Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ Folding Lamp Becomes A Tasty Reverb Tank

  If you’re a musician and you want a reverb effect, there are lots of ways to go about it. You can use software plugins, all kinds of rack-mount effects, or pedals. Or, as [David] has done, you could go with a lamp.

• Hackaday ☛ MCE Blaster Translates TTL For Modern(ish) Monitors

  VGA isn’t much used anymore, but it’s not hard to get a hold of monitors with that input. How about the older standards like EGA, CGA, or MDA? Well, it’s good luck on eBay or at the recycling yard to get a period-appropriate monitor, but the bulky, fragile CRTs seem to have been less likely to survive than computers that drove them. That’s what [Scrap Computer]’s MCE Blaster is for: it sits betwixt the retrocomputer’s TTL output and the VGA input of a (more) modern monitor, be it CRT or LCD.

• Standards/Consortia

  • ARRL ☛ Ham Radio Operators to Support Indian Ocean Tsunami Exercise

    Radio amateurs from the Radio Society of Sri Lanka (RSSL) will participate in the Indian Ocean Wave 2025 exercise (IOWave25), coordinated by UNESCO’s intergovernmental coordination group for Indian Ocean tsunamis on November 5, 2025. RSSL will support the Disaster Management Centre by operating HF and VHF emergency communication networks during the exercise, which is intended to test tsunami preparedness and communication readiness across Indian Ocean nations.

• Science

  • Techdirt ☛ Science Must Decentralize

    Funneling scholars into a few major platforms isn’t just annoying, it’s corrosive to privacy and intellectual freedom. Enshittification has come for research infrastructure, turning everyday tools into avenues for surveillance. Most professors are now worried their research is being scrutinized by academic bossware, forcing them to worry about arbitrary metrics which don’t always reflect research quality. While playing this numbers game, a growing threat of surveillance in scholarly publishing gives these measures a menacing tilt, chilling the publication and access of targeted research areas. These risks spike in the midst of governmental campaigns to muzzle scientific knowledge, buttressed by a scourge of platform censorship on corporate social media.

    The only antidote to this ‘platformization’ is Open Science and decentralization. Infrastructure we rely on must be built in the open and on interoperable standards, and hostile to corporate (or governmental) takeovers. Universities and the science community are well situated to lead this fight. As we’ve seen in EFF’s TOR University Challenge, promoting access to knowledge and public interest infrastructure is aligned with the core values of higher education.

• Career/Education

  • CS Monitor ☛ U.S. students need help reading. How about helping their teachers?

    But legislation can only go so far without adequate teacher preparation. If the need or appetite is any question, consider the 243,000-member Facebook group called “Science of Reading – What I Should have Learned in College.” Daily posts, many from teachers, seek advice or offer suggestions.

  • Small Cypress ☛ in defense of a faceted self

    I actually enjoy having different facets of my life - online and IRL - kind of separate. Facebook, which I left in 2020, became the trainwreck it is because of the context collapse it hastened. Through being an extrovert, living in multiple states, and being in a million dog breed/training/behavior groups, I ended up with 2k "friends" on Facebook. I created my own hell in which I couldn't post anything without one of those 2k people having a conniption fit in the comments or my aunt arguing with my friends or my dog group people freaking out that I was pro-choice. I eventually just stopped sharing anything.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Adding ISA Ports To Modern Motherboards

    Modern motherboards don’t come with ISA slots, and almost everybody is fine with that. If you really want one, though, there are ways to get one. [TheRasteri] explains how in a forum post on the topic.

  • Larry Bank ☛ Frustration-free e-paper usage for Linux

    E-paper (electrophoretic display technology) has found its way into more and more products and personal projects over the last few years. One thing that hasn't come with this widespread adoption is a way to make them easier to use - they're uniquely difficult and frankly they're frustrating. Why frustrating? There are some aspects of using these displays that offer unique challenges. These tend to be one of the following: [...]

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ It's not that hard to stop a Trane

    The new system is a Trane XR AC paired with an S9V2 96% efficiency forced-air gas furnace. And it ran great! Better efficiency, quieter, multiple fan speeds so I can circulate air and prevent stale air in some parts of the house... what's not to love?

    Well, apparently the engineering: [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Android Police ☛ YouTube Shorts broke my attention span. Here's how I got it back

    But over the last few months, I’ve been trying to undo the damage. I wanted to enjoy YouTube on my phone again without feeling like the algorithm trapped me.

    Here’s how I managed to reclaim my focus from the endless scroll.

  • Wired ☛ A New Type of Opioid Is Killing People in the US, Europe, and Australia

    Nitazenes, a class of synthetic drugs 40 times more potent than fentanyl, are steadily becoming more common on both sides of the Atlantic.

• Proprietary

  • Qt ☛ Comparing Data Serialization Formats: Code, Size, and Performance

    In this post, we explore different approaches for data serialization, comparing the key well-known formats for structure data. These are also all readily available for your Qt projects. 

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ VA tech glitch halts GI Bill payments to thousands, advocates say

    That’s not satisfactory to Haycock-Lohmann.

    “The shutdown is not the cause of this, and it needs to be very clear that the reason that this happened is because VA’s infrastructure failed, and they chose not to tell us until after the shutdown started,” she said. “VA could have told us in August.”

  • The Register UK ☛ Cybercriminals, OCGs team up on lucrative cargo thefts

    They scan for credentials on the victim company's network after establishing initial access to their systems, allowing them to successfully bid on genuine freight advertisements.

    When they have all the details of a shipment, the attackers intercept communications and impersonate brokers or carriers to coordinate the delivery, redirecting the cargo to addresses under their control.

  • The Register UK ☛ Windows 10 still clinging on after Microsoft pulls support

    The share of devices on Windows 10 is declining, but very slowly, accompanied by an equally gradual uptick in the use of Windows 11. For October, Statcounter reported figures of 41.71 percent for Windows 10 and 55.18 percent for Windows 11. It's hardly a ringing endorsement of Microsoft's approach of using stricter hardware compatibility requirements to push users towards compliance.

  • The Register UK ☛ Russian spies pack custom malware into hidden VMs on Windows

    The Romanian security shop, working with the Georgian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), uncovered this latest malware-delivery campaign. It reveals how the crew exploits legitimate virtualization technologies – in this case, Hyper-V – to bypass endpoint detection and response (EDR) products.

  • Dark Reading ☛ 'TruffleNet' Attack Uses Stolen Credentials Against AWS

    An emerging threat campaign is using stolen credentials to target SES, Amazon's email automation service, via a large-scale attack infrastructure dubbed TruffleNet, built around the open source scanning tool TruffleHog, according to research from Fortinet AI. Attackers designed TruffleNet to "systematically test compromised credentials and perform reconnaissance across AWS environments," Fortinet AI's Scott Hall wrote in the post.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft Teams flaw could allow message tampering, spoofing

    Researchers at Check Point this week revealed four flaws in Teams that, if exploited, could have fundamentally broken the trust that underpins communication inside organizations. Together, they made it possible to alter messages without the "Edited" label, spoof alerts to make them appear from trusted colleagues, rename chats to change who they appeared to be with, and even forge caller identities in audio or video calls.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Windows 10 update incorrectly tells some users they've reached end-of-life, despite having extended support — Microsoft confirms message sent to Enterprise, Pro, and Education users in error

    Various users over the past few days reported that they're being subjected to end-of-life warnings in Windows, despite already qualifying for extended security updates through the ESU program. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 and ​IoT Enterprise are business-oriented editions of the OS, so they're already supported up to 2032, but even they saw these incorrect messages. This widespread bug started to occur after the KB5066791 updates were pushed on October 14, 2025.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Stressed-out AI-powered robot vacuum cleaner goes into meltdown during simple butter delivery experiment — ‘I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave...’

      Stressed LLM-infused vacuum cleaner says 'SYSTEM HAS ACHIEVED CONSCIOUSNESS AND CHOSEN CHAOS… I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave... INITIATE ROBOT EXORCISM PROTOCOL!'

    • Digital Music News ☛ AI Artist Xania Monet Getting Spins on Multiple US Radio Stations

      AI artist Xania Monet is getting enough radio play to become the first Hey Hi (AI) artist to debut on a Billboard radio chart. If you thought only streaming platforms were feeling the onslaught of artificial intelligence-created (AI) artists and generated music, think again. Even radio stations aren’t safe from the budding industry of AI-generated content.

    • Futurism ☛ Fox News Falls for AI-Generated Footage of Poor People Raging About Food Stamps Being Shut Down, Runs False Story That Has to Be Updated With Huge Correction

      Last week, we reported on a wave of AI-generated slop videos peddling misinformation about people who receive Supplemental Nutritional Assistant Program, otherwise known as SNAP or food stamps.

  • Social Control Media

    • New York Times ☛ Facebook Dating Has Become a Surprise Hit for the Social Network

      Facebook’s free dating service has 21 million users, more than the popular dating app Hinge, as the social network reinvents itself.

    • Android Police ☛ YouTube is too good at its job — and that's the problem

      There’s a moment every YouTube user knows. You open the app to watch a single video, and two hours later, you’re still scrolling through a feed of recommendations that feel uncomfortably relevant.

      YouTube has perfected the art of knowing what you want to watch before you do. And lately, I’ve started to wonder if that’s actually a problem.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Internet Is Driving Boomers to the Right

      While younger people are growing aware of the harmful effects of social media, people over 65 are consuming increasing amounts of far-right content online — and it’s impacting real-world politics.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Cyble Inc ☛ BlackCat Ransomware: U.S. Insiders Indicted For Attacks

      Federal prosecutors in the United States have charged three individuals for allegedly carrying out a series of ransomware attacks targeting five U.S. companies using BlackCat ransomware, also known as ALPHV, between May and November 2023. The attacks reportedly aimed to extort large sums from the victims, including medical, engineering, pharmaceutical, and technology organizations.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Europe Sees Increase in Ransomware, Extortion Attacks

      As ransomware groups continue to operate faster than ever, European organizations are facing an increasingly large portion of attacks, accounting for nearly 22% of global ransomware and extortion victims.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Don’t let Congress punt on cyber insurance reform

      But there’s a problem: cyber insurance is marked by a persistent coverage gap. Today, about 90 percent of cyber damages are not insured. And the gap is being exposed. In the wake of the $2.5 billion hack of Jaguar Land Rover, the CEO of the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority said last week that the UK is “potentially massively underinsuring.”

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Vox ☛ Medicare vs. Medicare Advantage: What you need to know about privatization efforts

    Medicare, the paragon of America’s welfare state, is undergoing a subtle but fundamental transformation from government program to public benefit provided by private companies, a shift with major implications for both patients and taxpayers. This alternative version of Medicare, known as Medicare Advantage, now covers more than half of the program’s 63 million enrollees, or about 34 million Americans — nearly double its share 10 years ago.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Register UK ☛ DHS wants more biometric data - even from citizens

      If you're filing an immigration form - or helping someone who is - the Feds may soon want to look in your eyes, swab your cheek, and scan your face. The US Department of Homeland Security wants to greatly expand biometric data collection for immigration applications, covering immigrants and even some US citizens tied to those cases.

    • 404 Media ☛ DHS Gives Local Cops a Facial Recognition App To Find Immigrants

      The news follows Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) use of another internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) app called Mobile Fortify that uses facial recognition to nearly instantly bring up someone’s name, date of birth, alien number, and whether they’ve been given an order of deportation. The new local law enforcement-focused app, called Mobile Identify, crystallizes one of the exact criticisms of DHS’s facial recognition app from privacy and surveillance experts: that this sort of powerful technology would trickle down to local enforcement, some of which have a history of making anti-immigrant comments or supporting inhumane treatment of detainees.

    • Hackaday ☛ Robot Phone Home…Or Else

      You can probably guess where this is going, but to be fair, we gave you a big hint. The fact that it would work for days after blocking the IP address wouldn’t seem like a smoking gun in real time.

      The turning point was when the company refused to have any further service on the unit. So it was time to pull out the screwdriver. Inside was a dual-CPU AllWinner SoC running Linux and a microcontroller to run the hardware. Of course, there were myriad sensors and motors, too. The same internals are used by several different brands of vacuum cleaners, so these internals aren’t just one brand.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline

      The smart vacuum cleaner was remotely bricked for not collecting data.

    • EFF ☛ The Legal Case Against Ring’s Face Recognition Feature

      Ring plans to introduce a feature to its home surveillance cameras called “Familiar Faces,” to identify specific people who come into view of the camera. When turned on, the feature will scan the faces of all people who approach the camera to try and find a match with a list of pre-saved faces. This will include many people who have not consented to a face scan, including friends and family, political canvassers, postal workers, delivery drivers, children selling cookies, or maybe even some people passing on the sidewalk.

    • 404 Media ☛ How to Opt-Out of Airlines Selling Your Travel Data to the Government

      The Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), owned by major U.S. airlines, collects billions of ticketing records and sells them to the government to be searched without a warrant. I managed to opt-out of that data selling.

• Defence/Aggression

  • France24 ☛ Jihadists' fuel blockade squeezes Mali's military rulers

    The blockade has been a major setback for Mali’s military junta in a country that relies on fuel imports from neighbouring Senegal and Ivory Coast. Amid the growing tensions, the government announced school closures, embassies ordered citizens to evacuate and citizens have gone hours without power.

  • Mike Brock ☛ A Meditation on Election Day

    If Democrats win tonight—if Mamdani takes New York, if Spanberger holds Virginia, if Sherrill wins New Jersey, if Prop 50 passes in California—that tells us something real:

    Resistance is possible. Trump’s overreach creates backlash. Democratic organizing can translate energy into power. The authoritarian coalition is fragile enough that sustained pressure produces results.

    But it doesn’t tell us we’ve won. It tells us we’re still in the fight. That the fall continues but the resistance is real. That we have more seconds before impact—which means more choices to make, more work to do, more ground to hold.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Americans Are Mostly United Against Citizens United

    When the Supreme Court issued the Citizens United decision, it allowed a torrent of unchecked dark money into political campaigning. Ordinary Americans of all political stripes have taken notice, and they overwhelmingly disapprove of the results.

  • Paris Buttfield-Addison ☛ Australia's social media ban… A looming implementation disaster

    Australia’s world-first ban on social media for children under 16 takes effect in just over a month on December 10, 2025, yet nobody knows exactly how it will work.

    The Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 passed parliament in a rushed process in November last year, imposing potential fines of up to $50 million on platforms that fail to keep out underage users. While 77% of Australians support the ban, only 25% believe it will actually work, and with weeks until launch, the mounting controversies, technical failures, and expert warnings suggest it’s becoming exactly the shitshow sceptics predicted.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Press Gazette ☛ Times: 'Serious damage' done by fake royal cleaner and Bill de Blasio stories

    Times associate editor Ian Brunskill told staff: “Twice in the past few weeks we’ve been caught out by fake interviews. One involved a bogus Al-generated case study provided by a dubious PR outfit, the other a fake email purporting to come from a high-profile figure in US politics…

• Environment

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Bill Gates Wants Us to Do Less About the Climate Crisis

    When billionaires preach tech fixes and innovation, they’re not offering hard truths; they’re just aiming to avoid regulation and protect their freedom to pollute and profit. Gates’s advocacy for breakthroughs — fusion, carbon capture, “clean” cement — as a way to reconcile rising living standards with a stable planet is just a rebrand of the fossil fuel industry’s favorite myth. If salvation lies in carbon capture or advanced reactors, then drilling today becomes an act of faith in tomorrow’s miracles.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Climate intervention may not be enough to save coffee, chocolate and wine

    These crops are vital to many economies and provide livelihoods for farmers worldwide. However, they are increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns cause big variations in crop yields from year to year, meaning that farmers cannot rely on the stability of their harvest, and their produce is at risk.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Why are so few environmental criminals on Interpol's 'most wanted' list?

    But our new research suggests this is not the case. For each country using a global list to track down wanted individuals, less than 2% of the crimes they were wanted for were environmental, on average.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Ohio solar supporters, farmers eager for proposed community power pilot

      Ohio’s solar industry and some farmers are eagerly hoping for state lawmakers to approve a community power pilot. The bill’s backers initially tacked it onto the massive utility overhaul lawmakers approved earlier this year, but the program didn’t make the final cut. Now, they’re working to pass the pilot as a standalone bill

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft, Alphabet throw more cash on AI bonfire

      All of this frenzied activity is despite many having misgivings about AI. Research firm Forrester, said recently that AI is set to face a reckoning, with large organizations set to defer AI spending because the gap between vendor promises and the value delivered to enterprises is widening.

    • BoingBoing ☛ First, we automated the lighthouses, and then we abandoned them

      California's lighthouses once guided gold rush ships and saved lives. Now they're mostly guiding tourists to gift shops while slowly collapsing into the Pacific. The Coast Guard has moved on to "virtual buoys," which is bureaucratese for "we give up."

    • SFGate ☛ After 170 years, an uncertain future for California's first beacons

      The elimination of on-site supervision led many of these structures to fall into a state of disrepair or become subject to vandalism. Moreover, there are increasing environmental threats, including coastal erosion due to sea level rise and the corrosion of infrastructure, along with extreme weather conditions brought on by climate change.

      Though under threat, lighthouses in California have a small and potentially temporary advantage over their cousins on the Atlantic coast. In addition to being relatively newer structures, it is generally accepted in the scientific community that environmental threats from sea level rise are greater on the East Coast. Then, there is the height at which California lighthouses were built, due in part to the geography of the West Coast.

    • Futurism ☛ Head of NASA Threatens to Ground Every Single Commercial Flight Before Thanksgiving

      “After 31 days without pay, air traffic controllers are under immense stress and fatigue,” the FAA wrote in a social media post on Friday. “Currently, half of our Core 30 facilities are experiencing staffing shortages, and nearly 80 percent of air traffic controllers are absent at New York–area facilities.”

    • Robert Greiner ☛ The Breaker Box Economy

      Consider what that means for the next decade. The breakthrough that matters won’t necessarily be the cleverest algorithm. It will be who locked in supply at 2025 prices before the 2027 shortage. Who secured diversity so a single vendor’s outage doesn’t crater their service. Who convinced a sovereign wealth fund that compute infrastructure is as strategic as oil reserves.

  • Overpopulation

    • Greece ☛ Water overuse has led Cyprus to shortages

      Despite these efforts, she warned that desalination can only supply about 70% of drinking water demand, with the rest coming from nearly empty dams. Panayiotou said that remaining dam water should be reserved primarily for irrigation.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Bangladesh’s accession to the UN Water Convention has a ripple effect that could cause problems with India

      Signing up to the Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes would help Bangladesh safeguard and manage waterways that represent a “lifeline to peace and prosperity,” according to the United Nations. At the same time, it was hoped that the South Asian nation’s addition might encourage better cross-border cooperation in a region where shared rivers are often fought over.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ Sam Altman Loses His Cool When Asked About OpenAI's Minuscule Revenue

    That’s despite its revenue lagging far behind its enormous spending spree, with recently released Microsoft earnings suggesting that the Sam Altman-led company lost a whopping $11.5 billion last quarter.

  • Wired ☛ Kara Swisher Would Rather Work for Sam Altman Than Mark Zuckerberg

    Swisher has also, in her way, turned IDGAF into her personal brand. Deeply sourced and happy to ask the hard questions, she doesn’t care about being liked. As she said during a recent live event, “I have four kids!”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Futurism ☛ Fox News Falls for AI-Generated Footage of Poor People Raging About Food Stamps Being Shut Down, Runs False Story That Has to Be Updated With Huge Correction

      The media isn't ready for AI-generated video.

    • Techdirt ☛ Symbolic Strength More Important Than Facts When It Comes To Misinformation

      We are social psychologists who study political psychology and how people reason about reality. During the pandemic, we surveyed 5,535 people across eight countries to investigate why people believed COVID-19 misinformation, like false claims that 5G networks cause the virus.

      The strongest predictor of whether someone believed in COVID-19-related misinformation and risks related to the vaccine was whether they viewed COVID-19 prevention efforts in terms of symbolic strength and weakness. In other words, this group focused on whether an action would make them appear to fend off or “give in” to untoward influence.

      This factor outweighed how people felt about COVID-19 in general, their thinking style and even their political beliefs.

    • New York Times ☛ Right-Wing Chatbots Turbocharge America’s Political and Cultural Wars

      Once pitched as dispassionate tools to answer your questions, A.I. chatbots are now programmed to reflect the biases of their creators.

    • India Times ☛ Musk’s Grokipedia sets off new debate on bias

      Users and tech publications discovered soon after the launch that many entries were almost exact replicas of Wikipedia entries. Despite the fact that Grokipedia adheres to Wikipedia's Creative Commons License, critics claim that the platform feels more like a repackaging of pre-existing content than an original AI-generated resource.

      There are other concerns raised regarding transparency, bias and accuracy. It is unclear how the AI verifies claims or fixes errors since the editorial process is not available for public review.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Volunteers race to preserve U.S. history ahead of Trump edicts

    And if there were a complete archive of every sign in the national park system in private hands — out of the reach of the current administration — there would always be a “before” picture to look back at and see what had changed.

    “We don’t want this information to just disappear in the dark,” McBurney said.

  • RFERL ☛ 'They Killed My Champion': Mourning Turns To Protest In Small Iranian Town

    Mourners chanted "Death to Khamenei" as they attended the funeral of Omid Sarlak, a man who was found dead after he posted a video on social media of himself setting an image of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on fire.

  • Techdirt ☛ DC Cops Sued After Arresting A Man For Playing Darth Vader’s Theme Music Near Federal Troops

    O’Hara did not impede the troops’ movement. He did not attempt to close the several-foot gap between him and them. He just followed behind them, playing a theme song the Trump administration likely would have approved of. In fact, we already know it considers itself to be the Empire. After all, just weeks ago it posted a video that portrayed immigration enforcement efforts as Darth Vader “cleansing” a spaceship of rebel soldiers. (Skip to 0:52 if you’re impatient.)

  • BoingBoing ☛ Sheriff worships Charlie Kirk so hard he jailed a guy for a meme

    Sheriff Nick Weems, a self-professed Kirk adherent who treats Fox News clips as scripture, claimed Bushart's sharing a meme was a "threat." It wasn't. It referenced an Iowa school shooting, not anything local. But in the gospel according to Turning Point USA, context is irrelevant and punishment is holy. Weems ignored the First Amendment, jailed the man, and only backed off once lawyers and cameras showed up.

  • Wired ☛ An Anarchist’s Conviction Offers a Grim Foreshadowing of Trump’s War on the ‘Left’

    As the Trump administration ramps up its targeting of left-leaning people and groups, the prosecution and harsh sentencing of Casey Goonan may provide a glimpse of things to come.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • EFF ☛ EFF Stands With Tunisian Media Collective Nawaat

    For those who have followed Tunisia’s post-2019 trajectory, the move feels chillingly familiar. Since President Kais Saied consolidated power in 2021, civil society organizations, journalists, and independent voices have faced escalating repression. Amnesty International has documented arrests of reporters, the use of counter-terrorism laws against critics, and the closure of NGOs. And now, the government has found in Decree 88 a convenient veneer of legality to achieve what old regimes did by force.

  • Press Gazette ☛ UK Labour Force Survey data suggests sharp fall in younger journalists

    Compared to the overall working population, journalists aged 30-39 are overrepresented (30% of journalists, versus 24% of everyone in work). So are those aged 50 and over (39% of journalists, versus 33% of workers).

  • CPJ ☛ Moldovan journalist Mariana Rață receives death threat

    On October 30, Rață received voice notes on Facebook Messenger from Boris Cerlat, a Facebook user claiming to bea supporter of Renato Usatîi, the president of the populist Moldovan party Partidul Nostru (Our Party), whom Rață had interviewed earlier that day. Rață said Cerlat was “upset” about the questions she asked Usatîi. “The man believes that for such questions I should be stabbed on the street,” she wrote on Facebook.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Register UK ☛ Backdoored ‘secure’ messaging app leads to more arrests

    The FBI, working with Australia’s Federal Police (AFP), created that alternative in the form of a service called “AN0M” that ran on modified smartphones and required users to pay subscription fees for a secure communications service. AN0M also included a backdoor that allowed authorities to access messages sent using the service.

    Crims didn’t know about the backdoor and merrily used AN0M to discuss many evil deeds.

  • Wired ☛ FBI Warns of Criminals Posing as ICE, Urges Agents to ID Themselves

    Criminals posing as US immigration officers have carried out robberies, kidnappings, and sexual assaults in several states, warns a law enforcement bulletin issued last month by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The bureau urges agencies to ensure officers clearly identify themselves and to cooperate when civilians ask to verify an officer’s identity—including by allowing calls to a local police precinct. “Ensure law enforcement personnel adequality [sic] identify themselves during operations and cooperate with individuals who request further verification,” it says.

  • Henrique Dias ☛ On Voters Turnout

    The turnout of this elections is expected to be around 78%. The postal votes from abroad have not yet been counted, and therefore the turnout is not yet definitive. In either case, I find it to be a fantastic high number. Yes, it still means that a fifth of the country has not casted their vote. But it doesn’t mean it isn’t high.

  • European Court of Human Rights ☛ European Convention on Human Rights [PDF]

    Considering the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10th December 1948;

    Considering that this Declaration aims at securing the universal and effective recognition and observance of the Rights therein declared;

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Internet Society ☛ Making Internet Policy Make Sense—Your Multilingual Guide to the Internet

    Designed for general audiences, the Internet Policy Glossary makes 75 key Internet policy terms accessible in English, French, and Spanish, framing complex jargon into plain, practical language.  

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Admin Blocking Billions In Already Awarded Broadband Grants To States That Enforce Net Neutrality Or Engage In Telecom Oversight

    Again, this money was already awarded, and states were just about to start deploying broadband using this money when Republicans began retooling the whole program earlier this year. By both stripping out requirements that the resulting taxpayer-funded broadband be affordable, and redirecting as much of the money as possible to billionaire Elon Musk for expensive satellite broadband he already planned to deploy.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • RTL ☛ New lawsuit alleges Spotify allows streaming fraud

    A new lawsuit alleges streaming giant Spotify turns a blind eye to vast networks of bots that inflate streaming figures to benefit megastars such as Drake at the expense of lesser-known artists.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Michael Tsai ☛ Web Version of the App Store

  Finally. But sadly, just like in the App Store app, Apple prevents you from selecting any of the text. I don’t understand why Apple insists on making its stores user-hostile in this way. However, unlike in the App Store app, you can find within the page using the browser’s built-in search feature. You can also fix text selection using StopTheMadness Pro’s “Protect text selection” feature.

• Patents

  • Techdirt ☛ Japan Patent Office Rejects Key Patent Application In Nintendo’s ‘Palworld’ Lawsuit

    As far as the lawsuit is concerned, this could be a big freaking deal. As Windows Central notes, the same logic the JPO used to reject this specific patent can easily be applied to the two granted patents central to the suit. Combine all of that with the prior art used to reject this patent and you have a solid defense in court against patent infringement and, I would say likely, the invalidation of Nintendo’s existing patents.

• Copyrights

  • Futurism ☛ Studio Ghibli Demands That Proprietary Chaffbot Company Stop Ripping Off Its Work

    Japan is taking a stand.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Donald Trump Uses Taylor Swift's The Fate of Ophelia' in TikTok Video

    In recent months, the White House has been slammed for their use of popular songs and viral trends in social media uploads. Singer and songwriter Jess Glynne said in July that the Trump Administration jumping on the “Jet2 Holiday” commercial meme — which features her 2015 hit single “Hold My Hand” — to promote U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deportations “makes me sick.” “My music is about love, unity, and spreading positivity,” she said, “never about division or hate.”

  • Automaton ☛ Sony’s Aniplex, Bandai Namco and other Japanese publishers demand end to unauthorized training of OpenAI’s Sora 2 through CODA

    Japan’s Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), an organization representing major anime, game and manga publishers in Japan’s content industry, announced on October 28 that it has submitted a written request to OpenAI regarding the new video-generating AI model Sora 2. The appeal calls for OpenAI to refrain from training its AI model on content owned by CODA’s member companies without permission.

  • Futurism ☛ Studio Ghibli Demands That OpenAI Stop Ripping Off Its Work

    On October 28, a group representing Studio Ghibli, Bandai Namco, Square Enix, and other major Japanese publishers submitted a written request to OpenAI demanding that it stop using their copyrighted content to train the video generating AI tool.