Leftovers

• Nelson Elhage ☛ Solving Regex Crosswords with Z3

  For a while now, I’ve been fascinated by Z3 and by SMT solving more broadly. While on pat leave recently, I was reminded of the existence of regular-expression crossword puzzles, and allowed myself to get nerdsniped by writing a Z3-backed solver.

  I expected to spend perhaps an afternoon cranking out a quick solver; I ended up getting sucked into understanding and debugging Z3 performance, and learning far more about Z3 and about SMT than I expected. In this post, I’ll describe my approach and my initial solver, and then dive into some of the improvements and variations I explored.

• Matt Langford ☛ The Ever Evolving Blog

  I almost titled this post something along the lines of Rethinking the Rethinking of the Rethinking of My Blog. Fortunately, common sense won out and that didn't make the cut. But essentially that's what this is. Let's recap: [...]

• Joel Chrono ☛ Listening to Full Albums Again

  Eventually, I stopped using Spotify and streaming for the most part, and now that I have local music again. And that I am not limited by storage like on my first phones, I just started to get the full albums downloaded to my phone, I am kind of iffy about not having everything in full I guess.

• RFA ☛ Myanmar junta says it seized 30 Starlink receivers in scam center raid – Radio Free Asia

  Myanmar’s junta said on Monday it raided one of the country’s most notorious cyberscam centers and seized Starlink satellite [Internet] devices.

• Inside Towers ☛ Major Internet Outage Hits Over 1,000 Companies - Inside Towers

  A widespread internet outage on Monday disrupted services for more than 1,000 companies, taking down major websites and apps including Amazon, Reddit, and Halifax Bank, according to multiple news outlets. The outage, traced to issues with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a backbone for much of the [Internet], impacted platforms across banking, e-commerce, gaming, and home security sectors.

• Matthew Weber ☛ Micro Blogging Vs Regular Blogging

  I don’t know if micro-blogging on a real blog makes sense. I could just post a blog post of the size I want and leave it at that. Why make it special? Instead of putting effort into re-creating a Tumblr feed here on this site, I’ll just continue blogging as I do. It makes more sense and its simpler.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ NASA May Ditch SpaceX for Moon Landing Because It's So Behind

    It’s an astonishing twist, showing that NASA is growing wary of SpaceX and its enormous Starship spacecraft falling behind schedule. The rocket’s development has been mired in setbacks over the last couple of years, raising concerns among NASA officials that a Human Landing Systems variant may not be ready to deliver astronauts from the Moon’s orbit down to the surface as soon as 2027, as part of its Artemis 3 mission.

  • Ned Batchelder ☛ Natural cubics, circular Simplex

    This post continues where Hobby Hilbert Simplex left off. If you haven’t read it yet, start there. It explains the basics of Hobby curves, Hilbert sorting and Simplex noise that I’m using.

  • [Old] Geeks For Geeks ☛ Group Theory - GeeksforGeeks

    Group theory is a branch of mathematics that studies algebraic structures known as groups. A group is a set of elements combined with an operation that satisfies four fundamental properties: closure, associativity, identity, and inverses.

    Groups can be found in various areas of mathematics and science. They are fundamental in studying symmetries, solving polynomial equations, and analyzing geometric objects. For instance, the set of all rotations and reflections of a geometric object forms a group because these transformations can be combined and each has an inverse.

    In this article, we will discuss the fundamental concepts of group theory, including the definition and properties of groups, various examples of groups, and their applications in different fields.

  • Reuters ☛ NASA opens SpaceX's moon lander contract to rivals over Starship delays

    The mission involving SpaceX, Artemis 3, would be the first human lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972. Bezos' space company Blue Origin, with its Blue Moon lander in development, has a similar lunar landing contract awarded by NASA in 2023 but for later Artemis moon missions. The company had protested NASA's initial decision to only pick SpaceX in 2021 and fought for years to convince the agency and lawmakers to select another proposal as a redundancy. Duffy's reference to Blue Origin on Monday suggests Bezos' space company could contend for Artemis 3.

  • Rlang ☛ Compositional modeling of plant communities with Dirichlet regression

    Compositional data, where observations represent proportions that sum to a constant, are ubiquitous in ecology, yet many analysts fall back on problematic approaches like separate binomial models, beta regression on ratios, or worse, standard linear regression on raw proportions. These methods ignore the fundamental constraint that proportions must sum to unity and fail to model the inherent dependencies between components. Aitchison’s landmark work established the mathematical foundation for proper compositional analysis, while van den Boogaart & Tolosana-Delgado provide comprehensive coverage of modern compositional data analysis methods.

    Here I demonstrate how Dirichlet regression with Gaussian process smooths provides a principled, flexible framework for modeling plant community composition across environmental gradients. I’ll use Riutort-Mayol et al’s approximate Hilbert space Gaussian processes, which make these models computationally tractable even for moderately large datasets.

• Career/Education

  • Hazel Weakly ☛ Scaling Innovation: Building Ecosystems

    Nevertheless, I consider it dearly important to share and study and discuss the topic of innovation, and so I will provide some research notes here, as well as my overall interpretation of them. Most of this is going to be a compilation of research and the synthesis of it; consequently, I will note where my hypothesis and personal opinions sprinkle in. Otherwise, you may assume that the information here comes from somewhere with strong empirical backing (it will also be cited).

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ CNI Pre-Record Project Briefing Series Call for Proposals Winter 2026

    We are now accepting proposals for the next edition of the CNI Pre-Recorded Project Briefing Series. More information about this year-round program is available on the CNI website.

  • CNN ☛ Scouts will now be able to earn badges in AI and cybersecurity

    The new badges aren’t Scouting America’s first foray into AI. It launched an AI chatbot called Scoutly over the summer to answer questions about the organization and its merit badges.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ 'Diamond blanket' transistor cooling method delivers incredible success in testing, drops temps by 70C — micrometer-scale diamond layer grown directly on transistors reduces heat by 90%

    A research team at Stanford University has engineered a new approach to handling the thermal bottleneck of RF transistor by using diamonds. By wrapping transistors in an integrated diamond layer, grown on the transistor, researchers were able to decrease chip temperatures by up to 70°C in the real world, and by 90% in simulated tests.

  • Matthew Weber ☛ Fountain Pens

    I have looked into getting into fountain pens myself, if I’m being honest. I love the idea of them. And I do own one. I do not know if it’s a good one or not, I just bought it on Amazon when I was looking for a new pen (I ended up with six new pens). One thing I discovered is, fountain pens really don’t work well for people who have shitty handwriting. It just gets messier.

  • Arduino ☛ WORM collaborative robots automate art in a new way

    Imagine that your job is to carve thousands of tiny decorative marks into the surface of a clay. That is incredibly time consuming and repetitive, but it is also really difficult to program a robot for the task — each mark requires dexterity and movement in several axes. That’s where the WORM system comes in: it lets an artisan move a collaborative robot by hand to “teach” the complicated action (carving the mark), then tell the robot to repeat that action according to parameters (rotate the work around the Z axis by five degrees between marks, for example).

  • GreyCoder ☛ The Best Computing Set-Up Without Using Apple, Google and Windows

    We believe the best alternative comes from System76 — a U.S. computer maker and open-source tech company based in Colorado.

    It’s one of the few PC makers in the world that designs its own hardware, firmware, and Linux operating system all together.

  • Tedium ☛ RF Shielding History: When The FCC Cracked Down On Computers

    Today in Tedium: Could we pin this all on C.W. McCall? In the early 1980s, the personal computer industry had a big problem—they were feeling perhaps their first-ever bout of regulation from a federal agency. The regulatory body in question? The Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The reason? A huge amount of concern about radio frequency interference, and how it might cause our TV and radio signals to stop working correctly. And the result? Thick metal plates in basically every home computer of the era. It wasn’t a problem that the computer industry created, necessarily. Rather, they were feeling pressure rooted in the failures of a completely different kind of technology: The CB radio, which surged in popularity and caused longstanding issues for prime-time viewers along the way. Today’s Tedium considers how RF interference (and indirectly, CB radio) created a giant headache for the home computer industry. — Ernie @ Tedium

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • CS Monitor ☛ How one Michigan town is putting partisanship aside in pursuit of clean water

    It was just over two years ago that the state discovered the source of the lead contamination was in the lateral pipes that supplied water to each house.

    People of all political stripes wanted the city to replace those pipes at once. The estimated cost: $4.2 million.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ An open-source tool to measure microplastic sinking rates in water

    Microplastics have become an invisible but persistent threat in rivers, lakes, oceans, and even in the water we drink. These tiny plastic fragments can drift for miles, settle on the seafloor, or remain suspended for years, harming ecosystems and human health.

• Proprietary

  • Truthdig ☛ The Good and Bad of Amazon’s ‘Dark Patterns’ Settlement

    The Amazon lawsuit was by far the closest a ROSCA case has come to a jury trial and a decision of liability. The documents already made public during the litigation were objectively terrible for Amazon; indeed, the company named its Prime cancellation maze the “Iliad Flow” after Homer’s poetic description of the arduous Trojan War — a four-page, six-click, 15-option gauntlet Prime shoppers must endure to end their memberships. Much more about Amazon’s business model and its reliance on Prime as fuel for its online shopping monopoly would have likely come to light during trial. By backing out of the trial early, the FTC likely left good case law on the table and the public in the dark.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft rushes out emergency Windows 11 patch after botched update breaks Recovery — restores USB keyboard and mouse input inside WinRE for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2

    But for anyone stuck in a recovery loop or trying to service a dead system, you might be stuck. Without USB input in WinRE, you’re effectively locked out of your own recovery tools. Microsoft advises these users to utilize touchscreen or PS/2 ports where available, or use a USB recovery drive. OEMs and enterprises can use the Preboot Execution Environment in Configuration Manager.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Colossal AWS outage breaks the [Internet] — Roblox, Fortnite, Zoom, Snapchat, and beyond all crippled

    Amazon Web Services (AWS) has confirmed it is tracking a massive issue that has rendered large parts of the [Internet] unusable. AWS says it has identified and fixed the main issue causing the disruption, but it could be some time before all affected services are back to normal.

  • The Register UK ☛ AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes

    "My bed is stuck in Relax mode and won't change," moaned one user, while another admitted they were "sweating through my sheets because the app's dead."

    Another exasperated sleeper noted that EightSleep pumps out 16 GB of data a month – an impressive haul to generate while unconscious.

  • The Register UK ☛ Major AWS outage across US-East region sows chaos online

    AWS reported an issue to its Health Dashboard at 12:11 AM PDT (7:11 UTC) of increased error rates and latencies for multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region, effectively Amazon's home region in Northern Virginia.

  • Security Week ☛ CISA Warns of Exploited Apple, Kentico, Microsoft Vulnerabilities

    The US cybersecurity agency CISA on Monday warned that recently disclosed vulnerabilities in Windows SMB Client and Kentico Xperience CMS have been exploited in the wild.

  • Security Week ☛ Supply Chain Attack Targets VS Code Extensions With 'GlassWorm' Malware

    Dubbed GlassWorm, the malware was designed to steal sensitive information from the victims’ machines, including NPM, GitHub, and Git credentials, and to drain funds from 49 cryptocurrency extensions.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Rewriting a file’s history

    Never take file attributes such as datestamps at face value. It’s only too easy to pull tricks by changing the system clock, and it’s straightforward to construct a bogus file with a made-up history.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Electron Apps Causing System-Wide Lag on Tahoe

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ This Is How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services

    On the face of it, these numbers don’t look good. Ed’s analysis shows that Anthropic’s AWS compute spend is well over 100% of revenue.

  • The Register UK ☛ AWS admits more bits of its cloud broke as it recovered from DynamoDB debacle

    Amazon Web Services has revealed that its efforts to recover from the massive mess at its US-EAST-1 region caused other services to fail.

    The most recent update to the cloud giant’s service health page opens by recounting how a DNS mess meant services could not reach a DynamoDB API, which led to widespread outages.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Nation ☛ A Warning From the Past About the Dangers of AI

      As far back as 1958, Nation writers were grappling with the prospect of ‘artificial brains,’ particularly when placed in the hands of the military.

    • The Register UK ☛ Woman allegedly pranks husband with AI 'home invasion'

      A Maryland woman who allegedly used AI to fake a home invasion was arrested and charged with making false statements after telling police that the ersatz intruder was part of a prank gone wrong.

    • New York Times ☛ How Trump is Using AI to Attack Enemies and Rouse Supporters

      The New York Times used tools designed to detect A.I. images to help identify the fakes, alongside manual review. Content that could not be clearly identified as A.I., and posts that appeared to primarily show real videos that had been edited by A.I.-powered filters, were excluded.

      Mr. Trump’s use of A.I. content began in earnest during his re-election bid, when the tools became sophisticated enough for amateur creators to produce realistic images of famous people, including Mr. Trump.

    • 404 Media ☛ Anthropic Promises Trump Admin Its AI Is Not Woke

      Amodei doesn’t explicitly say why he feels the need to state all of these obvious positions for the CEO of an American AI company to have, but the reason is that the Trump administration’s so-called “AI Czar” has publicly accused Anthropic of producing “woke AI” that it’s trying to force on the population via regulatory capture.

    • Wired ☛ Anthropic Has a Plan to Keep Its AI From Building a Nuclear Weapon. Will It Work?

      Still, he says, AI companies should be more specific when they talk about safety. “When Anthropic puts out stuff like this, I’d like to see them talking in a little more detail about the risk model they’re really worried about,” he says. “It is good to see collaboration between AI companies and the government, but there is always the danger with classification that you put a lot of trust into people determining what goes into those classifiers.”

    • Chris Enns ☛ Descript Needs More Money for AI Generator Slop Machine

      Also, AI credits take the place of unlimited usage of their "Underlord" AI tool. So now if you use "remove all 'uhms'" or "summarize this recording", you're using up credits each time you do any sort of AI assisted editing or automation.

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Researcher Forced to Delete "Embarrassing" Tweet Claiming Huge Breakthrough

      But the mathematician who literally runs the website erdosproblems.com, a researcher at the University of Manchester named Thomas Bloom, tweeted that this was “a dramatic misrepresentation,” because the AI had only found existing work that already solved the problems.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Using math to ensure AI systems can operate safely

      A research team at the University of Waterloo is addressing this question using tools from applied mathematics and machine learning to rigorously check and verify the safety of AI-driven systems.

      The research, "Physics-informed neural network Lyapunov functions: PDE characterization, learning, and verification," appears in Automatica.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Google AI Overviews 'leading to affiliate revenue drop of 20-40% at some publishers'

      Cunliffe, former managing director at Shortlist and director of affiliates at Time Inc UK, said Google’s AI Overviews, which began to summarise content from across the [Internet] at the top of search results last year, have “reduced traffic considerably to buyer’s guides and review content”.

      He said this is having an effect of “as much as maybe 50% in some cases”.

    • Nick Heer ☛ The Blurry Future of Sora

      I saw this quote circulating on Bluesky over the weekend and it has been rattling around my head since. It cuts to the heart of one reason why A.I.-based “social” networks like Sora and Meta’s Vibes feel so uncomfortable.

  • Social Control Media

    • El País ☛ Algorithms and misogyny: How Latin American teenagers are exposed to toxic content

      The Brazilian findings confirm studies such as those by University College London and the University of Kent, which previously stated that “harmful views and tropes are now becoming normalized among young people. Online consumption is impacting young people’s offline behaviours, as we see these ideologies moving off screens and into school yards.”

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Algorithmic outreach can lead to information inequality

      Algorithms that identify influential people in social networks can help maximize the reach of messages, but a modeling study published in PNAS Nexus shows that those same algorithms can disseminate information inequitably, potentially exacerbating existing social inequalities.

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ Chatbot the ultimate social media feed

      Now, that’s social media in the sense of algorithmic silo socials like TikTok, X, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and similar. Not all social media is algorithmic (Discord isn’t, although it is a silo) nor is all social media even silos; email and fedi are examples of non-silo socials.

    • Tim Bradshaw ☛ How to orphan an online account

      So, you want to walk away from whichever tentacle of the creeping undead horror that the [Internet] has become in 2025 has engulfed you. But you either want to leave the things you said in place as some kind of terrible warning to those who might come after you, or for some entirely obvious reason the nazi plutocrats who now rule the world want to make it very hard to erase your account.

      Good. But you are scared that you might weaken: the addiction is never cured, only in remission. Here is what I do to make sure it is extremely hard to relapse1.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Ransomware Payments Get Bigger Even As Fewer Pay

      The report, which the NDR vendor conducted with Censuswide, is based on a July 2025 survey of 1,800 security and IT decision-makers in midsize and large organizations in seven countries.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • El País ☛ ICE intensifies surveillance of immigrants with facial recognition programs, human tracking, and social media monitoring

      Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is ramping up its surveillance capabilities to advance the government’s immigration agenda on an unprecedented scale. According to the federal spending site USASpending.gov, the agency signed contractual obligations in September for a $1.4 billion order — the highest in 18 years — for the acquisition of new technologies such as an iris-scanning app they plan to use in the field, spyware that can remotely hack smartphones, and location software that can track phone activity without a warrant, including nearly all social media platforms.

    • Techdirt ☛ Germany Blocks EU Chat Control Proposal, Noting That Mass Surveillance Of Encrypted Messages Must Not Be Allowed

      This is exactly the kind of clear-eyed recognition of fundamental rights that’s been missing from much of the chat control debate. Hubig didn’t mince words about the broader principle at stake, calling chat control something that “must be a taboo in a state governed by the rule of law.”

      The proposal that Germany torpedoed would have required messaging services like WhatsApp, Telegram, and Signal to scan messages and check for images, videos, and URLs that might contain child abuse content—including scanning through end-to-end encrypted communications.

    • India Times ☛ OpenAI launches web browser to compete with Google Chrome

      OpenAI said Tuesday it is introducing its own web browser, Atlas, putting the ChatGPT maker in direct competition with Google as more internet users rely on artificial intelligence to answer their questions.

    • The Register UK ☛ OpenAI puts ChatGPT into Atlas browser in bid to rethink web

      Released on Tuesday for macOS, OpenAI's Atlas offers the ability to direct ChatGPT via text or voice to interact with web content and to navigate through websites. (Atlas for Android, iOS, and Windows is expected soon.) In a livestream presentation, OpenAI CEO and AI hypemaster Sam Altman said that Atlas represents an opportunity to "rethink what a browser can be about." In this case, "rethink" means allowing ChatGPT to observe, mediate, and direct browsing sessions.

    • The Record ☛ Judge bars NSO from targeting WhatsApp users with spyware, reduces damages in landmark case

      Phyllis Hamilton, U.S. District Court judge for the Northern District of California, also cut the damages the spyware manufacturer, the NSO Group, will have to pay to Meta from $168 million to $4 million.

      The ruling stems from a 2019 NSO hack of WhatsApp to target 1,400 app users with its zero-click Pegasus spyware.

    • Matt Birchler ☛ The next big browser is here

      As you might expect, this is based on Chromium, and my extensions work great in it.Other than that, it's a pretty basic browser that has quick access to ChatGPT everywhere from an "Ask ChatGPT" button at the top right, just like all other AI browsers and Chrome, and your chat history always accessible from a slide-out sidebar. The new tab page is predictably a text box that intelligently does what you ask it to do, routing your queries to perform web searches, start a standard ChatGPT chat, or simply load a website from your bookmarks or history. You can, of course, also just paste in the URL and go.

    • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ A Flock of prying eyes

      Nobody should be proactively surveilled. Promises of transparency mean nothing when there's already ample evidence that this technology has been abused. There is no reason to believe that this technology will not also be abused when it's not installed here, particularly when the city outsources policing duty to county sheriffs whose chief has made it very clear that he will cooperate with abusive, fascist agencies like ICE to the maximum extent possible.

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ Regulation Isn’t the European Trap — Resignation Is

      I’m not here to add another complaint to the pile (but if we meet over a beer or coffee, I’m happy to unload a lot of hilarious anecdotes on you). The unfortunate reality is that most of these constraints won’t change in my lifetime and maybe ever. Europe is not culturally aligned with entrepreneurship, it’s opposed to the idea of employee equity, and our laws reflect that.

      What bothers me isn’t the rules — it’s the posture that develops form it within people that should know better. Across the system, everyone points at someone else. If a process takes 10 steps, you’ll find 10 people who feel absolved of responsibility because they can cite 9 other blockers. Friction becomes a moral license to do a mediocre job (while lamenting about it).

• Defence/Aggression

  • FAIR ☛ To Media, Gaza Ceasefire Holds Despite Repeated Israeli Strikes

    In the ten days following the implementation of the ostensible truce, the Israeli military reportedly killed at least 97 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded 230, violating the ceasefire agreement no fewer than 80 times. One might have expected, then, to see a headline or two along the lines of, I dunno, “Israel violates ceasefire”—or maybe “So much for ‘peace’ in Gaza.”

  • Pro Publica ☛ Why Arizona Police Agencies Are Opting Out of Immigration Enforcement Program

    Arizona law enforcement agencies are largely rejecting a fast-growing ICE program that lets local officers act as deportation agents — citing the experience of the state’s largest sheriff’s office, which was booted from the program in 2009 after a federal judge found deputies racially profiled and violated the constitutional rights of Latinos.

    Even in Republican-led communities known for backing immigration measures, law enforcement leaders are steering clear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) task force program, which the Trump administration is using to enlist local officers in its mass deportation efforts.

  • Pro Publica ☛ How Maricopa County, Arizona, Was the “Model” for Local Police Carrying Out Immigration Raids

    Manuel Nieto Jr. and his sister had just pulled into a gas station to buy cigarettes and Gatorade when he noticed a sheriff’s deputy standing over two Latino men on the ground.

    Their north Phoenix neighborhood was on alert. Sheriff’s deputies had been targeting day-labor centers in the area and making traffic stops — arresting people who couldn’t prove their immigration status. They had one thing in common: They looked Latino.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Further | The Frog Abides: We The People Are Pissed | Opinion

    Despite a suddenly silent GOP after their incendiary drivel about a "hate America" rally - which organizers said saw RSVPs more than double - the mood of No Kings' over 2,700 rallies was jubilant. Many said it felt like a giant block party, and it was giant: Protests in small towns and big cities in all 50 states - yes Alaska! - drew two million more people than the first No Kings, and 14 times more than both Trump's inauguration crowds combined. (What a loser.) Among Dem pols was Chicago Mayor Johnson: "We will not bend, we will not bow, we will not cower." Global rallies included London, Berlin, Vancouver, Mexico, a sole patriot in Estonia: "One person, one pebble is all it takes to start a landslide. Sir, thank you for your service." The message, organizers said, was clear: "America will not be ruled by fear, force, or one man’s power grab."

  • Robert Reich ☛ Friends, the Sleeping Giant is Roaring

    It is starting to roar now — at the sociopathic occupant of the Oval Office who won’t tolerate criticism, who has revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him.

    I’ve seen a lot. I know the signs. The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken.

  • USMC ☛ Marine artillery shell explodes over highway during drill, police say

    The incident occurred in an area where officers had shut down traffic, the highway patrol said.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Other Demonstration on Saturday

    Some of the Marine Corps’ shells that were fired by M777 howitzers across California’s Interstate 5 prematurely detonated, sending shrapnel down on what could have been hundreds of motorists.

    Why the hell did the Marine Corps fire artillery shells over Interstate 5 anyway?

    Interstate 5 is the largest and most-traveled north-south freeway in California.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ How a ‘safe’ plan to fire munitions over I-5 went off the rails

    Now, the California Highway Patrol is reporting that a CHP cruiser parked on an onramp of Interstate 5 was hit by falling shrapnel after an artillery round exploded midair, far earlier than intended, forcing an early end to the artillery demonstration. Although no one was hurt, the revelations raised new questions about safety issues and whether it was wise to fire live munitions over a freeway.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ The Ball Turret Gunner, One of the Toughest and Most Dangerous Jobs of World War II

    Being a ball turret gunner was among the most perilous positions in the U.S. Army Air Forces. If the aircraft was hit and crash-landed on its belly, the gunner could be trapped or crushed. Many crews regarded their ball turret gunner as both brave and vulnerable — admired for his courage but pitied for his isolation.

    The role became immortalized in Randall Jarrell’s 1945 poem “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” which starkly captured its horror: [...]

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ I Met Hamas’s Founders. The Palestinian Terror Group Can’t Surrender in Gaza.

    In these interviews Hamas leaders made clear to me that their intention was to fight Israel—and the Jews—until Judgment Day, allowing for only temporary hudna ceasefires when necessity dictated.

    Signing anything resembling the Oslo Accords, which aspired to compromise and, implicitly, a two-state outcome, was anathema to Hamas’s core beliefs. The organization’s leaders spoke out and acted forcefully against the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the 1990s and 2000s.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ "Resigned Because Of Trump” — Marine Colonel Walks Away After 24 Years

    “I could not swear without reservation to follow a commander in chief who seemed so willing to disregard the Constitution,” Krugman wrote. “President Trump’s actions became increasingly difficult for me to justify, culminating with the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.”

  • Robert Reich ☛ What Can We Do Now?

    What’s next? How do we use that power? What should we do now? I’ll leave to others bigger or more dramatic suggestions. Mine boil down to a dozen simple ones: [...]

  • The Atlantic ☛ Why the ‘No Kings’ Protests Matter

    Protests like these won’t immediately change much of anything in the country, but they matter nonetheless. Trump’s authoritarian takeover is unpopular—his approval is deep underwater, rivaled only by his first term for the worst since at least the 1950s—which means that its progress depends on despair and surrender from the majority of Americans who oppose it. The huge and energetic crowds that came out this weekend are an antidote to that. The “No Kings” slogan is clever because it is broad enough to bring together Trump opponents who disagree on many issues; because the view of the Constitution that it represents is immediately intelligible to almost everyone; and because it’s hard to challenge without endorsing monarchy.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Donald Trump Has Lost Touch With Reality

    But while the tech bros can certainly make many people’s lives miserable, it takes the power of the presidency to threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. And Trump is doing just that – he is descending into states of delusion that are as he would say, like nothing anyone has seen before (notwithstanding Nixon’s nighttime drunken tirades).

    On Sunday, the day after millions of Americans marched in the massive No Kings Day protests, Trump dismissed them: [...]

  • The Atlantic ☛ Why the 'No Kings' Protest Moved Me

    I don’t know if No Kings will transform from an intermittent day of protest into a political movement. But if anything can rouse the stupefied mainstream in time to stop the collapse of everything good about America, it’s a spectacle like this: dignified, irreverent, driven by old-fashioned love of country. No Kings has no celebrated leaders. It offers no political platform or strategy, but instead a reminder, an example, and a rebuke. It presents a vision—perhaps a mirage—of what once was and might still be. Hope in a dark time is enough to make you want to cry, and I found myself on the verge of tears. There was something moving about the modesty of the idea, and the quiet depth of feeling—anger, longing.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ Moscow backs bill to transfer ‘ownerless’ homes in occupied Ukraine to the state — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ ‘Regulated life has won’: Fifteen years ago, Alexander Gronsky photographed Moscow’s unruly outskirts. Now he says they’re disappearing. — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Russian man sentenced to prison for keeping grenade soldiers gave him as a thank-you — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Yeltsin survives, boom times for Lockheed Martin, and street musicians unite Meduza breaks down today’s biggest Russia-related news stories, October 21, 2025 — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ I'm suing DC Metro Police for body cam footage of US Institute of Peace raid

    On March 19th, I submitted a request to the DC Metropolitan Police Department for body camera footage from a call they’d responded to two days earlier at the United States Institute of Peace. I just wanted to understand what the police had done (or not done) to allow the complete takeover of a privately-owned building. And seven months later, I’ve received just a few minutes of footage, with none of any value. The process, as I’m learning, is frustratingly slow.

    Through the fog of the past nine months, it may be difficult to remember the particulars of something that happened all the way back in March. Even as someone who covered it closely at the time, I had to go back and re-familiarize myself with the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) galling actions that day.

• Environment

  • PC World ☛ Starlink reaches 10,000 satellites launched, but not without consequences

    According to US researchers, the growing number of satellites in low-Earth orbit could soon leave measurable traces in the atmosphere. Aluminium oxide is produced when old satellites burn up and is deposited in high layers of air. A recent study warns that if more than 60,000 satellites are in low orbit by 2040, up to 10,000 tons of aluminium oxide could be released every year.

  • University of Colorado Boulder ☛ Within 15 years, plummeting satellites could release enough aluminum to alter winds, temps in the stratosphere | CIRES

    In the new study, Maloney and his colleagues simulated how clouds of alumina vapor could impact Earth’s middle and upper atmosphere. They modeled scenarios for different locations on the globe where satellite reentry could happen and also modeled alumina aerosols of different sizes. The size distribution of alumina aerosols plays an important role in how long these particles stay in the atmosphere and how much infrared energy they can absorb or reflect.

  • AGU ☛ Investigating the Potential Atmospheric Accumulation and Radiative Impact of the Coming Increase in Satellite Reentry Frequency - Maloney - 2025 - Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres

    Large increases in the number of satellite megaconstellations in the low Earth orbit (300–2,000 km) are projected, with the number of satellites in an orbit exceeding 60,000 by 2040. This will lead to annual emissions of man-made material into the upper atmosphere on the same order of naturally occurring emissions from meteorites. A lack of observations and validated models of reentry demise limits our ability to simulate the complex aerosols associated with reentry, which makes estimating the climate impacts difficult. Aluminum is a primary satellite component and will likely be emitted during reentry vaporization in the form of alumina. Unmodified alumina is a useful approximation for metallic reentry aerosol. In this study, we simulate a potential yearly emission of 10,000 metric tons of alumina from reentering space debris. We investigate how the location of atmospheric accumulation, aerosol size distribution, and radiative properties of reentry alumina impacts the middle atmosphere. We find that 20,000–40,000 metric tons of alumina accumulates at high latitudes between 10 and 30 km in both hemispheres. Small changes in mesospheric heating rates lead to 1.5-K temperature anomalies in the middle atmosphere at high latitudes. These temperature anomalies are accompanied by changes in wind speed in the polar vortex.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Mosquitoes found in Iceland for first time as climate crisis warms country

    He said: “Three specimens of Culiseta annulata were found in Kiðafell, Kjós, two females and one male. They were all collected from wine ropes during wine roping aimed at attracting moths.”

    The species is cold-resistant and can survive Icelandic conditions by sheltering through winter in basements and barns.

  • Iceland ☛ Scientists Confirm First Mosquitoes Found in Iceland

    Björn later captured two more specimens and sent them to the Institute of Natural History, where entomologist Matthías Alfreðsson confirmed they were mosquitoes, specifically the species Culiseta annulata.

  • Iceland ☛ Mosquitoes found in Iceland - Iceland Monitor

    He first reported the finding on the Facebook page Skordýr á Íslandi (“Insects in Iceland”) after spotting an unusual-looking insect on October 16.

    In an interview with mbl.is, Hjaltason says he immediately suspected what it might be. “I could tell right away that this was something I had never seen before.” Björn caught the insect, which turned out to be a female.

  • New Yorker ☛ A Dark Ecologist Warns Against Hope

    After twenty years of campaigns, though, he sensed that the movement was going nowhere—and missing the deeper point. Too many environmentalists had “no attachment to any actual environment,” he complained; they talked up the Earth but showed “no sign of any real, felt attachment to any small part of that Earth.” A few years earlier, he had co-founded the Dark Mountain Project to promote what he would call “dark ecology.” Its manifesto declared the fight against climate change lost and a “collapse” inevitable.

  • Wired ☛ Google Has a Bedbug Infestation in Its New York Offices

    Employees were told to avoid the office until the treatment was complete. On Monday morning, they were allowed to return. Google is performing additional inspections at other Google campuses in New York, including buildings at the company’s Hudson Square campus, “out of an abundance of caution,” the email says.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Vox ☛ The ratepayer backlash to data center expansion is here

      Copious data centers have sprung up across the United States, nearly doubling in number between 2021 and 2024, with no end in sight to their rapid spread. According to consulting firm McKinsey & Company, companies are projected to spend $1.6 trillion on data center hardware in the US by 2030.

      It’s not just the existing facilities that are creating heftier bills; even data centers that have yet to be built are driving up power prices today.

    • Wired ☛ Melania Trump Used as ‘Window-Dressing’ in Elaborate Memecoin Fraud, Legal Filing Claims

      On Tuesday, the plaintiffs sought the court’s permission to file yet another amended complaint, based on alleged information provided by an anonymous whistleblower. With Chow acting as the “commander,” the pair launched, pumped, and dumped at least 15 [cryptocurrency] coins, the proposed second amended complaint alleges, including $MELANIA. The scheme allegedly inflicted millions of dollars in losses on unwitting investors.

      Trump, who is not a named defendant in the lawsuit, was used as “window dressing for a crime engineered by Meteora and Kelsier,” the proposed second amended complaint alleges. The filing further states that the plaintiffs do not allege that Trump or Milei “operated the scheme.”

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Depreciation

      More than three years ago, based on Paul Butler's The problem with bitcoin miners, I wrote Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. The TL;DR was that the economic life of Bitcoin mining rigs was estimated at 16 months, as Moore's law in a competitive ASIC market rapidly generated more power-efficient rigs. But the Bitcoin miners's accounts were using 5-year straight-line depreciation for their rigs, which was significantly increasing their nominal profits.

      Below the fold I look at the same problem unfolding in the heart of the AI bubble.

    • YLE ☛ Former Finland-Russia trains start Turku route next month with a new look

      Now refurbished, the trains will start service between Helsinki and Turku at the beginning of November. The new trains will run during commuting hours and in the evenings, said Marika Schugk, VR's Director of Customer Experience and Service Development, told Yle.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ An elephant family smashed pumpkins at the Oregon Zoo. But this baby just wanted to play ball

      Weighing just 775 pounds, eight-month-old Asian elephant Tula-Tu is about the heft of one of the giant pumpkins so is too small to smash them. Instead, zoo handlers gave her a small pumpkin to practice with. The little elephant dribbled the gourd around like a soccer ball, a video from the zoo shows.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • International Business Times ☛ Who Is Pastor Marvin Winans? Outrage After He Shames A Mum Who Gave $1,200 Instead Of $2,000 'Donation'

    This incident has reignited fierce debates over the 'prosperity gospel', a controversial belief that financial donations will yield spiritual and material blessings in return. With nearly 13% of Americans living below the poverty line, experts warn that these high-pressure tactics can feel deeply exploitative.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Elon Musk Discovers What Hierarchy Actually Means

    Musk genuinely believed his wealth made him Trump’s equal. That his “genius” and his billions and his control of critical infrastructure (Twitter, SpaceX, Starlink) secured him a permanent seat at the table. He thought he was Roy Cohn but permanent. He thought “First Buddy” meant something.

    He’s learning what Roy Cohn learned: You’re useful until you’re not. And when you’re not, the humiliation is public, arbitrary, and designed to demonstrate to everyone else what happens when you forget your place.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ New study shows widespread AI misinformation

      A major new study by 22 public service media organizations, including DW, has found that four of the most commonly used AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory.

      Journalists from a range of public service broadcasters, which also included the BBC (UK) and NPR (USA), evaluated the responses of four AI assistants, or chatbots – ChatGPT, Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini and Perplexity AI.

      Measuring criteria such as accuracy, sourcing, providing context, the ability to appropriately editorialize and the ability to distinguish fact from opinion, the study found that almost half of all answers had at least one significant issue while 31% contained serious sourcing problems and 20% contained major factual errors.

      DW found that 53% of the answers provided by the AI assistants to its questions had significant issues, with 29% experiencing specific issues with accuracy.

    • Google ☛ Pro-Russia Information Operations Leverage Russian Drone Incursions into Polish Airspace | Google Cloud Blog

      Observed messaging surrounding the Russian drone incursion into Polish airspace advanced multiple, often intersecting, influence objectives aligned with historic pro-Russia IO threat activity: [...]

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ State Department Revokes Visas Of Foreigners Who Refused To Pretend Charlie Kirk Is Worth Mourning

    If you can stomach it, the X thread contains a list of supposed offenders of this brand new rule about temporarily residing in the United States. As is to be expected, those singled out for their refusal to treat Kirk’s death with the respect it doesn’t deserve are from countries this bigoted administration considers to be unworthy of rights or basic human respect, like Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Paraguay. Somehow, a couple of social media posts from people in Germany and South Africa make it into the mix.

  • The Nation ☛ History’s Lessons for the Second Committee for the First Amendment

    Unfortunately, the institutional responses to Trump’s power grab and shakedown attempts have been anemic-to-subservient compared to the actions of so many everyday Americans. When the Trump administration threatened to cut off funding to universities unless they change curriculums and silence protesters, most failed that test. Harvard fought back, but it hasn’t had much company—although some universities are finally showing some backbone in refusing the administration’s “social compact,” which secures their political fealty via threatened federal funding cuts. ABC and Viacom/CBS caved to Trump’s meritless lawsuits alleging slanderous coverage. The bosses at both networks gave in to Trump for purely financial reasons—in Viacom’s case, a pending merger with Skydance—and paid out $30 million in legal settlements. In our national documentary moment, the platforms airing documentaries have mostly failed.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Fairhope police arrest woman in penis costume at 'No Kings' protest

    A 61-year-old woman who wore a phallic costume to a “No Kings” protest in Fairhope on Saturday was arrested after being held down by police officers.

  • Wired ☛ The FTC Is Disappearing Blog Posts About AI Published During Lina Khan’s Tenure

    It’s not clear why the blog posts were removed from the [Internet]. An FTC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. Khan, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Russia’s repression record

    Since February 24, 2022, CPJ has documented: [...]

  • CPJ ☛ 3 journalists in Turkey receive death threats 

    Three journalists have been hurt, killed, or otherwise attacked in Turkey in the past three weeks. CPJ is investigating whether these attacks were related to the journalists’ work.

  • BIA Net ☛ Tech giants, social media, and journalism: To leave or to stay?

    “In journalism, activism, and the fight for human rights, we often rely on social media to reach our audience or to amplify marginalized voices,” explained Marina Grnja from the Novi Sad School of Journalism. “At the same time, these platforms are built on a business model that profits from our attention, our data, and sometimes—even from the spread of disinformation.”

    In other words, are we actually feeding the beast that is eating us?

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Walrus ☛ Why I Still Believe in Human Rights, Even When It May Seem Easier to Give Up

    As we face the enormous crises of our fractured world, so many of which rise to the level of existential threats to humanity and our planet, and as we so readily feel overwhelmed by the gravity of those challenges and powerless to make a difference, those words—small places, close to home—take on even greater import. Beginning with those small places, close to home, people find and exercise their power, individually and collectively, to demand—but also to deliver—the promise of universal human rights.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Internet in Spaaaaace

    If you haven’t watched it yet, I recommend Marc Blanchet‘s presentation from the Internet Society’s webcast from 19 June 2025 titled: Using the IP Protocol Suite for Deep Space Networking – TIPTOP WG. Marc has been working for decades on the deployment of the Internet and related protocols in space, with a particular interest in the deep space networks, which connect Earth to satellites in orbit around other planets, asteroids, and our moon.

  • APNIC ☛ WSIS+20: An important moment for the future of the Internet

    APNIC welcomes the publication of the WSIS+20 Zero Draft (PDF) and appreciates the opportunity to contribute to this important review process. As the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific, APNIC remains committed to the WSIS vision — supporting inclusive, sustainable digital development through responsible stewardship of Internet number resources, technical capacity building, and active participation in multistakeholder governance.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Boring Is What We Wanted

    A predictable update schedule means that incremental updates are inevitable. Revolution then evolution is not a bad thing; it’s okay that not every release is exciting or groundbreaking. It’s how technology has worked for decades.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• India Times ☛ Apple attacks EU crackdown in digital law’s biggest court test

  Apple Inc. launched a significant legal challenge against the EU's Digital Markets Act, arguing the antitrust rules impose "hugely onerous and intrusive burdens" on its rights. The iPhone maker contends the DMA's interoperability mandates and App Store regulations threaten user privacy and security, while also challenging the probe into iMessage.

• India Times ☛ China consumers file antitrust complaint against Apple over app store practices

  The complainants, led by lawyer Wang Qiongfei, argue that Apple maintains a monopoly over iOS app distribution in China while permitting alternative payment methods and app stores in other markets following regulatory pressure from the European Union and United States.

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • Kernel Space

      • The Register UK ☛ Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough [Ed: Patented crap]

        NTFSplus is an unexpected development because for about four years now, the Linux kernel has contained a read-write NTFS driver. It's called ntfs3 and it appeared in kernel 5.15 back in November 2021. It's called NTFS3 because it effectively replaced the old ntfs driver, which just offered read-only support, and ntfs-3g which works via FUSE – meaning that it runs as an ordinary, unprivileged userspace program, which imposes performance and other limitations.

      • Linuxiac ☛ NTFSPlus Proposed as New NTFS Driver for Linux

        After years of dealing with outdated or poorly maintained NTFS drivers, Linux might finally be getting a fresh and modern replacement. Kernel and Samba developer Namjae Jeon has proposed NTFSPlus, a new NTFS filesystem remake, aiming to deliver better performance, full write support, and long-term maintainability.

• Copyrights

  • Press Gazette ☛ Freelance journalists want to get paid for AI using their work, survey

    Just 11% of the remaining journalists surveyed said they agree their online work should be licensed for use by AI (with or without their consent).

    A fifth of freelance journalists (20%) said their work should not be licensed for use by AI under any circumstances.

    Journalists are also keen to be compensated for past use of their work for training AI, the survey found.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ IPTV Pirates May Soon Be Named and Shamed, Italian Minister Says

    Having established itself as a moving and unpredictable target, it's widely accepted that piracy cannot be defeated using a single tool. Italy's toolbox is one of the most comprehensive available, having just added the ability to effectively fine IPTV pirates twice for the same offense. According to Italy's Minister for Sport and Youth, pirates may soon face the prospect of being named and shamed.