready to hobble the landmark civil-rights law. What does that mean for Black voters, democracy, and control of Congress?

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ At least 15 'No Kings' protests planned across Alabama Saturday

    In a statement on Wednesday from 50501 Freedom Fighters, one of the partners for the No Kings demonstrations, said the protests are a part of a nationwide campaign to reject President Donald Trump’s “multi-faceted attack on the democratic process.”

  • Wired ☛ One Republican Now Controls a Huge Chunk of US Election Infrastructure

    The news last week that Dominion Voting Systems was purchased by the founder and CEO of Knowink, a Missouri-based maker of electronic poll books, has left election integrity activists confused over what, if anything, this could mean for voters and the integrity of US elections.

  • Mike Brock ☛ History Will Not Wake You Gently

    He estimates we won’t fully grasp the democratic decline that began in the early 2010s until the middle 2030s. By then, the choice will have been made through accommodation—each violation normalized, each evil deemed sufferable, each step toward authoritarianism accepted because the alternative seemed too frightening to face. The slap arrives not from outside but from the accumulated weight of our own indifference.

    Ignatieff’s essay catalogs what we’re losing in real time: officers of law who owe allegiance to law rather than the president who appointed them, police who wear badges and keep faces uncovered so citizens can lodge complaints, the requirement for warrants before entry into homes, the right of institutions to govern themselves free from political control. These aren’t abstract principles—they’re the concrete infrastructure of democratic life that most of us never thought about until we watched them systematically dismantled.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ 'No Kings' Protest Organizers Aren't Scared of Trump, GOP

    It may all come to a head this weekend as millions across the country prepare to march in the second iteration of the “No Kings” protest. Over 2,500 events have been planned across the United States and abroad, with some of the largest expected to take place in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and, of course, Washington, D.C.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ I tracked down one of Europe’s most wanted people smugglers

    Ali, 37, is alleged to have smuggled migrants across the world. He is also accused of leading dozens to their deaths, specifically on a boat from Mauritania to Spain where migrants were tortured, murdered and thrown overboard.

  • Le Monde ☛ Revealed: Group 78, the secret US task force fighting cybercriminals

    Police officials had come from across Europe to The Hague, Netherlands, gathering at the headquarters of Europol, the agency that coordinates law enforcement cooperation among European police forces, in early November 2024. There, they were meeting to secretly work together on a highly sensitive investigation into Black Basta, an elite gang of cybercriminals.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ How World War II Influenced 'The Chronicles of Narnia,' C.S. Lewis' Beloved Fantasy Novels

    Released in the United Kingdom 75 years ago, on October 16, 1950, C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has sold more than 115 million copies globally and been translated into around 60 languages. For all its timeless appeal, however, the fantasy classic—the first book published in Lewis’ best-selling The Chronicles of Narnia series—is grounded in a real-world history of wartime evacuation and survival.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Despite Taliban amnesty declaration, killings of US allies persist

    Haidari’s case is just one of dozens of killings of Afghan forces documented in a new investigation demonstrating that the dangers faced by the U.S.’ former allies in Afghanistan persist until today.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Great Moral Inversion

    Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark identifies something crucial: “We are a decade into Trumpism. These Young Republicans have never known any other type of Republicanism... By 2032 we’re talking about a full generation of Republicans who only understand politics in the context of an authoritarian project.”

    This isn’t individual failure—it’s systematic socialization where Nazi sympathies are baseline rather than disqualifying. These operatives watched Trump mock disabled reporters, POWs, Gold Star families—without consequence. Watched Republican leaders condemn then endorse Trump—learning principles are performative. Watched January 6th attackers get pardoned—learning tribal violence is acceptable. Watched constitutional conservatives either lose everything or accommodate—learning power matters more than principle.

    For seven months, Nazi sympathies, Holocaust jokes, white supremacist codes, slavery celebration. Not one objection. Why? Because objecting marks you outside the tribe. As weak. As politically correct. As someone who hasn’t learned that politics is power, domination, winning by any means. The person who says “this is wrong” isn’t displaying courage—they’re displaying tribal disloyalty, failing to understand that public values are performance and what matters is loyalty when cameras are off.

  • The Nation ☛ The Right Is Lying About Left-Wing Violence

    Portlanders deploying inflatable animal costumes, a brass band, mass ukulele renditions of “This Land Is Your Land,” naked bike rides, and other tactics in their ICE protests are undermining the Trump administration’s lurid claims that Portland, Oregon, is a “war-torn” city under siege by a violent left. It’s hard to portray someone dancing in an inflatable frog or chicken costume as a terrorist.

    This, of course, hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from officially designating “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem even claimed to have arrested in Portland “one of the girlfriends of one of the founders of Antifa,” which has never been a real organization, just a nickname for antifascists. Girlfriend of founder of imaginary group is, well, a very Kristi Noem category. But the right has been claiming the left is violent even longer than it’s been hallucinating about antifa. And because these claims are often used to justify crackdowns and suppression of First Amendment rights, they’re worth unpacking, especially as we head into the huge #NoKings demonstrations on Saturday.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Recap: Highlights from the US Army’s 2025 conference in Washington

    Army officials attending the conference emphasized the service’s need for transformation as the technologies, policies and spending at the core of these conflicts intersect with the Army’s global mission.

  • JURIST ☛ UK introduces tougher English language requirements for migrants

    The UK government on Tuesday announced English language requirements for migrants under new immigration reforms introduced this year and described the changes as a means of replacing “Britain’s failed immigration system with one that is controlled, selective and fair.”

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] Death threats force far-right Wilders to suspend campaign

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] Colombia: Venezuelan activists attacked in targeted shooting

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-12 [Older] Philippines says China rammed their ship in South China Sea

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-12 [Older] Madagascar: Elite army unit turns on President Rajoelina

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-13 [Older] Madagascar's president has left the country after weeks of youth protests, reports say

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] Madagascar protests: Army takes charge after president flees

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] Nord Stream attack: Polish PM Tusk against extradition to Germany

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-12 [Older] Pakistan seals Afghan border crossings amid clashes

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-12 [Older] Hungary tries German activist despite rule of law concerns

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] North Korea displays long-range missile at parade

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-13 [Older] As Pakistan battles Afghan Taliban, fears of major war rise

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] Pakistani Taliban claim attacks in northwest that killed 23

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] Several people injured after shooting in town in central Germany

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] 'No survivors' found after Tennessee plant blast

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] Germany: Body of missing boy Fabian found in forest

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] Germany news: Coalition frictions open on military service

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-12 [Older] Zelenskyy and Cheeto Mussolini talk amid possible Tomahawk delivery

    • Atlantic Council ☛ How the US and Europe can deter and respond to Russia's chemical, biological, and nuclear threats

      Russia will likely continue using chemical weapons in Europe in a range of scenarios over the next five to ten years, particularly if doing so undermines Alliance unity and disrupts Ukraine’s integration into the West. Based on its recent behavior, however, Russia appears less likely to use biological weapons. Furthermore, while Russia has threatened nuclear use, a large-scale nuclear attack appears unlikely.

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Trump says he is planning to meet Putin in Budapest

      US President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he would meet Vladimir Putin in Budapest to discuss an end to the war in Ukraine, following what he described as a “very productive” phone call with the Russian leader. “President Putin and I will then meet in an agreed upon location, Budapest, Hungary, to see if we can bring this ‘inglorious’ War between Russia and Ukraine to an end. President Zelenskyy and I will be meeting tomorrow, in the Oval Office, where we will discuss my conversation with President Putin, and much more,” the president said on Truth Social. The call, which a Kremlin aide said lasted nearly two-and-a-half hours, appeared to soften Trump’s tone towards Moscow and was followed by announcements that a delegation led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio would hold talks with Russian officials. Trump later told reporters he expected to meet Putin “within two weeks or so.” 

      The US President suggested the success of recent diplomacy in the Middle East could help efforts to halt the fighting in Europe, and said talks touched on trade and the possible future supply of long-range weapons. “President Putin congratulated me and the United States on the Great Accomplishment of Peace in the Middle East, something that, he said, has been dreamed of for centuries. I actually believe that the Success in the Middle East will help in our negotiation in attaining an end to the War with Russia/Ukraine,” he wrote in his social media post. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the administration would provide “more details as soon as we can.” 

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Medium ☛ I Analyzed 200+ E‑Commerce Sites, and 73% of Their Traffic Was Fake

    Instead, I built a janky little tracking script. It was nothing fancy. It just watched how users actually interacted with a page: mouse jiggles, scrolling speed, the precise time between clicks, the tiny, chaotic imperfections that make you look human versus the cold, sterile perfection of a robot pretending to be one.

    I installed it on their site (with their permission, of course). Within a week, I had my answer. And it was a gut punch.

    “Oh no,” I thought.

    68% of their traffic was bots. And they weren’t even trying to hide it once you knew what to look for.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Virginia Giuffre Details Epstein Abuse, Meeting Prince Andrew in Book

    As she writes in the new Nobody’s Girl excerpt, Giuffre fell into Epstein’s orbit after taking a job at Mar-a-Lago, where her dad also worked. She briefly describes meeting Trump at the resort, and how the future president — and known Epstein associate — helped her find additional work babysitting for wealthy friends who lived nearby.

• Environment

  • NL Times ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] Housing, immigration, and climate top concerns for Amsterdam voters ahead of elections

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] Record renewable energy growth falls short of climate goals

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-13 [Older] A Japanese Pinot Noir Town Blessed by Climate Change Now Worries About the Weather

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2025-10-12 [Older] All Guns and No Butter on a Burning Planet

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-12 [Older] Climate Tipping Points Are Being Crossed, Scientists Warn Ahead of COP30

  • TruthOut ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] Youth Climate Leaders Test New Legal Strategy to Counter Fossil Fuel Expansion

  • CBC ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] How Canadian steelmakers are 'greening' their steel amid tariffs, global challenges

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2025-10-09 [Older] In Spain, Farmworkers Are Dying in the Heat

  • The Guardian UK ☛ What are rare earths and critical minerals – explained in 30 seconds

    Rare earths are a group of 17 heavy metals that are abundant throughout the Earth’s crust. The United States Geological Survey estimated in 2024 there were 110m tonnes of deposits worldwide. That includes 44m in China – by far the world’s largest producer. Vietnam, Brazil, Russia and India also have significant deposits.

    But mining them requires heavy chemical use that results in toxic waste and has caused several environmental disasters. Production costs are also high.

  • Futurism ☛ The Latest Climate News Is So Bad That You Should Probably Not Click This and Just Bury Your Head in the Sand

    The United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has released its latest report on global greenhouse gas emissions, and — how do we say this without sounding deliberately alarmist? — it’s looking extremely bleak out there, folks.

    The report found that the global average concentration of carbon dioxide spiked by 3.5 parts per million between 2023 and 2024, the biggest increase since modern measurements began in 1957. Even between 2011 and 2020, the average increase was a mere 2.4 parts per million per year.

    The results paint a dire picture of our planet’s future, highlighting once again our species’ devastating environmental footprint.

  • CBC ☛ CO2 in the atmosphere has reached highest level in 800,000 years: WMO report

    Heat-trapping carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere jumped by the highest amount on record last year, soaring to a level not seen in human civilization and "turbo-charging" the Earth's climate, causing more extreme weather, the United Nations weather agency said Wednesday.

    The World Meteorological Organization said in its latest bulletin on greenhouse gases, an annual study released ahead of the UN's annual climate conference, that C02 growth rates have tripled since the 1960s, reaching levels not seen in at least 800,000 years.

  • World Meteorological Organization ☛ WMO Greenhouse Gas Bulletin - No. 21

    CO2 impacts climate today and for many centuries

  • CBC ☛ World's coral reefs in almost irreversible die-off, scientists say | CBC

    The warning in the Global Tipping Points report by 160 researchers worldwide, which synthesizes groundbreaking science to estimate points of no return, comes just weeks ahead of this year's COP30 climate summit, being held at the edge of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.

    That same rainforest system is now at risk of collapsing once the average global temperature warms beyond 1.5 C based on deforestation rates, the report said, revising down the estimated threshold for the Amazon.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Scientists Resurrect 40,000-Year-Old Microbes From Alaskan Permafrost. What They Found Raised Worries About the Future of a Warming Arctic

    As the Arctic heats up, scientists are worried about permafrost thaw for numerous reasons. But a major concern is the resurrection of ancient microbes, which they expect to start chowing down on organic matter and producing greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane. These gases, in turn, would further contribute to global warming, leading to more permafrost thaw and more greenhouse gas-spewing microbes—a vicious, unstoppable cycle.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-13 [Older] India, US to Hold Trade Talks as New Delhi Seeks Higher Energy Imports

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-12 [Older] California Oil Workers Face an Uncertain Future in the State's Energy Transition

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] New England Unions Lead the Way on Offshore Wind

    • Truthdig ☛ 2025-10-09 [Older] As Cheeto Mussolini Champions Fossil Fuels, the World Bets on Renewable Energy

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-10-09 [Older] Energy Company Abandons Proposal to Store Nuclear Waste at Site in New Mexico

    • The Atlantic ☛ Why Safety on the Subway Matters

      One significant reason for this disparity is that American governments have typically prioritized building roads over rail lines, and the needs of drivers over bus or subway riders. And because the costs of constructing public transit are much higher in the United States than in other developed countries, new projects are rarer and more slowly built than they ought to be. Other problems flow from the cost issue, such as low service quality: Trains and buses make less frequent stops in the U.S. than in peer nations, and public transit tends to serve a much smaller area.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Norway declares victory in move away from gas cars

      Norway is an outlier, though: About one in five cars sold in Europe in 2024 was electric, and several larger European markets, including Germany and France, have begun rolling back subsidies. After years of increasing European market share, EV growth has slowed, the International Energy Agency reported this year.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Old-school material could power quantum computing and cut data center energy use

      Barium titanate, first discovered in 1941, is known for its powerful electro-optic properties in bulk, or three-dimensional, crystals. Electro-optic materials like barium titanate act as bridges between electricity and light, converting signals carried by electrons into signals carried by photons, or particles of light.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Georgia Recorder ☛ National parks, public lands feared at risk of long-term harm as shutdown drags on

      “What that’s done is created this facade for the visitors, so that in many cases they don’t see the damage that’s happening behind the scenes,” he said in a phone interview Wednesday.

• Finance

  • FAIR ☛ WaPo Says ‘Hard Math’ Means Europe Must Lower Its Quality of Life

    The European welfare state has to die. At least, that’s what the Washington Post wants you to think.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-13 [Older] German businesses asked to repay COVID-19 emergency aid

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] China decries Netherlands takeover of Wingtech subsidiary

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-13 [Older] Nobel economics prize awarded for innovation-growth theory [Ed: Fake 'award']

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-12 [Older] China criticizes US for 'double standards' over new tariffs

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-12 [Older] EU seeks US trade concessions by doubling steel tariffs and cutting quotas

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] Germany news: Union group warns of 'major social conflict'

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] EU fines Gucci, Chloe, Loewe for price fixing

  • The Age AU ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] The next financial bubble is hidden in the shadows. Is it about to pop?

  • EA Workers Rally Against $55 Billion Saudi-Backed Acquisition

    There have been a lot of opinions floating around from industry experts after EA’s $55B sale to private investors, but today might be the most important opinion yet. The United Videogame Workers-CWA is a joint union that covers the North American games industry, and they’re calling the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to scrutinize this EA deal.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] France: PM Lecornu backs suspending Macron's pension reform

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] France: Macron reappoints Sebastien Lecornu as PM

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-11 [Older] Gen Z pushes back against fast furniture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-13 [Older] How the EU wants to get Gen Z on board

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Atlantic ☛ It’s Not a Dog Whistle If Everyone Can Hear It

    Sometimes just a few news items over a couple of days can capture an entire zeitgeist. Here are several that caught my eye this week: The Supreme Court is poised to weaken or destroy one of the last remaining pillars of the Voting Rights Act. A group of Young Republicans exchanged texts in which they casually dropped the N-word, called Black people “monkeys” and “the watermelon people,” and said “I love Hitler.” The Trump administration is considering turning the American refugee system into one that prioritizes “English speakers, white South Africans and Europeans who oppose migration.” Rounding things out, Border Patrol circulated a video with an anti-Semitic slur, and a congressional staffer appeared in a video meeting with a swastika-defaced U.S. flag behind him.

  • Court House News ☛ Former Trump adviser John Bolton indicted on classified documents charges | Courthouse News Service

    The indictment is the third against one of President Trump's perceived enemies, following those of James Comey and Letitia James, but contains much more evidence than the others' bare-bones indictments.

  • Futurism ☛ Western Executives Shaken After Visiting China

    “There are no people — everything is robotic,” he told The Telegraph.

    Other executives recalled touring “dark factories” that don’t even need to keep the lights on, as most work is being done around the clock by robots.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Why Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified

    “I can take you to factories [in China] now, where you’ll basically be alongside a big conveyor and the machines come out of the floor and begin to assemble parts,” he says.

    “And you’re walking alongside this conveyor, and after about 800, 900 metres, a truck drives out. There are no people – everything is robotic.”

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Why the web-hosting industry needs a trust seal

    That’s why the Secure Hosting Alliance (SHA) is introducing the SHA Trust Seal. The seal sets a clear bar for providers by demanding transparency, accountability, and resilience. Certified hosts commit to offering fair and understandable terms of service, with no hidden surprises. They act quickly and responsibly when their infrastructure is misused, maintain reliable and resilient services through proactive monitoring and recovery planning, and handle government requests with documented, lawful processes that respect privacy and due process. Most importantly, they commit to ongoing accountability.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ Bending Spoons’ insatiable appetite

    Evernote, Vimeo, Meetup… These once household names of the early internet now share a common fate: they’ve all been snapped up by Bending Spoons. The little-known Italian tech group has gone on an acquisition spree — and triggered waves of layoffs — over the past two years. According to Reuters, its next target could be an icon from the dawn of the internet: AOL, the former access provider turned online portal and digital services company.

  • The Age AU ☛ Silicon Valley AI boom: Donald Trump’s policies create volatile environment for tech companies

    A September 4 White House dinner epitomised the awkward dance between tech and Trump. Thirty-three Silicon Valley leaders gathered in the State Dining Room after weather forced the cancellation of a Rose Garden event. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Google’s Sundar Pichai – nearly every major figure attended. (Notably absent was Elon Musk, whose public falling out with Trump earlier in the year had made him persona non grata.)

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-13 [Older] Fact check: Disinformation surges amid Gaza ceasefire

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Social media comments can act as 'quick warning signals' against misinformation, study shows

      As part of a large-scale study with more than 10,000 participants across Germany, the UK, and Italy, researchers examined people's ability to classify true and false news in social media posts. Participants were shown a set of false and true news posts drawn from real online content.

      The study included forty-seven different topics, including health, technology, and politics, all drawn from real online content. False news posts came from material flagged by fact-checking organizations in each country. The findings highlight just how challenging it is for people to identify false information: most false news stories were considered accurate by at least three out of ten people, and some were judged true by around half of respondents.

    • BoingBoing ☛ U.S. taxpayers forced to pay $51 million to fund commercials praising Trump

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Don’t let MAGA turn protest into a crime

    Grossman, now one of the organizers of the Beverly Hills segment of the “No Kings” marches being held in more than 2,000 cities this weekend, remembers that opponents of that long-ago protest threw stinky rat poison on the lawns in Exposition Park so participants couldn’t sit on the grass. But protesters were not deterred. Advertisement

    “It made it all the more rebellious of us to be there,” Grossman told me. “It made us more insistent that we had to be there.”

    Today, that rat poison is being metaphorically hurled by MAGA leaders such as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), in the form of noxious allegations that the No Kings marches are “Hate America” rallies staged for a “rabid base” of criminal agitators.

  • The Local SE ☛ Swedish prosecutors suspect Syrian man of murdering Quran burner

    Swedish prosecutors on Thursday sought the arrest a young Syrian man for killing Salwan Momika, who repeatedly burned copies of the Koran in 2023 and sparked outrage in the Muslim world.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK press freedom rebounds slightly from historic low, journalists' union says

    According to the survey, the press freedom index stood at 28.9 points on a hundred-point scale, a score that the HKJA said remained “extremely low” and did not reflect “any substantive improvement in Hong Kong’s press freedom landscape.”

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Mario Guevara discusses post-deportation life in El Salvador

    Guevara was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as he was reporting on a “No Kings” protest on June 14 in the Atlanta area. The 48-year-old journalist filmed his own arrest because he was livestreaming.

  • JURIST ☛ Journalists turn in press badges following new Pentagon reporting requirements

    Dozens of journalists on Wednesday turned in their press access badges instead of complying with the Pentagon’s new reporting rules.

    Media members rejected US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent rule changes for the Department of Defense reporting, which require journalists to pledge to seek authorization before publishing any department information, including unclassified reports.

  • JURIST ☛ Press group urges Türkiye to investigate motives behind journalist shooting

    The group expressed concern that the assault may have been linked to the journalist’s work, though the reason for the shooting remains unclear. CPJ’s Turkish representative stated that,“The shooting of Günışığı and Yeni Ufuk publisher Nafiz Koca in Elazığ requires a comprehensive investigation to determine the motive behind the assault.”

  • The Walrus ☛ You Can’t Always Measure the Impact of Journalism in Clicks

    But the impact of our reporting can’t always be captured in headlines—or in page views, time on site, and social shares. More often, it’s the strange, unpredictable directions a story takes once it leaves our desks. How it takes up space in a reader’s life—stirs a memory, sparks dinner table debate, or completely changes how they think about a subject. You can’t plan for that. You certainly can’t control it. But it’s the reason most of us got into this business in the first place.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ Tracking ICE with Media Cloud data

    I’m starting my day at MIT at a conference on the quantitative analysis of news, hosted by the folks behind Media Cloud. I shared the stage in the first session with an inspiring set of students, Jack Vu and Abby Manuel, who’ve developed icemap.dev, a map of ICE activity across the US using news data.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ How City of Chicago Beat Back Stephen Miller's Shoddy Propaganda ... So Far

    For 44 days and counting, Stephen Miller’s goons have been trying to create a pretext to federalize law enforcement in Chicago.

    Along the way, they’ve engaged in a whole bunch of propaganda: making false claims of assault to explain away ICE assaults, setting up dramatized attacks on an entire apartment building, deliberately creating “shitshows” that result in arrests that almost all get dismissed.

    And at least thus far, it has not worked.

  • New York Times ☛ Meta Removes Facebook Group That Shared Information on ICE Agents

    Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, was the latest tech giant to remove content in response to government pressure. Last week, Apple and Google removed apps used to track immigration agents from their app stores. That included ICEBlock, a free app with hundreds of thousands of users, which let people anonymously share the locations of ICE agents within a five-mile radius.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Shift Change at the Wheel Reinvention Factory

    In the same way that we on the left must gracefully accept our new allies in the fight against fascism, people like David Brooks must also have the grace to be quiet when they find themselves out of their depth. You want a movement? Brother, there are people who have been neck-deep in social and political movements for their whole lives, right here in America. Ask them what to do! They know! One of the reasons why it is hard to build and sustain movements is that it is more fun to be “a wealthy pundit basking in praise for your brilliant insights” than it is to be “one of a million anonymous people acting in solidarity with a million more.” David Brooks does not need to give us any more social theories. The best thing that he, and others like him, can do right now is to learn how to follow, not lead.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ "The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point."

    Surely now people will stop with this "good billionaire" bullshit. There are no good billionaires. It is a mathematical impossibility. If they were good people they would not be billionaires. We're probably only 18 months away from Taylor Swift going off about "blood and soil".

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ Making Things Together: Zines, Strategy, and Survival

    "We can only be brave together,” says Mariame Kaba. In this episode of Movement Memos, host Kelly Hayes talks with Kaba and writer and organizer Red Schulte about political education, collective courage, and the mistakes we’ll make along the way.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Scotsman ☛ Why I am summoning [Internet] providers to Shetland after latest cable breakdown

    It is not hard to picture the fallout. Outrage in the press, urgent questions asked in the House of Commons or in the Scottish Parliament, perhaps even protests in the streets (how these would be organised without access to social media is another matter entirely). In short, major [Internet] disruption to a major city would be seen as entirely unacceptable and requiring urgent political intervention.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Digital Music News ☛ Local Artists Getting Edged Out of AUS/NZ Streaming Platforms

    Rights management org APRA AMCOS says the number of local artists streamed in Australia and New Zealand has fallen drastically over the past five years — at least as a percentage of total plays. Local artists now account for less than 10% of all plays, according to the eye-opening data.

  • APRA AMCOS ☛ APRA AMCOS

    Digital streaming continues to dominate: Doubling in value since FY20 and 51.3% share of overall revenue with Subscription Video on Demand showing significant growth in FY25

  • PC World ☛ CNN is trying again with a new streaming service

    CNN has a checkered history when it comes to streaming subscriptions, to put it mildly.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• EDRI ☛ The DMA is a success, it should be strengthened and expanded

  Last week, the European Commission asked the public to provide ideas about how to improve the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). Together with EDRi member Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), we submitted a response to the Commission with a clear message: strengthen enforcement, drastically increase transparency around what gatekeepers must do and have already done, and expand the DMA to cover additional core platforms services and industries suffering from concentrated gatekeeping power.

• Patents

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-10-14 [Older] [Guest post] The patentability of prohibited practices in the field of AI [Ed: Slop and software patents... as explained by a patent profiteer]

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-10-10 [Older] Patents make surprise appearance in UK consultation on precision breeding framework [Ed: Patents in most domains should be banned, but lobbyists write laws]

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-10-08 [Older] What do sex toys and patent law have in common?

  • IP Kat ☛ 2025-10-07 [Older] Use of AI in the patent industry: The spectre of hallucination [Ed: This should be considered a serious offence with lifelong bans]

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Personal/Opinions

    • Going to the "Pott"

      The trip to Oberhausen and the Sealife Aquarium there went surprisingly smooth, junior fell asleep about half an hour into the ~3 hour trip and kept sleeping until a couple minutes before we arrived at the hotel. As the 3rd of October is a national holiday here, the Autobahn was pretty empty, which also made the trip really relaxed.

      The hotel in itself was quiet nice, i suspect it was build around the 50s and had never really been modernized, but it was clean, it was cozy and it was cheap. We spend the first evening exploring the surrounding area (*sigh* how i miss the Ruhrpott) and eat some really good Doener at a small corner shop. As the weather got progressively worse over a couple of hours we decided then that it would be better to return to our room. How glad i was that this was a rather robust and really family friendly hotel! Junior - who was completely winded up - had an absolute blast running around, screaming and playing. Luckily he tired himself out quickly and fell asleep shortly after.

    • 🔤SpellBinding: AHRSTYW Wordo: OVENS