Leftovers

• New York Times ☛ Roger Summit, Who Invented an Early Online Search Service, Dies at 95

  A research scientist at Lockheed, he came up with the idea for a computer system that would search scientific and technical literature almost instantaneously.

• Robert Birming ☛ The backseat blogger

  If we start doubting our blogging, maybe it's time to be truly honest with ourselves. When we look in the rearview mirror, is anyone looking back?

• Alex Haydock ☛ This blog is hosted on a Nintendo Wii... in a field

  Back in 2024, I rescued a Wii from the tech swap shop at EMF Camp.

  After spending a while under my TV playing only the finest Wii games, I repurposed it last year to host this blog. You can read last year’s post here.

  This year, I brought it back to its EMF Camp homeland to continue its job hosting the site: [...]

• MWL ☛ June’s Juryrigged Sausage

  My second priority is getting back to making words. I’m financially okay for a few months, but people support me when they see progress and there has been no real progress for a few months. I can’t just leap into writing eight hours a day, however. Writing is a muscle that must be warmed up or you crash and burn out. I’m starting by blogging more often. Some of that content will make it into Sausage posts as relevant, but most of it will be randomness to get the writing brain rolling. The impulse to write is once again present, but I know my brain. Brains are the worst. The worst. I can’t afford a self-imposed crash.

• Vidit Bhargava ☛ It's not a coincidence that analog film is making a comeback.

  People value imperfections and asymmetry more than they're willing to admit. The human is face is not symmetrical even if it appears to be. That's where our appreciation for assymetry and imperfection begins. But it goes beyond that.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Slow Food, Slow Publishing: The Beauty of Not Being First

    As I sit at my desk here at the American Mathematical Society (AMS) offices in Providence, RI, I am having a slow moment. I see the urgent calls to the Government to stop destroying science in the USA. I see the rush to hop on new business model bandwagons in a bid to be the coolest on the block. I see the hype and reality of AI invade our publishing thoughts from sunrise to dusk. Just yesterday for example, we were trying to devise suitable author guidelines that encourage book and journal authors to disclose how they are using generative AI in manuscript preparation, but struggling to understand how to respond when they disclose that content is in part generated by AI. And then I reflected on how little our guidelines are likely to affect authors’ actions, in any case.

    Slumping in my chair, and feeling mildly ornery, I wonder why the word copyright has become almost a dirty word for some.

  • Hackaday ☛ How Octopuses Hacked Their Ribosome To Become Smart

    A fascinating aspect in evolutionary biology is that of convergent evolution — whereby similar structures and functions evolve independently from each other. The highly advanced nervous system of octopuses is a good example here, displaying levels of intelligence and capabilities far beyond those of other cephalopods and matching that of primates, despite no evolutionary link here. Exactly how octopuses developed this rather unique capability remained a mystery, though recent research by [Rishav Mitra] points at the rather unique ribosomes in these animals.

  • Mikael Zayenz Lagerkvist ☛ Propagating the minimum distance between selected points

    Writing a custom propagator is worth considering when one constraint carries much of a problem’s structure. My paper Propagation Algorithms for the Minimum-Distance Constraint over Selected Points, to be presented at ModRef 2026, works through one such case in Gecode.

    Suppose we want to select five facility locations, spread out so that the closest pair is as far apart as possible. Let z denote that minimum distance. A straightforward CP model introduces a distance variable for every selected pair, then constrains z to be the minimum of those distances. This is a clear specification, but it creates quadratically many auxiliary variables and propagators.

• Career/Education

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ on the deaths of things, and their life

    The band director doesn't show up on time, so his kids don't. He isn't locked in ready to go when the bell rings, so they aren't. He lets himself ramble off on tangents, so they talk out of turn and off-task. He does not treat the band's success or failure as a team sport, so the kids have no esprit de corps or sense of ownership. He makes excuses for himself and blames others, so his students do too. He gives the constant impression that band is a burden and a distraction to him from more important things, so that's exactly how the students treat it.

    I cannot build a program on those expectations.

  • Alex Alejandre ☛ Interview With Matheus Moreira

    School projects were a big motivator in my early school years, but at some point it was about curiosity, and a desire for The Right Thing. I wanted a language to call home. I stuck with Ruby the longest. It’s a really nice language. I always have it installed, and have recently started a Rails project! But it has its imperfections too. The other language that I stuck with was C. Its low level simplicity was really captivating to me.

  • Vidit Bhargava ☛ UC Berkeley, MDes Guest Lecture: Ethical Software

    It was great to be able to present my work to students who are using emerging technologies to build systems that leave a positive social impact, and share examples from my experience that'd give them practical advice.

  • Robert Reich ☛ You Can't Make Old Friends

    I didn’t quite understand what he meant. I asked him: “Why can’t you just make new friends?” He explained that he had tried to make new friends, and had succeeded somewhat. But he couldn’t make an old friend, and there was a difference.

    I didn’t understand him then. I do now.

  • Kyle Reddoch ☛ July 2026

    I finished my degree, kept writing and building, started learning SwiftUI through a couple of Apple app ideas, and have been trying to give myself some grace through a heavier stretch of life.

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ My first Finncon — Turku, 2026

    The first session I joined was Kirjoittajan oppaat scifiin ja fantasiaan (Writer’s guides to scifi and fantasy) with Saara Henriksson, Anne Leinonen and Jani Saxell. I’m an aspiring writer of scifi in that I think about one day wanting to write some stories but I haven’t actually written fiction since high school when I took part in NaNoWriMo.

    I enjoyed the panel discussion (a side note: coming from a tech conference world where 95% of the talks are individual presentations and very rarely panels, it was interesting to see how Finncon was mainly panel discussions) and picked up a few good new ideas.

  • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Embracing Amateurs to Get Experts

    Looking over this progression, and the rest of the folk revival, it seems likely to me that the music Cocke dismisses as low-quality was a necessary prerequisite of the thriving live music tradition she's now glad to see. I suspect the people in the community who pushed hard for live music, including accepting tradeoffs like small repertoires and amateur musicianship, set up the conditions to restore live dance music as a core component of the living tradition. The "wealth of competent, experienced dance musicians" she celebrates in 1992 grew out of communities that had been willing to dance to bands that couldn't play hard stuff up to speed and played the same ten tunes every time. I'm sure this wasn't all of it: folks working hard to become better musicians, and better dance musicians, must also have been critical. To become good at playing for dancers, however, you have to play for dancers, and that means a community that is accepting of people at a range of stages along their musical journey.

• Hardware

  • MWL ☛ Saucer Separation and Amazon Wishlist

    Having the extra desk space is great, though, and I ache for some mobility. The obvious solution is to build a sturdier standing desk. A smaller set of the wire shelves I use for the main desk and a solid desktop would be far more stable. Unfortunately, my life is chaos right now and my Patronizer system hung up for a couple months exactly when I couldn’t pay attention to it. I am not spending money if I can avoid it.

  • MWL ☛ Saucer, Separated

    What I wound up with is another set of wheeled wire shelves, 36″ by 18″. The top is a 2’x3′ sheet of laminated MDF supported by half-inch plywood. I used a hole saw to notch post settings in the bottom of the plywood. The Mac is mounted beneath the shelf, along with a power squid. My landscape-mode monitors are on the other desk. Each desk is independently powered, but they can be connected with one USB, one audio, and two DisplayPort cables.

    Without a better workshop, this design is as sturdy as I can get. The monitors still wobbled. Adding the ten-disk tower PC to the bottom shelf as ballast sufficiently steadied it.

• Proprietary / SaaS

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

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Don’t Just Nationalize AI. Democratize It.

      Public ownership of AI is no guarantee of democracy. We need democratic public ownership to prevent elites from maintaining control of the technology.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ AI data centers must produce as much power as they use, Australia PM says — new national AI framework will also ensure water efficiency and protect intellectual [sic] property [sic] rights

      Aside from concern for data centers’ use of natural resources, the Australian government also wants to ensure that the intellectual [sic] property [sic] rights of its people are protected. Albanese said that Australian creators, including writers, musicians, artists, and news reporters, should “retain control of the price and value of their work” when used for AI training. “Anything less is theft. No country has got this right yet,” says the prime minister.

    • New York Times ☛ Australia to Put Environmental Brakes on A.I. Data Centers

      The announcements on Wednesday in a speech by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came as Australia draws significant interest from A.I. companies because of its size and the availability of renewable energy, and as resistance to data centers builds in many parts of the United States and Europe.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ I grew up idolizing George Lucas, but his passive stance on AI is deeply wrong

      For me, that’s the kicker. This notion that you can’t do anything about AI, or on the other side of the coin, that AI is inherently bad and it shouldn’t exist at all. Both arguments are extremes, but what about the middle ground? What about a world where AI exists, but we do indeed do something about it?

      I don’t have a hatred of AI. I have a hatred of unethical, generative AI. The kind of artificial intelligence that scrapes existing works, regardless of copyright and MacGyvers them into AI slop. My problem with generative AI is that it removes the human element and to me, it’s the human element that makes art, art.

    • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk's xAI, Which is Being Sued Over AI-Generated Sexual Deepfakes, Sues Grok User Over AI-Generated Sexual Deepfakes

      The lawsuit follows a massive deepfake scandal that unfolded over the winter, as X users realized that Grok — which had been updated with a new photo and video-editing feature — could be used to quickly and easily alter images to artificially undress real people and depict them in sexual positions.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ San Francisco Demands Removal of Nudify Apps

      Burgess gives the impression, which is my base assumption, that these 13 apps were clear about what they do, so App Review has no excuse for missing them. But I’m sure it’s keeping us all safe in other regards.

    • MacRumors ☛ Apple and Google Hit With Demand to Pull AI 'Nudify' Apps

      The letters, sent on Thursday, target eight apps on the App Store and five on the Play Store that market themselves as face-swapping tools but are used to "undress" photos of real people. The attorney's office wants both companies to cut ties with the developers and stop taking a cut of in-app payments, arguing they are effectively "aiding and abetting" the sale of explicit deepfake images. The attorney called the practice "illegal, harmful, and completely unacceptable" and believes Apple and Google have collected millions in fees from the apps.

    • Wired ☛ San Francisco Demands Apple and Google Delete AI ‘Nudify’ Apps From App Stores

      The City Attorney’s Office sent the tech giants cease-and-desist letters this week telling them to stop profiting from 13 “face-swap” apps that are overwhelmingly used to target women and girls.

    • Maarten van Gompel ☛ Formulating an AI policy for my free software projects

      To cut to the chase, I am highly critical of the current use of LLMs and agentic coding in software development. I do not deny that it can, at times, deliver results that look quite impressive, and at great speed. But there are several reasons why I think the state this technology is currently in has an over-all detrimental impact for free software projects and the world in general and should therefore be limited as a matter of policy.

    • Bitdefender ☛ Google's Gemini lets strangers send messages from your locked Android phone

      So, imagine the scene. Someone gets hold of your locked Android phone and, despite not knowing your security PIN, they can send messages via SMS or WhatsApp pretending to come from you.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Portents Of Doom

      This re-calibration is just one of the many signs that the AI bubble is about to deflate. Below the fold I present a necessarily incomplete list of them, which I will try to update as more appear.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Criticisms of Bernie’s AI Wealth Fund Idea Don’t Hold Up

      Bernie Sanders has proposed making artificial intelligence providers hand over 50% of their stock to a US sovereign wealth fund. Criticisms of the idea, ranging from AI skepticism to arguments against public ownership, have not been compelling.

    • Scott Willsey ☛ No, I Am Not AI

      Apparently a bunch of people on Hacker News think my post about vibe-coding Mac and iOS apps was itself vibe-coded.

      I guess I should have expected it, considering it IS a post about using AI to do things I don’t want to do, like futz around with Xcode itself. But I gotta say… does this site really look AI generated? Any of it?

    • Michael Geist ☛ Outdated Data and Dubious Comparisons: Digging into the Government's AI Strategy Adoption Claims

      Relying on survey data about AI knowledge and public attitudes, the Canadian national strategy claims that low literacy and low trust are the “binding constraints” on deeper AI integration. But the latest Statistics Canada survey found that two in five businesses regarded AI as irrelevant to their operations. In an earlier survey, 78.1 per cent of businesses with no adoption plans cited lack of relevance, while privacy and security concerns only registered at 8.1 per cent. The story the data tells is that the problem for most non-adopters was not a lack of trust, but the absence of a convincing use case. The Canadian sectoral results reinforce the point. AI use reached 42.3 per cent in information and cultural industries and 40.4 per cent in finance and insurance, compared with 4.5 per cent in agriculture, 7.9 per cent in wholesale trade and 9.2 per cent in construction. In other words, adoption rates are far higher among businesses that have more obvious use cases and lower among those that don’t.

    • Manuel Moreale ☛ On ethics and usefulness

      Kevin sent me a link to this email from Linus Torvalds the other day, and I found that to be a great example of something that has been bothering me for a while now. It’s about AI—everything is about AI these days, so damn boring—and, more specifically, Linus’ position when it comes to the use of LLMs.

      What I find bothersome is the lack of any consideration for the moral and ethical implications of the technology itself. The justification for its use essentially boils down to “it’s a useful tool”, which is a totally unconvincing argument in this context.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Lorde Slams Spotify Over Sloppy AI-Generated Song Descriptions

      In the caption for the post, Lorde tagged the streaming service. “Hey @spotify i’m gonna go out on a limb n say we don’t want this,” wrote Lorde. “Not only is this inaccurate (not the song i did that in) but reducing a song to an ai generated meaning right at the source feels like it limits free interpretation imo. At least make it possible for artists to opt out please.”

  • Social Control Media

    • TruthOut ☛ Truth Social Is Selling Instant Access to Trump’s Posts to Banks and Traders

      The product is known as “Truth API,” and Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs Truth Social plans to leverage it into a “meaningful source of revenue for the company,” said interim CEO Kevin McGurn.

    • Android Police ☛ I stopped trusting YouTube's algorithm after one curious click destroyed my entire feed

      I open my dedicated YouTube account and watch a video on the design analysis of one of my favorite games. I find another video in the sidebar that shows a major graphical project for a PlayStation 1 title.

      Immediately, I am drawn to the thumbnail, and I click it. The entire video was AI-generated.

      Now I open my YouTube feed, and I find more videos like it.

      But this isn't a one-off; it happens with many of the videos I watch, even if I only check them out for a few seconds before turning them off.

    • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Haley Stevens Is Getting Flamed Online. Will It Matter in Michigan?

      And on Michigan voters’ TVs this week, a pro-Stevens outside group funded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee dropped another ad slamming her opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, for his “sexist attacks” on Stevens. That spot adds to the 10-to-1 advertising advantage for Stevens, according to the ad-tracking firm AdImpact.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Ransomware curdles production at Coca-Cola's Fairlife dairy biz

      The business, which was fully acquired by Coca-Cola in 2020 and makes ultra-filtered milk and Core Power protein shakes, said the quality and safety of the products themselves have not been affected.

      The drinks giant said it is still investigating the incident and working to restore affected systems, adding that it has not yet determined whether the attack is reasonably likely to materially affect the company.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Partnered Health Cyberattack Exposes Patient Records

      The Partnered Health data breach, involving clinics owned by healthcare provider Partnered Health, a company backed by Quadrant, affected facilities in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, and the ACT.

      The incident has also renewed scrutiny of the growing number of cyberattacks targeting Australia’s healthcare sector.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • CBC ☛ Meta will now tell parents if their teens talk about suicide with the company's AI chatbot

      The new rules are an expansion of Meta's guardrails. Prior to this, when a teen suggested they were considering self harm or suicide, the AI chatbot would redirect them to crisis help lines and encourage them to reach out to a parent or other trusted person. If teen Instagram users repeatedly make searches related to self harm and suicide using the platform's regular search function, that also already triggers a notification to parents.

      Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, says the new feature is live for users in Canada, the U.K., the U.S. and Australia.

    • TruthOut ☛ The Fight Against Surveillance Cameras Is a Struggle for Democracy

      While companies like Flock Safety, Axon, and Motorola Solutions (among others) sell cameras to cities and police departments across the country under the auspices of improving public safety, these AI surveillance cameras are much more powerful than the companies pushing them suggest, and it is increasingly clear that they actually make us all less safe. These misnamed cameras are always on, collecting data on passing cars at all hours, and do more than just document license plates of driving cars: They can make essentially all information captured in a photo — including the make of a car, color, manufacturer, if the car has dents, bumper stickers, etc. — searchable by police and corporate customers.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ TikTok Age Verification Probe Launched By UK Regulator

      The investigation follows the publication of a new Ofcom report that found age checks are becoming more common across online services, but significant gaps remain, particularly on social media platforms and some pornography websites.

    • The Verge ☛ TikTok is testing an AI likeness detection tool

      TikTok is starting to test an opt-in tool that scans for AI likenesses and lets creators report them to the company, as spotted by social media consultant Matt Navarra. The tool is initially being tested with “some” US creators, TikTok US spokesperson Zachary Kizer tells The Verge. YouTube has been working on a similar tool and recently made it available to all adult users.

    • The Record ☛ Senator calls on Rubio, Blanche to push back against Canadian surveillance legislation

      Wyden says the Lawful Access Act “threatens to weaponize American technology infrastructure by enabling the Canadian government to force U.S. companies to secretly facilitate surveillance of Americans, while systematically undermining the security of their products.” The letter, dated Thursday, went to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in his capacity as acting national security adviser.

      The Canadian legislation would require providers to store user metadata — for example, location history — for up to a year. It also would allow the Canadian government to force providers to create backdoors or set up tracking.

      The bill additionally would mandate that electronic service providers change their systems so they can easily share information with law enforcement equipped with a warrant.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Nation ☛ Trump’s Election Fraud Speech Was a Sick Joke—and a Threat

    In fact, the speech was so disgracefully packed with lies that even some of the president’s most loyal lapdogs decided to keep their distance from it. Before the speech, Republican officials were already leaking to Politico their concern that Trump was wasting his time rehashing conspiracy theories that appeal to the base rather than offering a positive economic message that would win over moderate voters in the midterms.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Election Interference is Fine For Me But Not For Thee

    So yeah, call me dubious about Trump’s devotion to standing against election interference. (OK, you could have called me that before last night’s speech, but work with me here.) Trump has made election interference in Europe to be the official policy of the US Department of State, and he’s putting $5M in cash behind that policy.

  • El País ☛ Merz warns against possible US interference in German elections

    “In Germany it is illegal to finance political parties from abroad. It is illegal. That said, I assume that our friends around the world also respect these legal rules that we have imposed in Germany,” the chancellor said forcefully.

    The German politician stressed that just as Germany does not interfere in U.S. electoral affairs, he would expect “neither the U.S. government nor institutions close to it to interfere in German elections.”

  • Wired ☛ A Humanoid Company Backed by Eric Trump Is Preparing Its Robots for War

    Pathak, Foundation’s CEO, says his company plans to start giving its humanoids lethal capabilities soon, although he declined to share specifics. “We have some kinetic things we're exploring,” he tells WIRED. (He means weapons systems.) “We'll probably unveil something in the next couple of months,” he adds. Besides combat, the company says its robots could be useful for logistics, reconnaissance, and inspection.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Real Message of Trump's Address to the Nation

    Despite his repeated assertions that U.S. elections are not secure, Trump during his second term has significantly cut the budget of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, including its election work. That’s because Trump grew contemptuous of the agency, and the government’s election security work generally, after it validated the integrity of the 2020 election.

    So the entire performance tonight was fake — an extension of his Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Anti-Forbes list ranks wealthy by the wealth their companies generated for others

    How about "ranked by how much tax they paid?" Yes, now I'm just being silly.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • New Eastern Europe ☛ Transnistria: how the Ukraine war is heating up Russia’s longest forgotten separatist conflict - New Eastern Europe

      Unresolved separatist conflicts are especially common in post-Soviet countries, from South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia, to Donbas in Ukraine. Most are unstable. But Transnistria, despite being entirely cut off from Russia, has survived for so long because the status quo was uniquely tolerable for the powers in the region. For Russia, it offered a low-cost foothold on Europe’s edge. For Moldova, which legally controls the territory, it has become too politically costly to reintegrate. For Ukraine and the West, it was a distraction best contained rather than ignited.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Releases Evidence Debunking His Own Election Interference Claims

    Both of those claims are misleading, as China’s election interference has largely been contained to efforts to sway public opinion on the Trump administration, and the intelligence community has known for years that China has been collecting publicly available voter data from various states. He also alleged that American intelligence agencies had hidden evidence of foreign election interference from him, and published a tranche of declassified documents as supposed proof.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ GOP senator blasts ‘amateurish’ DOGE [sic] work, lack of detail on savings

    Vought previously told House lawmakers that there would be no after-action report on DOGE’s [sic] performance ahead of its July 4 sunsetting. But Tillis asked him to share one initiative that was the “best example” of what the Elon Musk-created group accomplished.

  • Times Media Limited ☛ ‘I can’t investigate Andrew,’ acting attorney-general tells Epstein victims

    Todd Blanche, the US attorney-general nominee, told the family of Virginia Giuffre that a lack of co-operation and testimony was hindering further investigation

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Warren Buffett explains why his kids, not the Gates Foundation, will now give away all his fortune

    Billionaire Warren Buffett said Wednesday that his decision to cut the Gates Foundation out of his charitable giving is more about believing his three children are ready to handle giving away his entire fortune than it is about Bill Gates ‘ ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

    Buffett told CNBC that Gates’ association with Epstein was “distasteful,” but the 95-year-old investor suggested that Gates’ actions weren’t much different from mistakes he himself had made over the years in hiring the wrong person or in choosing friends.

• Environment

  • New Republic ☛ The First Wrongful Death Suit Against Big Oil Is Not Going Their Way

    A judge has ruled that tort claims against the industry can proceed to trial, potentially opening the door for prosecutors to become agents of climate accountability.

  • The Nation ☛ AI Data Centers Are Just the Tip of the Iceberg

    These destructive behemoths are part of a broader model of total extraction—particularly in rural areas.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Wildfire smoke kills tens of thousands of people a year. Here's how it attacks the body

    Smoke causes inflammation by triggering the body's immune system to go into overtime to fight the irritant. Scientists have found it can harm the brain, the skin and men's sperm, with almost no system of the body spared, Johnson said. People over 60 become more prone to stroke in wildfire smoke, she said.

    "Wildfire smoke is the toxic product of combustion of whatever burned," which could include houses and cars, said Dr. Courtney Howard, an emergency room physician, chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance and president-elect of the Canadian Medical Association.

    "So really it's a big giant toxic soup of particles and gases."

  • Common Dreams ☛ Landmark Science Report Confirms Big Oil’s Fingerprints on Extreme Weather, as Industry Races for Legal Shield

    The National Academies of Sciences released a report today that puts the full weight of the country's most respected scientific institution behind extreme weather attribution science, affirming that the field can reliably connect specific disasters to fossil fuel pollution. The three-year review comes as nearly two dozen states and municipalities sue fossil fuel companies for climate damages, while roughly a dozen states advance climate superfund legislation that would force the industry to help pay for climate-related damage. Legal experts say the report could significantly strengthen both efforts.

    Fossil fuel companies aren't waiting to find out. Congress is weighing legislation, and several states have already passed laws that would shield oil and gas companies from climate liability altogether — including model legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council for other states to adopt. In response to the report, the Make Polluters Pay campaign released the following statement.

  • Inside Towers ☛ NY Is ‘First’ State to Pause Large Data Centers

    New York has become the ‘first’ state to impose a one-year moratorium on new large-scale data centers (50 MW or larger), according to Datacenter Digest. Signed by Governor Kathy Hochul, the one-year pause halts environmental permits while the state develops regulations to evaluate data centers’ impacts on energy demand, water use, air quality, and local communities.

    The new framework includes a statewide environmental impact study and guidance for local governments to negotiate community benefits with developers. The state is also considering requiring data centers to help fund grid upgrades and may eliminate sales tax exemptions for these facilities.

  • Doc Searls ☛ InOrOutDay

    This is the first morning since I arrived in Baltimore on Wednesday that stepping outside in the morning didn’t feel like walking into an oven. It was 76° F (24.4° C), which isn’t bad. I also couldn’t see far up the road, because the air was full of smoke, and it was hard to breathe. See the above.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Elon Musk’s Colossus 2 data center installed 59 natural gas turbines without permission, report claims — thousands of tons of pollutants reportedly impact black communities in Mississippi already suffering from elevated lung disease rates

    Elon Musk's Colossus 2 xAI data center, which runs independently of the power grid through on-site natural gas turbines, is said to be releasing thousands of tons of nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide every year. According to Reuters, the company has installed 59 temporary, mobile natural gas turbines without permission, and these unpermitted portable units mostly heavily affect the communities surrounding the site, which happen to be predominantly black and are already suffering disproportionately high lung disease rates. xAI has claimed that it’s running 27 turbines without any permits, saying that it’s exempted because of their temporary nature.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ A Million Warnings and One Huge Invitation: Climate 2026

    It is like a bad dream that keeps recurring: people are drowning while we are prevented from reaching them with our rowboats and life preservers; homes are burning but someone is standing on the firehose or knocking down the ladders; there is a planetary thermostat and countless people are trying to turn it down, but powerful figures backed by militaries and money are turning it up; we grab the firehose but they keep pouring gasoline, literally, on the fire. That's a description of a world in which the majority of us want climate action and a thriving planet; we're overpowered --in some ways– by the minority willing to sacrifice the whole, largely to further enrich the wealthy. Meanwhile, new life rafts and fire retardants are being invented, and the planet itself as well as the news are offering warnings and invitations, over and over and over.

    It is good to be on the same side as your planet.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • MinnPost ☛ Speeding costs you — and doesn't actually save much time

      They found that if drivers of light-duty, conventional internal combustion engine vehicles actually drove at posted speed limits, it could save an average of $22 million, based on fuel costs at the time, 6.7 million gallons of fuel and 57,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide every day. The researchers said that is comparable to taking about 5.5 million passenger vehicles off the road.

      And while drivers say that speeding saves them precious time, researchers found that is not really the case. With an average daily driving distance of 28.6 miles (46.03 kilometers), driving at or below the posted limit corresponds only to about 54 seconds longer per day.

    • Australia ☛ AI in Australia's interests | Prime Minister of Australia

      The Government will introduce a set of Australian Standards for AI, building on the Data Centre Expectations, with our values as the benchmark to ensure AI works in Australia’s interests.

      The new standards will set out clear rules for large data centres— including a legal obligation to underwrite their own new power supply, pay their full share of connection costs so energy bills are not impacted, reduce power when needed to strengthen the grid, and be as water efficient as possible.

    • Tedium ☛ Terminus History: What Happens When A Road Ends

      When a really long road ends, why don’t we do more to celebrate the staggering amount of collective work that went into it? The ancient Romans really outclassed the federal highway system on this front.

    • Futurism ☛ Eric Trump Has Lost $600 Million of Daddy's Money Betting on [Cryptocurrency]

      After merging with an existing mining company, the company made the questionable decision last year to pivot from building data centers — an extremely lucrative industry that has seen massive interest as of late — to [cryptocurrency] mining, a gambling-like practice that’s far from guaranteed to make a profit.

    • Hackaday ☛ A Sloshing-Mercury-Powered Neon Light

      Since this is, essentially, a triboelectric effect, other materials besides mercury should work; [Styropyro] tested several materials, and found that pieces of Teflon produced a faint glow, and copper beads a somewhat brighter glow. Unfortunately, Galinstan, the obvious replacement for mercury, wets and coats glass, preventing a charge buildup.

    • Robert Reich ☛ NO to [CRYPTOcurrency]

      Let me get right to the point. Congress should not enact legislation that further legitimizes and expands an industry whose promised public benefits are zilch while its costs and risks are increasing by the day.

      There’s simply no legitimate use for [cryptocurrency]. Its only practical uses are tax evasion, money laundering, fraud, speculation, and crime.

    • Jim Grey ☛ The 1928 Lincoln Highway in Indiana: Eastern Indiana

      When the Lincoln Highway Association rerouted the Lincoln Highway between Fort Wayne and Valparaiso in Indiana in 1928, they simply moved it to US 30. This isn’t the US 30 that exists today. That US 30 is a four-lane expressway across the entire state, built in sections from about 1939 to about 1990. In most places, the original US 30 remains as a series of county roads. That’s a good thing for Lincoln Highway fans, as modern US 30 is heavily used across the state. Old US 30 is often a quiet, lonely road.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ As great whites and humans share the waters, shark lab runs out of funding

      The shark safety program has tagged 380 great whites since its inception, and about 250 sharks have active transmitters. Acoustic receivers collect the data, which is shared with lifeguards. The program also uses 16 buoy systems to send live detection data to lifeguards.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ These photographs are breaking my heart, but this 55-year-old elephant’s viral rescue also proves the power of photography

      The veterinary team and authorities were able to rescue the animal, however, thanks to videos circulating on social media that revealed the elephant’s condition. Authorities said that the elephant’s previous owner had been unable to afford the cost of treatment and upkeep.

  • Overpopulation

    • Western Water ☛ Climate change could double Santa Cruz water bills

      Santa Cruz receives about 95 percent of its water from local surface water, including streams and its main reservoir, Loch Lomond. The reservoir holds roughly one year of water supply. That leaves the city vulnerable when drought lasts longer or rainfall becomes less dependable.

    • Western Water ☛ Colorado River Forecast: Water use rising in 2026

      Both Arizona and California are forecast to exceed their approved water use totals for 2026.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ The plan to stop AI from breaking the world

    At the centre of the plan is a “standards body” modelled on the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (Finra), the private, industry-funded organisation that polices Wall Street under US government oversight. Backed by Washington but funded by the AI labs, it would test frontier models for their most dangerous capabilities – cyber, biological and “deception” or agentic risks – under a majority-independent board of technical experts, with industry, government and open-source representatives alongside.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Navy orders removal of commanders’ portraits, bios, on websites

    These official pictures and biographies, hosted on Navy websites and social media pages, create an “elevated risk” for officers and their families, according to a Navy administrative notice, or NAVADMIN. Specifically, the directive regards officers and sailors ranks O-9 or below who specifically serve as commanding officers, executive officers, chiefs of staff, chief staff officers, deputies and command master chiefs.

  • US Navy Times ☛ Navy instructs commands to remove portraits, biographies from websites

    The official leadership biographies to be removed include those of commanding officers, executive officers, chiefs of staff, chief staff officers, deputies and command master chiefs or equivalent.

  • FAIR ☛ Remembering Lindsey Graham Not for the Evil He Did But for the Fun He Had Doing It — FAIR

    When Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham died suddenly on Saturday night, July 11, corporate media’s elegiac coverage didn’t just whitewash his record—it illustrated the affinity and symbiosis between the press corps and the politician they were meant to hold to account.

  • The Register UK ☛ Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

    Never mind not being a fork – Poseidon's kernel isn't even really a port of Linux. It's a rewrite, and a rewrite of a very early version. It's based on Linux kernel 0.11, whose source code you can peruse on this mirror.

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ The Status Quo Outlived Its Status

    Because the status quo isn’t defended because it won an argument. It’s defended because it’s the null hypothesis, and the burden of proof only ever runs one direction. Every so often, you have to flip the burden and make the process re-justify itself in terms of an outcome rather than another process. If it can’t, it isn’t protecting you anymore.

    It’s just protecting itself.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Trump Can’t Get No Respect

    In reality, one of the most spectacular consequences of Trump’s return to power and the mess he has made since has been a collapse of global respect for America. The chart at the top of this post is from Pew’s Global Attitudes Survey, but you don’t need a formal survey to know that the world increasingly despises the U.S. Just travel overseas and talk to people.

    And it’s not just public opinion. Governments around the world, very much including nations that used to be our most loyal allies, are scrambling to reduce their dependence, economic and military, on an America that can’t be trusted and has also proved itself far weaker than anyone imagined.

  • Hackaday ☛ EU Adds Exemptions To User-Serviceable Batteries Rules

    Built-in batteries put a timebomb inside devices, with especially the calendar aging feature of Li-ion chemistries setting a hard limit on when you’ll have to toss the device or figure out a way to replace the battery somehow. Here the EU’s Battery Regulation policy with the 2027 implementation of the user-serviceable battery requirement provided a lot of hope. Now six new categories of exemptions are diminishing what could have been a bonanza of easy repairability.

  • MacRumors ☛ EU Drops Battery Removal Requirement for Apple Watch and AirPods

    The new categories effectively cover the Apple Watch and AirPods, both of which rely on the kind of small, sealed designs the Commission is now carving out, along with Meta's smart glasses. The change follows months of pressure from U.S. officials over rules that had reportedly complicated ‌Meta‌'s plans to bring its newest display-equipped smart glasses to Europe.

  • 9to5Mac ☛ Apple Watch among wearables exempted from EU user-replaceable battery rules

    The European Commission has now adopted an exemption covering certain wearable devices whose safety, durability, or water resistance could be compromised by user access to the battery, including devices that are too small for safe battery replacement or rely on compact, sealed enclosures.

    That includes smartwatches, smart glasses, fitness trackers, and other small wearable devices.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Pocock-on-Sea: nomination for Clacton by-election, 13 August 2026

    On 6 June 2024, the day before voting, members of the Debianism cult distributed a falsified legal document in contempt of court. The timing of the malicious publication was clearly an attack on the democratic process. In 2025, it was revealed that a key member of the group engaged in that vendetta is a registered sex offender from Florida. Other members of the group have repeatedly and publicly expressed support for violence.

    Subsequently, I published a detailed history of the dispute, demonstrating how another collaborator in the group died on our wedding day in 2011. His wife became the mayor of Basel. Imagine having that death on your mind on your wedding anniversary every year. As with everything in Switzerland, there is extreme embarrassment about the whole affair because it was part of the Debian suicide cluster.

    Many people in Clacton-on-Sea are deeply concerned about the risks of social control media for their children. If this online culture is not even safe for the people who created it, how can it be safe for kids?

    Mental health, in general, is a big issue for the region.

  • Android Police ☛ Verizon shedding stores signals a shift in the way the carrier does business

    While price hikes and expanded offerings are the norm here, we're now getting word that the brand is shedding some of its stores. Fierce Network reports that Verizon will be selling 247 of its corporate-owned stores. In addition, it will also be cutting 500 corporate jobs.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • ANF News ☛ Iran executes another protester from “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” uprising

    According to HRANA, citing Khoshkar’s relatives, his family was informed of the execution only after the death sentence had already been carried out. The authorities initially refused to release his body and transferred it to the Tehran Forensic Medicine Organization. His family was instructed to identify and collect the body on Thursday.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: The Political Librarian: EveryLibrary Institute’s Open-Access Academic Journal

    As I have said many times on the blog and in public-- we are 100% responsible for the political and censorship mess we find ourselves in. 100%. You can blame T*ump all you want but that is wrong. When the attacks started to come for us we put our heads in the sand and claimed that we could not fight back because libraries are not allowed to be political.

    Sticking up for ourselves, countering false narratives, and sharing the truth is NOT POLITICAL. It is actually what we claim to do every day in our profession, for others. And yet, when it comes to ourselves we won't do it. Think about that for a minute. It is okay for us to inform others on how to fight for their rights but when it comes to ourselves......crickets.

  • BIA Net ☛ Kurdish bookstore banned from Trendyol online marketplace

    Berşev's store was handed two "violation points" by Trendyol on Jun 12 over the book "History of Kurds and Kurdistan." This happened despite the fact that the book had its own product page on Trendyol and was sold by other sellers before them, said Berşev.

    "A day later, the products in the store were put under a collective review," he added. "Around 1,200 to 1,300 of our products, including books, Kurdish novels, children's books, paintings, posters, Kurdish balloons, and mugs, were suddenly closed to sale. Then, the store was given 48 violation points and was completely closed."

    Berşev added that the removed books included works from the Avesta, Nûbihar, Dara, and Dipnot publishing houses, the latter of which publishes books by Selahattin Demirtaş.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ condemns Trump administration rule restricting international correspondents access to the United States

    The changes would limit foreign reporters’ entry into the U.S. to up to 240 days, or 90 days for Chinese nationals, with new additional restrictions for the initial application review as well as renewal applications. This new rule replaces the open-ended “duration of status” framework that has governed the I visa since 1985.

  • CPJ ☛ In eastern DRC, journalists face death, arson threats for reporting on war

    Government-allied Wazalendo militiamen have threatened to kill or capture one reporter and to burn down another’s radio station because of unfavorable coverage, as frontlines shift under diplomatic pressure for peace in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.

  • CPJ ☛ Mexican journalist Josué Martínez shot dead in Puebla, fourth killed in over a month

    “The brutal killing of Josué Martínez, in front of his child and in broad daylight, is the fourth such deadly attack on a Mexican journalist in just over four weeks in what is rapidly becoming one of the deadliest years in recent memory for the Mexican press,” said Jan-Albert Hootsen, CPJ’s Mexico representative. “Time and time again Mexican authorities show their unwillingness to make the country safer for reporters by allowing these attacks to occur in almost complete impunity.”

  • International Business Times ☛ 'What A Crybaby': Netizens Slam Donald Trump's Threat To Shut Down ABC And NBC

    Donald Trump threatened on 16 July to push for ABC and NBC's broadcast licences in Washington to be revoked after the networks declined to air his election-security speech live, a move that immediately triggered online mockery and reignited debate over the limits of presidential power in the US media landscape.

    This unprecedented escalation, a direct challenge to editorial independence, has sparked a volatile debate regarding the boundaries of presidential power and regulatory control.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ To innovate, news needs allies

    This is exciting to me: I’ve been saying for a while now that news needs to get more involved in building technology. My flippant line is that news treats technology as something that happens to it, like an asteroid — but it’s actually a creative work, like an article. Although many newsrooms are too small to build a strong capacity in themselves, it’s perfectly possible for news as an industry to build capacity and create the technology that is unique to its use cases on its terms. So I think it’s a very good thing that news institutions are talking about this need.

  • The Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures at CUNY ☛ We are not alone - by Adiel Kaplan Tow-Knight Center

    But archives hold immense value; the challenge was always finding the exact information you needed within a vast repository of unstructured sources. It just wasn’t economically feasible to build the systems to sift through that data.

    Now it is.

    I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about archives this year, not just in terms of how we make newsroom archives more accessible (and monetizable) stores of information, but also more broadly, in the context of libraries and other institutions. In my other role uptown, I’m working with Columbia’s Incite Institute on an oral history of the global spread of investigative journalism over the last 50 years. The ultimate home of an oral history is an archive, and one of the core decisions in building a large oral history project is choosing how to make the material publicly accessible for however future generations may access information.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ America’s Only Successful Coup Served the Ruling Class

    On November 10, 1898, more than five hundred armed white men seized Wilmington, North Carolina — a city run by a biracial government born of Reconstruction and sustained by a coalition of white populists and black Republicans. This was no mob; it was an army with commanders, units, even a machine gun mounted on a carriage. The insurgents targeted a black newspaper editor first, torching his office, then turned on the wider black community and its most successful figures.

    They didn’t just storm city hall — they stayed. After evicting the elected government at gunpoint, they issued a Declaration of White Independence and installed themselves as the city’s new rulers, liberated, as they saw it, from black rule. One local pastor summed up the mood without shame: “We have taken a city.”

  • ANF News ☛ The consequences of the Yazidi genocide

    Previously, the Yazidis had built an economy that was not dependent on outside forces through fig cultivation, small livestock herding, and natural production. This economic independence was one of the foundations of their freedom. When people own their land and sustain themselves through the resources their mountain provides, their dependence on dominant political systems is minimized. However, once the Yazidis were uprooted from their mountains and relocated to state-designed collective settlements, their economic independence became a direct target. In these settlements, they could no longer maintain their traditional way of life. They ceased to be producers sustained by their own mountains and instead became dependent on state institutions, merchants aligned with the system, and external sources for their livelihoods, food, and daily necessities.

  • Truthdig ☛ ICE's Violence Goes Public Again

    The circumstances surrounding the deaths of Araujo and Guerrero were hardly unique. During the autumn of 2025, an ICE officer shot and killed 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in the Chicago suburb of Franklin Park. In early October, a Border Patrol agent shot Marimar Martinez five times in the streets of Chicago. In both cases, ICE initially claimed that the victims had used their cars as weapons against arresting officers; In Martinez’s case, incriminating text messages sent by the agent who shot Martinez led to her charges being dismissed (“I fired 5 shots and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys,” he wrote). Martinez also testified about her experience before Congress in April.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Further | ICE Is Still Killing People. Susan Is Still Concerned. | Opinion

    Talk about following the money. Having somehow railroaded through last year's big obscene bill gifting over $170 billion to immigration and border enforcement - and last month inexplicably adding another $75 billion, seven times ICE’s annual budget (thanks Susan), with virtually no public accounting of how they spend it - the regime is now scurrying to spend their blood money by setting random, armed-to-the-teeth, 2,000-arrests-a-day benchmarks of what have become mere numbers of bodies in an ethnic cleansing of immigrants, brown and black people, or anyone standing near them. What could possibly go wrong?

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Internet Archive ☛ The Hidden Political Costs of Vanishing Culture | Internet Archive Blogs

    The article’s second half revisits the four digital rights at the heart of the Our Future Memory movement: the rights to collect, preserve, provide access to, and collaborate around digital materials—the same things memory institutions have always done with physical collections. It walks through why each right matters on its own terms, from the Wiley e-book withdrawal that blindsided George Washington University to the federal government’s removal of climate data and environmental justice tools like EJScreen. The throughline is simple: none of this is inevitable. Vanishing culture is a policy choice, and it’s one we can still reverse if libraries, archives, and museums make the case together instead of absorbing these losses one at a time.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • BoingBoing ☛ FTC forces John Deere to share repair tools

    But that's a-gonna change, thanks to a decision made by the FTC and a number of States, earlier this week. For the next 10 years, Deere must give farmers and independent repair shops the same repair resources its dealers get. The deal resolves a lawsuit accusing Deere of blocking repairs by farmers and independent shops.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Semafor Inc ☛ EU orders Google to open Android AI system to rivals

    The European Commission said the preloading of Gemini onto Android devices reduced the attractiveness of rival third-party models for the 60% of EU adults who use Android.

  • Rui Carmo ☛ Google Ordered to Open Android and Search in Europe

    Google is playing the EU game much better than Apple, but the EU still doesn’t seem to understand how privacy and security work in modern platforms. Letting people swap the onboard agent is being treated much like the ancient argument over shipping/default browsers–politically correct, bureaucratically led and technically much harder than changing a default handler.

  • The Verge ☛ Google and Epic give up fighting — third-party Android app stores are coming next week

    In October 2024, Judge James Donato originally agreed that forcing Google to carry rival Android app stores within its own Google Play store for several years, and forcing it to share its own entire catalog of apps with those stores, would be the best way of undoing the company’s illegal monopoly over Android applications. Google has been fighting that ever since, and eventually convinced Epic to join in, by settling all their legal disputes around the world and making a secret $800 million deal along the way.

  • New York Times ☛ Google Ordered to Give A.I. Rivals More Access on Android Smartphones

    The decision is a response to fears that Google will leverage the enormous user base of Android, which powers about 60 percent of all smartphones in the European Union, to gain an edge in the growing A.I. market and undercut competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic.

  • Copyrights

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Instagram Copyright Scam | Creators Move Delhi High Court Against Backdating

      Financial educator Pushkar Raj Thakur and digital creator Neeraj Joshi have made serious allegations in separate petitions. They state that some unknown individuals are using fake copyright strikes as a weapon to harass original creators and threaten to shut down their accounts.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate Sites' Domain Hopping Habit Undermines Belgium's New Blocking Order

      Belgium has added over 100 new domains to its ISP blocklist, but this expansion might not be as effective as it seems at first glance. Most of the blocked domains are already obsolete, as the operators of sites such as Zone-Telechargement and Wawacity have already switched to new TLDs in response to other blocking efforts. Notably, the order even targets 'information' pages that host no infringing content themselves.