Leftovers

• Scott Jehl ☛ Could Open Graph Just Be a CSS Media Type?

  Is this something the browser should handle? I don't know! What if an img element, dressed with a particular new opengraph attribute, could be used to reference a site this way when linking to it? Maybe the browser would know to load that site with a opengraph media type and render it out as image data instead of a costly (potentially insecure) shrunk-down website. Maybe this could be facilitated by canvas attributes, or a special object or iframe.

• Robin Rendle ☛ An Abundance of Inspiration

  But this redesign was a good reminder that I’m always working amongst smart, inquisitive folks and all of them are taking inspiration from unlikely sources and adding their own thing to the mix. There is an abundance of inspiration out there—across media and genre and quirky publishing formats—and I just have to keep my eyes open to see it.

• Matthew Weber ☛ Smaller Notebooks Are Better Notebooks

  Maybe it’s just the notebooks that I bought, or maybe I’m just coming around the idea that smaller notebooks are better. It seems wasteful when I can get three of these fuller notebooks for cheaper than the price of three Field Notes, but if I’m not going to be happy with them, then I’m not really saving any money.

• Chris Enns ☛ Inside Disney's Secret Sound Lab with Dallas Taylor

  I really enjoyed the tour of SNL's audio department and when he got to go inside Disney's Sound Lab (both embedded below).

• Chris Aldrich ☛ How do you use your typewriter? [Wrong Answers Only Edition]

  It’s really an over-asked question: What do you use your typewriter for?. (tl;dr: writing). To make things more interesting and entertaining in the middle of the week, let’s turn it on its ear and ask only for the wrong answers today.

• Gregory Hammond ☛ Pictures

  With all this taking of photos, do we want the photos or the memories? You might say, if I don’t have the photos I won’t be able to remember it as clearly. While I believe that’s partially true, we can’t hold onto every memory forever.

• Science

  • Kevin Boone ☛ Gâteaux differentials and Euler-Lagrange equations using Maple

    integral sign This article describes how to solve simple problems in the calculus of variations using Maple. Maple actually has a function module for this, but it's more illustrative -- and perhaps more reliable -- to perform the algebraic manipulations step-by-step.

    In what follows I assume that the reader is basically familiar with the terminology and notation of calculus of variations. If that isn't the case, you might prefer to look first at my related article Calculus of variations: a lunchbreak guide. I also assume knowledge of calculus (particular integration by parts) and some familiarity with the computer algebra system Maple. I've tested the examples with version 16 on Linux, but I have no reason to think that other versions would behave differently.

• Hardware

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Updating CPU frequencies for Apple silicon Macs – The Eclectic Light Company

    The best way to discover which frequencies are supported by the P and E cores in the CPU of an Apple silicon chip is using the output of the command tool powermetrics. This lists frequencies for P and E cores, and this article assumes that those it gives are correct. Although it’s most likely that these frequencies aren’t baked into silicon, so could be changed, I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that Apple has done that in any release Mac.

  • Matthew Weber ☛ Not Enough Keys - Matt's Blog

    I do not need it. The three key cluster on my current deck is plenty. I can easily make this board last years and then replace it when it is actually in need of being replaced. That was my plan. But then I saw a friend of mine buy a new keyboard (the Glove 80), and that looks nice, and that spurred me into thinking about how nice it would be if I had a new keyboard. It’s been worming into my thoughts more often than I’d like to admit.

  • David Rosenthal ☛ The Bathtub Curve

    Enterprise disks are typically warranted for 5 years, so a disk manufacturer is incentized to focus engineering effort on eliminating the "first region", the left side of the bathtub, and ensuring that the second region extends past the 5 year mark. Eight years ago Backblaze was starting to see that the engineers were succeeding in the first region: [...]

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Scientists claim you can't see the difference between 1440p and 8K at 10 feet in new study on the limits of the human eye — would still be an improvement on the previously-touted upper limit of 60 pixels per degree

    Researchers at the University of Cambridge and Meta Reality Labs have conducted a new study into how the human eye perceives pixels on displays at different sizes and resolutions, and claim that once you get to a certain size and detail, there's no discernible difference, via TechXplore. According to the calculator they developed, at 10 feet distance, a 50-inch screen looks almost identical at 1440p and 8K resolution.

  • Jakub Steiner ☛ USB MIDI Controllers on the M8 - Even a Stopped Clock

    The M8 has extensive USB audio and MIDI capabilities, but it cannot be a USB MIDI host. So you can control other devices through USB MIDI, but cannot sent to it over USB.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Hunger Games Begin

    While in in the check-out line, I often see some patrons, typically elderly and/or disabled, paying with EBT cards. EBT cards are the way the government delivers food aid under the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, formerly known as food stamps. SNAP has become a crucial part of America’s social safety net, with more than 40 million Americans relying on those EBT cards to put food on the table.

    And unless the government shutdown ends this week, which seems basically impossible, federal support for SNAP will be cut off this Saturday.

    Here are four things you should know about the imminent hunger games.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ AWS outage: Myths vs reality

    A single AWS region is a single point of failure. With a lot of dedicated work, you can add another cloud provider or AWS region or datacenter into the mix until finally, at tremendous effort and expense, you have added a second single point of failure. Good work; now you're subject to your existing issues with us-east-1, but you've added in your workload having problems whenever Azure hiccups too.

  • The Register UK ☛ Next-gen firewalls, VPNs can increase security risks: At-Bay

    Organizations using Cisco and Citrix VPN devices were nearly seven times as likely to suffer a ransomware infection over a 15-month period, according to At-Bay, a provider of cyber insurance and a vendor of managed detection and response products.

  • The Register UK ☛ AWS US-EAST-1 region is having another bad day

    Amazon throttled some requests for EC2 resources, but said retrying a request should resolve the issue.

  • The Record ☛ Researchers warn of Qilin ransomware gang after group hit hundreds of orgs this year

    The group has existed since July 2022 but expanded its operations in the last few years, now operating through the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) business model.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ AirTrafficDevice: Ignored, Reluctantly Fixed, No CVE, No Bounty

    However, Apple never assigned a CVE while reluctantly fixing this serious bug/privacy leak.

  • Jonathan Kamens ☛ How you actually should respond to that “183 million credentials leak” – Something better to do

    The article makes a big deal of the fact that “Gmail passwords” were included in the leak without saying a single word about the fact that your Gmail password is also your Google password. Google Photos, Google Docs, Google Drive, any site you’ve used “log in with Google” on… all these are compromised if your “Gmail password” is. It’s kind of laughable that this article goes to some effort to fearmonger about compromised “Gmail passwords” when the problem it’s trying to scare people about is actually worse than it says it is.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Gmail users have been urged to check their accounts after more than 183 million passwords were stolen

    Australian cyber expert Troy Hunt, who revealed the incident, called it a ‘vast corpus’ of breached data, which totals 3.5 terrabytes. He explained that’s the equivalent of 875 full-length HD movies.

  • Heise ☛ Sharp criticism of the EU framework for cloud sovereignty

    The industry association CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe) is sharply criticizing the new EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework. In its current form, the framework does not create clarity, but rather dilutes the concept of cloud sovereignty through an imprecise rating system.

    The core of the criticism is the "Sovereignty Score" introduced by the framework, which makes cloud sovereignty assessable and also gradable. CISPE draws a comparison to organic food: "A cloud service is either sovereign or it is not – just as food is either organic or not. There can be no 75 percent organic, and there should be no 75 percent sovereign." The scoring system mixes unattainable goals such as complete EU control over every hardware component with vague concepts such as "safeguards against changes in control."

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • 404 Media ☛ a16z Is Funding a 'Speedrun' to AI-Generated Hell on Earth

      Do you want ‘AI-powered social orbits,’ ‘autonomous recruiting firms,’ and an ‘AI-powered credit card?’ Too bad, you’re getting them anyway.

    • Jacky Alciné ☛ An exploration on what could be a leftist position on generative AI

      First things first; if the following things don't click, then I don't think much can be said going forward that you'd be able to gleam from what I'm expressing here: [...]

    • Jeff Sheets ☛ HuskerFinder: Claude Code Shipped my ~20 year old idea

      To be clear, I’m not just prompting and shipping blindly. I still review every change. I still make architectural decisions. I still catch bugs and edge cases. I still write some code myself when I want to.

    • The Register UK ☛ AI browsers wide open to attack via prompt injection

      With great power comes great vulnerability. Several new AI browsers, including OpenAI's Atlas, offer the ability to take actions on the user's behalf, such as opening web pages or even shopping. But these added capabilities create new attack vectors, particularly prompt injection.

      Prompt injection occurs when something causes text that the user didn't write to become commands for an AI bot. Direct prompt injection happens when unwanted text gets entered at the point of prompt input, while indirect injection happens when content, such as a web page or PDF that the bot has been asked to summarize, contains hidden commands that AI then follows as if the user had entered them.

  • Social Control Media

    • Task And Purpose ☛ Navy to review Marines’ and sailors’ personal social media posts

      The message does not specify what exactly prompted the review, or how sailors’ and Marines’ social media posts may have been “misaligned” with official guidance.

    • Dark Reading ☛ YouTube Ghost Network Uses Scary Tactics, Targets Users

      Instead of using their own homegrown YouTube accounts and videos, Ghost Network favors compromising established accounts and hijacking the videos to spread malware. The vast majority if videos are focused on video game cheats and hacks, with the descriptions containing malicious links.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Mastodon: if it could happen, doesn’t mean it did

      Mastodon is a far better community than those aforementioned commercial social networks, but I will admit this specific attitude is exhausting. I dare us to do better.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ I watched my first YouTube shorts, and I’m confuzzled

      To be clear, is an idiom. Vertical video makes sense, given people are watching this sort of disposable media on their phones. I’m all for the accessibility subtitles provide, though I’d prefer they weren’t baked in and didn’t take up half the screen. The looping I don’t get; whenever I see people watching these sorts of videos they’re swiping as soon the previous video finishes.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ You have one week to opt out or become fodder for LinkedIn AI training

      If you thought living in Europe, Canada, or Hong Kong meant you were protected from having LinkedIn scrape your posts to train its AI, think again. You have a week to opt out before the Microsoft subsidiary assumes you're fine with it.

      LinkedIn announced changes to its data use terms several weeks ago, noting that as of November 3 it would start sucking up data from "members in the EU, EEA, Switzerland, Canada, and Hong Kong" to train AI models. While not mentioned by name in the notice, scrolling down the update page to the section on the UK indicates that previous exceptions which rendered Blighty safe from LinkedIn scraping are being eliminated too.

      As for what's up for harvesting, it's pretty much everything on LinkedIn, the update noted – profile details and public posts are all fair game. LinkedIn did take pains to spell out in multiple places that private messages aren't included in the data it'll be extracting, and with good reason. The company was sued in early 2025 for allegedly using private messages for AI training and it doesn't want a repeat of that mess, even if the plaintiff withdrew the suit shortly after filing.

    • Techdirt ☛ Biden Admin Blessed UN Surveillance Treaty, Trump Admin Gets To Abuse It

      The US attended the UN Cybercrime Treaty signing ceremony in Hanoi this weekend, where 72 countries signed on to a Russia-backed framework for global surveillance cooperation. Whether the US actually puts pen to paper (and all the reporting on this is kind of cagey) is almost beside the point—by showing up and legitimizing the proceeding, what the Biden administration last year blessed with “we’ll fix it from within” is now in the hands of the Trump administration. You know, the one that views criticism as crime and governmental power as something to maximize, not constrain. What could go wrong?

      The Russian-initiated treaty, which we’ve warned about multiple times over the past few years, creates a framework for cross-border law enforcement “cooperation” on “cybercrime” that’s defined so broadly it could cover basically any activity a government doesn’t like that happens to involve a computer.

    • Techdirt ☛ Ring, Flock Safety Join Forces To Expand Law Enforcement Surveillance Networks

      Then it invited cops to play with its equipment and install some of their own. It went from keeping black people out of white neighborhoods to becoming a tool to be wielded by cops as they searched for a woman who had terminated a pregnancy — not because cops cared about her well-being, but at the behest of her apparently abusive boyfriend. Law enforcement investigators and officials claimed the nationwide searches for the person seeking an abortion was all about finding her safely. Even after internal documents revealed it was actually about finding her in hopes of pressing charges for violating Texas’s abortion ban, Flock Safety has continued to criticize journalists for reporting on this apparent abuse of its camera network.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Nigeria's government is using digital technology to repress citizens. A researcher explains how

      I found that local conflict and development needs drive the Nigerian government's demand for digital authoritarianism technologies. Foreign suppliers of these technologies are motivated by both economic gain and influence in the region.

      The findings are important. Firstly, it signals that the trend of using digital spaces to control populations has reached the African continent. It also shows that the trend is facilitated by foreign actors that provide governments with the technology and expertise.

    • EDRI ☛ A fair digital future at risk: EDRi’s contribution to the Digital Fairness Act

      The Digital Fairness Act (DFA) is the EU’s forthcoming law to modernise consumer protection for the digital age. It follows the Digital Fairness Fitness Check, an evaluation by the European Commission which found that current EU rules, such as the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive and Consumer Rights Directive, cannot adequately address the techniques companies now use to shape people’s behaviour online.

      Today’s online environments are filled with systems that continuously learn how to keep users engaged, spending, and sharing data. This often happens through design choices that manipulate attention, emotion, or decision-making rather than supporting free and informed choices. The DFA aims to close these gaps, ensuring that digital products and services respect people’s rights rather than exploit their vulnerabilities.

    • NYOB ☛ Criminal complaint against facial recognition company Clearview AI

      Today, noyb has filed a criminal complaint against Clearview AI and its managers. The facial recognition company is known for scraping billions of photos of Europeans and people around the world on the internet – and selling its facial recognition system to law enforcement and state actors. Several EU data protection authorities have already imposed fines and bans on Clearview AI. But the US company simply ignores these actions – given the lack of enforcement.

  • Confidentiality

    • The Walrus ☛ Quantum Computers Will Soon Be Able to Crack Codes, and No One’s Ready

      But Brassard’s is a peculiar kind of terror: a terror unavoidably entangled with validation. Because, in a sense, it’s a future he prepared us for. Over forty years ago, he helped pioneer one of our best lines of defence against the post-quantum future: the BB84 protocol, an elegant and unassailably secure way to transfer encrypted data using quantum mechanics. “The protocol we invented back in ’83 is mathematically proven to be unconditionally secure,” says Brassard, with the caveat that quantum theory is correct and carried out without introducing technical flaws or loopholes. In other words, BB84 works if quantum mechanics, one of the most complex and beautiful theories of how our world operates, is right.

• Defence/Aggression

  • FAIR ☛ ‘The Government’s Own Disclosures Demonstrate These Strikes Are Not Lawful’: CounterSpin interview with Jeffrey Stein on Trump's boat attacks

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ After No Kings, It’s Time to Escalate

    Of the many good reasons why you shouldn’t give up hope, the first is that popular resistance is growing, as seen in the recent Indivisible-initiated “No Kings” protests, the largest in US history. Second, Trump’s policies are unpopular, and large numbers of Americans are searching for a viable alternative. Third, if opposition to authoritarianism and economic mismanagement becomes wide enough, an anti-Trump electoral wave in 2026 and 2028 might still be large enough to swamp electoral machinations. Fourth, Trump is very old, and it’s not obvious that MAGA can survive its megalomaniac ringleader.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Guillotine Still Falls

    And sometimes philosophy requires us to tell an old story that keeps getting forgotten—not because people are stupid, but because each generation of very smart people convinces itself that this time they’ve solved the problem that stumped all their predecessors. That this time they’ve found the logic that derives values from facts, the calculation that reveals what humanity should want, the moral framework that justifies who should rule.

    They haven’t. They can’t. And David Hume is about to tell them why—again.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Tucker Carlson Just Showed Us the Future—And It’s Worse Than We Thought

    Watch the interview. Actually watch it. Don’t read summaries. Don’t trust secondhand accounts. Sit through the entire thing and feel what I felt: the cold recognition that we’re watching the next stage unfold in real time.

    Carlson treated Fuentes with the deference he reserves for serious intellectuals. Asked him softball questions. Nodded along as Fuentes explained his worldview. Never pushed back on the Nazi sympathies that Fuentes doesn’t even bother hiding anymore. This wasn’t journalism. This was grooming—preparing his audience to accept what comes next.

  • SBS ☛ Nationals senator says TikTok bullied his office amid new teen social media ban details | SBS News

    TikTok, Meta and Snapchat have faced a parliamentary inquiry into the teen social media ban, confirming they will deactivate, delete or freeze accounts of those under 16 when the new law comes into effect in December.

  • India Times ☛ Meta and TikTok to obey Australia under-16 social media ban

    Australia will from December 10 force social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to remove users under the age of 16.

    There is keen interest in whether Australia's sweeping restrictions can work, as regulators around the globe wrestle with the dangers of social media.

  • Digital Music News ☛ 'TikTok USA' Deal with China Expected to be Signed Thursday

    When pressed for details, Bessent responded: “I’m not part of the commercial side of the transaction. The—my remit was to get the Chinese to agree to approve the transaction, and I believe we successfully accomplished that over the past two days.” Brennan then pressed Bessent on whether the U.S. made any concessions beyond what was discussed with tariffs. Bessent stated there were no changes in export controls.

  • The Register UK ☛ EU sovereignty plan accused of helping US cloud giants

    CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe), a trade association of 38 of the region's cloud providers has issued a withering criticism of the official EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework, saying it is drafted so vaguely it will likely favor incumbents over local operators.

    Officials that represent the trading bloc need a clear definition of just what a sovereign cloud is, however, the framework [PDF] from the European Commission muddies the waters by inventing an opaque "sovereignty score" that dilutes meaningful standards.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • SANS ☛ How to collect memory-only filesystems on Linux systems

    I've been doing Unix/Linux IR and Forensics for a long time. I logged into a Unix system for the first time in 1983. That's one of the reasons I love teaching FOR577[1], because I have stories that go back to before some of my students were even born that are still relevant today.

    In recent years, I've noticed a lot of attackers try to hide their tools or stage their data exfiltration in memory-only filesystems like /dev/shm or other tmpfs locations.

• Environment

  • Omicron Limited ☛ How banks affect the environment and the role your money plays in it

    When you think about your environmental footprint, what comes to mind first? Maybe the flights you take, the car you drive or whether you choose the train instead. Perhaps it is the plastic you try to avoid, the clothes you buy or the food on your plate. But what about your money—how often do you think about where it is kept and what it supports?

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The US Military Is Destroying the Planet Beyond Imagination

    The US military is a behemoth that covers nearly the entirety of the planet, and the extent of the damage it is doing to the environment is difficult to comprehend. The military emits more carbon pollution than any other single institution and, depending on which estimates you trust, more than a vast number of countries in their entirety. As the world continues to hurtle toward climate disaster, the military is disproportionately responsible.

    Earth’s Greatest Enemy, a new documentary project from journalist and activist Abby Martin, makes sure you won’t forget it.

  • RIPE ☛ Enabling Sustainable Development Through Internet Coordination

    The path to sustainable development runs through the Internet’s technical core. Beneath every digital service, every collaboration, and every step forward in how societies grow and adapt lies the infrastructure that supports progress in education, healthcare, governance, innovation, and more. The RIPE NCC doesn't implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) directly, but plays an important role by sustaining the Internet commons that enable digital innovation and cooperation in pursuit of them.

  • RTL ☛ 'Brutal deterioration': Luxembourg's forests in severe decline, says top official

    A central question remains: what will nature resolve on its own, and what requires human intervention? Leytem explained that nearly 500 people, including 260 forestry workers, manage these ecosystems. He described Luxembourg's forests as a "cultural landscape" that has been significantly modified by humans over the years, a situation now exacerbated by climate change.

    While the forest struggles to withstand these rapid changes, Leytem pointed to Luxembourg's modern 2023 forestry legislation, which regulates and protects work in the forests. He affirmed that forestry work in Luxembourg is already carried out in a manner that is as natural as possible.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • YLE ☛ Helsinki public transport ticket prices to rise again next year

      "From the Social Democrats' perspective, the decision is a defensive victory, because the price increase was more than halved during the negotiations," a party statement said.

    • India Times ☛ Citi to tie up with Coinbase to boost digital payments for institutional clients

      Citigroup and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase plan to collaborate on digital asset payment solutions for the US bank's institutional clients, to expand the offering to global clients in the future.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Why aren't America's national roadways working?

      "The problem is we've built too many highways," says Erick Guerra, professor of city and regional planning at Penn's Weitzman School and the Penn Institute for Urban Research. In his new book, "Overbuilt: The High Costs and Low Rewards of US Highway Construction," he shows how the national roadway network ballooned beyond its usefulness—and why adding lanes hasn't eased congestion or improved safety.

      Ahead of Guerra's November 10 talk on this book, Penn Today spoke with Guerra to explore how our transportation priorities went off track, why adding public transit won't by itself fix commutes, and what a more humane city might look like.

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ Andy Griffith Posing With His Collection of Early Classic Cars at His Home, 1979

      Unlike Hollywood stars who flaunted Ferraris or Lamborghinis, Griffith preferred American classics that evoked his North Carolina roots. He admired vehicles built in the 1930s to 1950s, cars that captured the spirit of the simpler times his characters so often celebrated on screen.

  • Overpopulation

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Rising birth rates no longer tied to economic prosperity

      The global shift, she continued, can be traced to one common cause: the increased agency of women, who during the last century became increasingly able to opt out of traditional family roles to pursue other options, such as education and careers.

    • NPR ☛ Finland's stubbornly low birth rate shows why a population shift may be inevitable

      Researchers say Finnish people are increasingly delaying having children, or not having them at all. The nation's "total fertility rate" — a technical term used by demographers — has fallen to historic lows in recent years. Although there have been some signs of a possible rebound in recent months, the number remains less than 1.3 children per woman — well below the replacement level of 2.1 needed to maintain a steady population.

• Finance

  • J B Crawford ☛ the steorn orbo

    The dotcom boom and bust was an embarrassment to the computer industry, and it was also a pivotal moment in its growth. E-commerce, the graveyard of many '90s businesses, is one of the pillars of modern life. The good days of easy money can be an incubator for important ideas. They can also be an incubator for idiocy.

    Whenever I read about some historic scam, I always wonder about the people at the top. Was Sean McCarthy a fraud, or was he deluded? Did he play up the Orbo to keep the money coming in, or did he really believe that he just needed one more demonstration?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Grokipedia is such a mess even Grok thinks its untrustworthy

    As pointed out by several commenters on Musk's X post, the phrase "The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons" appears at the bottom of a number of Grokipedia pages. A Google site search of Grokipedia for pages containing that phrase returns several hits, and it's not an exhaustive list by any means, as several pages that show the phrase (MacBook Air, Crop Circle, etc.) don't appear in Google results.

  • 404 Media ☛ Grokipedia Is the Antithesis of Everything That Makes Wikipedia Good, Useful, and Human

    Wednesday, as part of his ongoing war against Wikipedia because he does not like his page, Elon Musk launched Grokipedia, a fully AI-generated “encyclopedia” that serves no one and nothing other than the ego of the world’s richest man. As others have already pointed out, Grokipedia seeks to be a right wing, anti-woke Wikipedia competitor. But to even call it a Wikipedia competitor is to give the half-assed project too much credit. It is not a Wikipedia “competitor” at all. It is a fully robotic, heartless regurgitation machine that cynically and indiscriminately sucks up the work of humanity to serve the interests, protect the ego, amplify the viewpoints, and further enrich the world’s wealthiest man. It is a totem of what Wikipedia could and would become if you were to strip all the humans out and hand it over to a robot; in that sense, Grokipedia is a useful warning because of the constant pressure and attacks by AI slop purveyors to push AI-generated content into Wikipedia. And it is only getting attention, of course, because Elon Musk does represent an actual threat to Wikipedia through his political power, wealth, and obsession with the website, as well as the fact that he owns a huge social media platform.

  • Reuters ☛ Nokia shares hit near 10-year high after Nvidia invests $1 billion in AI push

    Since joining Nokia earlier this year, new CEO Justin Hotard, who earlier led Intel's (INTC.O), opens new tab data centres and AI group, has focused on growing the Finnish firm's data centre business, betting on AI growth.

  • CNBC ☛ Nvidia takes $1 billion stake in Nokia

    Nokia will issue over 166 million new shares and will use the proceeds to fund its plans for AI and other general corporate purposes.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Apple races past $4-trillion in market value

    “The iPhone accounts for over half of Apple’s profit and revenue and the more phones they can get into the hands of people, the more they can drive people into their ecosystem,” said Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer for Northlight Asset Management, ahead of the milestone.

  • India Times ☛ Apple races past $4 trillion market value as new iPhone models revitalise sales

    Apple reached a $4 trillion market value for the first time, driven by strong demand for its latest iPhone models. This milestone comes despite concerns about its AI progress, as robust iPhone sales have boosted its stock and pushed it into positive territory for the year.

  • teleSUR ☛ Amazon to Cut 30,000 Corporate Jobs

    As the second-largest private employer in the United States, Amazon has more than 1.54 million employees worldwide, mostly in warehouses and roughly 350,000 in corporate roles.

  • Irish Examiner ☛ Fears for jobs as Amazon set to cut 14,000 roles worldwide

    The Seattle-based technology giant is seeking to reverse its hiring spree from during the peak of the pandemic.

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Amazon expected to cut up to 10% of its corporate workforce

    The figure represents a small percentage of Amazon’s 1.55 million total employees, but nearly 10% of its roughly 350 000 corporate employees. This would mark Amazon’s largest job cut since late 2022, when it started to eliminate around 27 000 positions.

  • CBC ☛ Amazon cutting 14,000 corporate jobs to spend more on AI

    Jassy encouraged employees to get on board with the company's AI plans. Earlier that month, Amazon announced it was planning to invest $10 billion US in building a campus in North Carolina to expand its cloud computing and AI infrastructure.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Amazon to slash thousands of jobs

    Amazon announced Tuesday it would cut 14,000 jobs, one of several companies reducing head count while still aiming to increase profits.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Amazon cuts 14,000 corporate jobs as spending on artificial intelligence accelerates

    Amazon will cut about 14,000 corporate jobs as the online retail giant ramps up spending on artificial intelligence while cutting costs elsewhere.

  • Deseret Media ☛ Amazon cuts 14,000 corporate jobs as spending on artificial intelligence accelerates

    Since 2024 started, Amazon has committed to about $10 billion apiece to data center projects in Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio and North Carolina as it builds up its infrastructure to tries to keep up with other tech giants making leaps in AI. Amazon is competing with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and others. In a conference call with industry analysts in May, Jassy said the potential for growth in the company's AWS business is massive.

  • The Nation ☛ Destroy the Metrics, Destroy the Truth

    Trump built his career on fraud: cooking the books, inflating assets, falsifying ledgers. Now he governs the same way. But still, many are responding to Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s myriad misleading health claims by emphasizing the importance of debate. This plays straight into Trump’s hands, because Trump and his cronies aren’t, despite surface appearances, actually trying to claim authority over truth; they’re trying to make belief in truth itself untenable. In this context, debate is a ruse. It’s absurdist theater masquerading as bureaucratic seriousness, with transparently fabricated (and meaningless) numbers like the “650 percent discounts” on some medications that Trump claims to have delivered.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft's OpenAI losses hidden as part of $4.7 billion 'other' expense — stake in AI company still doesn't turn a profit as companies grapple with ongoing contract negotiation

    Microsoft’s filings obscure the cost of OpenAI, but Wednesday’s earnings may offer clarity.

  • The Register UK ☛ Automattic accuses WP Engine of false advertising, deception

    Mullenweg’s stance earned him criticism from some in the WordPress community, especially after WordPress.org imposed new rules on user groups that forbade them from accepting sponsorship from WP Engine and limited what volunteers could say on social media.

    The two parties went to court, and WP Engine came out on top.

  • The Register UK ☛ Amazon axes 14,000 desk jobs in AI-powered slimming plan

    Amazon is cutting 14,000 corporate jobs, blaming the accelerating impact of artificial intelligence for changing how the company operates – and how many people it needs.

  • Linuxiac ☛ Python Software Foundation Withdraws $1.5M U.S. Government Grant Over DEI Restrictions

    The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has announced that it has withdrawn its $1.5 million proposal to the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation after discovering terms that would have restricted the organization’s ability to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. Here’s how it all unfolded.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Electronic Arts is losing income and crippled by debt? More AI!

    Game studio Electronic Arts has been showing signs of trouble for a while now. They’re in profit, but the line is going down. The second quarter of 2025 shows net income of $201 million, down from $280 million in the second quarter of 2024. Year on year, it’s down nearly 10%.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • 404 Media ☛ Trump Admin’s Racist Halo Memes Are ‘A New Level of Dehumanization of Immigrants’

      Trump’s propagandists have used the aesthetics of Star Wars and Studio Ghibli to push their message. They’ve set the Pokémon theme song to footage of ICE raids under the title “Gotta Catch Em All.” They’ve layered fash-wave variations of the MGMT song “Little Dark Age” over footage pulled from arrests. We’ve seen this administration do similar things in the past, so why did the Halo meme feel worse to Senters?

      “What makes this debacle with the Halo memes different from other invocations of fandom culture is twofold in my opinion. First is the fact that Microsoft has declined to push back on the use of its biggest IP,” he said. “Combined with Microsoft donating to the White House ballroom project it gives the impression that Microsoft tacitly supports this.”

    • Wired ☛ Donald Trump’s Truth Social Is Launching a Polymarket Competitor

      As crypto-based prediction services attract a flood of attention and capital, the US president’s social media platform has announced plans to muscle in.

    • The Register UK ☛ Chatbots parrot Putin propaganda about Ukraine invasion

      The non-profit Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) on Monday published a study on the responses provided by four widely used chatbots – OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, xAI's Grok, and Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence's DeepSeek – in English, Spanish, French, German and Italian on matters related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ King Trump Makes It Clear He Wants His BFF Larry Ellison To Own Warner Brothers

    Whether it’s Jeff Bezos lobotomizing the Washington Post, Elon Musk turning Twitter into a far right propaganda mill, or Larry Ellison buying CBS, CNN, and TikTok, the country’s shittiest right wing billionaires aren’t being subtle about their quest to dominate what’s left of U.S. media. And Trump’s FCC is paving the way by destroying whatever was left of our media consolidation rules.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Why the US Has Such a Brutal Penal Regime

    If you look at penal practices in the developed countries — policing, for example — if you think about police violence and the frequency with which police officers kill civilians, there are about a thousand civilians killed a year by police in the United States since we’ve begun to count it. According to [criminologist] Franklin Zimring, that’s almost five times the frequency per capita of Canada, twenty-two times that of Australia, forty times higher than Germany, and more than 140 times the rate of police shooting deaths in England and Wales.

  • France24 ☛ 'Every day the situation for Afghan women gets worse and worse,' campaigner says - Perspective

  • The Nation ☛ The Soccer Mom Who Strikes Fear Into the Heart of ICE

    In these conditions of terror, Vargas’s decision to turn the fear back on ICE offers much-needed catharsis for her viewers. “You had them stressing 😂,” commented one user on a June video. “ICE works hard but Angie works harder 😭,” said another. “Do you think they sit around campfires and tell horror stories about you?” another joked.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ In the Middle East, women journalists and activists have been driving crucial change

    Though authoritarian powers and patriarchal systems continue to oppress, women journalists in the Middle East have combined reporting and activism. Many of these professionals operate under regimes that criminalize dissent. For them, reporting isn't just a profession, it merges with acts of resistance.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ To Rebuild the Labor Movement, Take On the Giants

    Unions in the US have responded to the hostile organizing environment by targeting smaller shops in more peripheral industries. To actually grow the labor movement, however, they will need to organize large units in the economy’s fast-growing sectors.

  • The Register UK ☛ Human impact of UK's Afghan data disaster revealed to MPs

    The survey also discovered that an even greater proportion (87 percent) reported other forms of personal risks stemming from the Taliban's reaction to the leak.

    Nearly 100 direct threats to respondents' own lives were reported, while 121 said their family and friends had been threatened in Afghanistan.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Register UK ☛ Cloudflare logs a turbulent Q3 online

    During exam season, Iraq, Syria, and Sudan once again pulled the plug on the [Internet] to stop students cheating. In Syria, officials even bragged that they'd dismantled "organized exam cheating networks... using advanced electronic technologies and devices." Cloudflare said the short, repeated outages "fit the pattern of short-duration disruptions repeating across multiple days," noting that similar tactics had been used in previous years.

  • The Verge ☛ Democrats slam FCC’s decision to ‘gut’ prison phone call price caps

    The Senate Democrats call the delay “unlawful,” saying it’s “snatching away relief for the incarcerated people and their families from predatory rates just as they were starting to go into effect.” The letter adds that the FCC’s draft order would increase the fees paid by incarcerated people and their loved ones by up to 83 percent when compared to the 2024 rule.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Old DVDs (media notes)

    The other day, one of my aunts mentioned that the family summer cabin that everybody shares has a couple of hundred DVDs in boxes that nobody can watch any more, and that if I emptied a few of the boxes that would free up storage space in the cabin.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Keep Android Open ☛ Keep Android Open | Web site for keepandroidopen.org

  In August 2025, Google announced that starting next year, it will no longer be possible to develop apps for the Android platform without first registering centrally with Google.

  This registration will involve: [...]

• Pivot to AI ☛ Australia sues Microsoft for forcing Copilot AI onto Office 365 customers

  Microsoft also emailed customers telling them to pay up or lose all their stuff.

  In some countries, that sort of trick is illegal — like Australia. The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission is taking Microsoft to court over this forced bundling.

• Copyrights

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Reddit Sues SerpApi

    This is a weird case. SerpApi is not like Common Crawl, building an index by scraping the Web. It’s scraping Google search results. Google actually does have legal access to scrape Reddit. And SerpApi is probably right that there’s First Amendment protection for indexing public search results, just as there is for indexing other public content. But, obviously, they’re trying to get at the Reddit data without paying to license it, and maybe the means for doing this violate the DMCA. On the one hand, hiring a hitman is illegal; you don’t get a legal shield by contracting out the crime. On the other hand, it’s not exactly clear to me which step of this chain is illegal, especially if Google seems not to object. Whatever, the result, I expect it to have far-reaching consequences for the Web.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Raymond Biesinger’s “9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off”

    Biesinger is an iconic designer and illustrator whose instantly recognizable style and entrepreneurial hustle have allowed him to achieve the coveted and elusive status of full-time, economically secure(ish) artist. But over the years – and even in recent times – Beisigner has found himself in the all-too-common and endlessly frustrating circumstance of being owed money by people who refuse to pay it. The sums involved are typically small by the standards of corporate budgets, but it's what Biesinger calls "needed money" – money that makes a huge difference to the life of the artist to whom it is owed.

  • The Walrus ☛ My Book Was Stolen by an AI Company. Why Does Suing Them Feel Wrong?

    The first wave of these posts came in September of that year. The Atlantic scrutinized an AI training data set called Books3, composed of “large, unlabeled blocks of text” and extracted ISBNs. This determined that Books3 was composed of 191,000 books, and the magazine identified author information for 183,000 of them. The Atlantic released a searchable index of these titles, with the news that Books3 had been used by Meta and Bloomberg to train their AI.

    The second wave happened this March, when The Atlantic released a new searchable inventory, this one consisting of the pirated books site Library Genesis, a.k.a. LibGen. Court documents revealed Meta and Anthropic were downloading books from LibGen to train Llama and Claude, their respective chatbots powered by LLMs.

  • SBS ☛ Government rules out changes to copyright law as creatives push for AI protections

    Writers, musicians and other creatives will be consulted alongside tech industry representatives on potential copyright laws in relation to AI.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Broad Coalition Backs Record Labels in Supreme Court ISP Piracy Liability Battle

    The Supreme Court battle over a $1 billion piracy judgment against internet provider Cox Communications is one of the decade's pivotal copyright lawsuits. After the ISP received broad support, including from the U.S. Government, a diverse group of amici have now weighed in to support the music labels. This includes the MPA, former members of Congress, the U.S. Copyright Office, as well as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.