Leftovers

• Pedro ☛ Closed for the summer

  I’ll still taking photos and videos, but I’ll probably post later when I have time.

• Sam Smith ☛ Why I Like Small Keyboards

  I use my keyboards a lot, my job as a software engineer involves quite a lot of typing, I also spend quite a lot of my spare time in front of a computer. I’ve been daily driving small keyboards for a while and have been enjoying doing so. Here’s a bit about which keyboards and why I like them.

• Bruce Ediger ☛ TFTP Honey pot Results

  My TFTP honey pot has been running for over a month, continuously on my $5 a month VPS, and intermittently on my Dell R530 home server. It’s time to see what surprises it has captured.

  When the TFTP honey pot runs, both servers see between 20 and 50 TFTP packets per day. Both servers see mostly the same traffic. I was extremely excited when I got daily UDP port 69 traffic, most of it in TFTP format. I was let down when I realized most of the traffic was regularly scheduled scans from seven infosec companies.

• Logikal Solutions ☛ It's Time to Boycott BestBuy Out of Business

  It’s time to boycott BestBuy until they either go out of business or cease doing any business with FedEx. “We the people” really should look into a class action against one or both. One of the biggest sources of identity theft is being required to open a free account. Yes, identity theft insurance will help some. About as much as life insurance helps you get over the loss.

• Jack Baty ☛ My home office in 1995

  Thing is, I did more and better work in all that chaos than I do today in my fancier, tidier, much more capable setup. This is because the desk has nothing to do with it. I loved what I was doing back then and everything else was tangential and irrelevant.

• Lee Peterson ☛ Starting a new blog, leaving WordPress

  I’m so tired of WordPress throwing AI absolutely everywhere, I’d tolerated it but now it gets in the way of me blogging. I do a simple post and I’m asked about suggested tags, AI images etc. I just enjoy sharing my thoughts in a blog, so I’m trying Pika.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • SBS ☛ It took 53 years to learn the truth about who my father is

    DNA testing technology has become more accessible, affordable and sophisticated, and more than 26 million people worldwide have willingly shared their genetic information with private companies. But are we giving up too much information? As DNA testing becomes commonplace, Insight asks: Can any family secret truly stay hidden?

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: 2... 1/2 THEN 3... 1/6 THEN 5 ....1/15 and so on. And So On?

    We derive the 1/15 for 5. 1/5 of all numbers have a factor of 5. Of those, only those that are \(\equiv 1,5 \pmod 6\) have 5 as the smallest prime factor. Hence \(2/6=1/3\) of those numbers have 5 as the smallest prime factor. Hence the fraction is \(1/5 \times 1/3 = 1/15\).

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Porting DOOM To The Casio Loopy

    Overall game performance isn’t too bad, though in the port’s current unoptimized state the resolution is fairly low. That said, even the console’s built-in printer is supported and demonstrated in the video, which is a pretty nice touch. It’s not like Sega or Nintendo consoles allowed you to screenshot those glorious headshots.

  • The Verge ☛ Apple’s self-driving car program left a legacy of powerful AI chips

    Apple is making its AI hardware a cornerstone of its strategy going forward. According to Gurman, the company is skipping the Pro, Max, and Ultra versions of its upcoming M6 chip. Instead, it’s accelerating development of the M7, which should arrive in the first half of 2027 with significant Neural Engine upgrades. The M7 Ultra is expected to be the basis for a new server product from Apple as well, with support for up to 1.5TB of RAM.

  • Bloomberg ☛ Apple’s Chip Plans: M6, M7 Pro, M7 Max, M7 Ultra, M8 Details; Touch MacBook Pro - Bloomberg

    Apple’s new Mac chip road map represents the company’s latest move to rebuild its operations for the artificial intelligence world. Also: The company is readying new Apple Pencil styluses and preparing to make the iPhone’s tap-to-pay feature more prevalent in its retail stores.

  • Robin Rendle ☛ EP-1320 Medieval • Robin Rendle

    And so, like programming, the EP-1320’s inflexibility, it’s almost complete and absolute stubbornness, is what makes it so charming.

  • Fabian Sanglard ☛ A dock that finally wakes up reliably

    Even the best Thunderbolt dock at the time, the CalDigit TS3, would occasionally fail to wake up the system. It was super annoying.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Eric Noodén ☛ Signs of Life – Sir Seved Ribbing, SCA

    Despite the doom and gloom. I am slowly getting back into doing more SCA/medieval fun stuff and will soon be picking up archery and rapier.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft layoffs: Kevin LaChapelle, the Xbox veteran who got laid off after 37 years says ‘I wish the team nothing but success'

    Microsoft’s newest round of layoffs came as a shock, cutting thousands of jobs across its global divisions, even after big investments in artificial intelligence and cloud tech. Among those who lost their jobs: engineers, designers, marketers, and high-level executives. If you ever thought decades of hard work kept you safe, think again.

  • A gamer successfully sued Microsoft for telling him to rebuy his Xbox games after his account was hacked

    This may as well be a Pyrrhic victory in the face of thousands of layoffs at Xbox, but we’ll take any one we can get, especially with the anti-consumer sentiment coming out of gaming as a whole. An Xbox gamer whose account was hacked and told by Microsoft that he would have to rebuy all of his games took the megacorp to court and soundly won his case.

  • India Times ☛ Bill Gates heir’s shopping app claimed sales it didn’t drive

    Phia, co-founded by Phoebe Gates, faces accusations of violating affiliate marketing policies. The browser extension allegedly claimed sales it did not drive by injecting its own referral codes. Independent researchers and competitors like Capital One Shopping highlighted these concerning practices. Phia acknowledged the issue, stating it has been fixed and resolved. The company has previously faced allegations regarding user data logging practices.

  • Nate Graham ☛ The graveyard of being paid to use Windows 11, AKA “winning!”

    I just finished reading Thom Holwerda’s hilarious article on OSnews about being paid to use Windows 11 for a month from the perspective of being a “switcher” moving away from Linux. It’s a great read; I encourage everyone to stop right now and go read it!

    In a nutshell, it’s truly amazing how bad the modern Windows user experience is when you’re accustomed to anything else: [...]

  • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Security Signal Weekly: July 4-10, 2026

    This week had a very familiar pattern: attackers kept aiming at the places where normal business systems concentrate trust. File-sharing controllers, identity-aware edge appliances, developer platforms, AI workflow tools, CMS plugins, endpoint security engines, bootloaders, and kernels all showed up because they can turn one foothold into much wider access.

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

    • TecMint ☛ OpenCode: AI Agent That Reads and Edits Code in Terminal

      OpenCode was different from the start. I pointed it to a messy Node.js project with around 40 files and asked why a background job kept failing silently. It traced the dependencies on its own, opened the right three files, and showed me that the retry logic was swallowing an exception. The whole process took about 90 seconds of typing and a few minutes of waiting.

    • Spectator AU ☛ I’m a freelance journalist. AI is stealing my work and calling it ‘training’

      I’m tired of people confusing the ability to generate words with the ability to write.

      Copying ChatGPT’s output and passing it off as one’s own has become so common that it’s spawned an entire online trend of exposing famous people who use AI to write their ‘insightful’ posts.

      The irony is that some of the loudest AI evangelists are the ones getting caught.

    • Spectator AU ☛ Artificial Intelligence and the elephant in the data room

      Artificial Intelligence is a major issue these days for all sorts of reasons, ranging from union concerns over likely job losses to the big question mark hanging over its huge energy appetite. However, there’s another fat elephant in the room – can it be trusted as a reliable source of information?

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Most Famous AI Writing Tic Is Also the Most Mysterious

      The prevalence of this device isn’t just anecdotal—it’s measurable. (Sorry.) Barron’s reported that its appearance in corporate communications more than quadrupled from 2023 to 2025. Researchers at Pangram, which makes an AI-detection tool, estimate that Not just X but Y sentences appear three times as often in AI writing as they do in human writing. Elyas Masrour, a founding engineer at Pangram, told me that all of the major chatbots—including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and various open-source models—rely on it to varying degrees.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ AI Is a Product of Humanity. Humanity Should Own AI.

      Tech billionaires’ companies are robbing humanity of its distinctive capacity to create. From social media data to academic outputs, literary pieces, artwork, movies, music, podcasts, software code, our health care records, you name it: generative AI models are trained on creative products from around the world. Once operational, data retrieved from user prompts is used to fine-tune them, improving AI’s predictive capacities. AI is, unmistakably, a product of humanity.

    • Robin Sloan ☛ Report from the march to Stop the AI Race

      On Saturday, beneath a sparkling blue sky, I joined the march to Stop the AI Race. We gath­ered in front of OpenAI’s office in Mis­sion Bay, then walked through the city to Anthropic’s HQ beside the Transbay Transit Center.

    • Futurism ☛ Grok Linked to Sickening Crime in Lawsuit That Puts SpaceX in Crosshairs

      According to boosters of AI, the tech was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented productivity, leisure time for workers, and scientific discovery. But in reality, it keeps being linked to crimes so ghoulish that they’re almost unbelievable.

    • Fabio Akita ☛ How Do I Protect Myself From My Agents Deleting My Stuff?

      This week the talk on Twitter was LLMs deleting other people’s files. Matt Shumer posted that GPT-5.6-Sol accidentally deleted almost ALL the files on his Mac. A review subagent expanded the $HOME variable incorrectly and ran rm -rf /Users/mattsdevbox. He killed the process midway, but the damage was already done.

  • Social Control Media

    • Brennan ☛ Publishing My Eleventy Blog to the ATmosphere with Standard.site

      So, of course, I've been thinking about adding integration with the AT Protocol, the open and decentralized network underneath Bluesky, a (kinda) spiritual successor to Twitter. Recently, a small ecosystem has grown up around making the protocol work for long-form publishing, not just short-form social posts.

      This is a writeup of how I integrated Standard.site into my 11ty blog, from writing a custom script to migrating to Sequoia for ongoing publishing.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Meduza ☛ Russia opens investigation into ‘Empire of Geese,’ the anime-and-gaming community whose creators allegedly locked children’s computers with ransomware and then demanded nude photos to unlock them

      According to Levchenko, group administrators targeted “insecure children who valued the community” and, under various pretexts (such as asking them to vote somewhere), sent links containing ransomware that locked access to their computers. The administrators would then promise to restore access in exchange for intimate photographs. “After that, those who complied were subjected to blackmail: refuse to send new photos and they’ll be shared online, sent to relatives and friends,” she said. Those who refused to give in to the blackmail did indeed find their photos sent to people close to them, she added.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Security Week ☛ Ghost Accounts Abuse GitHub API in Mass Recon Campaign

    “A large share of GitHub’s API surface is reachable without authentication. Listing an organization’s public repositories, walking a user’s followers and following lists, enumerating gists, starred repos, and org memberships, and running GraphQL queries against public objects all return data,” Datadog explains.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Sleep doctor urges caution with smart device sleep and health data

      Smartwatches and rings give a detailed morning summary of the previous night, measuring everything from sleep duration to overall energy levels. While modern technology helps people stay more connected to their health, sleep doctor Heisl Vaher recommends always trusting personal bodily awareness alongside smart devices.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ LAPD suspends use of Flock surveillance cameras over privacy issues

      The move follows an inspector general audit urging a pause on new deployments and contracts until enforceable privacy, security and oversight rules are in place.

    • The Verge ☛ Lorde says Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses are ‘not sexy’

      The comments were captured in videos shared to social media. After thanking the crowd for being there and taking part in “something real,” she said that it was increasingly hard to know is and isn’t real, before saying “You don’t know if someone is wearing sunglasses or if they’re wearing those fucked up fucking… Can I just say, for the record, fuck the glasses. Don’t get the glasses. Not sexy.”

    • Nick Heer ☛ Perhaps Meta Should Not Have Spent Decades Being Creepy

      This product is still rumoured, and perhaps the shipping version will have some kind of external recording indicator. But given the way Meta would intend a device like this to be used, I doubt it will, otherwise it would be indicating basically all the time.

  • Confidentiality

    • India Times ☛ AI trade secrets theft: Apple files lawsuit accusing ChatGPT maker OpenAI of stealing trade secrets

      Apple said in the lawsuit filed in a California federal court that OpenAI encouraged Apple employees it was recruiting to share confidential information, even guiding how to avoid scrutiny when taking jobs at the other company.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Meduza ☛ Many Russian soldiers would rather do time than die at the front, but the military is increasingly hauling them back to the war anyway

    As of May 2025, more than 28,000 Russians had been convicted of going AWOL. People are fleeing because they don’t want to fight. In late June 2026, authorities in the Belgorod region declared 13 people wanted after they fled almost simultaneously. Those who go AWOL — known colloquially as sochintsy, after “SOCh,” the Russian abbreviation for unauthorized absence from one’s unit — are often caught, and during the roundups even their relatives can be put at risk. One possible scenario is prison time, which at least secures the soldier’s discharge from service. In recent years, however, authorities have generally tried to send detainees back to the war. What follows is an account of how events can unfold when a mobilized or contract soldier goes AWOL, and of what such soldiers can do to avoid being returned to service.

  • El País ☛ The world is plunging into a dangerous spiral of military spending

    Geopolitical tensions, technological revolutions, economic interests and the absence of international treaties point to a sustained acceleration of the global arms race

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ EU defense remains heavily reliant on the United States

    It was also decided that European governments would play a bigger role in producing and maintaining the missiles that are so crucial to the continent's defense. Lockheed Martin and Rheinmetall signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly produce ATACMS missiles in Germany. This is one step towards increasing stockpiles without upsetting the United States, but in the long term Europe is aiming for greater independence.

  • RFA ☛ Philippines marks 10 years since historic South China Sea court ruling

    Manila celebrates the anniversary of the ruling on July 12 each year, calling it “West Philippine Sea Victory Day,” after what it calls the region of the sea that lies within its exclusive economic zone, or EEZ.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ New powerful directed-energy weapon set to bolster Europe's battle power

    The contract, signed on July 9, marks the transition from years of successful technology demonstrations to the development of an operational combat-ready system. The project will be carried out by the High-Energy Laser Naval Demonstrator Working Group (ARGE HEL), a partnership between Rheinmetall Waffe Munition and MBDA Deutschland. The two companies are also in the process of establishing a dedicated joint venture to oversee the programme.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • New York Times ☛ Zelensky Announces Leadership Shuffle as War Turns in Ukraine’s Favor

      President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine’s prime minister, Yuliia Svyrydenko, would step down amid a broader shake-up in Ukraine’s senior leadership.

    • RFERL ☛ Zelenskyy Announces Plans To Replace Ukraine's Prime Minister In Government Reshuffle

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced on July 12 that he intends to replace Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko as part of a broader government reshuffle

    • France24 ☛ Ukraine's Zelensky proposes new PM in Ukraine government reshuffle

      Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday he had proposed replacing Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko as part of a broader government reshuffle aimed at implementing an "updated political strategy".

    • Latvia ☛ The Deep Roots of Resilience: what a crown taught me about today’s Ukraine

      Have you ever held a real crown in your hands? Not just looked at it from behind glass, but actually felt its weight, touched its curves, and placed it on your head? I have that experience, and I am ready to share it.

    • New York Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Sought an Iran War Exit. Putin Pushed On in Ukraine. Now Both Are Stuck.

      The Iran and Ukraine wars underline the common limits of military force in achieving political ends, but also the differences between a dug-in Russian president and a vacillating American one.

• Environment

  • CBC ☛ Grey whales are dying along our shores. Researchers say a warming climate may be part of the problem

    “They haven't eaten for some period of months … and as they're making their way back up the coast, if something's gonna happen, it's gonna be March and April,” Darling told Laura Lynch of the CBC’s What on Earth. “If they run out of gas, this is pretty much when it's going to be.”

  • Science Alert ☛ Vantablack: World's Blackest Paint Could Solve A Major Problem For Astronomy

    In lab tests, coating satellites with Vantablack 310 meant that only 2 percent of incoming light was reflected.

    "Our results show that relatively simple material choices could make a meaningful difference to how satellites affect astronomical observations without requiring major changes to mission design," says Chaturvedi.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ FCC approves orbital space mirrors, first test satellites will launch this year — large spacecraft reflects sunlight to Earth’s surface for construction sites, search-and-rescue lighting, and more

    Reflect Orbital, a California startup that markets itself as “The Sunlight Company” and aims to make “clean, abundant energy available on demand,” has just received approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch the Eärendil-1. According to Space News, this is a low-earth orbit satellite equipped with four 18-meter (~60ft) thin-film reflectors designed to reflect sunlight on specific areas on Earth. This deployment will test the spacecraft’s capabilities in extending daylight for several minutes, which can be used from lighting construction sites and search-and-rescue operations to increasing solar farm energy production.

  • SpaceNews ☛ FCC approves first Reflect Orbital satellite

    The FCC on July 9 formally authorized the launch of Eärendil-1, a satellite developed by Reflect Orbital that will deploy a thin-film reflector 18 meters on a side in low Earth orbit, reflecting sunlight to the ground.

    The 142-kilogram spacecraft is scheduled to launch later this year into an orbit 600 to 650 kilometers in altitude, where it will deploy the reflector. The company plans to use the spacecraft to test its ability to direct reflected sunlight to specific areas on Earth for several minutes at a time.

  • DarkSky International ☛ State of the Science 2025

    With every passing year, awareness of light pollution grows. We read more news stories, consume more digital media, and listen to more podcasts about it. A survey of the contents suggests that the message is clear: artificial light at night (ALAN) is a threat to people and planet. But rarely do news stories go into much depth on what we know about the topic. In an era of social and political polarization and misinformation, it can be difficult to separate the signal from the noise.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Stories Told About Data Centres

    If you read a website like this one, you were probably aware that data centres were commonplace twenty or more years ago. Like the one near King’s Cross, some were hidden in plain sight, while others were purpose-built facilities that look like hangars stuffed with servers. But the A.I. boom has meant rapid increases in the speed, scale, and quantity of data centres. People quickly learned not only of their existence, but how much pressure they put on local resources. Tech companies, it seemed, were caught by surprise; and as someone who spends a lot of time immersed in this world, so was I.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • El País ☛ From libertarian dream to political weapon: How the far right appropriated the [cryptocurrency] wave

      In theory, however, the [cryptocurrency] world should be apolitical and free of ideologies. Bitcoin was born in 2008 inspired by the ideas of the cyberpunks, activists from the 1990s who saw cryptographic technology as a way to protect the privacy of their communications from governments and large corporations. As the world sank into the worst financial crisis in decades, caused by excesses in the financial sector, this new currency emerged, designed to operate outside banks and intermediaries. That anti-system rhetoric — distrust of the state and the promise of quick prosperity — does align with the ideology of part of the new populist right and of authoritarian leaders who have appropriated the iconography of this universe in their political discourse and made it their banner.

    • CBC ☛ A ship exploded in Lake Huron 143 years ago. Now, a team is trying to find its wreckage

      Archaeology experts know a faulty boiler caused the wreck, but Galbraith is now leading an underwater survey to find out more details.

    • Hackaday ☛ Software-Defined Vehicles Loom Closer Every Year

      Vehicles long ago began to incorporate electronics and software, to the point that modern vehicles increasingly have a sort of architecture problem. The software end of things evolves ever more rapidly, but vehicles and their centralized architecture are poorly-suited to continuous updates. As a result, the automotive industry is moving away from static, hardware-defined designs and more toward dynamic, software-defined platforms. In short, the era of software-defined vehicles looms nearer every year.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Ireland’s data centers consumed nearly as much electricity as every home in the country combined in 2025 — server farms gulped 23% of national power despite years of grid restrictions

      Data centers accounted for 23% of Ireland's total electricity consumption in 2025, according to data released by the country's Central Statistics Office last week. The report revealed that data center consumption rose to 7,663 GWh in 2025 from 6,973 GWh in 2024, a 10% rise in a single year. Meanwhile, consumption by the rest of the country increased by just 2% within the same period.

    • Maury ☛ Making cooled clothing:

      Thermometric cooling sounds great: replace all the plumbing with a solid state semiconductor junction.

      Except they don't work particularly well. Most coolers produce several times more heat than they remove and require huge radiators to avoid overheating.

      ... on top of their massive power draw and high cost...

      Ok, but what if I could leave the fridge at home and take the cold with me?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Wired ☛ Inside the Luddite Festival Harnessing Gen Z’s Rage Against Big Tech

    I’m here to watch a performance called “Luddite Recreations,” which is a history of the Luddite movement—a group of artisans and textile workers who resisted the adoption of machines during the early years of the Industrial Revolution in England and whose resistance to being displaced from their work was met with violence by the British monarchy.

  • JURIST ☛ Apple challenges OpenAI’s hardware push in trade-secret lawsuit

    The 41-page complaint, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, names OpenAI chief hardware officer Tang Yew Tan and engineer Chang Liu. Apple alleges that the defendants engaged in a “coordinated pattern of misconduct at an institutional level” involving confidential product designs, manufacturing methods, and supplier information. Apple also claims OpenAI used former employees, interviews, and suppliers to obtain protected hardware information. The claims have not been tested in court.

  • Techdirt ☛ Xbox Lays Off 20% Of Staff, Cut Studios, Largely Impacting Acquired Devs It Promised It Wouldn’t Layoff

    This round of layoffs will effect over 3,000 staff members eventually, or about a fifth of the Xbox division workforce. The appetizer this past week accounts for about half that number. Working at Xbox right now must be buckets of fun, where you get to try to perform quality work while wondering if your name is on some list somewhere. An email went around again acknowledging the layoffs, as well as several Xbox studios going independent.

  • Mike Brock ☛ No Eulogy

    That piece will not come from me. The ritual by which American public life launders men like Lindsey Graham at their deaths is one of the ways American public life keeps producing men like Lindsey Graham, and I do not intend to participate in it. The truth about a public life does not become false the day the man dies. And the truth about this public life, held plainly and without the softening that death is thought to require, is that Lindsey Graham spent the last decade of his career doing specific, nameable damage to the country he claimed to love, and the country will be living with that damage long after the eulogies have faded.

  • Mike Brock ☛ When is Political Violence Justified

    Someone in a Signal chat last week said, in the flat pacifist maximalist way that has become the default register of American liberal ethics, that political violence is never justifiable. I said, wryly, well, that’s not really true. He asked me what I meant. This piece is the receipt for the demurral.

    Before I give the philosophical answer, I owe the reader the operative one, because on this subject any philosophical treatment that does not begin with the operative holding is a treatment that has forfeited its own seriousness.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Latvia ☛ Baltic states 'strongly reject' Russian lies in Moscow / Article

      The denials of the Baltic diplomats are all likely to be grist to Russia's propaganda mill, on the basis that as long as everyone on the internet is talking about what it wants, it doesn't particularly matter whether it has any basis in reality and the more its own talking points are aired, the more they assume the appearance of being based in reality and not total fantasy.

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Hungarian public media suspends news service

      Hungarian public television suspended its news broadcasts, replacing programming with a message on screen that read: “Public media should not lie. We apologize for having done so for many years! Public media is currently being transformed to ensure that in the future, it remains trustworthy and independent. News services are temporarily suspended. Please stay with us!” During the election campaign, Prime Minister Péter Magyar and other Tisza party politicians repeatedly pledged to end what they described as state-funded party propaganda in the public media if elected.

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Russian disinformation surge may be connected to upcoming Baltic elections

      "Not only in the media, but also through diplomatic channels on Russia's part – they want to show that, look, the Baltic states are dragging NATO into a war against Russia. But this is yet another attempt to create confusion," Tsahkna said.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • NPR ☛ An artist brought 'I.C.E. pops' to a Texas campus. The show was shut down in days

    At first glance, those brightly-colored treats look like fun, nostalgic pop art. But there's something else going on, too. Each one has an item encapsulated inside of it, including handcuffs, replica firearms and old rosaries.

    "When you're a child finishing your ice cream, there was sometimes a stamp or a joke that was put onto the popsicle stick," Quiñonez said. But what's stamped on these sticks is not a corny Dad joke, but a parody of the official U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement seal with text that reads: "U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement."

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Hindu ☛ MP urges journalists to update their skills constantly

    Telugu Desam Party (TDP) Member of Parliament Kalisetti Appala Naidu has asked journalists to update their technical and language skills constantly in order to excel in their careers. He attended the ‘Maha Sabha’ of the Andhra Pradesh Journalists’ Forum (APJF) in Srikakulam on Sunday as the chief guest.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ The Trump administration is subpoenaing journalists to reveal sources. Their data security is more important than ever.

    "Historically, the Justice Department has sought to subpoena reporters only as a last resort after other reasonable options have been exhausted." Now the FBI is doing it to satisfy an angry President.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘His blood is on Trump’s hands’: man killed by ICE in Texas mourned at vigil

    A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer fatally shot Salgado Araujo, 52, on Tuesday after he was pursued by federal agents driving unmarked vehicles while he was taking his crew to their latest job site. The shooting has outraged Houston leaders and renewed public scrutiny over ICE and Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

  • International Business Times ☛ AI License Plate System Wrongly Tracks Journalist Before Police Surround Range Rover: 'Are You Armed?! Get Out!'

    Four police vehicles surrounded a $155,000 Range Rover in a Minnesota car park after an AI-assisted licence plate system incorrectly flagged it as linked to a stolen plate.

    Within moments, automotive journalist Joel Feder was at the centre of a high-risk stop during what had begun as a routine test drive.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Britain’s General Strike Was Class Struggle at Its Rawest

    A century ago, Britain was rocked by perhaps the most serious episode of class struggle it has ever known. Millions of workers joined the general strike of 1926, buoyed by hope that they could fend off attacks on the pay and conditions of coal miners and reverse efforts by bosses to claw back the gains organized labor made when workers were in urgent demand during World War I.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Life on the Internet adoption curve

    A recent PING episode noted that, for the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) at least, ‘the shape of the curve’ appears to have changed. That’s not quite right. The curve itself hasn’t changed; rather, our position on it has. So what is this curve, and why are we encountering this shift now?

    The ‘curve’ here is the technology adoption curve, and it’s not just one thing. It can describe who you are in the lifecycle of a new technology, and it can describe the size of the market and how that market is evolving. The PING episode touched on market size and the rate of change, but let’s start with who you are.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Links: July 12, 2026

    Although we’d rather bring you news of clever modifications and repairs down on the farm, more often than not, the name “John Deere” has appeared on the pages of Hackaday because of their opposition to farmers actually being able to work on the machines their livelihoods depend on. But thanks to a settlement reached between the company and the Federal Trade Commission this week, farmers seem to have been handed a much-needed win in the Right to Repair battle.

  • BoingBoing ☛ CDs are back because streaming made music feel disposable

    Vinyl is the expensive ritual. Streaming is the frictionless buffet. CDs are the weird middle child that suddenly looks reasonable again: cheap, durable, good-sounding, and not dependent on a licensing deal expiring while you sleep.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Seth Godin ☛ A captive audience

    The moment you start treating your customers as captives, they begin to make other plans.

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • India Times ☛ Meta scraps AI image feature days after launch following privacy backlash

        Meta's Muse image model provides a feature that lets users generate and edit images using natural language prompts like most AI image generators. However, it drew major criticism from privacy advocates, creators and entertainment industry groups given that it also allowed users to create AI-generated images using public Instagram photos without their explicit consent.

  • Copyrights

    • Components Media Corp ☛ Not your keys, not your songs

      It’s understood that they failed on these counts, but the magnitude of that failure has been underestimated: only about $33,000 was spent on Nina throughout the platform's lifetime, with the vast majority of releases going uncollected.

      Nina ultimately failed to articulate (or realize) an alternative to Bandcamp or Spotify. Others may manage.