Leftovers

• Medievalists.net ☛ 10 Medieval Inventions That Shaped the Modern World

  The Middle Ages are often portrayed as an age of superstition and stagnation, but many of the technologies that transformed everyday life were first developed or greatly improved during this period. From eyeglasses and mechanical clocks to windmills and universities, these medieval inventions continue to shape the modern world.

• Leon Mika ☛ Thinking About Progressive Timestamp Input Fields

  Thinking about it now, it would be nice if more timestamp fields supported something like this. But then, I need to be really invested in the system I’m using in order to care. And I think this is where such a feature could potentially be less useful that I imagined. It’s easy enough for me to add it, especially when I had fun working on the project. But if it’s a piece of software that users endure more than enjoy, I don’t think they would notice it (unless things go wrong). For all I know, the system I’m using right now has a super whizzbang mini-language for entering timestamps that I could only dream about, if only I cared to look it up.

• New York Times ☛ Om Malik, Whose Blog Shaped How Silicon Valley Saw Itself, Dies at 59

  Mr. Malik started his blog just as the dot-com bubble burst, leading to a recession that also took down many of the journalism start-ups that wrote about tech, like The Industry Standard and Inside.com. He was among the most prominent of the writers who quickly filled the gap, covering Silicon Valley with a mixture of hot scoops and sharp opinions that quickly made Gigaom a must-read.

• Eliot Peper ☛ Write what only you can write

  I believe the magic lies in how completely the author commits to only writing about what delights and interests him. Whenever we write something, there’s a chance that others will read it, and we often curtail our trains of thought to conform to what we imagine others will find acceptable.

• Winnie Lim ☛ Winnie Lim » my mortality and my writing

  I had a tougher week than usual. Someone I deeply care about had a bad fall, followed by the passing of Om. It made me think again about the impermanence of life: the mundaneness of every day can seem like this can go on forever, but suddenly in just a moment everything may change.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Deseret Media ☛ NASA races to save Swift telescope from falling back to Earth with daring rescue mission

    NASA hired startup Katalyst Space Technologies to boost the Swift Observatory to a higher orbit where it can continue hunting for some of the universe's biggest explosions. A three-armed spacecraft built by Katalyst will chase after Swift once it takes off from an atoll in the Pacific's Marshall Islands aboard an airplane-launched Pegasus rocket. Liftoff could occur as early as Tuesday.

  • Futurism ☛ There May Be Bizarre Forms of Consciousness Drifting Through the Universe, Mind-Bending Paper Claims

    “Suppose your best guess estimate is that, on Earth, consciousness is present in all vertebrates, plus cephalopods and some insects,” they wrote. “And suppose that your best guess estimate is that on average each galaxy contains a million planets where species of approximately that level of behavioral sophistication eventually evolve (even if technological civilizations rarely arise).”

    “The observable universe would then host, over its lifetime, a quintillion qualifying planets,” they added. “With that many draws from the lottery, some of these life forms will be strange indeed.”

  • Joseph Lorenzo Hall ☛ The Hologram in the Heartbeat: Testing Quantum Gravity with a Galactic Microquasar

    Physicists and scientists often tend to stick to their specializations. Theorists, for example, may dedicate their entire careers to working at whiteboards and running simulations, creating intricate and abstract universes based purely on mathematics. Observers can spend their careers pointing telescopes at the sky, cataloging raw data. But Caitlin stressed that you only achieve true, resounding impact when you force those two worlds to shake hands. A beautiful equation is just philosophy until an observation proves it; and raw data is just noise until a theorist explains why it matters.

  • Maury ☛ Arp 38: not that peculiar

    Total exposure time:
    327 * 30 seconds = 2.7 hours.

• Career/Education

  • Paul Krugman ☛ What Will AI Do To Our Minds?

    Now, however, students are using AI to write essays and answer questions on take-home exams, as well as taking in-person exams on their computers. As a result, an AI-arms-race has developed between instructors and students. Concerned that students are not doing the work themselves but are simply copying and pasting AI output, instructors have begun using AI programs to detect students’ use of AI. Inevitably, there are now AI programs that students can use to outwit the instructors’ AI detection programs.

    So, not surprisingly, many instructors are going back to handwritten in-class exams, generating a sudden boom in the demand for blue books. Ominously, even the return of in-person testing may not solve the problem of testing in the face of AI: Cheating using AI glasses is on the rise in Asia and will doubtless spread worldwide.

  • [Old] Konrad Reiche ☛ What Go conference reviewers look for in a talk proposal

    My ratings were roughly bell-shaped, clustering around 2 to 2.5 stars, with very few proposals earning 4 or 5. According to the scoring guidelines, 3 means a good talk with nothing specifically wrong. Most proposals scored below that threshold not because they lacked technical depth, but because they never answered: what will attendees walk away with? If you’re writing a conference submission, your first paragraph should answer three things:

    What is this talk about?
    Why does Go matter?
    What will attendees take away?

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-20 [Older] France bans alcohol during Fete de la Musique amid heat wave

  • Techdirt ☛ Whoops! Military Reverses Course On Flu Vaccine Requirements After Soldiers Got Sick

    When we talk about the scourge of anti-vaxxer philosophy within the federal government, we naturally spend a great deal of that time talking about RFK Jr. He’s the Secretary of Health and Human Services and perhaps the most infamous anti-vaxxer on the planet, after all. But if you thought HHS was the only part of the government infected with this dangerous unscientific nonsense, you’d be wrong.

  • Hackaday ☛ Phone Stand Aims To Fight Addiction

    The concept is straightforward enough—the smartphone stand uses a simple tactile button to determine if your smartphone is sitting on the little 3D printed shelf, or not. However, the smarts inside do a bit more than that, too. An ESP32-S3 is charged with monitoring whether the smartphone is sitting in place, and starts counting “focus time” while it’s there. If the phone is picked up, the OLED display on the shelf starts ticking down a 5-second timer to encourage you to put it back. If you don’t, the focus time is reset and you lose your streak.

  • Futurism ☛ Parasite That Affects Cognition Has Quietly Infected Billions of People

    In the research paper, a team of international scientists makes the case that toxoplasmosis meets the criteria for recognition as a “neglected tropical disease.” That designation would free up significant resources for further studies and the development of public health policy “to address the substantial burden” the parasite has on human health.

  • Cassidy Williams ☛ On the edge of burnout

    It’s wild how after a little time pulling myself out of that mindset and clearing some things off of my plate, I suddenly want to blog again, make more videos again, and code again.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-20 [Older] First case of H5 bird flu confirmed in Australia

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Star Wars Eclipse 'Simply Cannot Be Completed' if Quantic Dream Proceeds With Layoffs, Say Devs

    Layoffs are looming large for Quantic Dream following the failure of Spellcasters Chronicles, with 115 developers set to be affected. In response, the studio has gone on strike, both to protest the current leadership and to retain those employees to ensure that Star Wars Eclipse sees the light of day.

    Speaking to Gamekult, the team behind the title believes that they’re “absolutely essential” to the project and that it “literally cannot be finished” without them. If not retained, those remaining will have to crunch to make up for the loss (overtime reportedly went into effect for Eclipse hours after the announcement of layoffs).

  • Homo Ludditus ☛ Too many ways to install shit in world’s #1 desktop OS

    Win11 IoT comes without Microsoft Store, so I installed it. What I didn’t notice until recently is that Win11 IoT is so stripped down that it even lacks the Windows Terminal!

  • So-Called 'Artificial Intelligence' ('AI') / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Amazon AI Books Surge 3x, Readers Find Less Useful

      Cornell University economist Imke Reimers and University of Minnesota Professor Joel Waldfogel analyzed around 50,000 books. They compared based on AI detection tools, Amazon ratings, and sales. The conclusion was clear that the number of AI books increased rapidly. However, they received lower ratings. Sales were also less than books by human authors. Readers found them less useful.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ AI coding agents can be tricked into installing malware via 'clean' GitHub repositories — Mozilla's 0din team shows how Claude Code can be exploited by its own helpfulness

      Here's how it works. All a victim developer has to do is tell Claude to initialize a project from a malicious GitHub repository (or tell it to configure it after cloning it themselves). Said repo looks pretty clean, with just a handful of scaffolding files, and most importantly, nothing that will trigger security tools, whether remote, local, or even Claude's own checks.

    • Futurism ☛ Employees Are Using Their Jobs' Super-Expensive AI Tokens for the Most Hilariously Pointless Tasks Imaginable

      It’s a particularly ironic development, because workers are doing exactly what they were told — using the exciting new technology at all costs, thereby exposing just how little they’re getting in return.

    • Jack Franklin ☛ AI loops: who pays for the tokens?

      A recent trend in AI has become this idea of "loops". Rather than you doing prompting and working with the AI to design and implement, you instead give it a higher level goal and let it roll. You build a system to let the AI make decisions, build and verify its work, all with the aim of completing your goal.

    • Hackaday ☛ Teaching An AI To Play A Racing Game Via Screen Input

      This project reminds us of similar efforts to teach a raw AI how to play Trackmania, or the Drivatar technology in the Forza series of racing games.

    • Michael Green ☛ A Token China Shock

      The narrative that Chinese models are simply inferior copies completely collapsed. By optimizing training stability rather than relying on brute-force compute infrastructure, labs like DeepSeek and tech giants like Xiaomi have triggered a permanent, deflationary price war.

    • Connor Boyle ☛ MIT Researchers Named Their Project After a Paper They Don’t Seem to Have Read

      I was immediately perplexed by this passage, because the cited paper by Bender and Gebru et al.—the paper that coined the term “stochastic parrot”—does not contain even one of the cited claims. Indeed, none of the words “agreeable”, “deferential”, nor “sycophantic” (nor any close synonym that I could think of) appears even once in the original “Stochastic Parrots” paper. I’m also not sure what Chang et al. mean by the phrase “AI assistants”; the original “Stochastic Parrots” paper discusses language models, not voice assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant, or Samsung Bixby. It certainly isn’t about LM-based chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini; ChatGPT was not even released until November of 2022, more than a full year after the publication of “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots”!

  • Social Control Media

    • RTL ☛ Meta declined to respond to AFP questions: For sale on Facebook: monkeys, rhino horn and dead pangolins

      The GI-TOC research found over 20,000 adverts for more than 260,000 wildlife products on social media platforms between April 2024 and March 2026.

      Nearly three-quarters were on Facebook, and many remained up even after being reported, said Russell Gray, a data scientist and ecologist who co-authored GI-TOC's April report.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ Third-Party Breaches Teach Schools a Costly Lesson in Vendor Risk

      From the smallest rural K-12 districts to the world's most prestigious universities, IT professionals in education are focused on getting and keeping students and staff online, rather than protecting the systems their devices run on. Many have slim security budgets and are chronically understaffed. And the vast amounts of operational and personal data they hold could be ransomed or sold for use in future cybercrimes.

      According to Verizon Business's 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, there were 1,252 data breaches involving the education sector last year. More than half of those breaches involved malware, and 65% of those attacks involved ransomware.

• Security

  • Bleeping Computer ☛ 2026-06-21 [Older] Klue OAuth breach victim list grows as Icarus hackers claim attack

  • 2026-06-21 [Older] Brazil’s Civil Defense suffers a cyberattack on its official alert network

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • India Times ☛ How schools breach children’s data privacy: A snapshot

      Schools, coaching centres, edtech companies, hospitals, banks, employers and social media platforms all fall within its ambit.

      Yet compliance in India remains patchy.

      “Only about 30–35% of schools take the regulation seriously,” said Sharmishtha Gupta, former head of schools and an independent education consultant based in Delhi NCR. “Even among those, there is little clarity about the scope of the consent obtained, as many rely on vague blanket permissions that do not specify commercial use or publicity.”

    • Votebeat ☛ Trump Justice Department can’t have Pennsylvania voters’ private info, judge rules

      The Justice Department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for access to state voter rolls containing personal information such as driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers.

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ “Double Threat” to Private Communications: Undemocratic Chat Control Backroom Deals and Imminent Concessions Spark Relaunch of fightchatcontrol.eu

      Dr. Patrick Breyer, civil liberties activist and former Member of the European Parliament, explains:
      “What we are witnessing this week is a blatant disregard for democratic processes and fundamental rights. EP President Metsola is attempting an unprecedented power play to resurrect the expired ‘Chat Control 1.0’ mass scanning regime, directly overriding her own Parliament’s clear rejection from March. Her own EPP group opposed in the final vote. This trickery betrays European democracy. At the exact same time, the European Parliament is in the process of rushing a new scanning mandate, paving the way for fatal concessions in the trilogue on Monday. EU citizens are facing a double-attack on their right to private correspondence. We cannot let undemocratic backroom deals destroy the safety, security, and confidentiality of our digital lives.”

    • Futurism ☛ Woman Surprised When Flock Surveillance Tower Appears in Her Yard Without Warning

      According to reporting by Virginia’s WSLS 10, Kat Vaughn of Roanoke was alarmed to discover a Flock audio detection pole had been erected in her front yard. Vaughn told the station that she returned home from a brief trip to a nearby park to discover the freshly-installed device sitting in the parkway strip, the section of public land between her lawn and the street.

    • Kane Narraway ☛ Three Ways to Give an AI Agent an Identity

      There are, broadly, three ways to answer it. The agent can act as you, it can act as its own service account, or it can act as its own workload identity. Each one shines somewhere and falls apart somewhere else. There’s also a plumbing layer (identity brokering and governance control planes) that you can add onto all three of these and people often get the two concepts muddled.

      Now you’ve probably seen a lot of vendors in this space promising the world and by the time Google indexes this post three more vendors will have launched an “agent identity platform”, and at least one of them is an API gateway in a trench coat. The space is moving fast and so far it’s been hard to tell what will stand the test of time.

    • Alex Ewerlöf ☛ LinkedOut

      Apparently 12 years ago I allowed LinkedIn app to “sync my connection” with something which leaked 3.8k of my personal contact informations (emails, phone numbers, address, etc)! 🤯

      LinkedIn also stores the IP address of every login: [...]

  • Confidentiality

    • 2026-06-22 [Older] Xsolis breach affected 1,396,519 of its clients’ patients

    • 2026-06-21 [Older] Two Data Breaches Didn’t Sink Novo Nordisk’s Stock. Why Not?

    • 2026-06-22 [Older] Cherry Health provides preliminary notice of recent data breach

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-06-15 [Older] AU: American Express ordered to fix security gaps after customer was spied on

• Defence/Aggression

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-21 [Older] Scottish police arrest man over Edinburgh attacks

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-21 [Older] Sudan: UN warns of mass atrocities in El-Obeid

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-20 [Older] Bolivia's Paz declares state of emergency over blockades

  • CBC ☛ 2026-06-18 [Older] New law to strip Canada's military of power to handle sexual assault cases

  • CBC ☛ 2026-06-19 [Older] Canadian sniper rifles openly flaunted in Yemen, Sudan, Libya — despite arms sanctions

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Will Germany impose an age limit for social media?

    Leni's situation is daily life for a large proportion of teenagers growing up in Germany. According to recent OECD findings, 15-year-olds in Germany spend about 48 hours per week in front of a screen — an average of about seven hours per day. Compared with 36 other countries, Germany ranks fifth highest for screen time, just behind Poland and Estonia. Another study by German health insurance provider DAK showed that 1.5 million young people in Germany use social media to a problematic extent, and of these about a quarter, 350,000, are considered addicted.

  • Salon ☛ Impeachment is the only answer to Trump’s behavior

    One sure sign that our system of government — and social compact — is breaking down is that we have had three impeachments in the last half century, when we only had one in our entire history before that. The result is that most people are all too aware that impeachment is something of a paper tiger. As long as a president has just enough partisan support in the Senate to block a conviction, he is pretty safe. But that doesn’t mean the process is a useless exercise.

    Impeachment is still a very big deal with extremely high stakes. You never know if it just might work because party loyalties have been shown to only go so far. Despite this disclaimer — and despite his historic approval ratings — Trump holds tremendous sway over his party, and it’s highly unlikely he would ever be convicted unless he is drooling and incontinent, and even then . . .

    But that’s not the point. He is the most corrupt president in history, and that fact, with all its dark details, needs to be aired for the public to see while he is in office. After Trump leaves office, there is little chance that any successive administration would be able to charge him, even though the expansive immunity conferred upon him by the Supreme Court ostensibly only applies to official duties. We know any such charges would be litigated to death, and by the time it finally came to trial, he might very well be dead, and the case would be moot.

  • Baltics and War in Ukraine

    • Paul Krugman ☛ On Holding Elon Musk Accountable

      For most of last year, Elon Musk was the second most powerful man in America. He was running a large part of the government’s budget. And during that time, he established a track record of evil incompetence. I mean, really evil and really incompetent on enormous scales. And why aren’t people talking about it more?

    • NPR ☛ Inside a secretive Ukrainian team launching deep drone strikes at Russia

      Direct aid by the U.S. fell by 99% under the Trump administration, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy's Ukraine Support Tracker. Commander Charlie says Ukraine has never relied entirely on foreign aid alone. He says he has seen his soldiers constantly master new technologies to stay a step ahead of the Russians.

      [...]

      Zelenskyy has often called these long-range drone strikes "Ukrainian sanctions." Commander Charlie and Uki also use the phrase when referring to their missions. Like Zelenskyy, they say they want this war to end — but on their terms and not by rewarding the invader, Russia, with Ukrainian capitulation.

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Tartu protesters rally against Swedish 'trash' in Estonian jails

      Sweden will pay Estonia €30.6 million per year for up to 300 prisoners, plus €8,500 per month for each additional inmate. They will be housed in the half-empty Tartu Prison in south Estonia from the second half of 2026.

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Estonia's Baltic Defense Line section taking shape in Setomaa's forests

      "In total, 28 bunkers have been installed. In addition, we have built more than ten kilometers of anti-tank trenches in southeastern Estonia, and more than 20,000 dragon's teeth have been delivered. Some of them have been placed in forward storage areas, meaning as close as possible to our positions," he said.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Logikal Solutions ☛ Yet Another Company to Blacklist

    This isn’t about Indian firms though they engage in this practice to gather resumes. We are talking about fake job openings. What makes this worse is “matching software” on job boards actually pushes fake openings at highly skilled people. Most notable of these is ZipRecruiter. Don’t ever let your resume get into their database connected to an email address you actually look at!

  • International Business Times ☛ Trump Health Drama Exposed: How the White House Is Allegedly Controlling the Medical Story Tightly

    That tension matters because Trump is not just any patient; he is the oldest person ever to take the presidency, and every health disclosure now carries political weight. The issue is no longer only whether he is fit for office but whether the public is being given a full and honest picture of his condition, especially after repeated questions over bruising, visible marks, and the way his team has handled medical information.

    The reaction has been immediate and familiar: online debate, cable commentary, and renewed suspicion among critics that the administration is shaping the medical story as carefully as it can. Supporters point to official exam results and a doctor's positive assessment, while others argue that selective transparency is still a form of concealment.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Katie Phang Just Made Jeffrey Epstein Central to Todd Blanche's Bid for Confirmation

    A month after that, Phang asked for a preliminary injunction. Her ask was, on its face, fairly simple: First, to immediately do two things required by law: review the foreign language Epstein files for release and submit a privilege log explaining each individual redaction. And also to either unredact the names in several sets of documents or explain why he was refusing to do so.

• Environment

  • Lusaka ZM ☛ Zambia : Copper Production Expected At One Million Tons- President Hichilema

    “We shall continue working, so then we are saying 3 million tons of copper, one million tons of wheat, 1 billion tons of sugar and 1 billion dollars of beef export”, the President said.

  • Irish Examiner ☛ Salmon in crisis: 'There is nothing left in the river'

    Harding says the fish, along with other wildlife like trout, form an instrumental part of our ecosystems. Sadly, they have all but disappeared in the tributaries near Gowran and Gorsebridge, Co. Kilkenny.

  • Western Water ☛ Wildfires scorch 227,000 acres across Colorao River Basin states

    This report provides a detailed, state-by-state assessment of all major active wildfires as of this date, compiling data from official sources to deliver a comprehensive situational overview for the Colorado River Basin.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Human activity has driven retreat of Antarctica's fastest melting glacier

    Mira Adhikari, an ice sheet modeler at the British Antarctic Survey, said, "Our results add to growing evidence that human-driven climate change is likely affecting even the most remote regions of the planet. Changes in Antarctica have global consequences, particularly for sea level rise, highlighting the far-reaching impacts of a warming world."

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Europe swelters as heat wave moves east

    The World Health Organization said it had recorded more than 1,300 excess deaths in Europe since June 21. Overall, some 381 million Europeans were set to see temperatures exceed 30C, according to analysis based on forecasts from the German Meteorological Service and population data.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CBC ☛ 2026-06-19 [Older] Alberta’s new sky-high solar panel recycling fee sparks industry backlash

    • Josh Lospinoso ☛ The Water Keeps the Books

      Not literally. The five men behind me were still paddling, still strong, still trying to follow. But the canoe had lost the quiet coherence it sometimes acquires when everyone enters the same motion. The catches arrived separately. The hull shuddered through six private efforts. Water became foam. Urgency became noise.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Constellation wants two New York nuclear reactors operating till 2049

      According to reports, the company wishes to extend operations at Ginna Clean Energy Center and Nine Mile Point Unit 1 reactors until at least 2049.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • CBC ☛ 2026-06-20 [Older] How to move a beluga across the world

  • Overpopulation

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Humanity Could Vanish in 17,000 Years: Math Predicts Survival End

      Once mathematicians estimated that no more than 2.34 trillion people are likely to exist, they looked at current birth rates. For roughly the last 40 years, around 130 million babies have been born worldwide every year. Although birth rates are falling in many countries, the global population is still increasing.

      If births continue at around today's pace, it would take approximately 17,100 years for humanity to reach the estimated limit of 2.34 trillion people. The exact number could change if birth rates rise or fall significantly, but the estimate remains in the same general range.

    • Futurism ☛ Devastating Droughts Are Punching Massive Sinkholes Into Critical Farmland

      Some of these holes measure hundreds of feet both across and deep, literally and figuratively threatening Turkey’s food security.

      Scientists suggest it’s the result of a combination of intense agriculture draining dwindling groundwater supplies through illegal wells, ongoing droughts, and local geology.

• Finance

  • Robert Reich ☛ Musk in Deep Shite Again

    The SpaceX crash wiped out just about all of SpaceX’s gains from the last two weeks, which has caused massive headaches for its average investors and initial buyers. Not quite a Ponzi scheme yet, but heading in that direction.

    All this shows why we need a Securities and Exchange Commission that’s on the side of average investors and the public and not bought off by today’s robber barons.

  • CBC ☛ 2026-06-18 [Older] Detroit automakers, union set to open bargaining against backdrop of tariffs, CUSMA review

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-06-20 [Older] Germany news: Pension overhaul may push retirement age to 70

  • CBC ☛ 2026-06-18 [Older] Canada Post, CUPW sign collective agreements, ending years of heated negotiations

  • CBC ☛ 2026-06-19 [Older] Canada imposes 10% global tariff on canned vegetables — excluding U.S., Mexico

  • CBC ☛ 2026-06-19 [Older] Owner of beleaguered Toys 'R' Us Canada floats rebrand in court files

  • CBC ☛ 2026-06-19 [Older] Families crumble, debts build, kids go without therapy. Stories from Alberta’s waitlist for disability support

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Independent UK ☛ California dad admits dosing his children hallucinogenic mushrooms every other day

    “Psilocybin mushrooms are a controlled substance,” the attorney’s office said in a statement, “that act as hallucinogenic drugs, inducing altered states of consciousness and vivid sensory experiences.”

  • Robert Reich ☛ Sunday thought: Mourning in America

    America’s ideals have never been fully achieved, of course, but the effort to achieve them has been noble; it has inspired much of the world. That effort had been our nation’s purpose, the core of our moral authority.

    Those ideals haven’t died, but the effort to achieve them is on life support.

  • Ricardo Mendes ☛ A Node on the Web

    By allowing the U.S. government to treat Iran as a political target during the World Cup, FIFA did not stay neutral. It simply outsourced the dirty work to the host country.

    And in doing so, it created a precedent.

    Future hosts now know the rule: use visas, borders and entry restrictions as political weapons, and FIFA will look the other way — provided the stadiums are shiny enough and the sponsors are comfortable.

    There is no walking that back.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Corruption for Make Benefit Glorious Family of Trump

    Transcript

    It’s kind of hard to believe, but the original Borat movie was 20 years ago. It’s time for a second sequel. And I already have the title. It would be Corruption for Make Benefit Glorious Family of Trump.

    I hope that some of my listeners are young enough to not remember the original Borat movie. But it was a mockumentary, a satire, in which Sacha Baron Cohen pretended to be a journalist from Kazakhstan investigating and interviewing Americans about American mores. It was not about Kazakhstan, although he did insult the country along the way.

  • International Business Times ☛ [Cryptocurrency] Slump Fails to Stop CZ as Binance Founder Overtakes Bill Gates With $108 Billion Fortune

    Binance founder Changpeng 'CZ' Zhao has overtaken Bill Gates in Forbes' real-time billionaire rankings, even as the crypto market has struggled through volatility, regulatory pressure and a sharp pullback from previous highs.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Damage Caused by Private Equity Is No Accident

    Defenders of the private equity industry cast it as a bold force driving economic dynamism. But its record of destroying public services is no accident: private equity is essentially an elite project to profit from asset-stripping.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Task And Purpose ☛ DC settles with man who played 'Star Wars' music at troops

    “The government’s efforts to silence me ultimately backfired and brought more attention to the unjust deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C.,” said Sam O’Hara, plaintiff in the case. “This settlement serves as a reminder that constitutional freedoms are worth defending, especially when those in power would prefer we stay quiet.”

    Since the deployment of National Guard troops to the capital in August, uniformed patrols have become a regular sight in D.C., and so have protests against the military’s presence. Those have ranged from conventional demonstrations to mocking social media posts or, in O’Hara’s case, providing them with a soundtrack best known for following Darth Vader and a cadre of Stormtroopers.

  • JURIST ☛ International concern raised over blanket ban on protest and pretrial detentions in Türkiye ahead of NATO summit

    Amnesty described the measures as “excessive” and constituting an attack on the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.

    The Ankara governorate issued a statement June 22, announcing the special security measures ahead of the NATO summit, which will be held July 7-8. The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s office announced June 25 that 225 people had been detained under the measures, with 135 referred to court with requests for pre-trial detention. The statement said those arrested were linked to ISIS and leftist groups.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Guest Post by Peter Brass on the new NSF guidelines

    It is my aim to bring a bit more content to the debate, and encourage you to file comments, but on specific issues, in my opinion primarily on the passage against “promoting anti-American Values,” which might indeed be a catch-all for political pressure on research. Otherwise there is little new: reviews were always only advisory.

    The relevant section is https://www.federalregister.gov/d/2026-10817/p-amd-155, the revision of section 200.205, especially section (b) “pre-issuance review,” which states (underline and boldface mine): [...]

  • US Federal Register ☛ Proposed Rule: Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance [PDF]

    (2) Discretionary awards must not be used to fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate:

    [...]

    (iv) Any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Court House News ☛ Class certification granted for journalists suing over immigration protest crackdown in SoCal

    U.S. District Judge Hernán Vera found the plaintiffs, including the Los Angeles Press Club and the News Guild, had sufficiently shown the Department of Homeland Security has “a policy of treating the recording of their agents as an unlawful threat that may be responded to with force,” and granted class certification to anyone who peacefully films or photographs “immigration enforcement and removal operations, or protests of those operations” in the Central District of California, which covers much of Southern California, including Los Angeles and Orange County.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Native Americans commemorate victory at Little Bighorn with horse races, dance and song

    The battle, one of the most famous and symbolically charged events in American history, marked its anniversary Thursday. Allied tribes came together on that hot day near the banks of the Little Bighorn River in present-day Montana to hand the U.S. Army a rare defeat as they fought to preserve their way of life in the face of westward expansion. Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and more than 200 his troops were killed.

    Reenactments will illustrate the battle. Horse riders from the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota and elsewhere traveled hundreds of miles to the Crow Agency area in Montana to mark the occasion. Families were encouraged to share their oral histories. At the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, people planned horse races and traditional songs and dances.

  • Futurism ☛ Cops Caught Using AI to Edit Picture of Pathetic Drug Bust

    Asked by CTV why they used AI to manipulate the image, Vancouver’s sergeant Adam Donalson wrote that “we used software to edit out the names of the accused” — a confusing response, given that the original image showed the contraband arranged on a plank of cardboard and labeled with sharpie.

  • Ibrahim Diallo ☛ The Laziest Generation

    Last week I found a flyer wedged into my front door from a real estate agent in the neighborhood. On it was a list of homes she had sold, each entry showing a picture of the house and its sale price. The cheapest was $970k. For her, this was a record of her work. "Hire me and I'll sell your house," a calling card of bragging rights. For me, it was a nightmare.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ ICE’s Private Prison Contractor Wants Police-Style Immunity

    GEO Group, a top private prison contractor for ICE, is claiming immunity from lawsuits alleging forced labor at its detention centers. It’s using a controversial legal doctrine best known for shielding cops from police brutality claims.

  • Kev Quirk ☛ The Laziest Generation

    Unless my kids generation come out of school on a 6 figure salary, they don't have a hope in hell of buying a decent house.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Register UK ☛ Cloudflare teams up with big browsers to help websites tell welcome from unwelcome visitors

    Cloudflare, along with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox, have committed to develop Private Access Control Tokens (PACTs), a way for websites to generate a digital token that asserts a given browsing session is being run by a human or bot with legitimate intent, as opposed to network requests from people or software deemed abusive or improper.

  • Mozilla ☛ PACT: Anonymous Credentials for the Web - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog

    The good news is that the cryptographic foundations for a privacy preserving approach already exist. The Privacy Pass protocol, originally developed in 2018 to reduce the friction of Cloudflare CAPTCHAs for Tor users, introduced the core primitive: a token that is unlinkable between issuance and redemption. You prove something to an issuer (e.g. by solving a CAPTCHA), receive some tokens, and later present a token to a website. The website can verify the token is legitimate, but can’t link it to the user it was issued to.

  • Steve McIntyre ☛ It's dead, Jim!

    I previously wrote about the upcoming UEFI CA rollover. Well, it's happened now - the old Microsoft UEFI CA from 2011 expired yesterday: [...]

  • [Old] University of California, Berkeley ☛ How DRM-Based Content Delivery Systems Disrupt Expectations of “Personal Use” [PDF]

    We set out to examine whether current, DRM-based online offerings of music and movies accord with consumers’ current expectations regarding the personal use of copyrighted works by studying the behavior of six music, and two film online distribution services. We find that, for the most part, the services examined do not accord with expectations of personal use. The DRM-based services studied restrict personal use in a manner inconsistent with the norms and expectations governing the purchase and rental of traditional physical CDs, DVDs, and videocassettes. If adopted by consumers the DRM systems stand to alter the norms governing personal use of copyrighted content and create pitfalls of legal liability for unsuspecting consumers. In conclusion, we present technological and legal considerations which may help current and future DRM system designers better accommodate consumers' expectations of personal use.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Sony deleting 551 movies from own customers' accounts

    Sony unceremoniously announced that it would be deleting 551 movies from PlayStation customers' accounts in the U.K.: no apologies, no refunds, just a cold reminder that the only thing bought was a revokable license to access "content." The wipe is the result of Sony's deal with movie distributor StudioCanal ending.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ New patent reveals a simpler way to blend gasoline and electric power

      Now, California-based EV company Faraday Future says it has developed a new transmission architecture designed to tackle these long-standing problems. The company has received US Patent No. 12,630,004 for a “Range-Extending Hybrid Transmission System,” a design that separates the engine, electric generator, and drive wheels so they can operate more flexibly and efficiently.

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Futurism ☛ Tom Hanks Frets AI Could Voice Woody in Even More "Toy Story" Movies

        “Time is undefeated. The question would be whether or not we could cobble together some version of me,” Hanks ruminated. “Every word we have ever recorded in time in ‘Toy Story’ is on digital media somewhere, so they could put together anything they would want.”

  • Copyrights

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ 400 domains used for illegal 2026 World Cup streams seized by US Justice Department — operation is five times the scale of the previous crackdown

      Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department's Criminal Division said the seizures reflected the country's duty “as a host nation to protect the FIFA World Cup from criminals.” Domain seizures are a limited tool against operations that rotate addresses and fall back to redundant copies, hence why enforcement bodies suddenly pounce on hundreds of domains at once rather than one at a time.