Leftovers

• Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: Lines and lines and lines

  We had one of these for Sudo, but without the nose loop thing. I like that a lot actually - they get a twofer when they pull on these because it tightens around their snout first, then their neck (which in some dogs triggers their pulling reflex) and it was immediately effective in stopping him pulling.

• Adam Silver ☛ Why I don’t use interruption pages

  Last week, someone paid me to review their form flow.

  One thing they wanted advice about was interruption pages.

  Coincidentally, the following day the GOV.UK Design System added the interruption page pattern.

  Interruption pages are designed to pause the user within a journey - usually to warn them about a possible mistake or give them important information before they continue.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • India Times ☛ NASA climate data copied to Swiss supercomputer for AI training amid US funding cuts

    Researchers have copied massive quantities of publicly-available climate and environmental data from NASA onto a Swiss supercomputer to train artificial intelligence models and for safekeeping amid US funding cuts. Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) university announced the move late last week, saying its researchers had copied around 100 petabytes of NASA data to the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in the southern city of Lugano.

  • ARRL ☛ The ARRL Solar Update

    The increase in solar activity, which is expected to begin as early as the end of this week, while should last nearly until the end of the month, will result in significantly better shortwave propagation conditions than those experienced in the first half of the month. More significant changes (possibly an initial rise, but then very likely a temporary drop in MUF) will likely be caused by a geomagnetic disturbance, which is tentatively expected on July 21–22.

• Hardware

  • PC World ☛ Skip the RAM upgrade. Your bottleneck is probably somewhere else

    Some PC upgrades deliver meaningful performance gains, while others are simply a waste of money. The key is to upgrade where bottlenecks exist rather than replacing components unnecessarily. Here, we’ll show you which upgrades are worth considering and where you should think twice right now.

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Europe 2026: Project Gigapixel

    There was once a race to put out cameras with ever higher numbers of megapixels to snare customers eager to take the highest quality digital photos. These days, we know that things like optics, processing, and finer qualities of an image sensor are all very important beyond pure resolution. But, for a time, companies behaved as if megapixels mattered over all else.

    But what if you could go farther—shooting not millions, but billions of pixels in a single image? That’s precisely what [Yannick Richter] came to Hackaday Europe to talk about, covering his Project Gigapixel build.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ Acquired A-Z (1-25) Gray Pressboard 1/5 Cut Tab File Guides, Letter Sized (Oxford Pendaflex)

    I saw these while browsing through a thrift store and correctly clocked them as thick tabbed dividers though the person who rang them up for $1.50 thought they were folders because of their heft.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Scotsman ☛ Teenager who felt 'pins and needles' in leg has brain tumour removed by new robot tech

    A Highland teenager is recovering well after undergoing brain tumour surgery at the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow, thanks to innovative 3D exoscope technology.

  • USMC ☛ ‘Our veterans deserve better’: Inside the VA nursing shortage

    In its fiscal 2025 workforce assessment, the VA Office of Inspector General found that all 139 VA medical centers reported at least one severe occupational staffing shortage. Nearly four in five facilities identified nursing among those shortages, and facilities collectively reported 4,434 severe occupational staffing shortages across clinical and nonclinical occupations, a 50% increase from the previous year.

  • Wired ☛ Elite Young Runners Are Becoming Freakishly Fast. Welcome to ‘Trackflation’

    The track world, I discovered, has coined a name for this much-discussed phenomenon of kids getting ultra-fast: trackflation. In June 2025 at the New Balance Nationals, an annual championship that draws around 6,000 top youth athletes, more than 100 kids beat previous meet records. “There might now be a hundred kids that run under 4:10 in the full mile,” says Will Rodgers, who ran track at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in the early 2010s and now co-owns RunningLane, a coaching and events business. “Back when we were competing in high school, it might’ve been like 20 at max.”

    I had to know why kids today are essentially breaking track. And that meant trying to understand the dramatic shift happening at the sport’s roots.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Filippo Valsorda ☛ Opaque, Interoperable Passkey Records (and a Go API)

    Passkeys are the most important thing happening in information security right now because they are the only principled solution to the overwhelming effectiveness of phishing attacks. Just like memory safety is the only principled solution to memory corruption attacks.

    Unfortunately, implementing them on the server side can appear more complex than using password hashes. Part of this is unavoidable because passkeys require interaction with the browser to get their phishing resistance properties. Part of it, however, could be abstracted away a little more effectively by defining interoperable passkey record encodings.

  • Windows Central ☛ It seems another studio has broken free of Xbox and gone independent, following Double Fine and other cuts

    Following Double Fine Productions and Compulsion Games' examples, Mighty DOOM and Wraithbone creator Alpha Dog Games has announced it's broken off from Xbox and is now independent again.

  • EuroGamer ☛ After Doom director Hugo Martin denied reports that id Software had been gutted, "current and former employees" are disagreeing with his optimism

    It's been two weeks since Microsoft announced 3,200 layoffs and sweeping cuts hit the Xbox division. Not even well-established institutions like Doom and Quake studio id Software were safe - with the first reports painting a very bleak picture - yet Hugo Martin, director on the latest Doom entries, pushed back against claims the iconic FPS developer had been turned into little more than a support studio. A few days later, "current and former employees" are saying they aren't as optimistic as Martin.

    [...]

    More specifically, some of those developers directly expressed disappointment after hearing Martin's comments: "I don't agree with Hugo's statement and many who were laid off were upset by those comments and saw it as viewing their contributions as insignificant to the success of our games. I've been a gamer my whole life. If you cut a stat in half everyone would call that nerfed. In truth the Doom team is half here, half thrown away," one of the site's sources said.

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

    • The Guardian UK ☛ AI-altered images on birdwatching forums putting research at risk

      Experts warn increase in enhanced photos on birding platforms creating fake sightings, threatening credibility of tool used by scientists

    • Futurism ☛ "The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum" Will Use AI to De-Age Actors

      “There’s a little bit of de-aging for some of the characters and machine learning is part of the process,” Serkis, who is both directing the new film and reprising his famous role as Gollum, told Variety.

    • Futurism ☛ Spotify Doubles Down on AI Slop As It's Being Flooded With It

      “The low-effort content you see where it’s mass-produced, it’s mass uploaded, it’s AI slop… we’ve removed over 75 million spammy tracks in the last year,” Spotify executive Sam Duboff recently told the Australian Financial Review, adding that AI has “taken existing spam tactics and taken them to a new level.”

    • New York Times ☛ How Google’s A.I. Search Is Imperiling the Open Web

      Now in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web — and may be imperiling it.

      Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with A.I. It introduced AI Mode, which replaces search results of hyperlinks with conversational responses written by Gemini, its A.I. chatbot. Most recently, Google changed its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years so that people could add photos and videos to their queries and assign A.I. “agents” to run searches for them.

    • Ricardo Mendes ☛ A Node on the Web

      I am not going to reconstruct the entire disagreement that prompted this post.

      Some of the public exchanges have been deleted. Other parts happened privately or by email. I have no interest in tracing every sentence, assigning blame line by line, or producing a forensic account of who said what. That would only prolong a conflict that has already taken up too much space.

      But people noticed that I removed my participation from the project, and I have started receiving emails from strangers asking what happened. So I want to explain the broader issue, without turning a personal disagreement into public theatre.

    • Jeffrey Snover ☛ LLM Models Are Bullshit Engines | Jeffrey Snover's blog

      Harry Frankfurt wrote a wonderful essay called On Bullshit. His central move is a distinction most people miss: the difference between a liar and a bullshitter.

      The liar cares about the truth. He has to. Truth is what a liar wants to conceal, and you cannot conceal what you have not first located. Lying is a truth-tracking activity performed in reverse.

      The bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all. Not for it, not against it. Truth is simply not a variable in his function. His goal is to persuade, to impress, to manage how he is perceived. Whether the words happen to be true is incidental.

      That’s an LLM model.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Use Gemini AI to send messages from someone else’s locked phone

      The lock screen is supposed to protect you against the specific threat model of someone taking your phone. The blame for both these holes is on Google giving Gemini access to everything in the hope you’ll use it. At all.

      The lock screen should be a block at operating system level to any application access. But now it isn’t — so we should expect to see more holes like this in the future.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing.

      China's open-weights AI strategy is winning: its companies are taking the lead. America's closed-first, locked-down strategy is doomed to failure - and it could take the US economy down with it.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Inside the horrifying online network where children extort others to commit violence and self-harm

      The 764 network is just one part of a growing online ecosystem that pushes young members into brutal and degrading acts. It has perpetrators and victims in dozens of countries

    • The Guardian UK ☛ The disturbing rise of ‘gooner’ assaults at Dollar Tree stores: ‘They find it funny to degrade women’

      Over the next several weeks and months, MR would learn not only that there had been reports of similar incidents at the same store in the same timeframe – one that had been shared on social media and at least one other she heard about anecdotally from shopping center employees – but that masturbating in front of female customers at branches of Dollar Tree was fast becoming a national phenomenon, a disturbing new form of sexual assault that men were documenting and bragging about in dark corners of the internet.

    • India Times ☛ Meta faces Tennessee trial over allegations Instagram was designed to be addictive

      Meta Platforms faces trial in Tennessee on Monday over the state's claims that Instagram's design is to blame for a youth mental-health crisis, one of several trials in the coming weeks testing allegations that the company's social media platforms were intentionally built to be addictive.

      Tennessee accuses the company of violating the state's ​consumer protection law by knowingly designing a product that drives teens to compulsive use and misleading the public about its safety.

    • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams review – a former disciple unfriends Facebook

      This incident typifies how, in this 400-page memoir of her seven years at Facebook from 2011 – as it mutated from niche social network to global power able to swing elections, target body-shamed teens with beauty products and monetise millions of humans’ hitherto private data – Wynn-Williams had become part of what reads like a diabolical cult run by emotionally stunted men babies, institutionally enabled sexual harassers and hypocritical virtue-signalling narcissists.

    • [Old] NBC ☛ Publisher stands behind ex-Facebook employee's book, rebuffing Meta

      Macmillan, founded in the United Kingdom, is one of the Big Five publishing houses, and it has a history of publishing lightning-rod books, including a memoir by former spy agency contractor Edward Snowden and journalist Michael Wolff’s account of the first Trump White House. Macmillan CEO Jon Yaged has been a vocal critic of book bans passed by state governments.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Fairlife Ransomware Attack Halts U.S. Dairy Production

      The Coca-Cola Company also confirmed in a Form 8-K filing dated July 16, 2026, that fairlife detected the unauthorized access on Thursday. The filing reiterated that the company immediately activated its incident response procedures and business continuity protocols after identifying the intrusion.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Security Week ☛ OpenSSL Silently Fixes 'HollowByte' DoS Vulnerability

      HollowByte existed because older OpenSSL iterations pre-allocated receive buffer sizes based on the incoming message body length declared in the handshake message’s 4-byte header.

      The pre-allocation occurred before any data arrived, and an attacker could send an 11-byte payload to trigger an unvalidated buffer allocation of up to 131 KB.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EDRI ☛ The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel

      The European Commission is currently finalising negotiations with the Trump administration to conclude an “Enhanced Border Security Partnership” (EBSP) Framework Agreement allowing border control authorities to screen travellers against biometric databases and profile them for security concerns. The leaked draft text suggests that the Commission significantly caved in to US’s excessive demands for unfettered information access, exacerbating travel surveillance and putting our fundamental rights at risk.

    • The Record ☛ Flock Safety kills acoustic system designed to detect 'human distress'

      The automated license plate reader company Flock Safety is abandoning plans to sell an acoustic gunshot detection device whose ability to detect screaming and other types of “human distress” sparked an outcry from privacy advocates when it was announced in October.

      Flock quietly revealed on July 10 that it has decided to “remove” the product, according to a company blog post.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ On Flock License Plate Tracking Cameras

      Meanwhile, the police are using (alternate source) the Flock camera network to track people in addition to cars: [...]

  • Confidentiality

    • Chris Fenner ☛ The Design of Everyday Cryptography

      Cryptographers (and Applied Cryptographers) love to define beautiful, robust, complete protocols that solve interesting problems. And if you get enough Cryptographers (or Applied Cryptographers) into the room, they are gonna define protocols that solve a lot of interesting problems.

      And if we’re lucky, at least some of those interesting problems will matter to the security of a system someday.

      Unfortunately, any cryptographic protocol that solves sufficiently many sufficiently interesting problems will be impossible for mere mortals to use safely. It will be the Norman Door of cryptographic protocols.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Robert Reich ☛ Office Hours: What Will Trump Do in Iran NOW?

    How long can the U.S. continue the war? America doesn’t have sufficient munitions to maintain the current bombing campaign indefinitely. World oil reserves are almost depleted, which means that continued blockage of the strait will cause even more economic pain. Oil has again topped $90 a barrel. Plus, there are midterm elections to think about.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • RFERL ☛ 'Sooner Or Later This Problem Will Be On Your Soil': Estonia Pushes Europe To Bar Russian Fighters

      As Russia's war against Ukraine reshapes Europe's security landscape, Estonia remains one of the countries most closely watching the Kremlin's next moves. From Russia's first-ever unannounced live-fire exercise on Lake Peipus on Estonia's border to Tallinn's push for an EU-wide ban on Russian ex-combatants entering the Schengen area, Estonia argues that Europe must prepare not only for military threats but also for hybrid warfare, foreign influence operations, and long-term security risks.

    • New Eastern Europe ☛ "Russia is not keeping up"

      Every new minister needs time to understand the institution, appoint a team and establish effective relationships. Ukraine does not have that time, and constant turnover inevitably disrupts the work of its most important wartime ministry.

      It is questionable whether a successor can match the standard set by Fedorov. He developed a coherent vision for preventing a Russian victory and communicated it effectively to Ukrainian society and NATO partners.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Arizona Luminaria ☛ Judge to decide whether UA whistleblower's case goes to jury trial

    A Pima County Superior Court judge is expected to rule soon about whether a lawsuit brought by a former University of Arizona employee can proceed to trial, leaving unresolved for the moment a legal dispute that offers a window into dysfunction inside the UA’s College of Education in the months before the university’s financial crisis became public.

    The lawsuit was filed by Clarissa Siebern, a former business manager in the UA’s College of Education who says she was fired in October 2023 in retaliation for raising concerns about labor law violations and financial mismanagement — complaints she was making inside the university months before its financial crisis became public.

  • TruthOut ☛ Pentagon Slashed Civilian Harm Reduction Staff and Is Instead Using AI

    When it comes to the Minab massacre, in which the U.S. killed over 150 people with a Tomahawk missile, including over 100 children, those left at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence aren’t even allowed to investigate the incident, as well as other major incidents with civilian casualties, the report says.

  • Wired ☛ The ACLU Is Arming Lawyers to Expose State Surveillance Secrets

    The toolkit, which the group describes as the first of its kind, is built around handcrafted legal motions that, when granted by a judge, will force prosecutors to reveal whether surveillance technology was used against a defendant. It covers an array of technologies, from “stingray” phone trackers and location data sold by commercial brokers to AI-drafted police reports and forensic tools that crack phones and siphon data from car infotainment systems.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ The Electoral Roll Tampering Trump Left Out: His Own

    I’m still reading the document dump Trump released last Thursday. And while a number of commentators are laying out what Trump left out from his descriptions of the documents he declassified or focusing on how badly he cherrypicked things, I haven’t seen anyone mention something really basic: That Trump, himself, has done some of what he warns against.

• Environment

  • Wired ☛ Fans Flocked to World Cup Host Cities—Causing 80 Percent of the Tournament’s Emissions

    Last week, a research team from the University of Cambridge released a new framework in the journal Communications Sustainability to evaluate mega-events from the perspective of “climate viability.” Analyzing the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which ended on Sunday, and Coldplay’s 2024 European tour, the scientists weighed the consumer welfare gains of each event against the emissions costs.

  • Yle ☛ Heavy rainfall cuts off 16 gravel roads across Finland

    He added that many of Finland's gravel roads and drainage systems are decades old and were built for different weather conditions. As this heavy rainfall becomes more frequent, the ageing infrastructure is coming under increasing strain, but the country's vast gravel road network makes large-scale upgrades difficult.

  • BoingBoing ☛ CO2 in human blood is rising with the atmosphere

    The authors stress that the link is only correlational; measurement methods varied from cycle to cycle. But they argue the match is close enough to take seriously, because human physiology evolved under a stable ~300 ppm and is not equipped to handle this much extra CO2.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Will Free Buses Ever Arrive in D.C.?

      If that comes to pass, Lewis George won’t rule out eventually expanding “the universe of people receiving free transit” if and when revenue is available.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Transforming vibrations into clean fuels and chemicals through piezosynthesis

      The team showcased these breakthroughs in two recent studies: one on vibration-driven hydrogen peroxide generation, published in Nature Communications under the title "Bulk polarization field and interfacial electron sink in MXene-modified iodine-doped Bi4Ti3O12 enhance piezocatalytic H2O2 generation"; and another on hydrogen production, published in Advanced Energy Materials under the title "Enhanced Lattice Polarization and Directed Charge Transport Toward Pt Surface Sites Accelerate the Volmer Step in Piezocatalytic H2 Evolution on Co-Doped BiFeO3."

      The studies contribute to the emerging field of piezosynthesis, where mechanical deformation in piezoelectric materials generates charges that can be directed to drive redox reactions in water. A key challenge is preventing the loss of these charges through recombination before they reach surface reaction sites.

    • Terence Eden ☛ Public Transport – Don’t Make Me Think!

      In the last year, I've been through over a dozen cities and used public transport in all of them.

      It is wild just how confusing and complex buying a ticket can be. While some cities obviously take a user-centred approach to ticketing, others appear to take a Kafkaesque delight in a bureaucratic maze of zones, apps, and intricate restrictions.

      One of the seminal texts in computer systems design is "Don't Make Me Think". Every time a service forces the user into making a decision, it is placing a cognitive burden on them. Computers' jobs are to make things easier for us fleshy meatbags.

      There are some intractable problems with navigating unfamiliar spaces (looking at you Kyoto Station!) and a transport authority can't publish signs and make announcements in every conceivable language, but there's one thing they can control - ticketing.

      Let me take you through some of the public transport ticket experiences I had - and explain how easy or hard they were to use.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • TruthOut ☛ Politico Owner Axel Springer Gives Prize to Far Right Billionaire Peter Thiel

    In the past, the company has awarded its prize, which is non-monetary, to other right-wing tech giants like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. The company intends to hold a ceremony for the prize on September 24 in Berlin, and will reportedly include remarks by Bari Weiss, the right-wing, pro-Israel editor-in-chief of CBS News.

    Axel Springer is a Germany-based media conglomerate that owns Politico and Business Insider, as well as The Telegraph in the U.K.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Why the next battle for technology IPOs begins years before companies go public

    What they don’t see are the years leading up to that moment. Increasingly, that’s where the real competition is taking place. As artificial intelligence companies remain private longer, venture-backed firms mature at unprecedented scale, and exchanges compete globally for tomorrow’s market leaders, earning trust years before an initial public offering has become a strategic imperative.

    This month, the New York Stock Exchange quietly took a meaningful step that reflects this shift, naming Brian Baumann to the newly created role of global head of technology ecosystems, while he continues his capital markets responsibilities.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ Moscow’s leaked media playbook: spin Ukraine’s refinery hits as an attack on ‘car owners’

      To distract Russians from the Ukrainian strikes, the document’s authors urged editors and broadcasters to emphasize that “Vladimir Putin has effectively cut Ukraine off from the sea.”

      They also recommended covering Russian military strikes on Ukrainian cities. The document urged pro-Kremlin outlets, for instance, to highlight that overnight on July 19, Russia carried out “the most massive ‘ballistic’ strike on Kyiv.” The strike allegedly destroyed munitions that “the enemy wanted to unleash on Russia.” The document also mentions unspecified “drone warehouses,” as well as “factories producing components for the ‘Flamingo’ and ‘Neptun-MD’ missiles.”

      Journalists were also advised to report that “Ukraine will be left with no warehouses, no fuel, no trains, no substations”: [...]

    • CS Monitor ☛ Why Greeks are picking TikTok over TV for their news

      “On TV, I know the journalists will add commentary, their opinions, or – even more – the political line of their channels,” says the 20-something Ms. Spyropoulou, whose mother wrote for magazines while her father worked for television and radio. “I don’t want to be exposed to each channel’s political propaganda.”

      Instead, she turns to TikTok and Instagram to keep up with events in Greece and the world. Social media is her primary source of information [sic], whether deciding where to go on a Saturday night, whom to vote for, or decoding events in a war zone.

    • The Conversation ☛ Why do some people who trust in science also believe in scientific conspiracy theories?

      In our recent study of 843 US residents, we found that people who picture scientific progress as the work of lone geniuses, and who learn about science mainly from podcasts and documentaries, are markedly more drawn to conspiracy theories – whatever their level of education.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ She Sang And Now Faces 74 Lashes. Iran Sentences Another Female Musician

    Another female singer in Iran has been sentenced to 74 lashes after sharing a music video of herself performing without a head covering. The underground Tehran-based performer, who goes by the name Anita Popist, said she was sentenced for "violating public decency." Iran has been cracking down on female musicians who perform solo in public and violate its strict dress code. The ruling comes a month after singer Parastoo Ahmadi was sentenced to the same punishment.

  • Salon ☛ Her brother was convicted of terrorism over a protest he didn't even attend

    Earlier this year, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines. He was charged with corruptly concealing a document or record, one of the nine people convicted in the prosecution following last year’s noise demonstration at the Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas in northern Texas. Unlike the others convicted in this case, Sanchez-Estrada was not at the protest and maintains he had no role in its planning.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ After "Political Terrorism" Summit, U.S. Names 43 Americans + Groups

    As for who these supposed agents of Cuban influence are, the report is remarkably explicit. It names people like Ben Cohen (of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream fame), Mayors Zohran Mamdani and Karen Bass, media figures like Amy Goodman and Hasan Piker, and organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America and the Amazon Labor Union.

    The implication is clear: Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks there should be a modern-day blacklist of the political left in America. In fact, the report explicitly mentions the “blacklists, McCarthy-era investigations and prosecutions” of the 1950s and their effectiveness at dismembering the Communist Party USA.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Walrus ☛ I’ve Spent Years Covering Wars. I’ve Learned Nobody Knows Anything

    Which raises the more general question of what the hell Canadians are doing in Saudi Arabia generally, including their government. I, at least, could dress in Jeddah the way I do at home. I saw a lot of women in burqas. I saw others who weren’t. Dress requirements are fairly flexible. Saudi women have been permitted to drive since 2018, they’re increasingly present in the workforce, including in management, and they still need the permission of a male relative to marry. It’s a decidedly mixed bag. Returning home, I saw a lot of expressions of concern from friends on social media about whether it’s even decent to treat with such a regime after Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder.

  • CPJ ☛ Zambian journalist detained for audio leak under cyber laws weeks before elections

    “The detention of a journalist under the Cyber Crimes Act for publishing material that appears to be of significant public interest is deeply troubling, particularly with Zambia’s upcoming elections on August 13,” said CPJ Africa Director Angela Quintal. “The public has a right to know about matters that may affect the integrity of the vote. MacPherson Mukuka should be released immediately and any charges that criminalize his legitimate journalistic work should be dropped.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • ANF News ☛ Kurdish faces risk of disappearing in North Kurdistan

    Today, the Kurdish language is experiencing one of the most fragile periods in its history in Northern Kurdistan. The issue has evolved beyond one of assimilation into a situation where the language is increasingly becoming something that is no longer used in everyday life. Consecutive surveys conducted between 2020 and 2026 paint an increasingly pessimistic picture each year. The data clearly show that Kurdish is in danger of disappearing from daily life even within its own homeland.

    This article examines the language's trajectory in the home, on the streets, in schools, and across generations, as well as the social and political causes behind this decline and the risks facing both the Kurdish people and the Kurdish political movement if the trend is not reversed.

  • New Yorker ☛ Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die

    The linguist David Crystal, in his indispensable scholarly survey “Language Death,” has a term for the sort of thing that happened to Smith Galer and her dialët: cultural assimilation. The pressure to assimilate linguistically can be, he points out, either “top down” (laws, incentives) or “bottom up” (fashion, peer pressure). But it is hard even for dispassionate surveys to avoid lapsing into an elegiac mode in which these important distinctions are flattened into a single tragedy. It is one thing to be indignant about a Kenyan schoolchild asked to wear a sign reading “I AM A DONKEY” for speaking Kikuyu. But how should we feel about a Kichwa speaker who moves to Lima and starts living her life in Spanish in response to the demands of the labor market, especially when the Kichwa speaker doesn’t see the switch as involving any great loss?

  • MinnPost ☛ DACA renewal costly for single mothers

    With no savings, she had to decide between paying her rent to keep her baby and her 5-year-old housed, or paying the application fee — $555 — plus nearly $800 in attorneys fees she usually pays to ensure the application is done correctly. She chose rent.

    But without her work authorization, Alexa can’t find a better job or regain any stability. She picks up any odd job that comes her way — cleaning hotel rooms, cooking and selling food — to gather up enough to renew her permit.

  • Techdirt ☛ Attempted Murder Charges Dropped After Bystander Recordings Expose ICE Officer’s Lies

    Six months later, the losing streak created by unforced (but deliberate) “errors” continued. Federal immigration officers just couldn’t stop lying, forcing DOJ prosecutors to voluntarily dismiss a bunch of felony assault cases that were completely reliant on statements made by officers who were later shown to be lying.

    Here’s another case that’s hit a dead end because an ICE officer lied and an ICE supervisor decided to pass on these lies to a federal prosecutor. (h/t Aaron Reichlin-Melnick)

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ AI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring

    Researchers at Princeton University and the University of Chicago ran LLMs, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, through a simulated hiring game, adapted from a psychology study that explored how humans can form stereotypes. Each model was told it had been hired as a consultant by the mayor of a fictional city and was then asked to help hire people for 20 jobs, including doctors, lawyers, child-care aides, and janitors. Candidates came from four fictional ethnic groups: Tufa, Aima, Reku, and Weki.

  • Site36 ☛ Police was called to assist paramedics in Cologne – and then brutalized a psychiatric patient into a coma

    “Why should I come out? Why do I have to open the door? Can you please answer me before you use force?”, Pedro Corona asked repeatedly, nervously but politely, through the closed door of his one-room flat in the German city Cologne-Deutz on 8 April. Outside stood police officers and accompanying fire brigade paramedics, who had been called by friends – Corona was in the midst of a psychiatric crisis.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • RIPE ☛ Who's Running All Those Tiny RPKI Servers?

    Who runs the hidden infrastructure behind secure Internet routing? An internship report from SIDN Labs looks beyond the RIRs at the independently operated RPKI publication servers helping to secure BGP.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Techdirt ☛ Brendan Carr Is Illegally Dismantling U.S. Media Consolidation Law

    Current laws (remember those?) prohibit any single local broadcast news company from serving more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. The original (good) idea was that this helped protect opinion diversity and competition in the local broadcast news space. Republicans don’t like that, because they want to replace all journalism with right-wing and oligarch friendly propaganda.

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Indonesia Proposes Strict AI Regulations to Compensate Humans

      Indonesia is proposing a landmark copyright bill that could make the country the first in Southeast Asia to explicitly regulate AI in its copyright framework.

      The proposed legislation would grant copyright protection to AI-assisted works requiring human contribution, ban AI imitation of a creator’s distinct style, and mandate disclosure of AI use in content. Incredibly, it would also require tech platforms to compensate publishers for content used in AI training and aggregation, with strict penalties for non-compliance.

    • The Verge ☛ Here are the 30,000 songs Sony is suing Udio’s AI music generator over

      Sony has now made the more than 30,000 songs the subject of its new lawsuit, which the company says it could expand. It claims Udio “admitted that its generative AI models were ‘constructed by showing the program a vast amount of different kinds of sound recordings,’” including from YouTube. UMG and Warner Music Group have since settled with Udio and are now partnering with the company as the music industry embraces AI.