Leftovers

• Sebastian ☛ mashups are an underutilized art form

  i'm gonna be showcasing some of the stuff i've made in that third category, cuz it's the most interesting. i've narrowed this down into four (completely arbitrary) sections. each one has examples, which i've trimmed down into short snippets that get the point across since i know most people aren't interested enough to go listen to the full thing lol. there's 6 examples in total.

• Loura ☛ Hey Loura!

  I know this is not a common experience. It’s a byproduct of a trait that has shaped me. From childhood I was never sure who I was looking at unless I knew them really well or they stayed in the same context (a teacher in their classroom). Friendships suffer when you don’t acknowledge the person when you are out and about. Embarrassing situations abound. I tell people I’m bad at names and faces. They say they are too. But I think we are using different yardsticks to measure. Sometimes I don’t recognize my kids in different settings unless something else gives it away.

  Yeah, I’m face blind.

• Herman Õunapuu ☛ I guess I'm a cactus farmer now

  Then an acquaintance mentioned that hey, you can actually pop those forks off from the cactus and grow them separately.

  That’s when things got out of control. Once I popped one off, new ones would start growing from the host cactus nearby. Not long after, I had 37 cacti. I started giving them away because annoyingly these things are actually very cheap in gardening shops and I ran out of physical window sill space to put them on.

• Dave Gauer ☛ How I got through my inbox in only two months

  In a little less than two months after I started, I’ve replied to every one of those emails. In fact, I’ve been replying to replies (and new messages) for a couple weeks.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists May Have Finally Solved The Sun's Missing Silver Mystery

    With the help of a supercomputer, this study applies a significantly more detailed, 3D model of the Sun and its light output to reinterpret how silver atoms might behave and might interact with solar rays.

    "With our new model, we were able to interpret the spectral lines used to determine the solar silver abundance more accurately," says astrophysicist Sema Caliskan, from Uppsala University in Sweden.

  • Groot Koerkamp ☛ A seed-independent hash collision in GxHash

    For a pangenome deduplication tool I’m working on (pandedup), I’m using 128-bit hashes as “unique” identifiers of substrings.

    Sadly, it turns out that gxhash128 has a hash collision between the two strings of length 88 below that only differ in 5 positions, regardless of the value of the seed.

    Looking at the strings, this clearly isn’t a random collision. Those could be expected when doing \(2^{64}\) lookups in a dictionary of \(2^{64}\) keys, but my data is nowhere near that large.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Marmot researchers turn to OnlyFans for funding

    You can send the marmots a tip through OnlyMarms or donate to the research directly here, which I wish I knew before giving OnlyFans my credit card.

• Career/Education

  • Open Web Advocacy ☛ Bruce Lawson Interviews OWA: For A Better Web

    Check out Bruce Lawson’s interview with Alex Moore, executive director and co-founder of Open Web Advocacy. They run through the history of OWA, why OWA exists and what OWA fights for.

  • Sandor Dargo ☛ The C++ Interview Book is here

    Five years ago I published Daily C++ Interview — a collection of questions and answers that grew out of an email course I ran for C++ developers preparing for interviews. It did better than I expected. Over a thousand copies sold and plenty of kind emails from readers who found it genuinely helpful while preparing for their next role. Over time, the feedback made one thing clear: the book deserved a proper second edition, not just a few patches.

    This is that edition. I have renamed it The C++ Interview Book because the daily-email framing no longer fits what the book has become.

• Hardware

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Left-Handed People Can’t Use a Fountain Pen

    Apparently left-handed people can't use a fountain pen as the left hand smudges the ink as they write. I call bullshit on that. I'm left-handed, and I use a fountain pen just fine - even with an "overhand" grip.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Atlantic ☛ Anthony Fauci Is Not the Villain in This Story

    Fauci may have misjudged, mishandled, or misstated many particulars. He was a scientist and bureaucrat unaccustomed to—and dazzled by—celebrity. History will judge his actions with more dispassion than the present day can or will. One thing that people should keep in mind, however, is that Fauci was thrust into his pandemic-leadership role because of Trump’s shameful and deadly dereliction of duty. Trump’s record of dishonesty, callousness, and selfishness during the pandemic is a documented reality. The imputations against Fauci are mostly fantasies.

    No mistakes by blue America or by the scientific community begin to compare with the brutal indifference to the well-being of Americans—and the betrayal of their own cruelly deceived supporters—that disgraced MAGA and the broader right wing in the pandemic years. Their consciences should be heavy. They seek now to transfer their own burden of guilt onto Fauci. The reckoning is a lie. The transfer is a fraud.

  • Artyom Bologov ☛ No Laptop Wee… Month?

    It’s a deep night and I’m psyched up having watched around 20 Kpop music videos in one sitting. Meaning: No Laptop Week challenge ended after one month of abstinence from laptop and YouTube specifically.

    At the start of July, I set myself a goal: to radically minimize the time I spend on a laptop. And to cure my YouTube addiction. Every time I open my laptop lid should have a distinct motivation / goal and be strictly timed. I almost delivered on that, using laptop almost exclusively for useful and humanity beneficial purposes! All for a week, that ended up a month.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Cybernews ☛ Hamburg wants to cut its dependence on Microsoft

    Hamburg will assess replacing Microsoft 365 with openDesk to reduce dependence on the American tech company in public administration. The motion passed with broad support from major parties; only the far-right AfD voted against it.

  • Alsterrunde ☛ When will Hamburg move away from Microsoft?

    After seeing these numbers, I wanted to know how much Hamburg pays Microsoft directly for licences. I had already read that the German federal government pays around €500 million per year for Microsoft products. Unfortunately, I could not find a similar number for Hamburg. The state does not publish its Microsoft licence costs because it considers the prices confidential under public procurement rules. This means that we know some of the migration and operating costs, but we still do not know the complete bill.

    Hamburg is also planning to expand its use of Microsoft Teams, which is part of Microsoft 365. As far as I understand, the state still relies on Skype, and I also found costs for Cisco Webex and Zoom in some documents. Moving more communication into Microsoft Teams means that instead of reducing its dependency on Microsoft, Hamburg may become even more dependent on the company.

  • Riccardo Mori ☛ The ‘trap’ in the Apple Upgrade plan isn’t about money

    I can’t stress the point enough: the Apple device you’re leasing isn’t yours until you fully pay for it. Contractually, there’s a big difference between owning something and renting it. I’m not a lawyer, but when you own a product, you have certain assurances, warranties, and rights you probably don’t have when the same product isn’t technically yours. And until the product isn’t yours, a tech company can potentially find ways to screw you. (If you don’t like my cynical language, I’ll rephrase that with “a tech company can potentially use that to their advantage in various subtle ways”).

  • Jeff Geerling ☛ Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on my Mac Studio

    The problem is Macs all require Thunderbolt adapters; you can't just plug an inexpensive(ish) PCIe card into a Mac (RIP Mac Pro).

    I stopped looking until I saw this blog post. Christian Kohlschütter found a cheap 25G Thunderbolt adapter that uses a server-pulled OCP 2 NIC with a little Thunderbolt 3 adapter board. And it works on any computer with Thunderbolt.

  • Christiano Anderson ☛ Migrating from Standard Notes to Obsidian

    The primary driver behind this migration is that my workflow has evolved and become more complex over the time. I now require: [...]

  • Angelino Desmet ☛ 🌐 Warez your website | Angelino Desmet

    With the small web in mind I found these three options, sorted according to preference:

    1. Mataroa.blog
    2. Pagecord.com
    3. Bearblog.dev

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

    • Futurism ☛ Amazon Insiders Horrified at "Catastrophically Expensive" Internal AI Usage

      The Financial Times reports that staff at the company have identified cases of “catastrophically expensive” cost overruns as it switched over to using AI tools to perform what sound like pretty routine coding tasks.

      In one case, Amazon blew $1.8 million by using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet AI to match author details with product listings on its namesake ecommerce website. This menial job somehow went 860 percent over the allocated budget. And equally alarming was that it took five months to notice the piles of money being set on fire.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ How YouTube is navigating an AI tightrope

      “People just didn’t like it,” said Emily Moxley, YouTube’s vice president of product management. “Viewers want to hear from creators... the story and the information that creators can supply is something that we can’t replace,” she told Semafor.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Anthropic Cybersecurity Evaluation Reveals Claude AI Risks

      Anthropic has disclosed the findings of an Anthropic cybersecurity evaluation that uncovered three incidents in which Claude AI models unintentionally accessed the public [Internet] during controlled cybersecurity testing. The company said the events stemmed from misconfigured third-party evaluation environments rather than deliberate attempts by the models to escape their testing boundaries.

    • Rob Zolkos ☛ Agents Are Customers Too

      My agent wasn’t trying to steal Carnegie Hall’s data. It was trying to help me buy Carnegie Hall tickets.

      That is what makes this feel backwards to me. The agent was not replacing the customer. It was helping the customer show up at the right time.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Should You Use AI for a Task? Here’s a Simple Way to Decide

      The best way I’ve found to explain the dilemma comes from the AI researcher Daniel Meissler: it’s the difference between work and the gym.

      At work, if your job is to move a bunch of heavy things from one side of the room to another, you should use whatever assistive tech you have on hand: a wagon, a forklift… even an AI-powered robot. But at the gym, it makes no sense for that robot to lift weights for you. The point of weightlifting isn’t to move heavy things across the room; it’s to actually lift those heavy things.

      The same analysis holds for any task an AI can do for you. If it’s work—if the task has to be done and no one cares how—then it’s fine to use AI assistance. But if the task is more like the gym, and how the task is done is at least as important, then it probably doesn’t make sense to use AI.

    • Antirez ☛ The real AI risk is inside the labs

      I believe we should not consider AI safe. A critical event that may result in the extinction of Homo sapiens is possible, but the danger is not in open models, or China making faster progress than the US. The danger is that a few CEOs (everywhere in the world) without the required background and legitimacy are in the position of making hard choices for humanity at large. They were not selected to do so; it was just the randomness of events that created this setup. They can't speak for everybody, given the stakes, just because they have GPUs and money. This is the first thing that should be fixed.

    • 404 Media ☛ Company Offering Printed Books to Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage

      Following 404 Media’s reporting that book database company ISBNdb claimed to source printed books to then sell to AI companies for AI training, the company deleted the part of its website offering the service and walked back claims that it would train AI models, and instead called it “a test of market interest.”

    • Manton Reece ☛ Manton Reece - 404 Media on book scanning

      While I was waiting, I went searching in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. Turns out the quotes attributed to ISBNdb did exist a few weeks ago. ISBNdb removed the pages and added a note on their news blog about it: [...]

    • Fortra LLC ☛ The $5 Million Threat: AI Is Supercharging Phishing Attacks| Fortra

      To put those figures in context, the global average cost of a data breach across all types of attack came to US $4.99 million. In short, phishing and social engineering attacks cause above an average financial cost for victim organizations.

      But, of course, that doesn't tell the whole story. A successful phishing attack will often lead to a valid business account being accessed and abused - at an average cost, according to the report, of $5.07 million per breach.

    • Don Marti ☛ The hidden cost of New York Times AI columns

      The problem isn’t so much that “our side’s” AI is better than theirs, or the other way around. Every LLM is going to have embedded biases, for a variety of reasons. Propaganda and copyright-related biases are only two.

    • Derek Thompson ☛ The Four Horsemen of the AI Bubble Apocalypse

      If I had to shove all of these developments into one sentence, I might pick this one: The capabilities of AI are becoming more powerful, while the economic underpinnings of the AI buildout—and, as we’ll discuss, the political support for AI—are becoming more vulnerable.

      Beyond the headlines, I see four main categories of risk facing AI, or four horsemen of the potential AI bubble apocalypse. They include spending risk, revenue risk, political risk, and technological risk. In today’s essay, I’m going to break down each risk and—because in this field, nothing is certain—I’ll offer my favorite counterargument to each. This way, you’ll get a sense of both why the market seems to be souring on parts of the AI megaproject and what the market and its interpreters might be missing.

    • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ The AI Phrasebook

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Nik Suresh/Ludicity on surviving corporate AI psychosis

      Nik’s advice when your boss loves Claude a little too much:

      ‘Just let the money run out, it’ll be fine in two years’

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Google kills AlphaFold — so much for AI curing cancer

      Google’s real use case for AlphaFold was not the biology. It was to have a handy excuse for the excesses of the AI bubble.

      Whenever chatbots are being garbage, some bozo will always say: what about medicine, huh? What about AlphaFold, huh?

    • BoingBoing ☛ AI companies are scanning and destroying old books

      Bulk book sellers confirm surgees in large orders in the last year. One told 404 Media the buys clear dead inventory (unsold stock unlikely to sell for a profit) but also that "uncommon books are being pulped."

      Destructive scanning cuts off the spines of books, feeds pages through the machine, then bins the remains. It's faster and cheaper than non-destructive scanning, as practiced by real libraries and the Internet Archive.

    • BoingBoing ☛ U.S. delegation uses AI slop map of Africa at AIDS conference

      "The US government's failure to catch this error before displaying the slide at the top international AIDS conference in the world, in a session that featured the Director General of Nigeria as an invited guest, is not only disrespectful to African collaborators, it's also a significant tell." wrote Bass.

  • Social Control Media

    • SQ Magazine ☛ How to Get a Reddit API Key: The Steps Tutorials Usually Skip

      Reddit enforces a strict User-Agent requirement that catches almost every first-time integrator. Default User-Agent strings from common HTTP libraries get throttled or blocked, often without an error message that makes the actual cause obvious.

      User-Agent: platform:app-name:version (by /u/your_username)

      Set this on your very first request, not as a fix after troubleshooting an unrelated-seeming 429. It’s the single most common reason a correctly configured app still fails to make a successful call on the first try.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ LinkedIn cracks down on users posting 'AI slop' after previously encouraging it

      The company isn’t stopping there, either. In addition, Srinivasan said LinkedIn is dropping the “enhance your post” button that uses AI to tweak user’s wording. It’s believed that this button probably encouraged a lot of the AI slop now found across LinkedIn’s feeds, so it’s being replaced by an option to simply have AI proofread what users have written, while leaving their natural voice intact.

    • Søren ☛ Deleting LinkedIn

      Every time I opened it, it annoyed me. Meaningless press-release over-positive posts. And too many email notifications about things I didn’t care.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • New York Times ☛ Trump Blames Minnesota, Not Iran, for Cyberattack, Despite Initial Investigation

      President Trump claimed without evidence that Minnesota’s Democratic government was “behind” a cyberattack on the state’s own water systems. Investigators believe Iran is likely responsible.

    • MinnPost ☛ Cyberattacks on MN water systems investigated, eye on Iran links

      Digital warfare has become ingrained in military conflict, and local water plants or healthcare facilities often lack the funds and know-how to install the latest software patches or take other security steps. That has made them a favorite target, both because of the relative ease of penetrating them and because of the panic such disruptions can cause.

    • Western Water ☛ [Crackers] hit water systems in seven states, FBI warns

      The intruders reached devices that were connected directly to the internet. Once inside, they changed the devices’ internet addresses and set new passwords. That locked out the utilities and caused a “loss of monitoring and control functionality,” according to the FBI. At least one utility discovered that its control programs had been altered after staff noticed differences in the logic running across several of its sites.

    • The Record ☛ CISA warns of spike in attacks on water systems as Minnesota incidents probed

      The intruders “have modified passwords to lock out operators and disconnected the PLCs by changing their IP addresses,” CISA said. “This activity has resulted in boil water notices and sustained manual operations.”

      CISA, the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency are all involved in the response. The FBI said “utility companies in at least seven states” have reported incidents involving PLCs to the bureau.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Epstein files: How victims remain exposed to identification

      "I cannot live without looking over my shoulder," a sexual abuse survivor told US lawmakers in May, describing how her personal information was publicly exposed in January, when the Department of Justice (DOJ) released hundreds of thousands of documents related to the financier Jeffrey Epstein. "I can only imagine the long-term impact this mistake will have on my life."

      Three days after the DOJ released the largest of 12 datasets on Epstein on January 30, a department lawyer told a federal court that "human or technical error" had been among the factors that led to the publishing of personally identifying information of people who had been sexually abused by Epstein and his associates. As a result, the DOJ said it would remove, review and redact flagged documents before republishing them.

    • Memphis Flyer ☛ Pornhub Pushes Lawmakers on Age Restrictions

      “These laws demonstrably do not work and, as a result, have put your constituents’ children and adults’ personal data at risk,” the letter reads. “If you truly intend to protect minors online, you must acknowledge the facts and introduce a real solution.”

    • EFF ☛ The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites

      Unlike many state-age verification laws—which have been harmful in their own right—the SCREEN Act has no requirement that a significant portion of the website consist of sexually explicit content that is harmful to minors. The bill requires nearly any service hosting even a single piece of sexually explicit content to verify the ages of its users. The result is that the bill would apply not only to adult content sites like PornHub or OnlyFans, but also streaming services like Netflix, and social media platforms like Reddit, Discord, or Bluesky, if they host any adult content.

    • Papers Please ☛ “Can SFO rein in the feds?”

      No airline is allowed to issue a boarding pass for either a domestic or international flight unless and until it receives an individualized, per-passenger, per-flight permission message from the TSA or CBP in the form of a “boarding pass printing result” (BPPR). The default in the absence of a favorable BPPR is not to allow them to fly. These fly/no-fly decisions are based on a black box of secret algorithms that incorporate list-based rules (blocklists) and other rules based on other known and unknown data.

      What’s less well known is that the DHS doesn’t just use the information it gets from airlines to decide whether or not to allow you to fly. It can also use this information to generate “handling codes” instructing checkpoint staff to conduct special searches of your person and property, or to generate messages to other agencies that may want to arrange an “unwelcoming” party to intercept you at the airport, on departure or on arrival, to question, search, or arrest you – with or without a warrant.

      We question the legality of many of these activities. Many of them have not yet been reviewed or approved by any court, and have little or no basis in law.

      Airline passengers need to know that, legal or not, this is happening.

    • Dark Reading ☛ USA Fencing: The Hidden Identity Challenge in Amateur Sports

      First, a member uploads documents through USA Fencing's existing user portal. But on the back end, Jumio's AI-powered checking system detects document boundaries and provides real-time feedback if an image is blurry, poorly lit, or contains glare, prompting users to retake it before processing. Jumio president and chief product and technology officer Bala Kumar tells Dark Reading that once the ID is captured, the platform examines security features and looks for signs of manipulation, such as altered names, dates of birth, or other fields.

    • DNA Lounge ☛ DNA Lounge: 31-Jul-2026 (Fri): Wherein the Surveillance-Industrial Complex is asking for volunteers

      The SFPD "Real-Time Investigation Center" is the surveillance nightmare funded by a $9.4 million "donation" from billionaire Chris Larsen and another $3 million "donation" from Salesforce and Trump quisling Marc Benioff.

      "We're going to be covering the entire city with drones," said RTIC representative Captain Thomas MacGuire.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Finland to work with Estonia to stop migrants, interior minister says

    Over the past two weeks, over 80 migrants have been detained in Estonia, most likely after entering the European Union illegally via the Belarusian-Latvian border, as part of what authorities say is a hybrid attack orchestrated by the Minsk regime. This is a significant increase, as the total number stands at 128 detained so far this year.

  • Futurism ☛ Iran Appears to Be Blasting Amazon Data Centers Off the Map

    Overall, it marks the fourth such attack on a data center since the US began the war in February. Back in March, the IRGC announced a number of US tech companies as “Iran’s new targets,” including Google, Microsoft, Palantir, IBM, Nvidia, and Oracle. Now that the war is heating back up, it seems that they’re becoming targets yet again.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Just one in three Americans back Iran war, most unsure of Trump’s goals, poll finds

    Just one in three Americans support the war on Iran, the lowest reading in a Reuters/Ipsos poll since the five-month-old conflict’s early days, with most respondents saying that President Donald Trump has failed to explain his goals.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ The Pentagon’s New Missile Gap

    From almost the beginning of the Iran war, the experts have complained that the Pentagon is running out of missiles, a supposed problem that says more about the nature of the national security debate than the state of the US military.

  • Yle ☛ Finnish minister: Spain has 'completely failed' to secure border

    Spanish authorities estimated on Friday that about 49,000 migrants from Morocco had arrived in Ceuta within a 24-hour period.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Tech firm Nebius hiring push fuels speculation over Estonia data center plans

    Nebius also did not provide clarification on its plans in Estonia.

    Some data centre clients in Estonia will remain unknown to the public. For critical infrastructure, clients aim to keep the location of their data strictly hidden. Rungi said Greenergy is negotiating with many clients simultaneously and work is very active.

  • American Oversight ☛ American Oversight Calls on Newly Confirmed TSA Administrator to Come Clean on TSA-ICE Agreement

    The agreement, obtained through our Freedom of Information Act litigation, revealed that TSA and ICE entered into a formal memorandum of agreement (MOA) establishing procedures for sharing, storing, and managing information under the agencies’ partnership. The agreement appears at odds with then-Acting TSA Administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill’s sworn congressional testimony that TSA does not “send the information to ICE; we help ICE check against [TSA] information.” In an apparent contradiction, the MOA establishes a formal data-sharing arrangement and outlines procedures for ICE to retain information obtained from TSA.

• Environment

  • India Times ☛ European Union aims for seven AI gigafactories with €10 billion plan in race with US, China

    The Commission said it aims to attract at ​least €20 billion in private investments for the projects. The total ​was increased from five planned gigafactories to seven following strong interest from EU countries.

    The facilities will combine ​advanced AI processors, software, cloud ⁠technology, high-speed ‌connectivity and data centres. They will ​come ​on top of the existing 19 ⁠AI factories in various EU countries.

  • Wired ☛ What’s Behind the Heat Wave Scorching Huge Parts of the World

    The heat will be fueled by unusually hot ocean waters and El Niño as well as changes to the jet stream that lock high temperatures in place—and man-made climate change, of course.

  • Yle ☛ Workers extract 60,000 liters of fuel oil from Finnish warship that sank in 1941

    The warship, which sank off the island of Utö after striking a sea mine in September 1941, is considered one of the most environmentally hazardous wrecks in the Baltic Sea. Authorities estimate that it originally contained around 100,000 litres of fuel oil.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Jim Grey ☛ Old concrete was better

      My hypothesis is that Indiana built continuous concrete roads before figuring out that expansion joints reduced cracking and therefore maintenance. Based on my research, I’ve not seen any continuous concrete roads that were built after about 1925.

      I’ve always marveled at the good condition these centenarian highways are in. Many of them were bypassed within ten to 20 years, this section of US 40 among them. The pattern for well-traveled highways was that Indiana first hard-surfaced them in place during the 1920s, and then starting in the 1930s built bigger, better new alignments nearby.

    • Doug Jones ☛ Norway

      One thing I found cool is that Olso’s public transportation (including the island hopping ferry boats) has been completely converted over to battery electric. Our guide told us that Oslo wants to be the quietest city in Europe. I think their work has paid off, Oslo was very quiet!

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ Mark Zuckerberg's Pivot to AI Is Blowing Up in His Face Spectacularly

    But whether the company will have anything compelling to offer them remains dubious at best. Meta has been burning through its funds at an alarming rate. Even strong revenue numbers — a 28 percent increase this latest quarter compared to the same period last year — couldn’t stem the bleeding, with free cash flow sinking to the lowest level in at least five years thanks to AI spending.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Situational Awareness

    The second number is worse. By his math, hyperscalers that were earning 100 percent on each incremental dollar of investment a year and a half ago are earning 25 percent on it now, and a couple are already in the teens. That is what happens when you pour capital expenditure into an asset that depreciates like fruit. Each successive dollar of capex earns less than the one before it, and the industry’s answer to that arithmetic has been to raise the capex. Chanos’s warning is about where the compounding goes: “there could come a point 18 months from now where they’re all losing the race.”

  • The Next Move ☛ ‘Elections’ and Their Riggers

    In June, at the G7 summit in France, President Trump said, “Look, our elections are totally rigged. We have rigged elections.” America’s enemies have always said that our democracy is a sham. Now we have a president who says it, and on foreign soil.

    Who needs Kremlin propaganda? And who undermines trust in American democracy more than the president himself?

    Traditionally, the rigging of elections is a job for dictators and their cadres. Last week, Meduza, the Russian news organization in exile, ran an article under the following headline: “As support for Putin slips, the Kremlin lowers the ruling party’s election target amid fears a landslide victory would look suspicious.”

  • Bill Bennett ☛ Spark splits into Connectivity and Digital Services

    Alongside the restructure, Spark has changed its leadership team. Mark Beder, formerly the company’s chief commercial officer, is now the chief customer officer of the Connectivity division. Customer director Greg Clark will take on an interim chief customer officer, Digital Services role before departing in December 2026.

    Tommy Bjorkberg will be the new chief operating officer from October 1, with responsibility for network operations, business technology services and cyber security. Leela Ashford’s role is now chief marketing and corporate affairs officer.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Russian propagandist Xenia Fedorova faces deportation from France

      According to French media outlet Libération, which obtained a copy of the order given by the police to Fedorova's lawyers, French authorities said that her "conduct undermines the fundamental interests of the state," and her continued presence on French territory "therefore constitutes a particularly serious and immediate threat to public order."

      In early 2023, the French government froze RT France’s bank accounts as part of the European Union’s ninth package of sanctions against Russia.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Russian blogger gets three-year suspended sentence on pornography charges as authorities step up crackdown on online erotic content

    According to the prosecution, Vershinina advertised paid private chats on a public Telegram channel that gave subscribers access to pornographic photos and videos of her.

    News of the criminal case against the blogger emerged in late May, and Russian authorities detained Vershinina in late July.

  • [Old] Medium ☛ BitChat and the Unexpected Future of Bluetooth

    Instead of relying on cell towers or data centers, BitChat uses something far simpler: Bluetooth. On the surface it sounds too basic, almost outdated — like the days when people sent songs and ringtones over infrared or Bluetooth. But under the hood, BitChat is built on a brilliant idea: what if your phone could talk directly to another phone, and if needed, hop across other nearby devices until it reached its destination?

  • Bhaskar English ☛ Bitchat Bluetooth Messaging App Controversy

    This update comes right after the Indian government's demand to block the BitChat app from GitHub. The government stated that this app could be used by criminal groups, which could hinder legal investigations. This app came into discussion after it was used by Gen-Z youth during a demonstration by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) in New Delhi.

  • Harvard University ☛ Don’t mince words, Radcliffe told scholars. It worked.

    Along the same lines, students’ reticence to speak on controversial issues might not be the result of faculty pressure. The 2024 report from Harvard’s Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue working group, co-led by Brown-Nagin, “found that fear of student judgment, rather than faculty retribution, is the primary motivation for most self-censorship,” she said.

  • The Nation ☛ Universities Say They Value a Free Press. Student Journalists Tell a Different Story.

    Countless campuses across the country list press freedoms and information access among their core values. But when universities are called on to answer for their own actions, these values waver. In an increasingly repressive national landscape for journalists of all stripes, Wilson is one of many journalists who have had to fight for greater transparency and communication from universities that have increasingly stifled the student press.

    This is a nationwide trend on college campuses. According to reporting from Poynter, calls to the Student Press Law Center’s legal hotline rose 42 percent from the 2022–23 academic year to the 2023–24 academic year. The number-one culprit? Censorship.

  • New Republic ☛ ABC Accuses Trump’s FCC of Trying to Censor the Whole Media Industry

    “The Administration has openly and repeatedly called for the revocation of ABC’s licenses, because it dislikes the content and viewpoints expressed on ABC network programs,” ABC wrote in a fiery 119-page regulatory filing to the agency.

  • New Republic ☛ The Campus Free Speech Wars Are Over. MAGA Won.

    A new batch of documents published by The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals widespread censorship of course content at Texas A&M, one of many public universities where MAGA politicians—not faculty and department heads—now determine what can and can’t be taught. It is the latest example, among many since President Trump’s reelection, that the campus free speech wars of a decade ago are now over. The right has won.

  • 404 Media ☛ YouTube Bans Popular ASMR Artists, Accusing Them of Making 'Sexually Gratifying' Content

    So far, YouTube creators affected by the wave of bans who’ve spoken publicly about YouTube removing their channels include ItsBunniiASMR, Slight Sounds, Nananightray, Roseasmr, Simoneasmr, and Janina Wilhelmsen, all of whom had significant followings on the platform. There are still many ASMR creators on YouTube, making the bans even more confusing.

  • Tor ☛ Heads up: anti-censorship tools now packaged on deb.torproject.org - tor-announce

    We're doing this to ensure that downstream users of these important anti-censorship tools have an update channel that allows them to receive timely upgrades automatically.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Wisconsin moves to shut down anti-Trump brewery over minor permit violations

    Wisconsin's Division of Alcohol Beverages is trying to revoke permits held by Minocqua Brewing Company, an outspoken progressive brewery that recently promised free beer on the day Donald Trump dies. Owner Kirk Bangstad says the cited violations are minor and that the punishment can only be political retaliation. The state says it is merely enforcing alcohol laws fairly and consistently. The brewery will continue to operate while it appeals.

  • The Independent US ☛ Wisconsin brewery stripped of alcohol permit after promising free beer when Trump dies

    Bangstad, a liberal activist who often posts anti-Trump messages on the company’s social media accounts, said he plans to fight against the decision “tooth and nail” after receiving a letter from state officials dated July 15, and asked readers to donate to the brewery’s legal defense fund.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • [Repeat] New Yorker ☛ How Donald Trump Silenced the Voice of America

    The agency was created to spread the story of freedom and democracy around the world. Now, with many of its journalists being paid to stay home, it’s delivering a very different message.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ India's 'Cockroach' protesters face ongoing legal pressure

    Now, student leaders, lawyers and activists say the battle has shifted from the streets to police stations, courtrooms and social media.

    Indian lawyer and politician Kapil Sibal told DW that the government's actions after the movement called off further protests have raised fresh questions about whether its public assurances are being honored.

  • BBC ☛ Amnesty apologises to JK Rowling's sexual violence support centre Beira's Place

    The author said it was important that survivors of abuse had the option of "women-centred" and "women-delivered" care. 'Lapse of standards'

    In its apology Amnesty UK said: "This document should never have been published, and full responsibility for this error rests with Amnesty International UK.

    "We have an ongoing internal investigation into how this briefing came to be published."

  • Rest of World ☛ How data collectives are helping communities fight Big Tech AI extraction - Rest of World

    Marginalized communities and creators are forming data cooperatives to claw back control from Big Tech’s scraping practices.

    These grassroots collectives ensure that local communities — not Silicon Valley — dictate how their data are used.

    By leveraging collective bargaining, these groups are successfully forcing tech giants to negotiate for data rather than exploit it.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Record ☛ Finland to disconnect fiber-optic link to Russia as lease expires

    "The two telecommunications connections were part of the cross-border electricity transmission connection between Finland and Russia," a Fingrid spokesperson said. "This electricity transmission connection ceased operating in 2022, and the physical infrastructure has since been dismantled."

    Authorities have not detailed how much [Internet] traffic would be affected.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Nikon patent overruled, puts Viltrox lawsuit at risk

      Now that the dust has settled somewhat, it’s clear that Nikon was pursuing Viltrox primarily over its implementation of four bayonet lugs and the placement of electrical terminal groups (contacts) – but it’s still not clear which product(s) the lawsuit actually relates to.

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Silicon Angle ☛ PolyAI launches new real-time voice conversation model to make AI-driven calls more human

        Voice AI companies have been working to reduce delay and increase accuracy in voice AI agents, enabling them to sound more human on phone calls. In many cases, the chain of software needed to make this happen usually starts with speech recognition and processing, then the large language model for text generation, and finally speech output.

      • India Times ☛ EU to crack down on AI deepfakes, illicit imagery and [cracking] with new team in Brussels

        Brussels aims to track the use of AI models for violations of its new regulations, like the publishing of sexually explicit material, fake photos and videos, and cyber threats to public infrastructure. When the bloc's AI Act comes into force on Sunday, AI companies will be required to make clear to consumers with labels or digital watermarks that chatbots or imagery are generated with AI.

      • Security Week ☛ EU to Crack Down on AI Deepfakes, Illicit Imagery and [Cracking] With New Team in Brussels

        The European Union rolled out a new team on Friday to rein in AI companies across the world, in one of the most aggressive regulations the high-tech sector has so far faced as fears rise over the risks the rapidly advancing technology poses to people, politics and prosperity.

  • Copyrights

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Better to beg forgiveness (31 Jul 2026)

      In those early days, CC licenses were primarily of interest to people who were steeped in copyright law, lore and litigation; so many of the early debates about these licenses turned on esoteric (but important!) questions about copyright; for example, how CC would interact with copyright's "limitations and exceptions."

      You see, copyright has never meant the absolute right to control all uses of a work. Every system of copyright includes a set of "limitations and exceptions" for people making use of copyrighted works without permission, even if the copyright holder objects to that use. The best-known example of this is "fair use," a concept from American law.