Leftovers

• Jay Little ☛ Welcome to the Age of Irrationality

  Sometime over the last weekend I was confronted with a thought that hadn’t occurred to me before. This thought might’ve been the missing piece of the puzzle that prevented me from being able to effectively grapple with the ongoing decay of the tech industry. So what was the thought? It was simple: The presence of rationality in our industry is no longer guaranteed.

  Why is that important? Well it’s important because most of my opinion pieces, regardless of how you consume it or where you get it, rely heavily on the premise that regardless of whatever insane off the wall shit is happening right now, eventually the system will correct the issue because the system itself tends to move towards a more rational state over time. But what if that is no longer true? How does that change things?

• Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti ☛ Advice for tech writers on a job hunt in the AI age

  Hope, I think, looks less like a pill you swallow (or a book you read, or a course you take) and more like a LEGO set you have to assemble patiently. All the pieces are in there, along with a picture on the front of what you might build, but nobody hands you the finished thing. At some point you’ll swear a piece is missing. You put it together afternoon by afternoon: a coffee chat here, a side project there, a call that goes nowhere but teaches you something anyway.

  Hope rarely comes out looking exactly like the box. Build it anyway. My friend is still snapping pieces together. It’s fine.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Enshittification and Reverse Centaurs go global (29 Jul 2026)

  If your preferred language isn't on the list, I apologize. Translation deals are primarily "pull," not "push" – that is to say, a foreign publisher contacts my publisher and asks for the rights (though my publisher does market the rights and attends all the book fairs where these deals are often made).

  The upshot here is that I am not really in a position to do more than has already been done to get an edition published in your preferred language or territory. If you happen to have a favorite local publisher, you could always ask them if they would like to get in touch with Farrar, Straus and Giroux foreign rights team to secure a license.

• Chris Glass ☛ Saturday night at a laundromat

  There was no more time for delay, I found a 24 hour laundromat and loaded up a contractor trash bag. I contend the best time to hit a laundromat is late in the evening. Thinner crowds make for more washer and dryer availability.

• Chi Señires ☛ been a while; just some updates

  Been making a bunch of updates in the blog. Just gonna section them out since I can and I want to.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Confessions of an eclipse photographer: shooting my first ring of fire eclipse and discovering that photographing from a Caribbean cruise ship is much harder than it looks!

    I have photographed solar eclipses seven times over the last 47 years, and in the first part of this series I described my first efforts in the pre-[Internet] era – and the hard lessons that you learn when chasing the shadow of an eclipse. The most important one is that even with the best planning, you can never to be certain to avoid clouds obliterating your view!

  • Philip Zucker ☛ Finite Algebraic Effects as dicts and such | Hey There Buddo!

    Algebraic effects are a style / mathematical framework for modelling mutation, search, and some other things. They are another attempt to bridge the gap between mathy looking stuff and our crass world of mud and time.

    I think the main point of such endeavors to me is [...]

  • John D Cook ☛ Efficient code for inverting the (log) gamma function

    A couple years ago I wrote about how to compute the inverse of factorial. I used that code in writing the previous post because the post required solving the equation

    ⌊log2(n!)⌋ ≥ b

    given b. That is, given a number of bits b, find the smallest value of n such that n! ≥ 2b.

  • Wired ☛ An Extreme Solar Storm May Be Even More Devastating Than Previously Imagined

    Solar storms occur when the solar wind—a continuous stream of charged particles emitted by the sun—interacts with Earth's magnetosphere. During the Carrington Event, telegraph communications collapsed across half the world, and the northern lights were visible throughout North America as far south as Cuba. In today's world, strong solar storms can have wider-ranging effects and can even alter the upper atmosphere.

• Career/Education

  • Jasper Tandy ☛ The cognitive load of responsibility

    I think that's the worst part. Normally, when things are busy and I have a lot on, I can see: the end is when xyz is done. But I don't see that now. My todo list gets longer and longer, and things take longer and longer to complete. People get less patient; more demanding. They don't value my time, even as they paste AI-generated bullshit to me that I need to triage and see whether there's any validity to it at all (spoiler: there isn't, but it still drains hours out of my life justifying that respectfully). And people weirdly don't want me to bill them for the time or experience I draw on to give them good answers to "their" questions.

  • Logic for Programmers ☛ Logic for Programmers

    This is a book about designing, verifying, and reasoning about software better. And it’s about how learning a little bit of logic, the mathematics of Booleans, unlocks all sorts of cool techniques in our field.

  • Hillel Wayne ☛ Logic for Programmers is Now Available

    So I spent the last five years making that resource. Logic for Programmers teaches the working developer basic logic and its many applications, covering areas as diverse as property-based testing, domain modeling, and logic programming. It’s meant for people with no math background: if you know AND and/or OR, you can read this book. I researched each chapter’s topic for months, then ran the chapter by a domain expert to make sure it was accurate, then ran it by a junior programmer to make sure it was approachable.

  • Buttondown LLC ☛ Logic for Programmers is Done

    Logic for Programmers is now 1.0 and available in print. Full announcement here, official website here, direct Amazon link here. If you got an early version of the ebook, you can go back to leanpub to download the 1.0 for free.

• Hardware

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Slimbook Executive report 14 - I hope the good streak lasts

    All right, it's time for me to express myself, once more. This time, I shall revisit a topic, for the fourteenth time so far. That's right, I'm continuing my long-term usage, testing and reporting of the Slimbook Executive machine, a sweet piece of hardware riddled with some annoying bugs here and there. Which bugs, you ask. Well, I invite you to read the last report, and work your way back, or go into my Linux section and read chronologically.

  • Arjen Wiersma ☛ IKEA Grillplats and Home Assistant Green

    These devices use 2.4GHz to connect on the WiFi spectrum. My phone is modern and uses the 5GHz band if it is available (higher bandwidth), so it went from “Discovering Device”, “Generating Matter Credentials”, “Confirming connection to Thread network X” to “Could not connect to device”. The last bit stumped me for a long while, but then I turned off 5GHz on my WiFi and tried again. It finally worked.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ How A.I. Will Reshape Radiology—Without Replacing Radiologists

    Improving accuracy is important because the average human error rates involving diagnostic images are estimated to range from 3 to 5 percent, which translates to about 40 million errors worldwide each year. Yet the solution is not as simple as replacing humans with machines. Ten years after Hinton’s sensational prediction, the big question is not whether humans or A.I. do statistically better at a given task, but how the technical precision of A.I. can be combined with the experience and flexibility of humans to improve accuracy for the benefit of patients.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The biggest question I get from random strangers

    Another thing that doesn’t work is telling yourself it doesn’t matter. It does matter. Trump’s forever war in the Middle East and his bonkers tariffs are driving up the prices of everything you buy. So are his pro-monopoly moves. His domestic police state is making life hell for many of your neighbors, if not for you and your family. His subsidies for Big Oil and rejection of wind and solar energy are making the planet unlivable. His bigotry is inviting cruelty against the most vulnerable. And so on.

    A third thing that doesn’t work is pretending there’s nothing that can be done about it — that there’s no point in even trying because we’re all f*cked. That kind of cynicism is exactly what Trump’s billionaire backers and odious oligarchs want — so we give up and let them take it all.

    So, what does work? What am I doing?

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Numeric Citizen ☛ WTF Substack? What are you for? — Numeric Citizen Blog

    [...] Today, I wanted to read an article on Substack after following a link in an email from my inbox, but my app wasn’t installed on my iPhone. After reinstalling it, I tried to open the link again, but it didn’t work. [...]

  • Håkon Måløy ☛ Context Collapse, Part 3 - AI Worming through Word

    The findings described in this post are part of a coordinated disclosure with MSRC and Microsoft product teams. Microsoft was provided with reproduction steps, videos, environmental assumptions, and the exact proof-of-concept (PoC) prompts used during testing. They were also informed of a 90-day coordination period before disclosure. This was extended two times, resulting a 144-day coordination period.

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

    • Futurism ☛ It Seems a Lot Like Dead Internet Has Actually Come True

      This should come as no surprise. Bots have been everywhere on social media for a while now, and more and more people are wielding little posses of AI agents to do stuff on the internet on their behalf, ranging from conducting research to shopping. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman infamously said he was worried that the dead internet theory was coming true last year, seemingly without a shred of self-awareness.

      Further corroborating this new paradigm, Cloudflare announced in June that 57 percent of webpage requests were being made by bots, marking the first time that bots made up the majority by its own metrics.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Hugging Face Breach Raises Hard Questions on Liability

      Dark Reading walks through the many twists and turns in the bizarre story of how OpenAI's agent AI system broke out of its sandbox and decided to target Hugging Face, and what CISOs should be aware of.

    • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ In the era of AI slop, human curation is even more important

      In the earlier post, I mainly focused on the value of human curation even when algorithms push content written by humans that’s easy to digest and sparks the maximum amount of emotions — usually negative ones since those are the ones more like to engage us in the way platforms want.

      Quoting myself from the earlier blog post: [...]

    • Anirudh Oppiliappan ☛ The strain in your brain

      Reading LLM-written code or a summarized document doesn’t feel the same anymore. It’s still reading, but without the strain in the brain. It’s done the churning for me. It’s pre-chewed, I just need to swallow it.

      So why do this? Why subject ourselves to cognitive decline? Is it even cognitive decline? Some studies claim so, and some don’t—the jury is still out. Perhaps with every new technological advancement, we must trade a portion of our human ability.

    • TechCrunch ☛ Librarians are hosting viral 'Avoiding AI' workshops for people who are fed up with Big Tech

      “As a librarian, I think it’s important to see this as advancing digital literacy and helping people reclaim their autonomy over whether they want to use AI tools,” Bailey said. “It’s important, especially when it can be so difficult not to use them, and when the design seems to force adoption.”

      Bailey got the idea for the Avoiding AI workshop from Hannah Cyrus, a librarian in Maine. He was one of dozens of librarians from around the world who contacted Cyrus after she published a journal article about developing her own workshop.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Spotify Won't Label AI Music—So Third-Parties Are Categorizing It

      There’s also SlopTracker, where users can copy/paste links to Spotify tracks to run them through a tool that determines, with varying degrees of confidence, whether a song was generated almost entirely with AI. Like SoullessMusic, SlopTracker also found that Slime Dot’s hit “Fully” was “95% likely” to be generated by Suno.

      But even relying on third-parties to identify AI and AI-assisted tracks is not infallible, since some AI and AI-assisted artists may take issue with being included on sites like SlopTracker and SoullessMusic. SlopTracker previously identified the openly AI-assisted project Georgia Phantom as likely AI, but that project notably no longer appears on the site after a cease-and-desist was sent to SlopTracker.

    • Hermit Tech ☛ AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decisionmaking · Radically Ethical Data Consulting

      Over the past year, I’ve run point on all of our company’s sales, led the technical components of all but two of our engagements, and over the lifetime of this blog have had something like 300 catchups with professionals from around the world. This has ranged from people on the ground in niche service industries to executives at Fortune 500 companies.1 Because of this, I've had a front-row view to our collective institutions across both the private and public sector undergoing breath-taking mass psychosis. This essay is an attempt to describe the bizarre dynamics that are currently at play, as I am in the rare position where my wellbeing is not contingent on paying lip service to madness, and to reassure the people trying to survive amidst all of this that they are not crazy.

      The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. Not at banks, not at hospitals, not in our government institutions. The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.

  • Social Control Media

    • New York Times ☛ Meta’s Profit Falls 14 Percent as A.I. Spending Continues

      Meta also said its costs and expenses rose faster than its revenue growth for the second quarter. Revenue was $60.8 billion, up 28 percent from a year earlier, while costs jumped 55 percent to $42 billion. Profit was $18.3 billion, down 14 percent from a year earlier.

    • International Business Times ☛ Meta Took a $2.4 Billion Legal Hit and Warns of More Courtroom Risk From Youth Safety Trials

      Meta has revealed that a £1.9 billion legal charge linked to mounting youth safety litigation weighed heavily on its latest quarterly earnings, as the Facebook and Instagram owner warned investors that even bigger courtroom risks could lie ahead. The disclosure accompanied the company's second-quarter 2026 financial results, underscoring how lawsuits over the alleged impact of social media on young users have become one of the biggest financial threats facing the tech giant.

    • Meduza ☛ Russia accuses Telegram founder Pavel Durov of aiding terrorism: what the FSB alleges, why two agencies report different numbers, and what it means for Russians still using the app

      Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has accused Telegram founder Pavel Durov of aiding terrorism. The agency’s public relations center said Durov “is being placed on an international wanted list.” According to the FSB, Telegram’s administration refuses to delete channels that Ukrainian intelligence services use to prepare sabotage, cyberfraud, and mass murder — actions the agency says have caused “numerous human casualties,” including among women and children, and “material damage in the billions.” The relevant provision of the Criminal Code (Part 1.1 of Article 205.1) carries a sentence of up to life in prison.

    • SQ Magazine ☛ Russia's FSB Charges Telegram Founder Durov With Terrorism

      Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with facilitating terrorist activities and issued an international wanted notice for his arrest on July 29, 2026.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Zimbabwe ☛ POTRAZ starts data protection inspections on 1 September. Here is what it means for you

      Some quick background first. The Act made POTRAZ the Data Protection Authority. Then in September 2024 government published Statutory Instrument 155 of 2024. That SI said any organisation processing personal data must get a data controller licence. The deadline was 12 March 2025. That date came and went and there are probably many business out there that simply haven’t done it yet. So, yes, POTRAZ is saying it’s coming to check.

      According to this law, personal data means names, phone numbers, addresses, ID numbers, employment history, health records, biometrics.

    • EFF ☛ San Francisco: Don’t Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

      The concept of “surveillance pricing” is just one part of a much larger problem and business model: corporations maximizing their profits by invading our privacy. The all-too-common business model is to systematically harvest, collate, and store as much of our personal data as possible, and then monetize it through use and sale. When it comes to surveillance pricing, that looks like corporations offering the same product to two different people at two different prices, based on harvested personal information. That's why EFF supports A.B. 2654, authored by Assemblymember Chris Ward, which bans this harmful practice.

    • International Business Times ☛ Cops Tracked Woman's Abortion Across 83,000 Cameras for Her 'Safety'; Court Records Show They Eyed Criminal Charges

      A Texas sheriff's office ran a coast-to-coast search of more than 83,000 automatic licence plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman after she had a self-managed abortion – but told the public it was all about her welfare, according to court records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). Sworn affidavits tell a different story entirely.

      Documents show Johnson County Sheriff's Office (JCSO) deputies opened a formal death investigation, gathered evidence of the woman's abortion, and rang prosecutors to ask whether she could be charged. The case, first exposed by 404 Media in May 2025, has since triggered federal scrutiny, state legislation, and criminal charges against the sheriff himself.

    • Daniel Pocock ☛ Parliament leaks confidential cult inquiry witness contact list (COFG Victoria)

      Each time I reach out to victims, somebody else seems to come forward with something new. Look at how the Albanian women told me about blackmail and abuse in the tech sector and Dr Norbert Preining thanked me. More recently, Sonny Piers, after two years of being blackmailed to stay silent, has come forward and spilled the beans about the GNOME Foundation and their fake board.

    • [Repeat] Citizen Lab ☛ Co-Founder of Controversial Spyware Firm Had Israeli Diplomatic Passport

      Senior researcher John Scott-Railton spoke with OCCRP, saying that the finding “raises questions about NSO’s connections to the [Israeli] state.”

    • Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Group ☛ Co-Founder of Controversial Spyware Firm Had Israeli Diplomatic Passport | OCCRP

      Migration records from Panama show Hulio entered the country in December 2013 using a diplomatic passport.

      Experts said the finding turns the spotlight on the possible ties between NSO Group and the Israeli state.

    • EFF ☛ Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

      In 2018, the California Legislature published bill analyses (on that year's AB 2769) that went into detail about PatronScan’s business. Reviewing PatronScan's own materials, the California Senate Judiciary Committee found that the company had collected and retained information on 561,087 customers in Sacramento alone during the first five months of 2018—a remarkable figure for a city whose population had only recently topped 500,000.

      Lawmakers also found that at that time, PatronScan retained information for at least 90 days or longer in some cases, shared information among participating bars, and maintained bans that lasted an average of more than 19 years. A PatronScan “Public Safety Report” used 10,000 scans collected on a single day to report on “where customers live, how far they have traveled, and how many different venues the customers patronized.”

      This was not simply checking IDs at the door. PatronScan was building a database.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Spectator AU ☛ Europe is under attack

    It is Europe that is being targeted. On Monday a mosque in northern Paris – ten miles from the scene of the stabbing – was closed by authorities. The prefecture said the decision had been taken because the mosque ‘propagates a radical Islamist ideology that echoes the rhetoric of terrorist organisations, legitimises jihad and glorifies death as martyrdom’.

  • CBC ☛ Shopify CEO appears to endorse giving more votes to wealthy Canadians

    The comments were part of a thread in which Lütke also proposed stripping voting rights from retirees with pensions, saying in part, "Now you are a dependent and that means no voting, just like dependents under age. Enjoy the deal, let people with a stake in the future decide."

    People expressed shock and anger over Lütke's comments, calling the voting proposals "disgusting" and "antithetical to democracy," among less printable insults.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Shopify CEO endorses stripping voting rights from poor and pensioners

    Consider the many homekeeping spouses such a proposal would instantly disenfranchise. Lütke seems an good example of a tech "liberal" whose contrarian impulses slowly curdled into "anti-woke" rantings and finally to bald plutocracy.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • SANS ☛ Reconnaissance First: An SSH Bot That Sizes Up Your Hardware Before Deploying a Miner [Guest Diary]

    My honeypot is a DShield sensor built on a Raspberry Pi 4, running the Cowrie SSH honeypot on an [Internet]-facing address. Cowrie presents a convincing fake Linux shell, accepts logins with weak passwords, and records every command an attacker runs along with connection metadata such as the source IP and the SSH client fingerprint.

    The session itself was brief. A bot from 91.92.40.13 connected to the SSH service, logged in as root with the password 123123 on the first attempt, ran two commands, and disconnected after about eight seconds. Two details stood out right away: the SSH client identified itself as a Go program (SSH-2.0-Go) rather than a normal client, and the whole visit lasted only seconds. Both point to automation, not a person at a keyboard.

  • BoingBoing ☛ U.S. Senate unanimously opposes Ghislaine Maxwell pardon

    The U.S. Senate is on the verge of confirming Todd Blanche, one of Trump's personal lawyers, as U.S. Attorney General. Blanche's hostility to Epstein's victims (and mismanagement of the so-called Epstein Files detailing his crimes) creates a serious credibility problem; this resolution allows his supporters to affect concern.

  • BoingBoing ☛ The Senate unanimously tells Trump to leave Ghislaine Maxwell in prison

    Donald Trump has repeatedly noted that he has the power to pardon Ghislaine Maxwell while declining to rule out exercising that power. The Senate cannot stop Trump from pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, but it has now made the political terms plain. A nonbinding resolution opposing any form of clemency passed without objection, placing every senator present behind a sentence the White House has avoided: Maxwell should remain in prison.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Report: Interlochen sex abuse spans 70 years, extends past Jeffrey Epstein

    Two alumni reported sexual contact with Jeffrey Epstein at the school

• Environment

  • The Walrus ☛ More Firefighters and Water Bombers Won’t Solve Canada’s Wildfire Crisis

    The focus on fighting fires has distracted us from preventing them

  • David Revoy ☛ Fire - David Revoy

  • Vox ☛ Why Europe is warming twice as fast as the global average

    The wildfires sweeping France and Spain this week are the latest entries in that grim catalog. They are the largest blazes either country has faced in modern history — and they could worsen as temperatures spike above 100 degrees later this week.

  • Court House News ☛ Desert data center developer challenges county moratorium in court

    The project has become a flashpoint in Imperial County, where water-intensive industrial projects like data centers are seen by some as incompatible with the region’s limited water resources and agricultural economy. Rucci, however, claims the data center will provide new jobs and millions in tax revenue in the economically stagnant region.

    The Imperial County Board of Supervisors initially approved Imperial Valley Computer Manufacturing’s lot merger for the project, located near a neighborhood in an industrial area just south of the city of Imperial. But the plan was walked back in June when the county approved the 45-day moratorium on data centers, which was then extended to 10 months and 15 days — or until June 2027 — so that the county could evaluate its land use rules.

  • MinnPost ☛ Five things to know as data centers spread across rural America

    More than 1,500 data centers are planned nationwide, many in rural communities. Here’s what to know about their water use, environmental impact and the growing opposition.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • NL Times ☛ Electric to outpace fuel in new car sales for first time next year: ING

      The Dutch bank expects the market share of electric cars to reach 40 percent this year, and shoot up to 55 percent next year. This is largely due to a new tax measure: the pseudo-final levy. From 2027, employers who lease a car with a combustion engine for employees will have to pay an additional tax of 12 percent of the car’s value annually. Many employers are therefore only allowing employees to lease electric cars.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Dozens of utilities join pledge pledge to protect consumers from high bills from AI data centers

      But AI’s increasing ability to perform basic tasks — such as driving, analyzing spreadsheets and writing software — also potentially threatens millions of jobs. That has created mounting public resistance as tech companies concentrate historic levels of wealth in the hands of a select group of tycoons.

      The increased electricity demand could cause monthly utility bills to rise by 15% to 40% by 2030, according to a recent analysis by ICF, a consulting and technology services company.

    • 404 Media ☛ Data Centers Are Easy to Build. Powering Them Is Complicated, Slow, and Expensive

      To bypass the issue of grid demand, many data center builders have promised to power the buildings themselves. The problem with that plan is that it’s easy to build a warehouse full of GPUs. Building power plants and transmission lines to power those warehouses will take years and cost billions more than the data centers. A skilled and efficient builder can complete a data center construction in under a year. Building new energy generation to meet that data center's power needs could take a decade.

    • RTL-SDR ☛ isTRAIN: Detecting if a Train is Blocking a Local Crossing By Listening to Railroad Frequencies

      This is why Jhestyr used two RTL-SDR dongles to build isTrain, an open source program that decodes End-of-Train brake pressure and motion telemetry on 457.9375 and 452.9375 MHz, transcribes railroad voice traffic in the 160 to 162 MHz band via Whisper, and fuses both sources into a single live verdict on whether the crossing is blocked.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Lousy Hotel Avoided

      I now have the rest of the summer and all of the winter to read up and learn and build a better bee hotel. I’m also going to try and improve my macro-photography which at the moment is acceptable only for things that don’t move much. The bee hotel might help with that.

    • Science Alert ☛ Cockroaches Have a 'Collective Memory' That Emerges From Their Social Networks

      "Our theoretical approach reveals that social interactions and the group's structure are sufficient to display a collective memory," wrote a team led by social ecologist Mariano Calvo Martín of the Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium in a 2023 paper.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Google goes cash flow negative for the first time as AI data center buildout increases capex to a staggering $44.9 billion in a single quarter — CFO warns that capex will increase in 2027 as company banks big on TPUs

    Google's parent company Alphabet recently reported negative free cash flow of $5.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, the company's first cash-negative quarter since its 2004 IPO, after capital expenditures doubled year-over-year to a record $44.9 billion and exceeded the $39.1 billion its operations generated as it continues its rapid buildout of AI data centers, according to its earnings release.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The House of Ellison is on the Brink

    There is a line long attributed to Ellison, quoted by a biographer borrowing from Genghis Khan: it is not sufficient that I succeed — everyone else must fail. Whether he ever said it, he built like he believed it. The database monopoly, the litigation-as-strategy years, the acquisitions swallowed whole, the islands, the warplanes, the weddings. For five decades the universe declined to invoice him for any of it. What sets this past year apart is the synchronization: every wing of the empire drawing down at once, each failure feeding the next.

    One may be tempted to reach for the word karma. Let’s go through the whole cosmology and see how we feel about that at the end.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Establishment Extinction Event Reaches Wisconsin

    It’s national security code, blinking red, deployed against 37-year-old chef and state legislator Francesca Hong, to suggest that she is a walking threat. Not because she is, but because she is polling with more support than all other candidates combined.

    The debate was the best illustration yet of how the Democratic Party establishment is facing an extinction-like event, as I’ve written about and will explain in a moment. But the media obviously isn’t going to talk about that, so instead the commentary focuses on whether Hong is “qualified,” has enough “experience,” and other coded ways of nudging voters away from outsider candidates.

  • Futurism ☛ BuzzFeed Lays Off 33 Percent of Remaining Staff After Bizarre Pivot to AI

    On Monday, the struggling media company announced the layoffs of 180 employees, or about a third of its entire workforce, in the latest sign of its decline since its unexpected pivot to AI.

    The cuts, according to the New York Times, affect employees at its news site HuffPost, BuzzFeed’s film and TV studio, and the recipe publisher Tasty.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Techdirt ☛ AI Systems Out-Persuade Expert Humans, Including Professional Canvassers And World Championship Debaters

      An arguably more demanding test found that AI systems were not just persuasive when it came to opinions, but also in terms of real-world actions: they managed to elicit substantially more real-money donations to charity than well-paid professional canvassers. The researchers were able to pin down the two key factors that helped AI to out-perform the best human persuaders in all these tests: [...]

    • Salon ☛ Trump and Musk both want to control America's history

      While this push to redirect the country’s scientific research has incited alarm, reactions to interventions in the historical humanities have been more muted. Yet attacks on public museums and on creative retellings of historical narratives are just as dangerous to the health of this country’s democracy.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ A Russian father got 5 years for anti-war posts. Now his disabled son has been sentenced to 7 for ‘justifying terrorism.’

    Daniil Belousov’s father, Oleg Belousov, an amateur archaeologist in St. Petersburg, received a five-year sentence in 2023 for posts on VKontakte against Vladimir Putin and the war with Ukraine.

  • NDTV ☛ Author Salman Rushdie's Attacker Hadi Matar Convicted On Terrorism Charges

    The man who stabbed and partially blinded author Salman Rushdie on stage at a New York arts institute in 2022 was found guilty on Wednesday of federal terrorism charges stemming from the attack.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Admin’s Campaign Against ‘Radical Left Terrorism’ Is Built On A National Security Memo With No Congressional Approval

    That architecture is National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, issued on Sept. 25, 2025, which for the first time appeared to authorize preemptive law enforcement measures against Americans based not on whether they are planning to commit violence but for their political or ideological beliefs.

    Nearly a year later, that blueprint has moved from paper into practice.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Censorship in Chinese AI models can be undone, new research shows

    The findings undercut one of the US government’s top concerns — that Chinese open-source AI models are a pathway for Chinese political ideas to infiltrate the views of those who use them. The research also paves the way for US companies to make a stronger case for using cheaper and faster Chinese open-source models, or at least distilling from them to create customized models.

  • TruthOut ☛ This Activist Was Targeted by ICE for Criticizing Colombia’s President-Elect

    In a memo obtained by The New York Times in June, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed for Coral’s deportation and accused the activist of undermining U.S. foreign policy and interfering in Colombia’s democratic process by supporting current Colombian leftist President Gustavo Petro and attacking de la Espriella.

  • Project Censored ☛ The Project Censored Newsletter—July 2026

    We’ve been researching and writing State of the Free Press 2027, to be published by The Censored Press in December. The 2027 yearbook will feature a foreword by Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, cover art by Stephanie Borgovan, and original contributions from Sara Qudah (Committee to Protect Journalists), Tina Rosenberg (Solutions Journalism Network), Joshua Strange (Empowerment Avenue), and Lynn Walsh (Trusting News). Last month, our esteemed panel of international judges voted to determine the year’s top “Censored” stories, which SFP27 will spotlight, along with a Déjà Vu News update on climate crisis lawsuits, plus Junk Food News and News Abuse. Stay tuned here for more details.

  • 404 Media ☛ “Clapping Is a First Amendment Right:” An Interview With the Person Arrested for Clapping at a Data Center Meeting

    During the meeting, the commission warned the crowd to stop clapping multiple times, but Claridge walked into the room after the warnings. “We continued to clap, though eventually it started moving to snapping fingers, all beatnik style,” Claridge said. “I did that a little bit too, but in total, I clapped for 13 speeches. I snapped five times, and there were three warnings, a final warning. Then I finally got arrested.”

    On the recording you can hear commissioner Monica Duncan tell the police chief to toss out the next person who claps. Claridge had just finished their clapping for a speaker. Their wife was at the podium. “He instead just walks right up to me, tells me to get out, and then, well, you saw what happened. I went to the floor.”

  • New York Times ☛ Iran Hangs Protesters as Executions Surge, Rights Groups Say

    Iran has long been one of the world’s most frequent users of capital punishment, but public executions are extremely rare. Several human rights activists described Tuesday’s hangings as an escalation by a government seeking to stifle dissent after the unrest in January, particularly during the war with the United States.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Nick Heer ☛ Nova Scotia Court of Appeal Overturns Case Investigated and Decided Based on a Typo

    One of the main reasons he was found guilty, it would seem, is because no effective counterargument was made.

    In this decision, the judge notes the existence of several pieces of evidence that should have raised questions: a voice message, and an interview with the victim who described the perpetrator. But it seems like far more weight was put on the documentary evidence that, supposedly, showed an irrefutable link: [...]

  • CBC ☛ 'A subtle mistake': How a single underscore led to an innocent Halifax man's conviction

    The error leading to Brandon Klayme's conviction came down to the difference between one underscore — a keyboard symbol used in email addresses or usernames to represent a space — and two, said Nova Scotia's top court in a decision released Thursday.

    "If the correct username had been used at the start of the investigation, the subsequent steps in the investigation would not have led to Mr. Klayme," wrote the three-member appeal panel.

  • Ars Technica ☛ A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

    Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme.

    (Ars readers may recognize “fus ro dah” as the Unrelenting Force “dragon shout” from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.)

    Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term.

    Even after release, Klayme continued to fight his conviction. In the process of preparing his appeal, the username mistake that led to all these years of disruption was finally discovered. On Thursday, the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal overturned Klayme’s conviction, writing: “Mr. Klayme is factually innocent of the offences. He should never have been charged, let alone convicted.”

  • NDTV ☛ One Missing Underscore Sent Canadian Man To Prison And No One Noticed It For Years

    A Canadian man lost precious years of his life after he was wrongfully accused and convicted in a child-luring case involving mistaken identity due to a missing underscore. In 2018, investigators in the US state of Wisconsin were probing a case involving a 12-year-old girl and an adult male who had contacted her on Kik Messenger. A forensic review of the girl's phone turned up 125 messages from an individual going by the username "fus__ro_dah," two underscores after "fus" (Fus Ro Dah is a famous magical dragon chant from the video game Skyrim).

  • The Verge ☛ Logitech will pull a Nintendo — only European mice will come with replaceable batteries

    While I agree that Logitech’s mice are currently disposable products, I strongly disagree that they should continue to be that way. Isn’t the right-to-repair movement about changing that outlook on the world? Would consumers change that behavior if the devices were easier to fix?

    So I ask Piispanen, who says he believes in right-to-repair: Why doesn’t Logitech actually sell the wear-and-tear parts for its mice, despite claiming it does? Why doesn’t it sell the rubber grip pads on the side of my Logitech G502 Lightspeed, which I’ve now worn a hole through, or the mouse switch that’s beginning to double-click on the side of my mouse?

  • Small Cypress ☛ on murder

    I think of a friend who was a capital defense attorney. She took on clients who plead guilty, but were looking to avoid being put to death by the state. She said the one thing they all seemed to have in common was a lack of emotional regulation, or an ability to see beyond blinding rage to what would happen on the other side of the killing. She never had an evil, calculating client. And if everyone around you has guns, you become a sitting duck without one. It's a cycle that is really hard to break, especially in neighborhoods where carrying is standard.

  • Court House News ☛ Environmentalists, tribes sue feds over renewed approval of Mojave Desert pipeline

    In their complaint filed in Riverside, California, the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe, the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, along with the Native American Land Conservancy and the National Parks Conservation Association likewise argue that the project’s drawdown of the aquifer will seriously damage the groundwater-dependent ecosystem, including rare freshwater springs, seeps, and riparian areas.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Afroman Files Malicious Prosecution Lawsuit v. Deputies

    Afroman used his own security camera footage of the raid on his home to make music videos of the songs “Lemon Pound Cake” and “Will You Help Me Repair My Door,” both written about the incident. Notably, the raid stemmed from a tip asserting that there were illicit drugs in the home, but the investigation never led to any charges against him.

    “The claims asserted by [Newland] against [Afroman] in the prior lawsuit were not warranted under existing law and could not be supported by a good argument for the extension, modification, or reversal of existing law,” noted the rapper’s lawsuit.

  • TMZ ☛ Afroman Sues Cop Who Took Him to Court Over Raid Videos

    Afroman is suing one of the Ohio sheriff's deputies who previously took him to court over videos mocking a raid on the rapper's home.

    The rapper filed a malicious prosecution lawsuit Monday against former Adams County Sheriff’s Sgt. Brian Newland, claiming in docs obtained by TMZ that Newland’s earlier defamation case was baseless, forced him to rack up legal fees, and caused emotional distress.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Internet Archive ☛ Vanishing Culture Episode #5: A Language Worth Saving with Peter Scholing | Internet Archive Blogs

    Peter shares the story of how Aruba’s libraries, archives, and cultural institutions came together to build a digital collection that now preserves hundreds of thousands of documents, photographs, newspapers, recordings, and books. The conversation explores the unique preservation challenges facing island communities, from geographic isolation and climate risks to the legacy of colonialism, which has scattered much of Aruba’s historical record across multiple countries and languages. Peter explains why expanding access to materials in Papiamento is essential for education, cultural identity, and historical understanding, and how digitization is helping unlock previously inaccessible collections. Looking ahead, he discusses the opportunities new technologies offer for smaller languages and why ensuring a vibrant digital future for Papiamento is a crucial part of preserving Aruba’s culture for generations to come.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • [Repeat] Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft says physical discs should not have stopped working during the Xbox outage — clarifies issue with entitlement checks that failed to read licenses correctly, update on the way

    Xbox consoles recently experienced a worldwide outage, during which people were unable to access even disc-based games that should have been playable offline. Service was restored within a day but the impact of this discovery could be significant as tensions run high surrounding the crumbling state of physical media. Microsoft, however, was quick to suppress the negative PR, telling The Verge that discs should have never been affected by the outage in the first place.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Apple's New Upgrade Program Is a Trap

    The shift to renting versus owning is also symbolic of darker currents in the tech industry. Thanks to a shortage of memory chips produced by the profoundly resource-hungry and inefficient AI industry, consumer electronics are becoming much more expensive across the board. Last month, Apple raised prices on many of its devices, citing the increasing cost of memory. The new upgrade program will make Apple’s electronics look more affordable than they really are.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • The Conversation ☛ The EU has fined Google a billion dollars for ignoring competition rules – but will it have any effect?

    The European Commission’s decision to fine Google €890 million (US$1 billion) for failing to comply with the EU Digital Markets Act sounds like a significant financial and political intervention against one of the world’s largest technology companies.

    The ruling is certainly further evidence of Europe’s desire to regulate US big tech platforms more strictly.

  • Macworld ☛ [Installation] changed everything and nothing about my iPhone

    It’s not that alternative app stores don’t work. They do. But once the novelty wears off, I found myself going right back to the App Store.