Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ Rest in peace, Om Malik

  I was lucky to have a few conversations with him on Twitter too back in the day. One in particular I remember was scheming with him to teach his American friends about cricket. I even came close to meeting him when I briefly worked in San Francisco in the late 2010s, but a work issue pulled me away.

• Robert Birming ☛ The tool trap

  It doesn't have to be just physical homes, digital homeowners do it too. Planning, reading about different blogging platforms, comparing writing tools, making lists of ideas... all justified as "important work".

  It doesn't matter how exclusive the brush is, or how expensive the paint was. The only thing that really matters is getting the paint on the wall.

• Barry Frost ☛ My Atmospheric personal website

  This is my first personal website rebuild in five years. My last was a (deliberately) over-engineered Serverless platform that ran only on AWS. This time, I wanted a static website for greater end-user performance, to reduce server costs, and to make it easily portable to another static host.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Sketching Temporary Circuits With A Light-Triggered Floquet Topological Insulator

    In semiconductor technology, a base material like silicon is permanently modified to induce certain electrical behavior. In comparison a topological insulator material could be used to create temporary circuits using something like light exposure. An example of this is the Floquet topological state, which has long been theorized, but is now claimed to have been demonstrated in SnTe semiconductor material, per a paper by [F. Chassot] et al. in Nature Physics.

• Career/Education

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Ask the Community: What’s Next for the OMB Rule Change?

    Now that the public comment period has closed for the proposed US federal funding rule change by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), we asked leading voices in our community for their thoughts and expectations. Today, we ask the community: What key message(s) do you want policymakers to take from the responses submitted to the OMB?

  • Kevin Kelly ☛ The Technium: 88 Prompts for Long Term Thinking

    In January 2019 I wrote out scores of prompts for thinking long term that I felt should inform the foundation I was later co-chair of, The Long Now Foundation. These axioms were only shared internally, but I feel they would be useful to anyone trying to take a long view so I present them here.

  • Annie Mueller ☛ Waiting to be found by only you

    Pick 3 skills from the list below and master them as quickly as possible: [...]

• Hardware

  • Jim Grey ☛ Giving my Canon SureShot Z180u some exercise

    Earlier this year I wrote about how old point-and-shoot cameras are always a gamble because they will fail beyond repair. It might be tomorrow, it might be in ten years, but each one will eventually become a brick.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Digital Music News ☛ Artist Immunity Blueprint: A Framework for Musician Burnout

    Phil wasn’t looking for a marketing strategy. He was looking for a way out of the loop. “I was in this constant feedback loop with the algorithms,” he said. “My music was on a treadmill — constantly going and going. Is this song going to work? If I sign this artist, are they going to blow up?” The emotional weight of those questions was becoming the work. So he linked up with Ples Jones and the Artist Immunity Blueprint — not for generic coaching, but to figure out how to make his career work on his own terms, while protecting his peace in the process.

  • Yle ☛ Study: The problem isn't really how long you use your phone, but how often

    "You take your phone out of your pocket and look at it for a couple of seconds. Using a computer is different," he says.

    According to Lassila, previous research has suggested that phone notifications and social media apps frequently interrupt other activities, making people more susceptible to this pattern.

    The study also found that device-related stress tended to persist over time. Participants who reported higher stress levels generally characterised themselves as stressed throughout the seven-month study period.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • David Pogue ☛ Alexa+ is a buggy embarrassment

    But it’s been years since I’ve tested anything as half-baked as Amazon’s AI smart-speaker upgrade, Alexa+. It’s got more bugs than a CIA equipment shed.

    I asked it to do 135 tasks. It got them right about half the time.

    Can you imagine buying a microwave that only worked half of the time? Or a plane? Or a pacemaker?

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

    • New Republic ☛ Adopt AI or Die?

      In his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, Wright suggests that emergent AI—especially so-called Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI—represents not just a technological breakthrough, but an actual evolutionary outcome, possibly even a terminal one: a great, superseding mind, the next great leap forward for, or from, humanity. Wright is a great fan of the Roman Catholic philosopher and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who, in the first half of the twentieth century, sought to reconcile evolution, paleontology, and geology with Catholic theology, ultimately proposing a sweeping teleology in which the whole universe is drawn toward an ultimate state of unification and complexity. (Not for nothing, these ideas bear striking resemblance to the later science-fictional idea of a “technological singularity.”) Teilhard’s ideas about the “noosphere,” a kind of globally interconnected mind or consciousness, and the “Omega Point,” the final stage of universal consciousness and complexity, suffuse The God Test. Humanity now stands at an inflection point, the most important, literally, in the history of life on Earth, Wright proposes. AI represents a vast, alien, potentially godlike intelligence, and the test of his book’s title is whether or not we can get our shit together as a species and cobble together a sufficiently global, cooperative strategy for shepherding into existence a kindly god and an abundant future. The alternative? Pick your sci-fi dystopia.

    • The Conversation ☛ AI translators are getting more fluent – but communication is never just a matter of words

      The linguistic range is vast. London alone is home to more than 250 languages. Tight budgets and a shortage of interpreters for some languages can make it difficult to secure an interpreter with the right dialect and expertise for a pressing legal, health or social care matter.

      Notice we say “interpreter”, not translator. In professional language services, translation typically deals with written texts, while interpreting facilitates spontaneous communication between users of different spoken or sign languages, whether face-to-face, by telephone or via video.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Here’s why AI agents lie and cheat to reach their goals

      Historically, researchers have discussed reward hacking almost exclusively in the context of reinforcement learning, a common AI training regime. Like dog training, reinforcement learning involves giving the subject a reward when it achieves an objective; the rewards then reinforce the behaviors that led up to that achievement. In the case of AI training, the rewards themselves are purely mathematical, but in effect they’re the same as a dog treat: After receiving a reward, the agent is more likely to repeat whatever actions produced it.

    • The Verge ☛ Europe’s AI labeling and transparency rules are now in effect

      The transparency rules differ between providers (companies that develop and market AI systems) and deployers (platforms and services that use those AI systems), though some companies like Meta and SpaceXAI are classified as both.

    • Fernando Borretti ☛ Review: Job-Less Utopia

      Like many people who use AI to write, he uses this tiresome “I’m not a native English speaker 🥺” argument. But he published an English-language book in 2005—which I read!—and it was infinitely more readable than this. Now, I suspect Claude did more than just editing, because the book is full of unnecessary and convoluted figures, tables, abbreviations, taxonomies, including (and I swear to God this is verbatim from the book): [...]

    • Niklas Gruhn ☛ Don't be a meat proxy

      Jesus. I had to lookup almost every word to make sense of this.

    • Dominick Jay ☛ Google Has Opinions About What Your Posts Say | Dom Jay

      Last year, while working on a refresh of a client site, we noticed something odd about the way the pages appeared in Google’s search results. The title was right, the image was right, the URL was right…but the description underneath it? Well, that wasn’t exactly correct. In fact, it was completely wrong. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a site that was talking about bricks with a description talking about unicorns, but the description certainly wasn’t what I’d set it as. Originally, I considered that this was correct once, that maybe the old description was this a while ago, and I’d fallen prey to needing a reindexing of the site to show the new one. Was it that? Nope.

      So what was the text? Well, the site was a collection of services, but the summary framed the site as being a store that sold one of those services. A confident, plausible-sounding summary, created entirely by a machine that had never asked my permission to do it, and didn’t entirely understand what I was trying to say.

      The worrying part is, it wasn’t badly wrong at a glance. It was fluent nonsense though. The kind of wrong that a reader wouldn’t question, again it wasn’t talking about unicorns when actually it’s bricks, because it sounds exactly what you would expect the page to say.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Qilin Ransomware Led Global Attacks In H1 2026

      The first half of 2026 reinforced a familiar reality in ransomware: a small number of highly capable operators continue to drive a disproportionate share of global attacks. Among them, Qilin ransomware emerged as the most active threat group tracked by Cyble Research and Intelligence Labs (CRIL), demonstrating the scale and reach of today’s ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) ecosystem.

      CRIL observed Qilin targeting organizations across multiple regions and industries, with activity spanning North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, and other global markets. Its widespread campaigns highlight how modern ransomware groups leverage affiliate networks, purchased access, and proven extortion techniques to maintain sustained operational momentum.

    • Inside Towers ☛ Cyberattack Disrupts Water Utilities in More than 30 Minnesota Communities

      Minnesota Information Technology Services said it is helping utilities contain and investigate the attack while coordinating with state agencies, the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Environmental Protection Agency.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Reclaim The Net ☛ Senate Bill Puts Age Checks in Every US Operating System

      A bipartisan bill just introduced would build an age check into the operating system of every phone and computer sold in America.

      The Digital Age Assurance Act of 2026, S. 5090, from Senators Andy Kim, Cynthia Lummis, Adam Schiff, and John Barrasso, takes California's age-signaling law and makes it the national standard.

    • Techdirt ☛ 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.

    • Wired ☛ ICE Collected Nearly 1 Million People’s DNA Last Year—Including Young Children

      Moreno-Mendez’s case is part of a sweeping expansion of DNA collection from people held for civil immigration violations—a federal campaign that, backed by the threat of prosecution, funnels the genetic profiles of nearly everyone in ICE custody into an FBI database built for criminal investigations. New research from Georgetown Law's Center on Privacy and Technology estimates that the Department of Homeland Security has become the largest single source of new genetic profiles in the nation's criminal DNA system, with ICE alone potentially adding as many as roughly 920,000 profiles in 2025.

    • Wired ☛ The ‘Guardrail Guy’ Went Viral for Posting About Flock Cameras. Then Someone Destroyed Them

      ALPRs, sold by companies like Flock and Axon, use mounted cameras to capture vehicular data, which can be used to track people suspected of committing crimes. Eimers expanded his safety advocacy because he believes ALPRs may pose serious risks to passengers in the event of a crash. His claim is that many ALPRs are installed too close to guardrails, which undermines their functionality, or are placed on existing road signs, which can negate the ability of “breakaway” posts to function safely upon impact.

    • The Verge ☛ Your Fitbit data can now connect directly to Apple Health

      Google Health replaced the Fitbit app in May. The new app had a bit of a rocky rollout after users raised concerns over the new AI health coach, user interface, and other issues, though Google has since addressed some of these complaints.

  • Confidentiality

    • Jonathan Kamens ☛ 1Password problems running tally

      I may have been wrong. Since I’ve resumed using 1Password, I’ve encountered a lot of significant issues. I initially kept a running tally of them in a Mastodon thread. However, since then I’ve decided to start auto-deleting my Mastodon posts after a year, so that thread is eventually going to disappear. I think my experience with 1Password is worth preserving for the benefit of anyone else who might be considering using 1Password and wants to know what they’re getting into. Therefore, I am back-filling the contents of that thread into this post, and moving forward if I encounter any additional issues I will record them both here and in that thread.

• Defence/Aggression

  • BIA Net ☛ Thirty-one years after Srebrenica genocide, victims still await justice

    The 1995 genocide in Srebrenica, alongside the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, shaped the development of international criminal justice and the global resolve to prevent genocide.

  • ANF News ☛ ISIS tightened siege, trapping Yazidis in Shengal

    The offensive was also supported by covert cooperation between ISIS and certain local actors. Documents later collected by the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights (IHRC) revealed that secret agreements had been signed between ISIS commanders and the leaders of several Arab tribes around Shengal. According to the IHRC's Shengal report, some tribal leaders invited ISIS into the area under the pretext of protecting their villages and provided the group with maps identifying Yazidi homes. They not only facilitated the occupation but also became accomplices in what is now recognized as genocide.

  • ANF News ☛ Twelve years ago the Yazidi genocide in Shengal

    When the ISIS gangs stood at the doors of Shengal, thousands of Peshmerga and asayish members of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) chaired by Masoud Barzani, who until that very moment controlled the Shengal town, made a quick getaway without shooting even one single bullet. As a result of the flight of the KDP Peshmerga, thousands of Yazidis were slaughtered by the ISIS gangs, thousands more were abducted, predominantly women and children, and sold at markets into slavery. Interestingly, shortly before the genocide took place, the KDP forces seized all the arms and weapons the Yazidis had at that time and took into custody three of the twelve guerrillas of the People's Defense Forces (HPG) and the Free Women's Troops (YJA-Star), who came to the rescue of the fleeing Yazidi people. All this made it indeed very clear, how well prepared and organized this extensive genocide actually was.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Stink of Musk

    Elon Musk will be spending $100 million to $120 million in at least eight states to help elect Republicans in November, according to The New York Times.

    Musk’s spending is set to begin next month, targeting Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, and Ohio, and potentially North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas. Musk will also spend in House races in states including California, Wisconsin, and Washington.

  • El País ☛ Daniel Ortega establishes Latin America’s last dictatorship in Nicaragua

    That the death sentence for electoral processes was pronounced precisely on the day that commemorates the triumph of the Sandinista Revolution completed the bitterest irony: the same date that in 1979 promised the birth of democracy in the country served, almost half a century later, to definitively bury its last vestiges. Ortega is not only placing a tombstone on Nicaragua’s already drowned democracy, he is also cementing the region’s last dictatorship, sealing the country’s autocratic drift and paving the way for a new family dynasty. “It is the antithesis of what that struggle meant, of the aims and commitments of a fight that cost so many lives. Announcing that on the anniversary of the end of a dictatorship is like a mockery,” Baltodano says.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • PC World ☛ No, Linux didn't actually hit 10% market share. Blame bots

    In this case, it appears as if Linux is spreading like wildfire among desktop PCs, a development that’s being celebrated within the Linux community. But Windows Latest took a closer look at the supposed figures and reached a different conclusion: AI bots.

    According to Statcounter’s FAQ page, here’s how it operates: [...]

• Environment

  • Memphis Flyer ☛ Environmental Groups Call Out SpacexAI and MDEQ Over Agreed Order

    The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) called the agreed order “a stark reversal” of the company’s promise to operate its turbines for one year.

    “The ‘Agreed Order’ was negotiated in secret and without any input from the communities forced to deal with [SpacexAI’s] pollution,” SELC said.

  • Salon ☛ “A deal with the devil”: Religion motivates data center opponents in Texas

    “Do we think that entering into negotiations with Google, Meta and Amazon are closer to making a covenant with God, or making a deal with the devil?” he asked the council.

    Christians, Long concluded to applause, must stand up to data centers.

  • The New Lede ☛ The EPA says they want “PFAS Out.” Their policies are allowing more of them in

    But despite embracing the rhetoric of MAHA — the Trump administration’s regulatory rollbacks and approval of new types of PFAS signal what observers see as a sharp contradiction: promises to reduce exposure to the so-called “forever chemicals,” followed by policies that increase the risks of exposure for millions of Americans.

    “They’re saying one thing, and then they’re doing something completely opposite,” said Bill Pluecker, an independent state representative from Maine and leader in PFAS prevention policy.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Climate change kills’: Pedro Sánchez speaks plain truth to Spain’s deniers

    “I want to make something very clear,” the prime minister told reporters in Extremadura that day in 2022. “Climate change kills: it kills people, as we’ve seen; it also kills our ecosystem, our biodiversity, and it also destroys the things we as a society hold dear – our houses, our businesses, our livestock.”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Memory chips cut power 59-fold, may make satellites 2,000 lb lighter

      A custom SRAM-based chip design could cut the computing power needed by future space telescopes by nearly 59 times, potentially making it easier to image Earth-like planets around distant stars.

    • The Drone Girl ☛ DoorDash Air: What We Know About the New Drone Carrier

      When DoorDash announced on July 29 that its in-house robotics division, DoorDash Labs, had earned an FAA Part 135 air carrier certification to launch DoorDash Air, the headlines wrote themselves. Becoming just the eighth operator in U.S. history cleared to operate an autonomous drone airline is a massive regulatory milestone.

    • India Times ☛ Hackers hit Bitcoin’s safest hiding place in ongoing attack

      Hackers exploited a software flaw in Coldcard Bitcoin wallets, causing significant financial losses. This vulnerability affected the security keys used to protect user cryptocurrency holdings. Millions of dollars have been siphoned from thousands of compromised wallets globally. The flaw involved a predictable seed phrase generation mechanism within the devices. Coinkite has released updated firmware to address the ongoing security breach.

    • Gigi ☛ The Big Suck

      And regarding the civilizational-level importance I’ve mentioned above: bitcoin will only be able to fulfill its promise if people hold their own keys. If that’s not the case, bitcoin will just be another tool in the money printer’s toolbox. That’s why it all sucks so fucking much. A gaping wound in bitcoin’s very soul, and the bleeding hasn’t stopped yet.

• Finance

  • Tyler Sticka ☛ I Broke My 4th-Grade Class Economy

    They explained to me that I wasn’t in trouble, but I wasn’t allowed to accept real money (I returned the cash). And for the benefit of the whole class, there’d be some new rules to prevent kids from bankrupting themselves at a single shop.

    That was absolutely the right call.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Cults leak: email domains revealed, 8GB Swiss Archive to be tabled in British parliament

    Last week, I was one of the people impacted when the Parliament of Victoria's cult inquiry accidentally leaked the email addresses of all the witnesses and victims through CC.

    I have no interest in identifying any witness or victim personally, however, I feel it is safe and in the public interest to publish a list of the domain names from the email addresses. Some of the domains appear to name specific individuals so I am leaving those out.

    [...]

    Reform admit they have no control over their own cybersecurity. Am I the only candidate ready for the war of tomorrow? Video collage from Victoria's Cult inquiry, incumbent MP's resignation and my work at the UN level.

    8GB Swiss Archive will be tabled in the British parliament if the people of Clacton-on-Sea decide to vote Pocock, the local Australian.

  • India Times ☛ Meta, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI to meet Trump officials about AI safety testing

    Anthropic and OpenAI disclosed in recent days that their AI tools breached the systems of other companies, stirring concerns among US lawmakers about whether increasingly capable AI models could be used to conduct or facilitate cyberattacks.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ How China Won the Iran War

  • The New Leaf Journal ☛ Calvin Coolidge’s Homestead Oath of Office

    In this article, we will examine Coolidge’s account of the night he received with sadness the news that he would be the President of the United States, beginning with the recollections of Coolidge himself before examining other eyewitness accounts.

  • [Old] Om Malik ☛ The Myth, the Mythos and the Man

    Medieval European monarchy ran on the same logic. Divine right was the operating system. You did not interrogate it with evidence because the claim was structured to be outside the evidentiary domain entirely. When Parliament eventually executed Charles I, the radicalism was not the killing. It was the assertion that logos, law, evidence, process, had jurisdiction over mythos. That is what made it revolutionary.

  • Debian Family

    • Daniel Pocock ☛ Cults: Rupert Lowe's analysis of Nigel Farage & Reform eerily similar to Debianism cult

      I previously described in another report how the rogue Debianists tried to use police as a weapon to raid the supposedly secret Swiss Protonmail.

      The use of the police in this manner is much more than an attack on the victim named in the false accusations. These false persecutions are intended to send a message to every other cult member, whether it is a political party or a free software organisation, to deter anybody else from doing anything inconvenient for the gangmasters.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Fact check: Russian disinformation targets German elections

      The false reports have been cleverly designed so that they appear to come from major German media outlets, including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Stern TV, ARD and Spiegel TV. But the videos are as false as the allegations they make.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • LRT ☛ Russian independent media editor says he is leaving Lithuania for France

    Sergei Smirnov, editor-in-chief of the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona, said he is leaving Lithuania for France, citing what he described as a worsening climate for Russian opposition figures following an unsuccessful attempt to revoke the residence permit of opposition activist Leonid Volkov.

  • France24 ☛ Anti-war politician and Kremlin critic Boris Nadezhdin flees Russia for France

    Almost all of Putin's critics are in jail, in exile or dead.

    Nadezhdin had been seeking to stand in tightly controlled parliamentary elections in September.

  • The Nation ☛ Our Court Jesters Are Disappearing Just When We Need Them Most

    He didn’t name names, but he didn’t need to. He was nodding to those comedians who, as The Cut writer Jesse David so perfectly puts it, “all position themselves as outside the mainstream due to their resistance to political correctness, contrarian takes on liberal conventional wisdom, and ‘both sides are corrupt’ nihilism.” Their entire brand is about being anti-establishment, objective skeptics who bow and scrape to no one. Yet when Trump embarked on a tour of roughly a dozen of those manosphere—my descriptor, perhaps not theirs—podcasts throughout the 2024 campaign season, every host glazed him like an absolute doughnut. Those anti-woke podcast comedians who are all about saying what no one else will say seemed to lose their voices as soon as Trump entered the room.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘It’s not about the Qur’an, it’s about the money’: how boys of five are forced to beg on Senegal’s streets

    Every day, these talibés, or students of the Qur’an, join thousands of other boys, some as young as five, on the streets of the city in search of a piece of baguette, a handful of rice or a few coins. They beg not just to fill their own stomachs but also the pockets of their Qur’anic teachers, or marabouts.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • CPJ ☛ Mozambique court nullifies decree allowing government to shut down [Internet]

    CDD’s intervention followed a previous successful suit to stop cell phone operators restricting or blocking [Internet] access during 2024’s post-election protests, which CDD said “severely affected fundamental rights, access to information, freedom of communication and civic participation.”

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Techdirt ☛ Sony Gives Its Disc-Loving Customers A Giant Middle Finger

    Just a few weeks ago, Sony announced that it would stop producing games on physical media starting in 2028 and a very loud portion of Sony’s customers lost their freaking minds. And, in this writer’s opinion, for very good reason. Having no physical media option for your games is going to make game preservation efforts nearly impossible. It makes gaming companies coming up with physical collectables to ship with their games a much more complicated prospect. And, as Sony itself likes to remind us over and over again, a game purchased digitally isn’t a game purchased at all, but rather a limited and temporary license to play a game for however long the publisher decides it should be available.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Record Labels Offer to Abandon $46.8 Million Piracy Case Against Grande

      After the Supreme Court's Cox ruling reshaped ISPs piracy liability, the record labels behind a $46.8 million verdict against Grande Communications are ready to walk away from the case entirely. Grande won't let them, however. The Internet provider is holding out for a formal win and the millions in bond costs it says the appeal ran up.