Leftovers

• Sean Goedecke ☛ Blog about things you don't understand yet

  Every post I publish represents at least two things I’ve learned: the thing that prompted me to write the post, and the thing I learned in the course of writing it. If I don’t learn anything new while I’m writing, it’s not interesting enough to publish.

• Seth Godin ☛ Facts and feelings

  We find ourselves with feelings, and then we find (or invent) ‘facts’ to justify them.

• Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Interpretation of “I got on a new boat” by Pozavli (traditional)

  Before I elaborate on the substantive point of this song, I note how the challenge with traditional Greek music is to find a video with high image and audio quality. Usually you get some otherwise excellent performance whose recording leaves much to be desired.

  Below are the lyrics, my translation of them, and further comments.

• Johnny Decimal ☛ Purpose, mission, values

  After discussing this at the last small business meeting, we've thought about and written down our purpose, mission, and values. I'll put a copy here, and add them to their proper home which is our policies page. If it's much later than July 2026 when you read this, you should check there for the latest version. This post won't change.

• Johnny Decimal ☛ Once again, we failed to focus • Blog • Johnny.Decimal

  We mock 'mission statements', but their value just became apparent to me. We've never written down exactly what it is we're here for: why do we exist?

  We still haven't written that down, but if I think out loud it's something like: people need help organising stuff, and we have an interesting method of doing that, so we should try to help them.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Wonders of Web Weaving ☛ #9: Rachel (kwon.nyc) - Wonders of Web Weaving

    In Episode 9, I chat with Rachel, the author of kwon.nyc and curator of "The internet used to be* fun *(It still is, but it used to be, too)". We talk about, among other things, metaphors for the web, creative mediums on the web, physical creative spaces, and more.

  • Michael Geist ☛ The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 275: David Loukidelis on Why Stripping Privacy Enforcement from Canada’s Privacy Commissioner in Bill C-36 is Unnecessarily Risky Policy

    This week’s Law Bytes podcast features David Loukidelis, one of Canada’s best-regarded former privacy commissioners. Loukidelis served as BC’s Information and Privacy Commissioner from 1999 to 2010, where he was responsible for the enforcement of BC’s Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act and Personal Information Protection Act, which came into force in 2004. He joins me on the podcast to share his thoughts on the enforcement changes in the bill and what it may mean for privacy in Canada.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Joel Chrono ☛ How I lost my phone

    Yesterday tragedy stroke, and chaos ensued, losing your phone in the modern world can have a lot of consequences, so I decided to share how things worked out for me.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Fishing for DNA: How a cup of river water can reveal secrets about human health, pollution and biodiversity

    With eDNA, researchers can collect information about a species without ever needing to see or interact with it. Moreover, a cup of water, a few ounces (a few fluid ounces) of sand or even air sucked through a filter can hold enough information to determine what has been in the area, including people, wildlife and infectious pathogens.

  • LabX Media Group ☛ A Trap for AI Use in Peer Reviews Sparks Controversy

    “Designing a trap that presumes bad faith corrodes the relationship the whole system depends on,” Sören Auer, a computer scientist at Leibniz University Hannover, wrote on LinkedIn. “You do not build a healthy reviewing culture by treating your reviewers as suspects.”

    But others see merits in the approach. A similar prompt-injection effort has caught hundreds of reviewers misusing LLMs in submissions for next week’s 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026) in Seoul, South Korea, according to Nihar Shah, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and scientific integrity chair of that conference.

• Games

  • The Nation ☛ The World Cup Meets Casino Capitalism

    Soccer’s gambling problem doesn’t end there. Only a few months before the 2026 World Cup kicked off, Major League Soccer handed lifetime bans to two players—Derrick Jones and Yaw Yeboah—for placing bets on soccer, including gambling that involved their own matches. And just two weeks before the tournament, Elye Wahi, the Ivory Coast player who featured in the 2026 World Cup, was arrested in France for sports betting–related offenses .

• Career/Education

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Joy in learning computer science with Experience CS

    We talked about some of the challenges they faced, and how they’ve worked around them, including constraints on their time and the requirements around teaching their core content areas. But most of our conversation was on the impact the Experience CS resources had on their students. Mark and Taryn shared how teaching cross-curricular computing helped their students to find joy in their learning, express creativity in their projects, and build a sense of leadership within the classroom.

  • Winnie Lim ☛ Winnie Lim » things I would like to tell my 10 year old self

    I’ve been wanting to write a post like this for ages. A post which I essentially write about things I’ve learnt in life so far, that I would impart to my 10 year old self even though she would probably not listen, or that it wouldn’t be realistic because that so much I have learnt was simply not available in that era. I picked 10 years as the age because she would be old enough to understand and yet still untainted by life.

  • Michael Burkhardt ☛ It’s Official (Weeknote No. 26-27)

    After years of planning and months of counting down, my retirement from full time work finally arrived! I hadn’t thought about how the week would play out, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that is was a strange week.

  • Hackaday ☛ When An Engineering Education Doesn’t Teach You How To Really Make Anything

    The skill a professional engineer picks up here is designing for manufacture. It’s something I picked only progressively over the years, and learned with a bang when I became peripherally involved in the production of electronic conference badges. You learn to be much more exact in your PCB design to avoid those reworks and bodge wires, you pick your parts with much greater care, and pay far more attention to power supplies, decoupling, thermal issues, impedances, and ground isolation. Something that works has to become something that always works, first time. You go from having several spins of the prototype PCB to having maybe a couple, and you reach a point at which you can order 5000 boards and have less than 50 of them that need attention. My friend describes himself as more of a software expert than hardware, but he’s learned this process over the decades far more than I have.

• Hardware

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Steering light in a flash: New chip redirects light beams in less than a trillionth of a second

    Light can carry enormous amounts of information at extreme speeds, making photonic technologies promising for the development of faster communications, more powerful computing systems and more sensitive sensors. But for light to be useful for these purposes, engineers need to be able to control where it goes and redirect it quickly. A new device built by Caltech researchers uses a beam of light to steer another to a different angle in just 74 femtoseconds (74 quadrillionths of a second). That's about the time it takes light to travel the width of a human hair.

  • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ Why Gen Z is falling in love with film photography

    But within the past five years, younger people have been increasingly drawn to the old way of doing photography.

    In 2025, 35% of the 42 million active film camera users worldwide were reported to be between the ages of 18 and 30. The year prior, online searches for analog photography saw a 41% rise.

  • Jan van den Berg ☛ Preparing my vacation laptop

    We're about to go on vacation. And I have decided not to take my newish Macbook Air M4. Just on the off-chance something might happen to my favorite piece of technology. And also: we'll be travelling a lot and staying in lots of different places and I do not want to use brain CPU cycles every day thinking about whether I should take my laptop with me or put it in the hotelsafe or leave it in the room etc.

    So, the M4 is not coming with.

    But I do need a laptop. I mean, who goes on vacation without a laptop?! I am not a caveman. And also: I am not going to be blogging from my phone.

  • Josh Lospinoso ☛ UART: Timing Is Part of the Evidence

    A decoded UART byte can look atomic. It is not.

    Start with a synthetic timing setup: [...]

  • Jonas Hietala ☛ The T-34/0 keyboard layout

    This is an update to the T-34 keyboard layout I’ve been using for a solid number of weeks. While there are more changes I’d like to try, I’m quite pleased with these changes so I figured I might as well immortalize them before I explore further. (And I do have a bunch of big changes I want to experiment with.)

  • University of Toronto ☛ Our mixed building network wiring and its consequences

    In a comment on my entry about how sometimes it's the network that's the problem, I was asked what networking workstations typically have on our networks (and if we still use 100 MBit for low speed things). The simple answer is that it's somewhat mixed but mostly 1G Ethernet, often with 1G uplinks from the switches that the office network jacks are connected to. But there's some stories involved.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ This compact camera has stayed popular for 8 years – and its updated version tops Japan's sales charts despite changing very little

    Compact cameras are enjoying a huge resurgence, but the Canon PowerShot SX740 HS never really went away. Since launching in July 2018, Canon’s travel zoom has remained one of the brand’s most sought-after compact cameras, proving its popularity isn’t simply driven by today’s retro camera boom.

  • Hackaday ☛ Why The NES Put Out A Wobbly Picture

    The NTSC television standard is a masterpiece of mid-century engineering, to pack a color image into the transmission bandwidth of a monochrome one, and to do so while maintaining backward compatibility with earlier monochrome TV sets. In terms of its timings and choice of sync and carrier frequencies it’s elegantly thought out for maximum quality on a 1950s round-CRT color TV set.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ Doctors Are Missing Women's Heart Attacks Because of Just One Word

    For decades now, doctors have deemed women's heart attack symptoms as 'atypical' because they can differ from the symptoms of men.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ VA patient system wrongly deemed ‘low risk’, watchdog says

    When the Patient Advocate Tracking System-Replacement (PATS-R) — which Veterans Health Administration staff use to document communications with veterans — was transferred to the cloud and the Office of Strategic Initiatives in November 2023, the OIT did not go through all necessary risk management steps, the OIG found.

  • US Department of Veterans Affairs ☛ Audit of Security and Access Controls for the Patient Advocate Tracking System-Replacement | Department of Veterans Affairs OIG

    Patient advocates document interactions with veterans in the Patient Advocate Tracking System-Replacement (PATS-R), which contains personally identifiable and health information that VA is required to protect. The VA OIG conducted this audit to determine whether PATS-R had adequate security controls from March 2025 through January 2026 to safeguard veterans’ sensitive information in accordance with federal law and information security standards.

    The OIG found that PATS-R received an inappropriate low risk categorization when oversight of the system shifted portfolios in late 2023 and the system migrated to a cloud environment. During the transition, VA’s Office of Information and Technology (OIT) did not follow all the steps of the required risk management framework, including revisiting the privacy impact assessment. As a result, the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of veterans’ information were put at potential risk. Although OIT updated the system risk categorization to moderate impact in March 2025, access controls still did not function as intended, and the program office did not consistently validate that users were authorized. The OIG also found many users were unaware they could access medical records through PATS-R, and most reported that losing such access would not affect their duties.

  • CBC ☛ An off-duty Alberta doctor saved a man's life with CPR. Then he got a $250 ambulance bill

    Sutanto says this incident has opened his eyes to the high costs of ambulance fees, which he worries could keep patients from calling for help when they need it most.

  • 404 Media ☛ Scientists Gave Mice Cocaine. This Is What It Did to Their Brains

    After 24 hours, the genomes of the exposed mice showed several changes relative to the control group. Even more significantly, some of those shifts were still present after two weeks. The experiment hints that one cocaine exposure is enough to imprint long-term injuries into the genome, which may prime the brain for a stronger addictive response to the drug on a second exposure.

    “This would be like a silent injury, where the genome is altered,” Pombo said. “It looks like everything is normal, the mouse or the animal is going about its life, but if another exposure came along, it would have much more consequences.”

  • Inside Towers ☛ Empire State Building Climb Prompts Temporary Antenna Shutdown

    The pair unfurled a banner before descending and were arrested on multiple charges, including burglary, reckless endangerment, criminal trespass, and criminal mischief. Multiple safety experts contacted by Inside Towers said the climbers were exposed to harmful levels of RF radiation.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Tara Tarakiyee ☛ I Cannot Be Trusted to Send Email

    If this were the Privacy and Reliability Stack series, I would be telling you all about how I switched to one of them. But this is the Autonomous Stack series. To live up to the name of the series, leaving one [Internet] landlord for a better [Internet] landlord did not feel like sovereigntymaxxing.

    Many paid email providers will host your own domain, and even though having your first you@yournamehere.com address feels like independence, the domain is the most portable part. The mailbox part is less so. When you use any email provider, your mail lives on their drives, and getting it out means some form of export, only to import it somewhere else again. And you had better hope they do not lose it or decide you cannot access it anymore. Proton and Tuta both support custom domains, but that does not make the mailbox itself portable in the same way as the domain.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Maestral, My Favourite Dropbox Client for MacOS, Is No Longer Being Maintained

    I use Dropbox only for some relatively basic but necessary things, like hosting PDFs for this very website, which is why Maestral has been the perfect client for me. It is a testament to the effect of a good third-party app that I have stuck with Dropbox despite its corporate-focused strategy pivot.

  • Jack Baty ☛ Do I prefer Linux now?

    It's the weirdest thing. I needed to do something using macOS yesterday and the whole time I just wanted to get back to my Linux desktop. This isn't the first time I felt this way, but it happened sooner and the feeling was stronger this time.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ US Army websites defaced with pro-Kurdish sentiments, insults to Trump

    One of the websites, oil.army.mil, belongs to the Army’s Open Innovation Lab, a test bed for software and cyber capabilities established in 2020. The other belongs to the Artificial Intelligence Integration Center, established in 2019 to integrate AI technologies into the Army and train personnel on emerging technologies.

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

    • Futurism ☛ Workplaces Have Gotten So Bizarre That People Are Just Sending AI Slop Back and Forth at Each Other

      “‘I literally think [my boss’] AI is talking to my AI. That is the actual conversation happening right now,'” the employee told Leena Rinne, an executive at the edtech firm Skillsoft, in the Fortune piece. “‘I can’t crack the code of working with [my boss], because it’s just his AI and my AI going back and forth.'”

    • Futurism ☛ Zuckerberg Admits That AI Is Not Working Out the Way He Imagined

      It’s only the latest indication of major chaos behind the scenes as the tech giant struggles to remain relevant in an AI race being fought out by its competitors. That’s despite Meta committing to spending a stunning $145 billion on AI infrastructure this year alone, a record sum that could’ve paid for an untold number of salaries.

    • Futurism ☛ Experts Say There's Now an Open Source AI Model as Scary as Mythos

      GLM-5.2 can be downloaded by anybody, can be run on virtually any hardware, and unlike Mythos or Fable, there’s no vendor playing the middle man between the AI models and the users, raising the cybersecurity stakes considerably.

      Put simply, while these frontier models can aid researchers in patching holes in commonly used software, the can also be abused by [crackers] to bypass existing defenses.

    • Futurism ☛ Bank of America Warns That AI Investors Are in for a Nasty Reality Check

      The gap between those companies’ valuations and their ability to actually make money continues to grow at a breakneck pace, terrifying analysts. The S&P is up a whopping nine percent so far this year, wrapping up its best quarter since 2020 at the end of last month, as Fortune reports.

    • The Walrus ☛ The People Who Want to Stop AI by Any Means Necessary

      It would be easy to dismiss these episodes as the work of zealots. That would be a mistake. They are the most dramatic expression of a broader skepticism about artificial intelligence. Canadians are hugely wary: a Leger poll found 85 percent of respondents want the government to regulate the technology. But that number doesn’t convey just how frightened many are. One week, we learn an overly “sycophantic” ChatGPT may have aided and abetted a school shooting in Tumbler Ridge. The next, that data centres could consume as much water as the entire population of Sub-Saharan Africa does. Even as we absorb reports that generative AI may exacerbate delusional thinking—psychiatrists are now encouraged to screen patients for “chatbot psychosis”—we learn armies are expanding the use of autonomous AI-powered killer drones.

    • Digital Trends ☛ Scammers used Gemini AI to power a massive phishing operation and Google just sued them

      Google says artificial intelligence is helping fraudsters run larger and more convincing operations than ever before. The company has now filed a lawsuit against a cybercrime network that used Gemini AI to create phishing websites and power a massive scam campaign targeting millions of users.

    • Murtuzaali Surti ☛ Why Every AI Lab Now Ships Its Own Harness

      Almost every conversation about AI tools starts and ends with the same question, "which model is the best"? We argue about benchmark scores, we watch the leaderboards, and we switch tools the moment a new frontier model drops.

      Here's the thing though, the model tells you only one part of the story. The other part is something called the harness, and lately that's the half the entire industry is quietly fighting over. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and even the smaller Chinese labs are all racing to ship their own harness, and the reason has very little to do with raw intelligence and a lot to do with business.

      So let me break down what inference and a harness actually are, how they differ, and why owning the harness has become the real moat.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Today in Waymos On Fire:

      When they weren't rolling through fireworks they were trapping people near the Golden Gate Bridge.

    • Gazetteer, San Francisco, California ☛ Take me Waymo, I’m home: Autonomous taxis had a buggy July 4th

      Three incidents involving failures of the ubiquitous, Alphabet-backed autonomous taxis went viral over the weekend, sparking criticism of the company’s operational lapses and the car’s seeming inability to make adjustments during complex traffic situations.

      Waymos were a key reason for the traffic snarl in the Presidio after Saturday night’s foggy fireworks display on the Golden Gate Bridge. Videos and social media posts from people stuck in traffic show Waymos locked in giant lines, randomly blocking the road, and stuck in a roundabout.

    • Martin Fowler ☛ Viability of local models for coding

      Until recently I hadn't tried running models locally for quite a while, the disappointment had just always been too high when I did it. About a month ago though, I dove back in - there were just too many claims out there to ignore, about how far they have come, how it's now much more feasible to run them, and how some of them have become really good at coding. So this is my personal experience with using them, on and off, over the past 4 weeks or so.

      In this memo, I will start with a more general introduction and go through the factors that influence the viability of these models for coding. In a follow-up memo, I will describe my actual experiences in more detail.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Deepfake CSAM lawsuit against xAI, Grok expands

      Two new alleged victims detailed how Grok was used by friends and family to generate sexual images of them as minors. The suit also adds Stability AI as a defendant.

    • PC World ☛ The more we learn about how AI ‘thinks,’ the weirder it gets

      PCWorld reports on Anthropic’s discovery of the ‘J-space,’ an internal workspace where AI model Claude processes concepts and thoughts during reasoning.

      This breakthrough helps explain unpredictable AI behaviors like hallucinations [sic] and unexpected responses that emerge during training rather than by design.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Independent UK ☛ Trump bragged about his beautification projects having 4 billion TikTok views - but that might not be a good thing

      But the graphic doesn’t specify what type of content — critical, supportive or neutral — generated those views, as MeidasTouch News pointed out.

      One of Trump’s latest D.C. projects, the multi-million-dollar renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, has faced intense scrutiny after it turned green from algae, while its new American flag blue paint — as the president called it — chipped away days after it was completed.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Meta Laid Off Staff in Favour of Agentic Coding, and It Is Not Going Well

      A quintessentially Zuckerbergian premise: he pivots the whole company around whatever is the new thing, says oops, then reminds himself that nothing really matters as long as people keep looking at ads on Instagram.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ BusySnake Stealer Slithers Into Critical Infrastructure Networks

      Kaspersky observed the group launching attacks through spear-phishing emails masquerading as official government communications or social assistance communications and documents. Kaspersky found the emails to contain archive files with either malicious executables or Windows shortcut files disguised as documents such as psychological tests, humanitarian aid applications, or debt clearance certificates.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • The Register UK ☛ GitHub AI agent leaks private repos when asked nicely

    As the AI security sleuths discovered and detailed in a Monday blog, the workflows are vulnerable to a critical prompt injection flaw that causes GitHub’s AI agent to retrieve data from a private repo by crafting a GitHub issue in a public repository belonging to the same organization.

    The attacker simply hides the malicious commands in plain English in the issue body, and the agent will then post this data as a public comment on the issue in the public repository.

  • Dark Reading ☛ 'GitLost' Flaw Leaks Private Data From GitHub's Agentic Workflows

    GitHub Agentic Workflows pairs GitHub Actions — the platform's automation system for running tasks in response to repository events — with an AI agent backed by Claude or GitHub Copilot to help developer teams manage their GitHub workflows. The tool lets teams automate their interactions with code repositories using natural language, and the GitHub agent can read issues, call tools, and access other repositories within an organization.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Bitdefender ☛ Two arrested over credit card phishing - as the Netherlands is named Europe's worst for payment fraud

      Although the police statement did not describe the nature of the specific phishing sites alleged to have been set up by the men, or the lures used to fool the unwary, more generally the typical type of credit-card phishing scams currently encountered in the Netherlands involve fake PostNL/DHL "redelivery fee" texts, or spoofed bank webpages, or increasingly malicious QR codes.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • ADF ☛ Chinese Surveillance Tech a Threat to Privacy

      China is exporting surveillance technology to African countries that experts say is designed to monitor and control populations with little or no oversight or concern for privacy, personal security and human rights.

      The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) looked at 11 African countries that have deployed thousands of Chinese cameras in public spaces and concluded that the technology poses significant risks to freedom and facilitates digital authoritarianism.

    • Nick Heer ☛ An Age-Gated Internet Is an Admission of Defeat

      I am a tiny bit sorry for all the links I am posting regarding age gating. As I have written before, it is something I am still trying to work out for myself. After all, it seems straightforward why age verification is an easy way to reduce the risks to children of today’s platforms, the operators of which marketed their products directly to kids. But the trade-offs are numerous, whether from a predominantly U.S.-centric view of individual freedoms, or from the way such restrictions fail to address product safety concerns.

    • 404 Media ☛ Footage Shows Cop Stalking Woman He Met on a TV Set After Surveilling Her With a License Plate Reader

      The cop, Lamar Roman, wasn’t trying to pull over a suspected criminal. He was tracking and chasing a woman that he met and harassed on the set of the AppleTV+ show Bad Monkey, which he had worked a security detail shift on a few weeks prior to pulling her over. After meeting the woman, catcalling her and harassing her for her full name and Instagram details, the cop illegally looked up her vehicle information on DAVID, a Florida Department of Motor Vehicles database for law enforcement. He then put her license plate details on a surveillance “hotlist,” meaning he would get a notification in real time anytime she drove by an AI-powered license plate surveillance camera.

    • 404 Media ☛ Cops Say Waymo Snitched on Teens for Allegedly Drinking and Shooting a Toy Gun

      Waymo, which is owned by Google, says on a support page that its support team “may review video under certain circumstances, including after an issue is brought to our attention,” and “in more urgent circumstances, Support may access live video during a trip.”

    • ByteHaven ☛ The Popup That Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

      Here's why that's a bigger deal than a UI notification. When Apple introduced Private Cloud Compute back in 2024, the whole pitch was that the heavy AI lifting would still happen on Apple silicon, in Apple's own data centers, verifiable by outside security researchers. That was the differentiator. Google, Amazon, Microsoft — everyone else was shipping your prompts off to whatever GPU farm was available. Apple said: not us, we built our own.

      That promise just changed. Apple confirmed in a security blog post published the day of the WWDC26 keynote that its newest Foundation Models include a fifth, top-tier model called AFM Cloud Pro, built for agentic tool use and complex reasoning — and it doesn't run on Apple silicon at all. It runs on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, hosted inside Google Cloud. Apple's own words: this is the first time PCC has extended beyond Apple's own data centers into third-party ones. Google isn't just supplying a model anymore. They're supplying the racks.

• Defence/Aggression

  • ADF ☛ Deadly Jihadist Groups Gain Momentum Across Continent

    According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project, violent IS activity in Africa increased to 86% of the group’s global attacks in the first quarter of 2026, up from yearly totals of 49% in 2024 and 79% in 2025. The continental areas with the highest number of deaths related to Islamist violence in 2025 were the Sahel and coastal West Africa, Somalia, the Lake Chad Basin, the Great Lakes region and Mozambique.

  • Votebeat ☛ Trump administration warns election officials about noncitizen voting in 2026 midterms - Votebeat

    At least 13 other states, including Arizona, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, received letters containing identical language. More states likely received the letter as well but may not have immediately realized it; in several states, the Justice Department sent the letter to the generic email addresses listed on agency websites for use by the public.

    “I had to go look for it,” said one state election official, who asked not to be named.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Stop Private Equity from Profiting while Our Communities Burn

    Private equity firms are buying up all sorts of things that fire departments rely on — and jacking up their prices.

    This is particularly harmful to volunteer fire departments, which make up about 85 percent of fire departments in the country and operate on shoestring budgets.

  • Michael Geist ☛ Blocked Twice: How Bill C-34’s Kids’ Social Media Ban Would Compound the Online News Act’s Harm to Young Canadians’ News Access

    To be clear, the shift to social media over traditional news sources raises its own concerns as reliance on opinion rather that sourced news alongside the lack of transparency of algorithmic choices can create a misinformed audience. Yet blocking access is not the answer to those challenges. Indeed, the impact of the ban on news access in Australia is striking. Consistent with other studies, the researchers found that the ban has largely failed to change behaviour, with 61 per cent of under-16s reporting no meaningful change in their social media use. However, among the 26 per cent whose use was significantly disrupted, 51 per cent said they are now getting less news, together with reduced access to local news and community events, fewer discussions about news with others, and fewer opportunities to share their views or take action on issues they care about. Even 22 per cent of those not directly affected reported getting less news, which the researchers attribute to the changed experience as friends leave the platforms. The researchers pull no punches: [...]

  • Site36 ☛ Frontex hires US military surveillance firm to help EU states and Libya in intercepting migrant boats in the Mediterranean

    Metrea, a US company known for its cooperation with the military and secret services, is operating at least one aircraft for the European Union’s migration deterrence efforts in the western Mediterranean. This came to light through the tracking of conspicuous flight patterns resembling those of coastguards or the EU border agency Frontex. The twin-engined Beechcraft King Air 200 usually takes off from Alicante in Spain and monitors the route from Algeria towards the Balearic Islands. However, missions have also taken place between Crete and Libya. “Frontex is aware of and has authorised,” the border agency told “nd”.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Ukraine: We No Longer Need Permission to Strike Legitimate Military Targets Inside Russia

    “We will continue asymmetric operations with our own weapons, as this is our right to self-defense, guaranteed by Article 51 of the UN Charter,” Sybiha said.

    The statement reflects a major shift in Ukraine’s strategic position.

  • Meduza ☛ Fights are breaking out at Russia’s gas stations as the fuel crisis spreads

    Russian media have been reporting on a surge of conflicts at gas stations across the country. The fuel crisis, triggered by Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian oil facilities, has forced people to wait for hours at gas stations. Some drivers try to cut the line, which has at times led to brawls. The situation is compounded by the fact that some stations have taken a liberal interpretation of the requirement to give priority to official vehicles. As a result, local officials in some regions have begun jumping the line, and in Chita, participants in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and their family members were added to the list of those exempt from waiting. All of this has fueled widespread public anger. Here are just a few of the regions where the fuel shortage has led to conflicts.

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ War surgeon: Estonia should spread out hospitals to reduce wartime risk

    Tiit Meren argues that concentrating healthcare in large hospitals is no longer a sensible approach for Estonia and that today's enemies don't observe the traditional principle of sparing military medics, evacuation teams and hospitals from attack.

  • RFA ☛ China’s Pacific missile test sends message to U.S. allies, analysts say

    China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported Monday that a Chinese navy submarine launched a missile carrying a dummy warhead toward international waters in the Pacific at 12:01 p.m. local time, describing it as a “routine arrangement” in annual military training and not directed at any specific country or target.

  • Court House News ☛ Judge quashes Trump demand for private info of all 2020 Fulton County election workers

    “These records, even if they lead to the DOJ finding individuals who worked for Fulton County in the 2020 election who support the theory that the 2020 election was not fair, would not lead to information that could be used to charge anyone with anything, at least not any viable charge,” Ray wrote.

    “That is because the statute of limitations for any possible crime arising from the 2020 election has long expired, as the DOJ must have brought such a case, if it could, no later than late 2025 or the early weeks of 2026.”

  • TruthOut ☛ International Olympic Committee Lifts Russia Ban as It Continues Bombing Ukraine

    The decision over whether or not to allow the display of the Russian flag and colors or the playing of its anthem will be made at a later date, the IOC said in its release. The committee will continue its ban on organizing events in Russia or inviting Russian officials to events.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Pro Publica ☛ Ken Paxton’s Voter Registration May Violate Texas Election Law, Experts Say

    The Texas attorney general appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years — despite his warning voters that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records.”

  • Techdirt ☛ The Courts’ Solution To Overpriced Court Records: Make Them More Expensive

    For many, many years on Techdirt we’ve bemoaned the fact that federal court documents are not available for free as they should be. Instead, we have PACER, a bloated, expensive, difficult to use system that charges you for every “page” it loads up for you (including search results). The whole thing is a sham. Indeed, the law that allowed PACER to be established was based on the idea that, like photocopies, it cost money to “print” every page of every document. It also said that the fees PACER collected could only be used for… PACER. Instead, the fees far outpaced the actual costs, and the federal judiciary started using them for all sorts of other expenses. Courts have even told their own bosses at the judiciary that they’re overcharging beyond what the law allows.

• Environment

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Tells Big Tech He’ll Fast-Track Fossil Fuel Plants to Power AI

    While the administration has sought to waive environmental protections, expedite permits and loosen construction rules for gas plants and data centers, there are a slew of state and local requirements both power plants and data centers must satisfy that even in the fastest permitting environments take months.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Eight NATO allies launch HALO satellite constellation initiative

    Hybrid Alliance Layered Operations in Space — will focus on improving connectivity and integration of sovereign, nationally owned and controlled military satellites into a networked constellation.

    Denmark, Canada, Finland, Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden and Turkey are part of the effort. It aims to improve alliance resilience and military advantage in space, enabling high-speed communications, intelligence and missile tracking.

  • The Strategist ☛ An increasingly contested space: the Pacific seabed and the actors reshaping it

    The result is growing density, which is reshaping maritime power. Density is an underappreciated variable in Pacific maritime strategy. Individual activities – such as mining, cable routing, military operations and criminal exploitation – can each be managed within existing frameworks. What cannot be managed within those frameworks is the friction generated when they occupy the same space at the same time.

  • The Highland Times ☛ Calls Grow for Pause on Scotland's Largest Data Centre Projects - The Highland Times

    The intervention comes amid increasing debate over the impact major data centres could have on energy supplies, water resources and climate ambitions.

    According to the Scottish Greens, there are currently 24 proposed hyperscale data centres across Scotland.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ UK gives data centers option to apply for 'national importance' status that overrides local regulations, cuts timeline by a year — eligible projects to bypass local councils, save more than a billion dollars in NIMBY fights

    The UK just gave Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) the right to bypass pre-application consultation with local council planning processes, meaning the green light will come directly from the national government. According to The Register, NSIPs are major projects that the state considers to be nationally important, like power plants and railways. Data centers were included in this list earlier this year, meaning these developments could now get approval directly from the national government instead of going through hoops in local councils. Still, this is an opt-in process requiring developers to apply for the status.

  • Ketan Joshi ☛ Google’s exponential path to climate-wrecking digital bloat

    Every time I look at this chart I have to go and double check every single Google number, because it just looks so ridiculous

    The power grids that Google’s data centres are plugged into have to increase generation to match this new demand – and that includes rising use of coal and gas, and as a consequence, worse climate disasters like deadly heatwaves. Google’s consumption is rising way faster than the grids are being cleaned up with renewables, and that means their emissions number is going up fast, too. It’s the steepest rise on record: [...]

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Rural NV counties especially vulnerable to Hoover Dam hydropower decline

      Lake Mead is projected to drop below the critical threshold of 1,035 feet above sea level within the next 12 months, at which point the hydropower generating capacity at Hoover Dam would be cut from 1,302 megawatts to just 382 – a massive 70% decline.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ This island in the Great Lakes wants to tap waves for energy

      Beaver Island sits in the middle of the northernmost end of Lake Michigan, about 70 miles from the maritime border with Canada. The forested island, just a little bigger than San Francisco in size, is a popular summer destination for tourists and home to about 600 permanent residents. Getting there requires a boat or plane ride.

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Ministry wants to standardize timetables for regional bus services

      Under the guidelines, county bus routes would be divided into regional routes and basic connections. Regional routes are bus services linking a county's larger population centers with smaller surrounding communities or major transport infrastructure such as railway stations, ports and airports.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Why does WhatsApp drain so much phone battery?

      My phone’s energy scarcity made me learn more about settings and workarounds to extend its battery life than I would have liked. It also led me to revisit some habits that I carry from my first phones, over twenty years ago.

    • Jim Grey ☛ Old cars parked: June 2026

      I feature a car here when it is/could be more than 20 model years old and I found it parked on the street or in a lot, but not in a car show. Here now, the cars.

    • Hackaday ☛ It’s Full Steam Ahead For This Motorized Canoe

      The engine is an old two-stroke outboard that has a single steam cylinder retrofitted to it, along with a heat exchanger to warm up lake water with exhaust steam before it heads the boiler. The water is filtered first, of course, but we do hope the new owner– who posts on YouTube with channel “Steam Canoe” is diligent about cleaning the boiler. It doesn’t look like super high pressure steam, but the vapour phase of water is always something to be respected.

• Finance

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Is Mukando Going Digital? POSB's Huruyadzo/Inkunzi

    Zimbabweans have never really trusted banks with their money. Charges appear from nowhere. They complain that digital systems promise convenience but instead give failed transactions, long queues, or will not let you access your own money exactly when you need it.

    So when a bank says it wants to digitise something as personal as mukando, the questions are obvious. What will it cost? Will the money actually be there when it is asked for? Can a system really be trusted more than a person already known and already trusted for some time?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • CS Monitor ☛ As more young voters warm to socialism, Trump warns of ‘communist’ threat

    While democratic socialists favor greater government intervention in the economy and admire Scandinavian societies, it’s a far cry from Cuba's brand of communism, in which the government directly owns businesses and restricts private enterprise. But, to many voters, those distinctions might be blurred. The Cold War ended decades ago, and many Americans have only a faint understanding of either state-backed socialism or communism.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Thales to buy French underwater-drone maker Exail in $4.5 billion deal

    Thales will offer to buy the remaining Exail shares for €134 each, the company said on Monday. That’s a 44% premium to the Exail share price on June 25, the day before Safran announced talks with the Gorgé family at a price of €128.50 a share.

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ Bulgaria's European paradox - New Eastern Europe

    Yet the experience of many citizens tells a different story. Bulgaria has moved closer to Europe’s institutional core faster than it has transformed the everyday functioning of its own state. Formal integration has advanced rapidly, while public trust in institutions, political accountability and administrative predictability have evolved more slowly.

    This is Bulgaria’s European paradox.

    Bulgaria’s story is not one of failure. It is one of asymmetry. The country has achieved many of the objectives of post-communist integration, while some of the domestic reforms meant to accompany that process remain incomplete. Bulgaria has become more European in legal and institutional terms, but not always more predictable, transparent or accountable in daily life.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Great Gaslighting of America

    The scorekeeping is the operation. The scorekeeping has always been the operation.

  • COYOTE Media Collective ☛ S.F. Lawmaker Asks Chatbot About 'Suicidally Motivated Civilians' in Gaza

    In lieu of actually addressing his critics online, of which there were many in the replies, Dorsey only had eyes for Grok, a chatbot that is notorious for being programmed to push false narratives about politics, history, and everything else according to the very transparent whims of xAI’s trillionaire backer, Elon Musk.

  • Rlang ☛ Close Enough? Using the WGI as a Proxy for the WJP Rule of Law Index

    TLDR: this post tests whether the Worldwide Governance Indicators’ (WGI) rule of law measure provides a reasonable proxy for the World Justice Project’s (WJP) Rule of Law Index, such as when analysis might benefit from the WGI’s availability for more countries over a longer period. Results suggest the two measures broadly agree with one another when making cross-country comparisons, but care is warranted for country-level estimates where it’s likely to be more difficult to differentiate measurement noise from genuine changes in the quality of institutions.

  • Wired ☛ OpenAI’s Chief Futurist Is Leaving the Company

    OpenAI has not yet announced if anyone will fill Achiam’s role, which sat at the intersection of the company’s AI safety and policy teams, and involved studying the potential harms and benefits caused by the rise of artificial intelligence. Achiam worked with senior company leaders, including global affairs chief Chris Lehane, to advocate for government regulations aligned with OpenAI’s mission: to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.

  • The Verge ☛ Doom developer id reportedly cut in half as part of Xbox layoffs

    As part of the mass layoffs hitting Xbox, Doom developer id Software has laid off around 50 percent of its staff, according to Game Developer. One source claimed to the publication that the cuts equate to more than 90 redundancies. Another source said that id’s QA department was significantly impacted. The report was published the same day that id is releasing a major expansion for its latest Doom game.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Hungarian public media goes off air

      M1 was the flagship channel of Fidesz's propaganda within the public broadcaster, MTVA, which the public media's Fidesz-friendly leadership transformed into a news channel under the Orbán governments.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • FAIR ☛ Trump Era Repression Trickles Down to Student Press Censorship

    Political cartoonists in newspapers across the nation have made similar comparisons over the years, but the Wingspan is different, and its case differs from previous FAIR reports (3/27/25, 9/30/25, 4/9/26) on censorship of cartoons, in that it is a student newspaper. Within two days, school administrators at Gretna East High School in Omaha, Nebraska, had taken the cartoon off the paper’s website. McClaren, a junior, was not surprised by the decision, telling Nebraska Public Media (4/2/26): “I knew it was controversial. I knew that people would disagree. But isn’t that the point?”

  • Techdirt ☛ ICE Rebuts Nazi Allegations By Going Full Gestapo To Hunt Down Critics

    That is insanely disturbing, even if you blow past the the first sentence, which makes it clear this isn’t the first time federal agents have hunted down people who have done nothing more than engage in absolutely protected speech.

    David Streever sent then-ICE Director Todd Lyons an angry email shortly after federal officers murdered Minneapolis resident Alex Pretti — the second ICE protester the government had killed in during its politically motivated “surge” targeting the state. Here’s what it said, according to its author: [...]

  • EFF ☛ Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

    That warning proved prescient. The use of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify, flag, and moderate content has become the new norm—a permanent feature of how platforms govern speech online. In this two part series, we’re take stock of this new norm, and considering what platforms can and should do to ensure that AI serves online expression rather than stifling it.

  • Meduza ☛ Russian pop star Monetochka is sentenced in absentia to one year in prison for skipping ‘foreign agent’ disclaimers on Instagram

    A Moscow magistrate sentenced singer Monetochka (Elizaveta Gyrdymova) in absentia to one year in a penal colony for evading the obligations of a “foreign agent,” the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona reports.

    The court also banned Gyrdymova from managing websites for three years.

  • The Verge ☛ Discord accidentally banned over 8,000 people for posting grids and other ‘benign’ images

    Discord says a bug affecting its safety system caused it to mistakenly ban more than 8,000 accounts since May. The platform’s statement follows a wave of reports from users over the past week, who say they’ve been banned for posting images containing grids, such as chessboards, game textures, and even Minecraft inventories.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • BIA Net ☛ Journalist Hazar Dost detained overnight, alleges mistreatment

    Following his release, Hazar Dost made a statement detailing the mistreatment he faced: [...]

  • BIA Net ☛ Turkey's media regulator tells broadcasters how to cover NATO summit in new directive

    The Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) issued a directive to broadcasters ahead of the Jul 7-8 NATO summit in Ankara, urging them to observe "national security perspective" during news bulletins and discussion programs.

  • The Verge ☛ ABC tells the government to get out of its newsrooms

    “The First Amendment does not permit the government to sit in an editor’s chair,” ABC writes in response to the February investigation. “Yet that is the seat the Commission now proposes to take — deciding which broadcast programs qualify as legitimate news and, for those it finds wanting, compelling them to surrender their airtime to guests they never chose to feature.”

  • The Wrap ☛ ABC Says FCC Can't 'Sit in an Editor’s Chair’ Over ‘The View’

    “ABC did not come to the Federal Communications Commission asking for anything,” the filing stated. “The Commission compelled ABC to file the Petition for Declaratory Ruling at issue here, directing the network to explain why the government should not dictate which political candidates may appear on ‘The View’ — even though the Commission itself resolved that very question in ABC’s favor more than two decades ago, ruling in 2002 that ‘The View’ is a bona fide news program not subject to the equal opportunities requirement.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Court House News ☛ Feds’ child porn probe of peer-to-peer Freenet software gets First Circuit approval

    In a 29-page ruling, three federal appellate judges upheld a lower court’s finding that the investigation of Eric Robert Johnson’s activity on peer-to-peer file sharing software Freenet was in line with the Fourth Amendment.

  • CBC ☛ ICE fatally shoots man during enforcement operation in Houston: DHS

    Democratic U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia said the shooting happened during an ICE enforcement operation in her Texas district. She said in a post on X that the agency released an initial account, but that the information needs to be independently verified and investigated.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ Pod Save Patriarchy (or Whatever That Sorry Platner Spectacle Was)

    I've often joked, bitterly, that women's rights are very important to progressive men, just not as important as anything else. Because whether it comes to excusing a misogynist or even a rapist or dismissing the importance of reproductive rights and or being willing to trade them away for some electoral advantage, or joining campaigns of online abuse against women, or just attacking women in ways they would not attack men, I have seen progressive men do these things and other progressive men stand by. Not all of them – I know men in my own life and see men in public life and read men in print who are great feminists, both ardent and informed, but they're a minority. We need more men to articulate how they benefit from feminism, aka from living in a world of equality rather than inequality, and to move the conversation forward into how men are oppressed and distorted by patriarchy – granted unequal power, but at what cost to their psyches?

    The Epstein case seems to have been a wakeup call to some men that this stuff happens and matters and is the result of profound inequality, including inequality of voice (though it's still alarming to me how men continue to be shocked when they stumble across the foundational realities of women's and girls' lives). We still have a long way to go. Whether we as a society are going to continue that progress, or regress, or deny the problem, my commitment to universal human rights and absolute equality for all is unshakeable. I hope yours is too.

  • Yle ☛ Last all-male conscript outpost in Finland opens to women

    The change comes after the Lapland Border Guard completed new barracks in the far northern town of Ivalo earlier this year, including upgraded accommodation and shower facilities that provide greater privacy.

  • The Cyber Show ☛ And Deliver Us From Tech Evil

    On the Cyber Show we look carefully at technology from a humane and scientific point of view. We consider the psychological and political forces in play with as much nuance as we can, including perennial tensions around defence and preparedness versus belligerence, medical advances versus social costs and false hope, and the pressures on citizens, developers and politicians to navigate the complexities of technology, freedom, opportunity, security and dignity.

    We have guests who are simultaneously sincerely trying to do good and make the world a safer, more free place, yet are up to their necks in evil of various sorts. Sometimes this is very painful to encounter.

  • The Cyber Show ☛ Mad Dogs

    In my village there was a dog. He was clever and loyal. Trigger was his name and he was a sheep dog. Like most Collies Trigger was black and white. He crouched, nose to the ground, ready to pounce. He was a super intelligent bag of nerves, hyper-alert and had won awards in the dog trials. Sadly he had a psychological problem. He was prone to tail-chasing, and a hypnotically induced hunting instinct, a rage against or attraction to, any spinning objects.

    Trigger would try to rip the tyres off passing bikes and I enjoyed the hilarious shouts of annoyed cyclists. Behaviourists will immediately say, "Ah yes, he was injured by a cyclist once…". No. That never happened to Trigger. His brain went wrong about spinning things, which he might have confused for distressed birds or rodents, and one day he just leapt in front of a tractor. Stupid dog.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ IPv6-only vs IPv6-mostly: Appropriate use cases

    The terms IPv6-only and IPv6-mostly are a clear example of this. But despite the difficulty of reaching consensus on definitions, the IPv6 Operations (v6ops) Working Group is making progress on this front through ‘IPv6-Only and IPv6-Mostly Terminology Definitions’.

    One of the key points emerging from this work is that terms such as IPv6-only and IPv6-mostly only make sense when their scope is clearly defined. For example, saying that a network is IPv6-only is probably incorrect, because it would imply that IPv4 is neither configured nor used anywhere in the network.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Verge ☛ Netflix is about to host videos from BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, and other publishers

    The videos Netflix is adding from digital media brands will range from around 3 to 20 minutes long and span topics like “food, travel, fashion, entertainment, design, wellness, and more.” Netflix also notes that there may be “additional digital publishers and partners” added in the future.

  • The Verge ☛ Of course viewers are giving up on Netflix shows

    Some of Netflix’s problems are rooted in its internal practices, like the way it tends to cancel shows right as they start becoming more expensive to produce. It also doesn’t help that, on the whole, the wait between seasons of series has been gradually getting longer, which makes it easier for people to lose interest. But Netflix also has to deal with the reality that competitors like TikTok and YouTube are capturing people’s attention in ways that it simply can’t.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: How US states and international trustbusters can beat Big Tech (07 Jul 2026)

    This meant that American and German enforcers had very little to say to one another. Sure, they had a common enemy, but even if US and German authorities commandeered a fleet of zeppelins and used them to ferry documents back and forth between their respective agencies, it wouldn't have done them any good. The fact patterns about German ports had nothing much in common with the cases being built in relation to America's captured oil refineries.

    That's not how companies like Google, or Meta, or Apple, or Microsoft, or Oracle work. Like Standard Oil, these companies are planet-girding extraction machines that are strangling the world's economies. But unlike Standard Oil, these companies run the same playbook in every country, meaning that the facts that establish Google or Apple's guilt in Brussels can be translated and used to run cases in the UK, South Korea and Japan.

  • Trademarks

    • Salon ☛ The trademark wars of influencer culture

      Neither Mitrovich nor Hopkins fit the profile of a trademark troll — an individual who knowingly and fraudulently registers trademarks likely to be associated with legitimate businesses with the intent of using them to extort licensing fees and settlements from those entities. But they’re part of a growing number of self-described creatives who wield legal protections, legitimate and non, as a cudgel against others.

  • Copyrights

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Unix copyright code infringement lawsuit is back from the dead — IBM still under fire from Xinuos over 2003-era bytes

      For historical context, Xinuos (formerly SCO) and IBM have been embroiled in legal battles for decades, as the companies cooperated between 1998 and 2001 on developing an Itanium variant of Unix. Since then, SCO has repeatedly and dramatically taken IBM to court, claiming the defendant misused SCO-owned source code from the collaborative effort in its AIX and z/OS products, as well as Linux. Many battles have been fought over who owns the "Unix" name, what code IBM put in Linux, and even FreeBSD.

    • [Old] University of Michigan ☛ The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the Story [1]

      Google's announcement that it will include in its search database the full text of books from five of the world's leading research libraries has provoked newspaper editorials, public debates, and two lawsuits. Some of this attention can be attributed to public fascination with any move taken by Google, one of the most successful companies in the digital economy. The sheer scale of the project and its possible benefits for research have also captured the public imagination. Finally, the controversy over copyright issues has been fueled by Google's willingness to pursue this ambitious effort notwithstanding the opposition of the publishing industry and organizations representing authors. Much of the press coverage, however, confuses the facts, and the opposing sides often talk past each other without engaging directly. [2] This article will attempt to set forth the facts and review the arguments in a systematic manner. [3] Although both sides have strong legal arguments, the article concludes that the applicable legal precedents support Google's fair use position.