Leftovers

• Ruben Verweij ☛ Ahamkara: the ego machine

  I’ve already hinted at some of the practical steps you could take to tackle your own ego. I’m hesitant to give more advice, because I’m very much a beginner myself. The best I can come up with now, is to pick a starting point (for example, a daily morning meditation practice) and then further experiment and go from there, as each of our learning experiences are unique. I’ve also found that it helps to chuckle at myself and my follies from time to time — in a fond, good-natured way, not in a self-deprecating way. "Look at him! Using all those fancy words to write a blog post about his own ignorance! On the topic of ego, the irony!"

• Chris Coyier ☛ Everything is Broken

  Over in the ol’ ShopTalk Discord (that’s what our Patreon thingy unlocks) our editor Chris Enns was venting about some streaming gear woes. And I said:

  Nothing Ever Works

• Annie Mueller ☛ Make rules, break rules

  On the joy of making arbitrary small rules for yourself which you can break at will but which also might help you steer your own obstinate behavior a bit more in a direction you like

• Science

  • Scoop News Group ☛ DOGE [sic] went ‘slash and burn’ on EPA grants. Scientists fear ‘grave’ impacts

    Many of those grants appear to have been dropped simply due to the fact that phrases like “environmental justice” or “equity” were used in the applications. The EPA said in response to a request for comment that it has canceled “at least $29 billion in wasteful spending” and saved “more than $2 billion taxpayer dollars” through its work with DOGE [sic], while fulfilling its “core mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

    In interviews with FedScoop, recipients of now-rescinded EPA grants mourned their projects and the lost opportunities to address real environmental challenges. They also warned of a slippery slope that comes with drastic cuts to science and technology.

  • The Register UK ☛ NASA to open Artemis III contract to competition

    As we noted last week, SpaceX has a mountain to climb to develop NASA's Human Landing System (HLS). After a slew of unplanned explosions, the company achieved two sub-orbital missions for its monster rocket - impressive, but still more than 200,000 miles (322,000 km) from the Moon.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Inside the archives of the NASA Ames Research Center

    Founded in 1939 as a West Coast lab for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA Ames was built to close the US gap with Germany in aeronautics research. Named for NACA founding member Joseph Sweetman Ames, the facility grew from a shack on Moffett Field into a sprawling compound with thousands of employees. A collection of 5,000 images from NASA Ames’s archives paints a vivid picture of bleeding-edge work at the heart of America’s technology hub.

  • Wired ☛ NASA’s Boss Just Shook Up the Agency’s Plans to Land on the Moon

    There are a couple of significant takeaways from this interview. First is the public acknowledgment by a senior NASA official that the space agency’s current timeline of a 2027 landing is completely untenable. And secondly, the timing of Duffy’s public appearances on Monday seems tailored to influence a fierce, behind-the-scenes battle to hold onto the NASA leadership position.

  • Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ Data Mining: Finding Similar Items and Users

    How to find related items? Here are recipes based on really simple formulas. If you pay attention, this technique is used all over the web (like on Amazon) to personalize the user experience and increase conversion rates. Because we want to give kick-ass product recommendations.

    To get one question out of the way: there are already many available libraries that do this, but as you’ll see there are multiple ways of skinning the cat and you won’t be able to pick the right one without understanding the process, at least intuitively.

• Career/Education

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Can AI keep students motivated, or does it do the opposite?

    But there are caveats. More than 50 of the studies we reviewed did not draw on a clear theoretical framework of motivation, and some used methods that we found were weak or inappropriate. This raises concerns about the quality of the evidence and underscores how much more careful research is needed before one can say with confidence that AI nurtures students' intrinsic motivation rather than just making tasks easier in the moment.

  • Sergio Visinoni ☛ Three sources for personal and professional growth

    In today’s article, I want to explore three fundamental sources for sustaining your growth as an engineering leader.

    They are ordered by their popularity, which is roughly inversely proportional to their effectiveness.

    In other words, the most common approach does not generally lead to the best results.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Pre-sales engineering

    This is the first in a series about technical pre-sales engineering, at least as it pertains to someone like me working in the IaaS space. I don’t often talk about my job here, but people are often confused by what I do, so I thought this would be a fun topic to explore. I’ll go into what it is, the responsibilities it entails, some of the challenges, and maybe some lessons I’ve learned.

  • Ish Sookun ☛ Re-skilling for the Future: My Experience at the PMI Mauritius Conference 2025

    The discussion was moderated by Sareeta Nundloll Goundan, President of the PMI Mauritius Chapter and Managing Director of SSL Consulting Services. Sareeta also serves as a Board Director at ABC Banking.

    During the panel, I was asked about whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) is replacing people and the fear of losing jobs. I explained that there are two ways to look at it. On one hand, AI can write code, so it’s easy to assume we no longer need developers but that’s not entirely true. AI isn’t replacing developers; it’s enhancing their productivity. Yes, a team that once needed ten developers for twenty projects might now manage with five, which can make it seem like AI is taking jobs. However, that same team of ten could now deliver five or more additional projects thanks to increased efficiency. My main point was that people need to learn how to learn, and learn fast in order to stay relevant in this evolving landscape. As Sareeta added, it’s equally important to be able to unlearn and relearn when the world changes.

  • Allen Downey ☛ The Foundation Fallacy

    I suggested that if a “good theoretical foundation” is not actually good preparation for engineering work, maybe it’s not actually a foundation — maybe it’s just a hoop for the ones who can jump through it, and a barrier for the ones who can’t.

    The engineering curriculum is based on the assumption that math (especially calculus) and science (especially physics) are (1) the foundations of engineering, and therefore (2) the prerequisites of engineering education. Together, these assumptions are what I call the Foundation Fallacy.

• Hardware

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Shield AI unveils unmanned VTOL fighter jet design with 2,000-mile range

    Named X-BAT, the aircraft will be powered by Shield AI’s Hivemind, AI-enabled autonomy software that’s designed to fly platforms in communications-denied, degraded, and limited environments.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ 96% keyboard layouts

    I’ve been in the market for a mechanical keyboard kit that would give me a numpad. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by my Apple //e and Commodore 128, or it’s becoming tedious using the regular number row when doing my weekly reconciling. Let’s pretend it was both. I’d like to be able to type on a numpad, and maybe even learn to touch type on one.

  • Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: A change of scenery

    Charlotte was out for the day so I moved my office and sat in the kitchen with the dog. I had a call so I set up my webcam on a franken-tripod so it wasn't looking up my nose. I love setting up all these little arms and heads to make weirdo tripods, just so they sit at the right height. What an odd pastime.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-15 [Older] German researchers find highly effective HIV antibody

  • JURIST ☛ TikTok 'rabbit holes' still drive youth towards suicidal content, Amnesty International France finds

    The study focused on TikTok-use in France. Using three test accounts and appropriate research controls, the group found that after seeking mental health content on the platform, accounts increasingly displayed depressive messaging and videos that romanticized suicide on the app’s “For you” page. For instance, two videos of the so-called “lip balm challenge” surfaced on the feed of one test account. Critics say the “challenge” induces self-harm, and has won major media attention in France, although its existence has been denied by TikTok.

  • University of Michigan ☛ AI and TikTok aren’t your friends

    Although many internet users made the situation out to be humorous or lighthearted, Kendra’s story made evident the grave consequences of AI psychosis and platforming a mental health crisis. AI psychosis is a non-clinical term referring to incidents where people rely on AI chatbots and become convinced that they are real. Kendra’s story runs in tandem with growing trends of human emotional dependence on AI, as well as using AI systems for therapy purposes.

    Not only did Kendra’s virality reveal the inability of social media to deal with and address severe mental health issues, but it also displayed possibly one of the first instances of modern AI psychosis broadcasted to a wide audience.

  • Science Alert ☛ 'Forever Chemicals' in Mothers' Blood Linked to Brain Changes in Their Kids

    "We were able to measure seven different PFAS in this study, and found that individual compounds had specific associations with offspring brain structure," says chemist Tuulia Hyötyläinen, from Örebro University in Sweden.

  • Wired ☛ People Who Say They’re Experiencing AI Psychosis Beg the FTC for Help

    The mother’s complaint is one of seven that have been filed to the FTC alleging that ChatGPT had caused people to experience incidents that included severe delusions, paranoia, and spiritual crises.

  • The Conversation ☛ How higher states of consciousness can forever change your perception of reality

    As a psychologist, I have been studying such experiences for more than 15 years. Awakening experiences are sometimes viewed as mysterious and random, but I have found that, to a large degree, they can be explained.

    My research has found that they have three main triggers.

• Proprietary

  • Investopedia ☛ Meta Is Laying Off 600 Workers in Its AI Division—What You Need to Know

    Meta didn’t respond to an Investopedia request for comment in time for publication.

  • Meta cutting 600 AI jobs even as it continues to hire more for its superintelligence lab

    Axios first reported the cuts, which will affect Meta’s Fundamental AI Research, or FAIR unit, as well as product-related AI and AI infrastructure units.

  • Neowin ☛ Meta cuts 600 AI jobs from FAIR and other AI divisions [Ed: This will get more pundits talking about the "Hey Hi" bubble]

    For years, FAIR has been behind foundational projects like PyTorch, the open source machine learning library used by millions, and groundbreaking work in Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) that taught computers to learn from massive amounts of unlabeled data. Other teams hit by the cuts include the product-related AI and AI infrastructure units, which get Meta's AI models into consumer hands.

    In an internal memo seen by Axios, Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, stated the company hopes the reorganization will cut through bureaucracy. He said with a smaller team, "fewer conversations will be required to make a decision." Wang added that with the changes, "each person will be more load-bearing and have more scope and impact."

  • 404 Media ☛ The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smartbeds

    When Amazon Web Services went offline, people lost control of their cloud-connected smart beds, getting stuck in reclined positions or roasting with the heat turned all the way up.

  • Wired ☛ The Long Tail of the AWS Outage

    Experts say outages like the one that Amazon experienced this week are almost inevitable given the complexity and scale of cloud technology—but the duration serves as a warning.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Family Suing OpenAI Claims They Removed ChatGPT Suicide Safeguards

      In August, a California family filed the first wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Scam Altman, alleging that the company’s ChatGPT product had “coached” their 16-year-old son into committing suicide in April of this year. According to the complaint, Adam Raine began using the AI bot in the fall of 2024 for help with homework but gradually began to confess darker feelings and a desire to self-harm. Over the next several months, the suit claims, ChatGPT validated Raine’s suicidal impulses and readily provided advice on methods for ending his life. The complaint states that chat logs reveal how, on the night he died, the bot provided detailed instructions on how Raine could hang himself — which he did.

    • Trail of Bits ☛ Prompt injection to RCE in AI agents

      This blog post focuses on the design antipatterns that create these vulnerabilities, with concrete examples demonstrating successful RCE across three different agent platforms. Although we cannot name the products in this post due to ongoing coordinated disclosure, all three are popular AI agents, and we believe that argument injection vulnerabilities are common in AI products with command execution capability. Finally, we underscore that the impact from this vulnerability class can be limited through improved command execution design using methods like sandboxing and argument separation, and we provide actionable recommendations for developers, users, and security engineers.

    • Dark Reading ☛ It Takes Only 250 Documents to Poison Any AI Model

      In a recent study, researchers from Anthropic, the UK AI Security Institute, and the Alan Turing Institute found that they could successfully backdoor AI models of different sizes using just 250 poisoned documents. Their study upended the presumption that attackers needed to control a certain percentage of training data to manipulate a model's behavior and instead showed that a small, fixed number of malicious documents is sufficient.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Open letter calls for prohibition on superintelligent AI, highlighting growing mainstream concern

      The letter reflects deep and accelerating concerns over projects undertaken by technology giants like Google, OpenAI, and Meta Platforms that are seeking to build artificial intelligence capable of outperforming humans on virtually every cognitive task. According to the letter, such ambitions have raised fears about unemployment due to automation, loss of human control and dignity, national security risks, and the possibility of far-reaching social or existential harms.

    • TechCrunch ☛ OpenAI requested memorial attendee list in ChatGPT suicide lawsuit

      Speaking to the FT, lawyers from the Raine family described the request as “intentional harassment.”

    • The Register UK ☛ OpenAI defends Atlas as prompt injection attacks surface

      Indirect prompt injection can occur when an AI model or agent handles content like a web page or image and then treats that content as if it were part of its instructed task. Direct prompt injection refers to instructions entered directly into a model's input box that bypass or override existing system instructions.

    • Simon Willison ☛ Dane Stuckey (OpenAI CISO) on prompt injection risks for ChatGPT Atlas

      He addresses the issue directly by name, with a good single-sentence explanation of the problem: [...]

    • Numeric Citizen ☛ Hot Take on ChatGPT Atlas

    • Numeric Citizen ☛ Hot Take on ChatGPT Atlas - More Thoughts

    • Simon Willison ☛ Introducing ChatGPT Atlas

      ChatGPT Atlas is a Mac-only web browser with a variety of ChatGPT-enabled features. You can bring up a chat panel next to a web page, which will automatically be populated with the context of that page.

    • Nicolas Magand ☛ Not my kind of web browser

      This is not just about Atlas; I haven’t read about any cool use case of an A.I. browser, whether it is Dia or Comet. Maybe this new browser will change things, maybe it will reach more people and we will see good examples, but so far, it feels like even folks at OpenAI struggled to find compelling use cases. Or maybe I was too bored by the video to pay attention?

    • Anil Dash ☛ ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web

      OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let's talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it.

      The problems fall into three main categories:

      1. Atlas substitutes its own AI-generated content for the web, but it looks like it's showing you the web
      2. The user experience makes you guess what commands to type instead of clicking on links
      3. You're the agent for the browser, it's not being an agent for you

    • Adrian Roselli ☛ OpenAI, ARIA, and SEO: Making the Web Worse

      There are some signals in here that accessibility practitioners can decode. They’re relatively straightforward:

      • Slurping / stealing content from div-soup React (et al) sites is hard when semantics and structure are ignored;
      • OpenAI sees ARIA as metadata which can guide its bots;
      • OpenAI wants authors to use ARIA to make it easier to classify and structure the data is slurps / steals;
      • Open AI doesn’t understand ARIA conceptually.

      That last bullet requires a bit more context. But more advanced accessibility practitioners can tease some other signals from the noise: [...]

    • Anil Dash ☛ The Majority AI View

      Technologies like LLMs have utility, but the absurd way they've been over-hyped, the fact they're being forced on everyone, and the insistence on ignoring the many valid critiques about them make it very difficult to focus on legitimate uses where they might add value.

      What's amazing is the reality that virtually 100% of tech experts I talk to in the industry feel this way, yet nobody outside of that cohort will mention this reality. What we all want is for people to just treat AI as a "normal technology", as Arvind Naryanan and Sayash Kapoor so perfectly put it. I might be a little more angry and a little less eloquent: stop being so goddamn creepy and weird about the technology! It's just tech, everything doesn't have to become some weird religion that you beat people over the head with, or gamble the entire stock market on.

    • The New Stack ☛ Ray Comes to the PyTorch Foundation

      The PyTorch Foundation, the Linux Foundation-based open source AI organization, today announced that it will become the host of Ray, the popular open source distributed computing framework for scaling AI and Python applications. The Ray project will join existing projects like PyTorch itself, the vLLM inference engine and deep learning optimization library DeepSpeed.

    • Exple.Tive.Org ☛ Raised Shields

      Whatever you think about AI and the industry around it here’s a fundamental, provable, irrefutable fact: in its current shape, with its current participants, this entire sector can only exist by offloading its costs onto unwilling people, ignoring the fact that they’re part of an ecosystem, sneering at the idea of consentful participation and refusing to admit that consent even matters.

      I mean, look at this bullshit right here. Look at it. It’s a crime scene. You can get the entire wikipedia database by pushing one button. You can have all of Project Gutenberg by pushing one button. You can get the entire 280TB Common Crawl database with maybe four three mouse clicks. And yet somehow people think this “Make a DDOS” exercise is some sort of hiring filter and port 443 on my tiny little VPS is a black-ice-and-burning-clown-car pile up all day every day now.

  • Social Control Media

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Do more likes lead to more clicks?

      As Lin explains, "Our research shows that the first 'like' serves as a critical cue, encouraging users to both like and click on ads. However, additional likes enhance the liking rate without significantly increasing clicks."

    • Wired ☛ AI Models Get Brain Rot, Too

      A new study from the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and Purdue University shows that large language models fed a diet of popular but low-quality social media content experience a kind of “brain rot” that may be familiar to anyone who has spent too long doomscrolling on X or TikTok.

    • Android Police ☛ YouTube is rolling out daily timers to break your endless Shorts habit

      YouTube likely has data on this, and realizes that users struggle to leave Shorts once they start scrolling. That is precisely why the streaming giant is now beginning to roll out a daily limit timer for the Shorts feed on mobile.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Trump Administration's Arrival on Bluesky Highlights Growing Pains for Open Networks

      "It’s no accident that US political operatives have been singling out Bluesky as a target for political control and retribution for months." But the result puts protocol developers and the users of their networks in opposition.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ China's Salt Typhoon exploited SharePoint to hit govts

      Security researchers now say more Chinese crews - likely including Salt Typhoon - than previously believed exploited a critical Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability, and used the flaw to target government agencies, telecommunications providers, a university, and a finance company across multiple continents.

    • Broadcom Inc ☛ ToolShell Used to Compromise Telecoms Company in Middle East

      The attackers also gained access to the networks of two government agencies in South America and a university in the U.S. recently. In these attacks, the attackers used other vulnerabilities for initial access and exploited SQL servers and Apache HTTP servers running the Adobe ColdFusion software to deliver their malware. Notably, in the South American victims, the attackers used the filename “mantec.exe”, possibly to mimic a Symantec filename (“symantec.exe”) in an attempt to hide their malicious activity. This binary (mantec.exe), which is a legitimate copy of a BugSplat executable, a tool used for bug tracking, was used to sideload a malicious DLL.

    • The Record ☛ Cyber incidents in Texas, Tennessee and Indiana impacting critical government services

      In an update on Tuesday, city officials explained that the system used to pay water bills and property taxes was taken down by the cyberattack, forcing the city’s more than 40,000 residents to pay through check or money order. Cash and credit card payments will not be accepted.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Ransomware Targets VPNs, Microsoft 365 In APAC Surge

      The Akira ransomware group, in particular, has accelerated its growth, exploiting outdated or improperly patched systems with speed and precision.

    • Fortra LLC ☛ Cyber-criminals turn on each other: the story of Lumma Stealer's collapse

      Normally when we write about a malware operation being disrupted, it's because it has been shut down by law enforcement. But in the case of Lumma Stealer, a notorious malware-as-a-service (MaaS) operation used to steal passwords and sensitive data, it appears to have been sabotaged by other cybercriminals.

    • The Register UK ☛ Feds flag active exploitation of patched Windows SMB vuln

      "To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker could execute a specially crafted malicious script to coerce the victim machine to connect back to the attack system using SMB and authenticate. This could result in elevation of privilege."

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Digital Camera World ☛ New Facebook feature lets AI loose on your camera roll – should you opt in?

      But, as always, there’s a caveat. And it’s one that photographers, videographers, and anyone else protective of their images should pay attention to.

    • Android Police ☛ GM is bringing a new Gemini-powered assistant to it cars next year

      Detroit-based automotive giant General Motors just dropped big news. During its GM Forward event earlier today, the automotive manufacturing company announced that it will begin integrating a Google Gemini-powered AI assistant into its vehicles.

    • TechCrunch ☛ GM is bringing Google Gemini-powered AI assistant to cars in 2026

      GM is the latest automaker to lean in to generative AI-based assistants that promise to respond to driver requests in a more natural-sounding way. Stellantis is collaborating with French AI firm Mistral, Mercedes is integrating ChatGPT, and Tesla has brought xAI’s Grok to its vehicles.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Failures in Face Recognition

      It’s easy to blame the tech, but the real issue are the engineers who only considered a narrow spectrum of potential faces. That needs to change. But also, we need easy-to-access backup systems when the primary ones fail.

    • Arduino ☛ Provision, configure, and deploy, all from your phone

      Back in September, we introduced the new provisioning flow on Arduino Cloud, starting with the UNO R4 WiFi. It means that you can now connect and configure your UNO R4 WiFi on Arduino Cloud straight from your phone, with the IoT Remote app. It’s a game changer, making your device setup faster, smoother, and cable-free.

  • Confidentiality

    • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Drawing an ASCII TIE fighter for post‑quantum cryptography

      Therefore, it is desirable to have a “hybrid” KEM designed such that the hybrid “fails gracefully” by only losing the quantum safety property if the PQ algorithm is insecure, but doesn't compromise safety to traditional attack vectors that exist without sufficiently powerful quantum computers. My intuition is this will allow for more confident experimentation and deployment of PQ algorithms, as the stakes are much lower for actually rolling out the new algorithms with this construction.

• Defence/Aggression

  • YLE ☛ Amnesty: TikTok continues to expose young people to suicide-related content

    Their research, dubbed 'Dragged into the Rabbit Hole,' alleges TikTok's ongoing failure to address its systemic design risks affecting children and young people.

    While the group's research focused on France, the takeaways also apply to Finland, where TikTok is one of the most popular apps, according to Amnesty spokesperson Mikaela Remes.

  • The Next Move ☛ A Movement, Not a One-Man Show

    But this is a group effort. The Next Move is powered by the small-but-mighty team from Renew Democracy Initiative.

    And I must tell you that one of the most frequent questions I’ll ask my RDI colleagues is this: How are we going to make this less about me, and more about the fight for liberal democracy?

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ At Nuremberg, World War II’s Battle Turned to the Courtroom, and an Eloquent Lawyer Helped Lead the Allies to Victory

    Jackson is little known today outside the legal world, where, says John Q. Barrett, a legal scholar at St. John’s University at work on a Jackson biography, “he’s a patron saint.” But if Jackson has been forgotten, he is arguably the most accomplished forgotten man of the 20th century. His remarkable career took him from a small private practice to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, and he remains the only person in U.S. history to serve as solicitor general, attorney general and Supreme Court justice.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Jon King: Michigan's No Kings moment shows ‘We the people’ still means something

    Vigorous participation took place across more than 100 Michigan communities, stretching from southeast Michigan all the way into the Upper Peninsula, including major cities and smaller towns, even in a GOP stronghold like Livingston County.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-15 [Older] Hegseth's plane diverted to UK due to crack in windshield

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-15 [Older] Germany news: Cabinet agrees on 'active pensioner' plans

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-15 [Older] India: At least 20 dead in Rajasthan bus fire

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-15 [Older] India-Taliban rapprochement sparks women's rights debate

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-15 [Older] Italy top court blocks Nord Stream suspect extradition

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-15 [Older] Madagascar military leader to become transitional president

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-15 [Older] Pakistan: Fresh clashes on Afghan border leave several dead

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Virginia Giuffre’s ‘Nobody Girl:’ What We Learned From the Posthumous Memoir

    The book, Nobody’s Girl, was finished only months before Giuffre died. In a foreword, Giuffre’s collaborator Amy Wallace revealed that before her death, Giuffre sent Wallace and her publicist, Dini Von Muffling, an email asking that the book be published even if she died. “The content of this book is crucial as it aims to shed light on the systemic failures that allow the trafficking of vulnerable individuals across borders,” the note from Giuffre read. “It is imperative that the truth is understood and that the issues surrounding this topic are addressed, both for the sake of justice and awareness. In the event of my passing, I would like to ensure that Nobody’s Girl is still released.”

• Environment

  • The Nation ☛ Will the AI Boom Lead to Water and Electricity Shortages?

    Data centers house the computers, servers, and other hardware used to process and store digital information. With their enhanced processing capabilities, large “hyperscale” complexes are the preferred data centers for the computation-heavy training and use of AI models. They can cover an area of over 1 million square feet, roughly equal to 17 football fields. Water is used to maintain humidity and as a coolant for the heat-generating machines, and as American data centers have grown in size and number, so has their water consumption, from 5.6 billion gallons in 2014 to 17.4 billion in 2023.

    Communities are already feeling the squeeze. In Newton County, Georgia, a single Meta-owned center accounts for about 10 percent of all water use. Homeowners near the facility told The New York Times they believed the data center’s construction had damaged their wells: Their taps yield brown water, or no water at all. The community is also facing water shortages, and prices have skyrocketed; in the future, locals may have to resort to rationing. That’s a steep price to pay so that Mark Zuckerberg can sell AI-enabled spy glasses.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Sustainable solutions: Making the Raspberry Pi office greener

    We moved into our new 28,000 sq ft headquarters in December 2023, and have since introduced several measures both to lower our emissions and to streamline reporting them. Built in 2008, the site remains in good condition; being a big glass box, it even benefits from natural heating. But in order to become more sustainable, the building requires some retrofitting, and we’ve identified four key areas that will help us achieve net zero.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Federal News Network ☛ Government shutdown takes toll on air traffic control personnel

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Data centers turn to commercial aircraft jet engines bolted onto trailers as AI power crunch bites — cast-off turbines generate up to 48 MW of electricity apiece

      Fast, loud, and anything but elegant, these “bridging power” units come from vendors like ProEnergy, which offers trailerized turbines built around ex-aviation cores that can spin up in minutes to meet energy demand. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi Power’s FT8 MOBILEPAC, which derives from Pratt & Whitney jet engines, delivers a similar output in a self-contained footprint designed for fast deployment.

    • The Register UK ☛ Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators

      The Financial Times says two-thirds of gas turbines for electricity generation come from three manufacturers: Japan's MHI, Germany's Siemens, and GE Vernova, the latter formed from a spin-out of General Electric's energy businesses.

      It quotes an MHI executive as saying: "There's so much demand right now that we can't meet it all," and that there is a lot of demand out of North America, meaning customers are now facing a three-year waiting list for delivery of turbine generators.

    • Electrek ☛ Tesla is heading into multi-billion-dollar iceberg of its own making

      Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving Supervised’ expansion is back firing as it exposes its shortcomings. Customers left without promised features are growing discontent and demanding to be compensated.

      It’s turning into a multi-billion-dollar iceberg of Tesla’s own making.

      In 2016, Tesla proudly announced that all its vehicles produced onward are equipped with “all the hardware for full self-driving,” which would be delivered through future software updates.

      The automaker turned out to be significantly wrong about that.

  • Overpopulation

    • YLE ☛ One and done: Exhaustion dampens Finns' enthusiasm for big families

      THL's latest 'baby family' survey drew responses from nearly 12,000 parents: more than 7,500 mothers who had given birth and about 4,500 fathers or other second parents.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2025-10-15 [Older] Rembrandt paintings to be offered as shares on a public stock exchange

  • Quanta Magazine ☛ The Game Theory of How Algorithms Can Drive Up Prices

    Yet a widely cited 2019 paper showed that algorithms could learn to collude tacitly, even when they weren’t programmed to do so. A team of researchers pitted two copies of a simple learning algorithm against each other in a simulated market, then let them explore different strategies for increasing their profits. Over time, each algorithm learned through trial and error to retaliate when the other cut prices — dropping its own price by some huge, disproportionate amount. The end result was high prices, backed up by mutual threat of a price war.

  • The Street ☛ Walmart makes a controversial move affecting job seekers

    Finding a job in today’s economy is already challenging, with fewer openings available compared to recent years.

    Now, job seekers face another setback after Walmart, one of the nation’s largest employers, has made a controversial decision that could affect thousands of potential workers.

    Walmart has paused all job offers to candidates requiring H-1B visas following the Trump administration’s newly imposed $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applicants. This decision primarily impacts the retailer’s corporate positions, rather than its in-store-level workforce.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Cable giant Charter cuts 1,200 managers from its workforce

    The company operates Spectrum cable TV and broadband service, which was once a huge growth engine. But the company has faced a steady drumbeat of subscriber losses, including shedding 177,000 [Internet] customers in the first and second quarters of this year.

    The company has nearly 30 million [Internet] customers.

  • EFF ☛ It’s Time to Take Back CTRL

    Take Back CTRL is EFF's new website to give you insight into the ways that technology has become the veins and arteries of rising global authoritarianism. It’s not just because of technology’s massive power to surveil, categorize, censor, and make decisions for governments—but also because the money made by selling your data props up companies and CEOs with clear authoritarian agendas. As the preeminent digital rights organization, EFF has a clear role to play.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ China wants US semiconductor companies to submit sensitive data as part of probe — 'anti-dumping' investigation requests sales and profit data

    China has launched a raft of new questionnaires for US semiconductor businesses in an effort to discover data on the companies' activities in China, and particularly how their prices, income, and profits differ between native US sales and those in Asian territories, like China, via Bloomberg. Although no companies have been named specifically, the wording in the survey seems set to target major US semiconductor producers like Texas Instruments and Analog Devices.

  • The Register UK ☛ AI bubble inflates Microsoft CEO pay to $96.5M

    480:1 ratio compared to average employee? Must be all that 'leadership' juice

  • Dark Reading ☛ Russia Pivots, Cracks Down on Resident Hackers

    In a new report, and an exclusive interview with Dark Reading at its Predict conference in Manhattan in early October, Recorded Future hypothesizes that this symbiosis is starting to show cracks. Thanks to some major developments in the West — namely, increased law enforcement against Russian cybercriminals, and improving cybersecurity across sectors — Russia's law enforcement has been revoking the safe harbor it provides some low-level cybercriminals.

  • Joel Chrono ☛ I need to talk about TRON: Uprising

    Uprising tackles many themes with a mastery I just couldn’t believe. How someone gets radicalized to either side of the conflict, how people lie to themselves to keep it together, how some join a cause for selfish reasons. How trying to rebel can cause harm to innocents and how that may cause them to turn against you. How even the good guys keep secrets, why that may be a necessity in a certain context, or why it ends up not paying off in other times. Genocide, herd mentality, mind control, and many other topics are touched up, and pretty realistically in my opinion.

  • The New Stack ☛ Rust vs. C++: a Modern Take on Performance and Safety

    In this article, we’ll put Rust and C++ side by side, not to crown a universal winner, but to explore where each shines, where each stumbles and how modern developers can choose the right tool for the job. From memory management and concurrency to tooling, performance and real-world adoption, let’s take a closer look at these two titans of systems programming.

  • Security Week ☛ TARmageddon Flaw in Popular Rust Library Leads to RCE

    A high-severity vulnerability in the popular Rust library Async-tar could allow attackers to smuggle archive entries and execute arbitrary code remotely.

  • Michał Sapka ☛ How did Microsoft start?

    With the terrible Windows 11, and with the fiasco of EOLing Windows 10, we should remind ourselves that Microsoft was always a shady, nepo-baby company. Some of us know this story well, some not. But it's always nice to tell the abridged version, perfect around the 4th Guiness pint.

  • GNU Projects

    • The Stallmanist Manifesto

      So he eventually resigned from the MIT Lab and started the GNU Project in September of 1983. The goal was to build a completely free Unix-like operating system, which would be completely homemade and free of all capitalist proprietary software. And he would give it for free to anyone who wanted to use it. He later published his ideas in the more detailed GNU Manifesto in March 1985.

      [...]

      As you can see, though superficially similar, there is a wide chasm between the concept of Open Source and Communism. OSS is more similar to so-called “gift economies”, where people are rewarded (monetarily or otherwise) based on their work and contribution. RMS himself has actively rejected FOSS as a form of communism.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • US News And World Report ☛ After Others Departed, Pentagon Announces 'New' Press Corps Filled With Conservative News Outlets

      Hegseth's spokesman, Sean Parnell, announced the “next generation” of the Pentagon press corps with more than 60 journalists who had agreed to the new policy. He said 26 journalists who had previously been part of the press corps were among the signees. The department wouldn't say who any of them were, but several outlets reposted his message on X saying they had signed on.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • US Navy Times ☛ Judge orders ‘immediate’ return of books removed from 5 DOD schools

    U.S. District Court Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles granted a preliminary injunction, requiring officials with the Department of Defense Education Activity to “immediately restore the library books and curricular materials that have been removed since January 19, 2025 … to their preexisting shelves, classrooms, and units” at the five schools.

  • Truthdig ☛ ‘Newspeak’ Comes to the Department of Energy - Truthdig

    The latest announcement appears to apply to those working for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and adds to a list that was started some time ago. The list of “words to avoid” now includes: [...]

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ Why The Guardian is no longer dependent on page views to drive revenue

    This led to The Guardian offering readers the option to donate on a one-off or recurring basis. Between its print and digital business, 64% of Guardian funding comes from subscriptions, donations and newsstand.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • JURIST ☛ Three women die in Iran prison due to denial of medical care, says rights group

    Iranian prisons are notoriously overcrowded and suffer unsanitary conditions. Reports detail inadequate access to clean water, insufficient food, and rampant spread of disease. Qarchak prison is infamous for its harsh conditions. Originally a chicken farm, the facility was repurposed to house thousands of women—many of whom are political detainees or prisoners of conscience–in an environment that fails to meet basic international standards for prisoner treatment.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ The Time That Martin Luther King, Jr. Was Almost Assassinated in St. Augustine, Florida

    I grew up hearing my dad talk about Martin Luther King’s time in St. Augustine. I thought that I had heard all of his stories long ago. But earlier this year, he casually told me one that left my jaw open—not only because I hadn’t heard it before, but also because it seemed to me that it is important enough, in the context of the historical record, that everyone should know it. In that spirit, I now relay to you: The story of the time that Martin Luther King, Jr. almost got assassinated in St. Augustine, Florida.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Internet Is Going to Break Again

    The incident marked at least the third time in the past five years that Amazon Web Services’ Northern Virginia facilities contributed to a widespread [Internet] outage. This time, more than 1,000 sites and services were affected, according to Downdetector, costing companies an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars. Venmo users were locked out of their payments, and international banks experienced major blips in their service. People struggled to book urgent doctor appointments and couldn’t access their Medicare benefits. Snapchat and Reddit were down, as were Instagram and Hulu. Ring paused their doorbell cameras; ChatGPT stopped answering. (Some unfortunate customers of Eight Sleep, which sells AI-powered, temperature-changing mattresses, woke to bright strobe lights or an “absolutely freezing” bed, per testimony on X.) Throughout most of yesterday, the connective tissue of modern life seemed to be under threat—a reminder that the [Internet] is physical, fallible, and heavily reliant on just a few massive companies.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Copper Wire Theft From AT&T Vault in L.A. Cripples Phone and Emergency Services

    The crimes aren’t minor. Thieves often use heavy machinery to break into vaults covered by metal plates weighing up to 1,600 pounds. Their motivation? Soaring copper prices, which have climbed 58 percent in the past five years.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Harvard University ☛ Shielding Americans from corporate ‘tyranny’

  “Anti-monopoly is a governing philosophy that broadly views concentrations of power as a threat to freedom, recognizing that tyranny comes in many guises,” said Khan while delivering the 2025 Stone Lecture on Economic Inequality last week at Harvard Kennedy School. “Just as the Constitution creates checks and balances in our government, safeguarding against concentrated political control, anti-monopoly laws create checks against concentrations of economic power.”

• The Register UK ☛ Apple, Google earn strategic market status for mobile in UK

  The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has declared both mobile tech giants meet the legal threshold for "strategic market status" (SMS) under the UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, giving it sweeping oversight of their mobile platform businesses.

• Bruce Lawson ☛ 4 years, 3 months and 22 days

  It’s a mere 4 years, 3 months and 22 days since a weird Australian developer and his brother contacted me to ask if I would be interested in speaking to UK competition regulators about Apple’s continuing holding back the Web (which I’d long been moaning about on Twitter). Today, the UK has finally designated Apple (and Google) strategic market status in mobile platforms because of their substantial and entrenched market power.

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • OpenSource.com ☛ Why so little love for the patent grant in the MIT License?

      The MIT License unquestionably has an express license. That license is not limited to the granting of any particular flavor of intellectual property rights. The statement of license does not use the word "patent" or the word "copyright." When was the last time you heard someone expressing concern that the MIT License merely had an implied copyright license?

      Since neither "copyright" nor "patent" appear in the text of the grant of rights, let us look to the words in the MIT License to see what we might learn about what rights are being granted.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Anti-Piracy Groundhog Day: Recycled Arguments Plague USTR's Notorious Markets Review

    Every year, the Office of the United States Trade Representative uses input from copyright holders to update its list of notorious piracy markets. The process aims to help combat copyright infringement, but for the past several years, recurring arguments and rebuttals have contributed to a 'Groundhog Day' loop. Recent submissions also reveal various 'copy-paste' efforts, highlighting a persistent standoff between rightsholders and accused parties like Cloudflare.