Leftovers

• Sam Smith ☛ Hong Kong at Night

  I bought a mini tripod while I was in Hong Kong, but only after I’d taken most of these photos so for those I had to improvise ways to stabalise the camera well enough for a long exposure. I had to find walls or sometimes bins on which I could rest my camera, using my rucksack to angle the camera correctly. The mini tripod I bought didn’t come with a tripod head, so even once I had that it was still awkward.

• Robert Birming ☛ Re: Who would ever read this?

  For me, writing in public adds more reflection to the words. I can sit for a good while in front of a blank screen, not writing a single letter, just contemplating how to put words on what I'm feeling.

• Mandy Brown ☛ The open universe - A Working Library

  But, she continues, “from what is one escaping, and to what?”

• Bryce Kerley ☛ Flamin’ Hot Aerochrome

  Shot with a yellow filter (that removes blue), red in the scene becomes green, green in the scene becomes blue, and infrared in the scene becomes a vivid red. It’s a cool effect, but since the film got discontinued over fifteen years ago, it’s not ten bucks a shot cool.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Syria's ancient sites face widespread looting and systematic bulldozing, satellite images reveal

    A new Dartmouth study finds that many of Syria's archaeological sites were damaged not only by looting but also, in areas occupied by the Turkish military, by systematic bulldozing. The findings are published in the journal Heritage.

    Using satellite imagery from Google Earth and the European Space Agency's Pleiades program, researchers analyzed looting and damage at 200 sites throughout Syria.

    They classified the damage into four categories: "traditional looting," in which individual holes were excavated at a site; "mechanized looting" by bulldozer; "militarization," in which dugouts and other features were installed; and "construction or encampments," including temporary shelters used by refugees.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Are Weather Forecasts Less Accurate? Trump May Be to Blame

    Stensrud says that a lot of institutional knowledge goes into creating accurate weather forecasts, not just data. If you fire a lot of people who have that knowledge, forecasts will be worse.

  • Medievalists.net ☛ Medieval Stamp Found in Denmark Could Reveal Where Sutton Hoo Helmet Was Made

    Peter Pentz, a curator at the museum, examined the stamp and compared its mounted-warrior design with the images found on the Sutton Hoo helmet and comparable Swedish objects. His analysis suggests that the newly discovered Danish motif is considerably closer to the Sutton Hoo design than the surviving Swedish examples.

• Career/Education

  • Pro Publica ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] How to Research Private Schools Like an Investigative Reporter

  • Terence Eden ☛ Some Quick Thoughts on EMF Camp 2026

    Everyone has a different EMF. I mostly went to talks and looked at cool art. Some people were focussed on playing all the games. Some gorgeous people were just there to strut about in their amazing costumes. A few people delighted in showing off all their cool toys. It really is about seven festivals in one. I'm still bemused by some of the things - I've no idea what a challenge coin is, I'm hazy about how the various puzzles work, I didn't know about the cool musicians until it was too late.

  • Lalit Maganti ☛ How I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer

    “How do you find problems worth working on?” a senior engineer I mentor asked me recently. He’s trying to make the jump to staff engineer and realized that the role isn’t just about doing the work he’s assigned. He also needs to get involved in figuring out what his team and org should be building.

    Someone else had suggested blocking out time in his calendar to think about the bigger picture. He’d tried that, but hadn’t found it productive, so he asked if I had any alternatives.

  • Gabriel ☛ What do you want to be when you grow up?

    So, do you remember what you wanted to be when you grew up, as a kid?

  • Dhamma Talks ☛ Sn 2:4 Protection

    “Not consorting with fools,

    consorting with the wise,

    paying homage to those worthy of homage:

    This is the highest protection.

  • Chuck Carroll ☛ How to Pass the CCNA

    One of the most challenging things about the CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) exam isn't subnetting, spanning-tree, routing protocols, ACLs, or calculating longest prefix match. The most challenging thing is figuring out what study resources to use. There's a ridiculous amount of CCNA study material available out there and all of them claim to be the best. I spent far too much time trying to find the best and least complicated material. I'd spend time working through a resource and either discover quickly or far too late that the material isn't great. In retrospect I had far better options right under my nose. Some resources are better than others, but it's important to really narrow down and simplify the resources to use and create a study strategy for yourself. I've wasted more time than I care to admit on terrible resources or looking for a shortcut.

  • Isaac Van Doren ☛ Software Should Work Worked

    During most conference talks there's a large contingent of attendees who opt to skip the session and chat instead. Talking with other attendees is a great use of time at a conference, but as the organizer I was naturally a bit worried about this: what if half of the attendees skip the talks and the energy isn't there? Much to my surprise, almost everyone watched every talk! Further, I'm used to looking around during conference talks and seeing many attendees buried in their laptops or phones, daydreaming, or just ready for the talk to be over. Not so at SSW. Every time I turned around to look at the crowd I was pleasantly surprised; everyone was paying attention!

• Hardware

  • Viktor Löfgren ☛ Your harddrive is probably full

    Your harddrive is probably pretty full too. Maybe not as crammed, but odds are it’s probably closer to full than empty. I ran a poll on mastodon and approximately half of the respondents, counting 81 people in total, had a harddrive that was more than 75% full.

  • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Organ Pedals for Drumming

    I find this fascinating. The physical feel of organ pedals is very different from the kick drum pedals I play, much more keyboard-like, which means the technique is totally different. But it clearly works well, and Keller is able to play something musical, coherent, and (despite having only two feet!) very full. When I imagine playing this interface I expect I'd miss the rebound of my pedals (which feels a lot like stamping my foot on the floor, where all of this came from), and needing to move around horizontally would take some getting used to. On the other hand, it would be amazing to have the broader palette, with 17 different (virtual) drums to choose from!

  • Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: Pens, Ross!

    I've got this little pen pouch I keep in my bag. It makes me disproportionately happy, even though I don't really write that much.

  • David Revoy ☛ XpPen Artist Pro 27 Gen2 - review on GNU/Linux - David Revoy

    This article accompanies my video review of the XpPen Artist Pro 27 (gen2), a large-sized 27" display drawing tablet. The video provides my in-depth look at the device's hardware. This blog post, on the other hand, focuses on the information and technical aspects of installing and configuring the device on a GNU/Linux operating system.

  • University of Toronto ☛ How you wind up with switches above your office's false ceiling

    As you might expect, the university has any number of old buildings. When many of these buildings were built or, more likely, renovated for twisted pair Ethernet wiring, wiring and ports and so on were expensive and no one really foresaw how pervasive and popular this 'computer networking' thing would get. The result is that these buildings were often initially wired for a much lower port density than they turned out to need later. In the era of 100 MBit networking, this lead to some significant hacks such as Ethernet splitters, but these hacks can't be used if you need 1G Ethernet (and in practice you do these days).

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Memory-level parallelism: AMD is the king

    When your program asks for memory that is not in cache, the processor has to go to RAM. That trip costs on the order of 100 nanoseconds. On a 3 GHz core, that is about 300 cycles of doing nothing.

    Memory latency has not improved in ten years. The 2016 Broadwell answers a random access in 100 ns. The 2025 Turin, with DDR5-6400 and every advantage of a decade of progress, takes 140 ns. It got worse.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ Watching Too Much TV May Actually Rot Your Brain After All, Study Finds

    When it comes to brain health specifically, a new study suggests that spending hours glued to the TV may have a negative effect that's not seen when the same amount of time is spent sitting at a desk solving problems, answering emails, or otherwise putting your gray matter to work.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Security flaw in Vatican’s ‘Click to Pray’ app leaves over 700,000 global users exposed — app has been leaking user data for over six months and still does

    Click To Pray, the official prayer app of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network, was found to have zero security by a security researcher. According to BobDaHacker, they discovered in January 2026 that the Vatican-linked app had zero security, allowing anyone to access user data through the API endpoint by simply typing in user IDs. They emailed nine individuals about the vulnerabilities as soon as they discovered them but received no responses and saw no changes for six months.

  • John D Cook ☛ Excel column numbering

    There’s a name for this kind of number system: bijective base 26. The concept extends generally to bijective base b for any positive integer b. The idea is ancient, but the name was coined recently. It has also been called k-adic numbering. For most of history it didn’t have a name.

    The motivation behind the name bijective base b is that there is a bijection (a one-to-one correspondence) between these symbols and positive integers; there’s no possibility of leading zeros that would keep the mapping from being a bijection, unlike say 7 and 07 representing the same number.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ E-wasteful e-ID

    There is zero overlap between these two categories; i.e. I do not own one single device that has both appstore and NFC. (Beyond the six that have either, I have a couple of devices with neither.)

    The Swedish police’s new electronic ID that’s about to launch requires both.

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

    • 2026-07-19 [Older] Apple Books and Amazon Are Lousy With AI-Generated Books Ripping Off Legitimate Authors

    • Wired ☛ The OpenAI Models That [Breached] Hugging Face Were ‘Active on the Internet’ for Days

      Two of OpenAI’s cybersecurity-focused models broke out of a testing sandbox this week and went on to [breach] the AI research platform Hugging Face in an effort to solve a security benchmark test. Plus, researchers this week shed light on newly identified malware that is capitalizing on blind spots in AI software development infrastructure to grab logins and other sensitive data, even causing destruction to victims’ target files and systems.

    • Android Police ☛ I'm not letting Claude touch my passwords, no matter how safe Anthropic claims it is

      I've accepted that artificial intelligence is the future. What concerns me is how companies are turning my vulnerability into a product.

      It makes me nostalgic for a time when advice around security methods was much simpler.

      After the Conficker worm infected millions of computers in 2009, schools, governments, and even parents warned against sharing passwords.

      So, allowing artificial intelligence to sign in to my accounts wasn't on my 2026 bingo card. Here's why it scares me.

    • Debian ☛ General Resolution: LLM usage in Debian

      Debian has a well-earned reputation for stability. This stability is crucial to Debian's position in the free software ecosystem. It is our belief that widespread LLM usage comes from the "move fast, and break things" attitude that, while common in many parts of this industry, is contrary to what makes Debian Debian, and is inappropriate for Debian contributors.

      In practical terms, LLM usage raises the following concerns: [...]

      [...]

      In the interest of not eroding Debian's reputation or further damaging the community, LLM-assisted contributions should be prohibited from inclusion in Debian.

    • The Tyee ☛ Cory Doctorow Predicts the AI Bubble Will Burst | The Tyee

      In tech-bro dialect, a centaur is a human assisted by a machine, such a motorist or a user of hearing aids.

      “A reverse centaur,” Cory Doctorow tells us, “is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine,” like users of social media providing themselves as targets for advertisers.

      In his latest book, the Toronto-born science fiction author and tech critic argues that artificial intelligence will make us all reverse centaurs, or assistants to machines, if it succeeds.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Atlantic ☛ Even Trump Can’t Spin This One

      That era may be coming to a close, in large part because of the way he and his administration have bungled the war in Iran. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. His social-media posts, which once acted as a de facto assignment editor for the mainstream media, no longer command the same attention or respect. Now, interspersed with AI slop and inexplicable middle-of-the-night reposting binges, Trump’s Truth Social screeds sound more like the fevered ramblings of a radicalized Facebook uncle. For the past five months, he’s been trying to convince the American public (or at least his Truth Social followers) that the war is over, or ending, or a rousing success. His administration is even retroactively changing on the Pentagon’s website the number of American service members who have died in the conflict. But no one seems to be falling for it. His posts don’t have the juice. His alternate universe is no match for the harsh reality of war.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Every App a TikTok Clone

      Alison also said users will now be able to verify their accounts with a selfie, a free service it is calling Facebook Verified, which is not to be confused with its paid Meta Verified feature.

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ Anti-smartphone books

      Screens aren’t the problem. Or screens aren’t the only problem. The gilded pittrap of dark pattern algo silo vendor lock-in Huis Clos is the problem. Books that fall short of condemning that whole broken infernal machine are better used as bricks thrown through the glass labyrinth.

    • Derek Kędziora ☛ The company you keep

      While none of the groups I hang around online are anything like those mentioned in the two articles I linked to above, a lot of the loudest voices in many groups are, well, fools. I don’t mean this is some snobby sense. It’s just that even the halfway decent subreddits and the like are filled with people that I’d probably never want to be around in real life. So why spend so much time letting their thoughts become mine?

    • The Atlantic ☛ Why Would Meta Download So Much Porn?

      Strike 3, the parent company of Vixen Media Group, a prolific producer of adult films, is suing Meta for allegedly downloading 2,973 of its copyrighted videos. But in its efforts to collect evidence about these purported downloads, Strike 3 also captured information relating to many other files that Meta may have acquired over the course of two years: They include images from “Celebgate,” a 2014 [breach] that resulted in the leak of private photos belonging to Jennifer Lawrence, Kirsten Dunst, and others, plus several collections of deepfake celebrity porn featuring the faces of Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, Elizabeth Olsen, Gal Gadot, and others.

      Strike 3’s file-transfer lists include ordinary movies and TV shows, alongside dozens of videos from GirlsDoPorn, which was shut down after six people associated with the site were charged with sex trafficking. Meta allegedly downloaded several individual episodes from the website and two “GirlsDoPorn MegaPack” archives. Strike 3 also presents evidence that Meta made some content publicly available in addition to downloading it.

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] CISA Adds Four Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Tycon Systems TPDIN-Monitor-WEB2

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Siemens RUGGEDCOM APE1808 with Palo Alto Networks Virtual NGFW

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Siemens Opcenter X

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Siemens SIDIS Secured SmartPlug

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Siemens IAM Client

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Siemens CADRA

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Services Platform

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Rockwell Automation 1718-AENTR/1719-AENTR

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Rockwell Automation 1734 POINT I/O

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-21 [Older] Rockwell Automation Studio 5000 Logix Designer

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] CISA Adds Three Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] Rockwell Automation Arena

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] Rockwell Automation 1756-EN2, 1756-EN3, and 1756-ENBT

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] NASA Core Flight System (cFS) Health & Safety (HS) Application

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] AutomationDirect Productivity Suite

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] Siemens SICAM 8

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] Rockwell Automation CompactLogix, ControlLogix, Compact GuardLogix and GuardLogix

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] SALTO ProAccess Space

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] Rockwell Automation Flex 5000 Adapter

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk DataMosaix

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-15 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • GnuPG ☛ QuickerHash

      A friend of mine contributes to online security by training journalists, human rights workers, political organizers, and more in effective digital security. A couple of weeks ago he lamented to me the moment he tries to teach people how to use hash algorithms to verify downloads, half the people get scared because they're unaccustomed to working with terminals and they're afraid of breaking things.

      On the GUI front things are also pretty bad. There are ways built into each OS to do hashes, but it usually involves right-clicks, large context menus, and other such. His students need something simpler.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Verge ☛ After backlash, Meta pauses plan to ‘rate limit’ its smart glasses

      The most ridiculous part of Meta’s original plan was the “rate limits.” Meta made it sound like it needed to charge a subscription for Conversation Focus because running that service had an incremental cost, to the point that even paid subscribers would only get 15 hours of Conversation Focus per month. That was easy to disprove: When I disconnected my own Meta Ray-Bans from the internet, the feature kept on working.

      But Meta isn’t actually promising to abandon those “rate limits.”

    • The Verge ☛ Meta just created a moderation nightmare for its smart glasses

      Meta’s smart glasses have been a PR headache for the company. Public backlash has been swift, and fierce; people are concerned about the erosion of privacy and expansion of surveillance. Some especially bad actors are using the glasses to film themselves “pranking” random strangers. Women have become unsuspecting social media content for men filming themselves hitting on them without their knowledge. When your product is being referred to as “pervert glasses,” you have a problem on your hands.

    • Macworld ☛ Apple won the smartwatch war. Now what?

      Over time, the usage patterns of Apple Watch buyers revealed what people really wanted. Most users didn’t care about the luxury factor, nor did they want to replace their smartphones entirely. They simply wanted something to do basic things like check notifications and other quick updates without pulling out their phone.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Wired ☛ Chinese Companies Are Selling Vapes With Chemicals Potentially More Potent Than Nicotine

    “This is just like whack-a-mole, these companies will do everything they can to circumvent regulation,” says Robert Jackler, an emeritus professor of head and neck surgery at Stanford University and the founder of an interdisciplinary research group studying the impacts of tobacco advertising.

    The effects of nicotine analogs on humans haven't been extensively researched, but animal studies have found that one of the most popular variants, 6-methyl-nicotine, could be more potent and addictive than regular nicotine. Vapes containing nicotine analogs may also expose users to other mysterious chemicals. One 2024 study found that some manufacturers were selling nicotine analog vapes that contained additional unlabeled ingredients, including artificial sweeteners and cooling agents with unknown inhalation risks. “What's on the label has very little relationship to what's in it,” says Jackler.

  • JURIST ☛ EU Commission finds TikTok failed to protect minors’ privacy under Digital Services Act

    The findings concern Article 28(1) of the Digital Services Act, which requires platforms accessible to minors to provide a high level of privacy, safety and security. The commission said TikTok should make minors’ content visible by default only to users they have accepted. It also said content from minors should not be accessible outside the platform or promoted through the “For You” feed. The commission relied on TikTok’s interface, internal documents and company data, as well as interviews with law enforcement officials and experts in child protection, abuse and neuropsychology.

  • European Commission ☛ Commission preliminary finds TikTok in breach of Digital Services Act

    Even when minors choose private accounts, their accounts can be easily found through the ‘following' and ‘followers' lists of other users, and their profile photos remain accessible to anyone, including users without a TikTok account. TikTok's settings continue to expose them to risks – including unwanted contact, cyberbullying, or predatory behaviour.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • TruthOut ☛ Advocates Sue Trump Administration Over Secret Dossiers on ICE Watchers

    A coalition of privacy and civil liberties advocates filed a federal lawsuit Friday accusing the Trump administration of secretly collecting and keeping personal information about people who monitor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, arguing that the practice violates federal privacy law and threatens constitutionally protected speech and association.

    The lawsuit — filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia — was brought by individuals and advocacy groups represented by Democracy Forward.

• Environment

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ U.S. Firefighting Resources Are Already Maxed Out — And It’s Only July

    The country is using nearly all of its wildfire fighting resources far earlier in the season than usual, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center. On July 18, the country reached “Preparedness Level 5” status, the highest possible level on a scale that measures how much wildfires are taxing resources.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ 'I can't work in the farce of climate change cruise tourism anymore': Why Antarctic guides quit their dream jobs

    But for some guides, like those we quote in this article, that privilege slowly became impossible to reconcile with their beliefs. Watching climate change unfold while helping thousands more visitors reach the continent eventually led them to leave the jobs they'd once dreamed of.

    Antarctic tourism is growing fast, with over 120,000 visits in 2025–26 and up to 450,000 expected each summer within a decade. Our new study reveals how Antarctic tour guides grapple with the dilemma at the heart of their work—bringing more and more people to an ecologically vulnerable area and helping cause some of the greatest CO₂ emissions of any form of tourism.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ This is fine.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Conversation ☛ A 1952 Pan Am plane crash transformed passenger safety procedures – a former airline pilot explains how

      Remarkably, all 69 people on board survived the impact. What killed 52 of them was what happened afterwards.

      The airframe broke apart and began to sink, and in the ensuing chaos, many passengers refused the captain’s order to get out, remaining buckled into their seats. Investigators recorded drowning as the cause for almost all of the deaths.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Mangroves Are Key to Coastal Ecosystems. See 20 Breathtaking Photos That Reveal How the Trees Support Wildlife and Face Threats

      “They play a far more important role in our lives than you may think,” filmmaker Leo Thom says in a statement. With such a limited range, mangroves are out of reach to many people. But photography can bring them up close.

    • Doug Jones ☛ Iceland

      We traveled to Iceland for my sister-in-law’s wedding, congrats Ginny & McKenzie! I wanted to share a few photos from our time on the island.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Talking Again With Gabriel Zucman

    In my writing about wealth concentration and oligarchy, I <del>steal a lot from</del> lean heavily on the truly work of Gabriel Zucman, who is a hugely important researcher (winner of the 2023 Clark Medal) who is also starting to play a major role in policy. I’ve talked to him before, but this seemed like a good time to bring him back.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Doomsday Moat

    What OpenAI receives is more valuable than the equity it gives away. The federal government becomes a shareholder in the company’s valuation, a political participant in its continued solvency, and a beneficiary of the future returns OpenAI has promised but has not yet produced. A restriction that reduces OpenAI’s revenue would then reduce the value of a public asset. A competitor that displaces OpenAI would threaten an investment notionally held on behalf of every American. The regulator would acquire a financial interest in the regulated company before anyone had established that the company could earn returns commensurate with its valuation. This is not a conventional bailout. It is the architecture of a future bailout assembled in advance.

  • Richard Beck ☛ People of the Lie - Experimental Theology with Richard Beck

    The status of the nation, its heroic narrative, confers status on its citizens. And if you don’t have a lot going for you, you can cling to that. You can raise the flag. No one can demean or shame you, because you’re an American.

    This psychological exchange is the neurotic appeal of nationalism. And for a lot of people, especially those who feel invisible, disrespected, or losing, the exchange works. You can wrap yourself in the flag and borrow significance.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Centrica fraud exposed: worse than Palestine Action 'terrorists' with cardboard placards

    If you put down the newspaper, turn off your phone and go out and speak to people in the street you hear a completely different story: the cost of living crisis.

    During the Irish elections, I tried to draw attention to the outrageous case of a British energy company starting a law suit in the Dublin Circuit Court to claim €17,000 in "estimated" electricity charges for a house that had been unoccupied and disconnected due to a fire.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Nate Silver discovers the educated poor

    My son Daniel points me to a piece by Nate Silver which announces the discovery that highly educated workers with low or precarious income are the natural constituency of the Democratic Socialists of America. We’ve been over this at length at CT, starting as far back as 2012 (and it wasn’t new then). Given that Silver treats the question as new, I thought it might be useful to restate the basic points from this discussion.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • HyperAllergic ☛ Artist’s Planned Monument to Charlie Kirk Gets Trolled Online

    Kirk's death punctured the façade of the First Amendment as hundreds of people who celebrated or meme-d the incident, or simply made posts critical of Kirk's ideologies, were censored, doxxed, or professionally penalized. Among them was Karen Leader, a tenured associate professor of art history at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) who was placed on leave last year for reposting content criticizing Kirk's views.

  • The Tyee ☛ A Banned Book Club Blooms in Alberta | The Tyee

    According to the freedom of expression advocacy group PEN America, the number of book censorship challenges in the United States has almost tripled since 2021. Although Albertans can access the titles removed from school shelves at most public libraries in the prairie province, LitResistance allows Albertans to safeguard the diverse voices censors are trying to silence.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Independent UK ☛ Trump smiles and shrugs after Epstein reporters he sued for $10B win awards for exposing birthday card

    President Donald Trump stood by awkwardly at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as reporters for The Wall Street Journal won awards for their coverage of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that inspired the president to launch an unsuccessful $10 billion defamation lawsuit last year.

    WSJ reporters were honored multiple times during Friday’s dinner. The president often shrugged or smiled as their reporting was described, and he shook some of the winners’ hands.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • RFA ☛ Explained: China’s ‘ethnic unity and progress promotion’ law

    Second, it changes the legal framework around language. Under Article 15, Mandarin is given priority in education and government affairs. While the law says minority languages are “respected and protected,” it also states that when Mandarin and minority languages are used together, Mandarin should take priority in position and order.

    Third, it expands state oversight of religion. Article 46 requires religious groups, religious schools, and places of worship to promote a sense of community for the Chinese nation, follow the policy of “Sinicization of religion,” and guide religious activities to adapt to socialist society. Critics say this could further increase state control over religious practices, including Tibetan Buddhism.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ India’s “Cockroach” Protest Movement Faces State Repression

    The sit-in has transformed into one of India’s largest youth-led protest movements in recent years. Outrage over alleged examination paper leaks has broadened into a wider campaign against unemployment, government accountability, and what protesters described as a shrinking space for democratic dissent.

  • International Business Times ☛ 9/11 Families Want Zohran Mamdani Barred From 25th Anniversary Ceremony Over Past Remarks

    'Our objection is based on his public record — his failure to meaningfully acknowledge the horror of that day, and his employment of, support for, or association with individuals who have minimized 9/11, defended terrorists, or even suggested America 'deserved' the attacks,' Galante noted, adding that 11 September 'is sacred to us.'

    'It is not political, and it is not a platform for those connected to such views. His presence would be deeply hurtful and inappropriate — like an unwelcome guest at a deeply personal ceremony.'

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Prosecuted for using a duress code

    US government targets [sic] Cop City protester over phone operating system: [...]

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Apple’s robo-repo (25 Jul 2026)

    In other words: because poor people have a higher likelihood of defaulting, their loans come with higher interest rates and worse terms. Debt is steeply regressive: the less money you have, the more you're expected to pay. The industry term for this is the "risk premium": the riskier a loan is, the more it costs the borrower.

    Lenders are always seeking the highest possible return on their loan-books, which makes that "risk premium" awfully tempting. Why loan $1m to Elon Musk at 0.5% interest when you can make 10,000 $100 payday loans to non-union Tesla workers on food stamps at 1,000% interest?

  • BoingBoing ☛ Man prosecuted after GrapheneOS duress password wipes phone

    Cop City protester Samuel Tunick was forced to turn over his password during a warrantless search. Tunick gave them his duress password, and Federal agents unknowingly wiped his phone. Prosecutors are going to try to persuade a court that deleting data to prevent a warrantless seizure is a crime.

  • TechCrunch ☛ US accuses American of allegedly wiping his phone using a 'duress' password during border search

    The case centers on a feature included in GrapheneOS, a custom Android operating system that runs in place of the software on most modern Google Pixel devices. Tunick’s attorneys confirmed GrapheneOS was running on his phone.

    The software feature allows the device owner to set a passcode that deliberately wipes the contents of that device if entered instead of the user’s unlock passcode.

    Tunick’s case also raises ongoing questions about what constitutional rights can be invoked at the border, which the U.S. government has long asserted is not U.S. soil until a person is authorized to enter.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ US government targets Cop City protester over phone operating system

    The case, which had its first hearing on Monday, centers on a little-known US federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.

    Experts said it may be the first time the law has been aimed at the operating system, which works on Google Pixel phones, and expressed concerns about a technology created for privacy and security being used to criminalize protesters.

    [...]

    Tunick asked four times during the interrogation to speak with a lawyer, but was rebuffed each time, according to courtroom testimony. Additionally, the agents produced no warrant and did not read Tunick his rights.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ SF Officials Will Arrest You for Partying in SoMa, Also Really Want You to Come Party in SoMa

    That first press release is some copaganda defending SFPD's insanely dispropotionate and violent actions during Pride. Mission Local: [...]

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] The Cloud Cartel Has Created a Global Rentier Economy

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Google Fined €890 Million For Digital Markets Act Breaches

    According to the Commission, Google gives its own services greater prominence by placing them at the top of search results or displaying them with enhanced visuals and filters. The Commission said similar third-party services do not receive the same level of prominence.

    The Commission’s decision requires Google to treat third-party services featured in its search results in a fair and non-discriminatory manner compared with its own services.

  • European Commission ☛ Commission fines Google €890 million for breaches of the Digital Markets Act

    Under the DMA, gatekeepers must not treat their own services more favourably in ranking than third-party services. They have to apply transparent, fair and non-discriminatory conditions to such ranking.

    The Commission found that Google gives preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping, hotels, transport and sports results, over those of third parties in Google Search, thereby breaching its obligations under the DMA.

    Google displays its own services more prominently in search results, including at the top of the search results page or by using enhanced visuals and filters, while similar third-party services do not have the same prominence.

  • JURIST ☛ European Commission fines Google $1 billion over breaches of Digital Markets Act

    The DMA came into force in November 2022, and regulates the EU’s digital markets. The DMA aims to ensure that digital markets are contestable and fair by regulating “gatekeepers”, or large digital platforms such as online search engines and app stores. Google was designated as a “gatekeeper” in 2023, and the EC opened an investigation into its suspected non-compliance in 2024.

    The EC found that Google was “self-preferencing,” or giving “preferential treatment to its own services, including shopping,” “hotels” and “transport,” over third parties.

  • NL Times ☛ Europe slaps Google with €890 mil. fine for prioritizing own services in search results

    According to the European Commission, Google gives preferential treatment to its own services over those of third parties in Google Search, thereby breaching its obligations under the DMA. “Google displays its own services more prominently in search results, including at the top of the search results page or by using enhanced visuals and filters, while similar third-party services do not have the same prominence.”

    The DMA also states that app developers that distribute their apps via Google Play must be able to inform consumers of alternative offers free of charge, and to direct them to those offers on websites or alternative app stores, for example.

  • Patents

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Mexico can turn USMCA pressure into an industrial opportunity

      Now that USMCA revision discussions are underway, however, the US appears to be seeking stricter rules of origin across several sectors, including higher regional value content (RVC) requirements in autos and beyond, as part of an effort to boost US manufacturing and reduce dependence on Asia.

  • Copyrights

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-07-19 [Older] The CJEU Anne Frank judgment and its broader implications (including for the internet and, obviously, AI too)