Leftovers

• Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Planning and Executing an In-House Repository Migration: Opportunities, Challenges, and Successes Upgrading the Illinois Tech Islandora Institutional Repository

  Librarians of Illinois Institute of Technology’s Paul V. Galvin Library report on their challenges, opportunities, and successes while migrating Illinois Tech’s institutional repository to the latest version of Islandora. This in-progress migration project, managed collaboratively by a team of librarians without vendor assistance, may serve as a case study for institutions seeking to perform similar repository migrations. Illinois Tech’s institutional repository contains both traditional repository objects as well as archival and special collections objects, necessitating a careful and intentional examination of metadata structure to take advantage of new flexibilities inherent in the latest Islandora version. This presentation will cover the migration process from start to finish, including details on decision making with regard to metadata structure and linked data integration. It will also report on the team’s experiences modernizing their repository platform, such as moving to a Docker-based installation and utilizing automation tools like Python and Mercury for metadata transformation. A discussion of the team’s User Experience analysis will also be included, as well as aspirations on future work to extend the functionality of the Illinois Tech repository regarding the presentation and discovery of scholarly output of the Illinois Tech research community.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Why I (now) prefer light mode

  I definitely prefer and use light mode when I can now, but it wasn’t always the case. It’s funny how our preferences and requirements change over time.

• Jeroen Sangers ☛ The meeting ends the moment you share your screen

  Something happens the moment someone shares their screen to walk through a presentation. Their face disappears. The other participants turn into an audience. The content plays out in a straight line instead of being worked through together.

  From that point on the meeting is over as a conversation. What is left is a recording with witnesses.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Triggering Lightning With A Rocket

    To consistently get a strike, the rocket needs to be launched under a strongly-negatively-charged region of the cloud. An electric field mill measures the local field strength; these are usually quite expensive, but [Electron Impressions] managed to build his own. The rocket itself was 3D printed and designed to fly well under stormy conditions. It carried a strand of thin copper wire wound onto a plastic spool meant to minimize friction and prevent broken wires. The rocket’s igniter was waterproofed for storm conditions and remotely triggered using a walkie-talkie for safety.

  • Ray Myers ☛ Fibs and Fibbonacci - is LOGOS faster than Zig?

    The Fibonacci sequence is an elegant progression of numbers first documented by Indian poet-mathematician Acharya Pingala circa 200 BCE. It was dubbed “Fibonacci” after Leonardo of Pisa, who included it in his “Book of Calculation” (Liber Abaci) in 1202.

  • John D Cook ☛ Learning from historical mistakes

    The following extraordinary paragraph comes from Knuth’s TAOCP Volume 4A, right before the last set of exercises.

  • John D Cook ☛ Inverse differential equations

    Bessel functions came out of solving differential equations from astronomy. But then they turned out to be useful, not just in other areas of science, but in pure mathematics as well. So there are Bessel function users who came to the functions first and haven’t seen the differential equation they came from.

    You can learn a lot about Bessel functions, and other special functions, by looking at their defining differential equation even if you’re not directly interested in the differential equation or the physical problem that motivated it.

• Career/Education

  • Seth Godin ☛ Give me one reason

    The truth is simpler: People who reject you or your work aren’t giving you the real reason. They’re simply inserting “here is where I write a few generic sentences to sound polite.”

  • Christian Cleberg ☛ People & Blogs: Christian - cleberg.net

    Just a shout-out that I was recently featured on Zachary Kai's People and Blogs series.

• Hardware

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Choosing a compact digital camera

    I’ve come to the conclusion that having a dedicated device for photography is the way to go for me, I really like my iPhone 17 Pro but as I’ve proven to myself multiple times before unfortunately it doesn’t like me. Any phone over the 190g mark plays havoc with a hand issue I have so I’m going to be changing up my setup. The 17 Pro results in me needing to wear a wrist brace eventually no matter how I use it. So, I’m starting the path to finding a decent compact camera in the £500-£800 price range, which is the money I’ll get for my 17 Pro I’d think. This is all an experiment as I play with setups but it could hopefully help my hand pain and keep me engaged in something creatively as I really need a distraction from everything else going on.

  • Jim Grey ☛ Film photography blogs you should follow

    It’s time for my annual roundup of film-photography blogs. Some blogs last for a short time while others last for decades. But the film-photography blogging community remains strong. There are 121 active blogs here! Since last year, 14 blogs either closed or stopped posting. But 23 blogs are either new or have returned after a pause.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Jonathan Kamens ☛ Health insurance bureaucratic hell: Healthfirst, Integra Partners, Edgepark

    I asked, is there a directory of Integra suppliers I can search to find a new supplier? Nope, I have to call Integra and ask them to do it. I asked, can we just use the prescriptions that Integra already has on file from when these supplies were initially approved? Nope, new prescriptions are required. It’s almost like they erect time-consuming bureaucratic hoops which they offer no help with on purpose! Oh, wait, that’s exactly what it is.

  • Jonathan Kamens ☛ How hard should it be to get an electric wheelchair repaired with insurance coverage?

    Because one healthcare horror story per day isn’t enough, I want to tell you the story of how I’ve been trying for over two months to get my uncle’s electric wheelchair repaired. It’s still broken. It still hasn’t even been picked up by the company that is supposed to repair it.

    First, some background information.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • America Online ☛ Wix.com Ltd. Investors with Substantial Losses Have Opportunity to Lead the Wix Class Action Lawsuit

    Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP alerts investors inWix.com Ltd. (NASDAQ: WIX) that a securities class action has been filed in the wake of mid-May's massive 27% drop in the price of the company's shares after Wix announced its Q1 2026 financial results. Among the disappointments, operating expenses unexpectedly spiked 46% year-over-year leading to questions about the company's ability to defend its core business.

  • Johan Bleuzen ☛ macOS's Bloated Applications Folder

    Since 2011, Apple release its annual macOS upgrade and with every new release comes the new applications included in macOS (I didn’t check that every release comes with new apps but you get the picture). Last week, I installed the beta of macOS Golden Gate and discovered that my Application folder was even more filled with applications.

    Last year I didn’t upgrade to macOS Tahoe, because… Liquid Glass you know. But this year I wanted to give it a shot because I heard there was some improvement on it and that’s pretty much it.

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

    • Tedium ☛ The Problem With Vibe-Coded Flattery

      I’ve seen a strange problem in my inbox that I haven’t been able to put into words. A saga involving a botched app release helped me figure it out.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ AI professors are negotiating the new realities of academic research

      Rather than focusing on advancing capabilities, many fellows aim their attention at questions that are unlikely to be addressed by Anthropic or OpenAI. “I try not to work on problems that I think are gonna be solved by a tech company,” says Anjalie Field, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins. Companies need to make money, and research questions that have little promise of profit might not be worth investing in—especially if their answers might make the companies look bad. Recently, for example, Field conducted a study in which she found that language models give less sophisticated responses to prompts that are phrased in ways more commonly used by women than by men. It’s difficult to imagine that kind of research coming out of Anthropic or OpenAI.

    • Wired ☛ The Rise of the 1 am Job Interview

      “It’s a shitty time to be a candidate,” Samson says. “Your résumé goes into a black hole. You’re competing with thousands of candidates that are all using AI to write their résumés. So, good candidates can’t stand out.”

    • The Verge ☛ Four takeaways from Mark Zuckerberg’s massive AI manifesto

      The Meta CEO makes a case for unleashing Pandora’s box.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ This guy used Claude to accidentally plagiarize an app

      The irony of this story is that the generative AI didn’t “hallucinate” or make any mistake at all. It’s a probabilistic generator trained on the entire contents of the [Internet], including the DarkHours code that Beher keeps open on GitHub. When Godier asked for a site with the same feature set as Beher’s, Claude already had the exact code sitting in its training data. And plagiarism was born!

    • Marty Day ☛ Worthy Read: “Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Understand How to Live”

      Heck of a piece over at The Verge absolutely wrecking Mark Zuckerberg’s AI manifesto posted earlier today.

    • The Verge ☛ Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t understand how to live

      Zuckerberg suggests that using an AI to assist me in these tasks will let me accomplish more, and that is probably the case. But I always thought the point of a hobby was to relax and enjoy myself. It’s certainly not to maximize productivity. And Zuckerberg’s vision of maximizing productivity comes at the cost of my experience.

    • Manuel Moreale ☛ Raising the bar

      I just went through the queue of submissions to blogroll.org and probably deleted 95% of what was in there. This is not unusual, and has become more and more common lately. A big reason for this is clearly AI. The amount of slop submissions I’m getting is trending upwards, unfortunately. The other big reason is people attempting to use the blogroll as a way to get traffic for their shitty marketing sites, which is obviously annoying and a waste of my time. There’s people who have submitted their stupid marketing sites multiple times, and I’m starting to contemplate the possibility of blacklisting domains because some people out there clearly don’t know how to behave.

    • Darren Goossens ☛ Remove AI summary from Google search: Firefox – DSPACE

      And this removes the AI summary.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The bureaucratic AI arms-race is mutually assured destruction (10 Aug 2026)

      (And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint): [...]

    • Terry Godier ☛ Mea Culpa - Dark Hours

      About an hour later, once it became clear to me that the web app I had launched using Claude was strikingly similar to his open source project, even reproducing a bug he had later fixed, it was clear that there wasn’t anything to do except to redirect the domain directly to him and kill any plans I had to launch an iOS app for the project.

      I’d like to give credit where credit is due. I think he’s made a wonderful open source app and if you liked the features that were included in what I launched, please use the actual version of the project. That’s what I’ll be doing.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Verge ☛ YouTube is making it harder to earn money on YouTube

      Now you’ll need twice as many watch hours on YouTube to start making money from ads and subscriptions.

    • The Verge ☛ Bluesky now lets you hide reposts from that annoying person you follow

      You can hide reposts from individual users by going to their profile, clicking the three dots button, and selecting the option to “Hide reposts in feeds.” (X offers a similar toggle.)

    • Sacha Chua ☛ Replace YouTube captions from Emacs Lisp

      I want to be able to easily update YouTube captions from my VTT files. Adding a comment like this: [...]

    • Matthew Weber ☛ The Internet Doesn't Exist

      This is something that I’ve been thinking about for awhile. How do you think of the Internet? Is it social for you? A source of information? A simple tool? A burden? A toxic place filled with assholes?

      All of the above?

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Silicon Angle ☛ DEF CON hackers launch Water Watch Center to defend small water utilities

      Small water and wastewater systems tend to run legacy operational technology with exposed programmable logic controllers and weak credentials, said Matt Hartman, chief strategy officer at Merlin Group LLC. That turns fairly basic attack techniques into real operational risk. IT-focused monitoring may not register a direct interaction with one of those controllers.

    • The Record ☛ Senate Democrats introduce bill to distribute $300 million annually to shore up water system cybersecurity

      The bill would authorize $300 million each year of Drinking Water and Clean Water State Revolving Funds dedicated to cybersecurity improvements. It would amend the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Clean Water Act, giving the EPA the authorization to conduct cybersecurity assessments and would require corrective actions be taken when vulnerabilities are found.

      Water and wastewater systems would need to assess their cybersecurity risk as part of resilience planning and would be forced to comply with incident reporting requirements outlined in the forthcoming Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA).

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • TechRadar ☛ Quote of the day by Julian Assange: 'If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever'

      The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange carved a reputation as a firebrand and intense critic of the modern tech companies after rising to fame following the WikiLeaks disclosures. Although he's been absent from the public eye in recent years, he frequently commented on the emerging trends in the technology landscape.

    • New York Times ☛ Why Are So Many People Upset About Flock Cameras?

      Flock Safety’s automated license plate-reading cameras, used by thousands of law enforcement agencies in the U.S., have drawn intense criticism from civil liberties groups.

    • New York Times ☛ Flock Cameras Can Track Every Car in America. Police Love Them. Citizens Don’t.

      Flock’s 120,000 cameras can be found alongside roads in every state but Alaska, allowing law enforcement officers to see within seconds where a car might be, and where it has been. The company has contracts with 7,000 law enforcement agencies, which is 40 percent of all departments in the United States.

    • 404 Media ☛ ICE to Pay LexisNexis Millions for Data to Feed to Palantir

      LexisNexis sells a massive amount of data to law enforcement, including ICE. New records indicate ICE wants to feed that data into a Palantir system.

    • 404 Media ☛ The Mayor Who Said 'No' When Flock Came to Town

      But Norman’s leaders had questions about privacy and data security and they didn’t like Flock’s answers. “Those were some of the reasons why we ended up not doing it,” Holman said. “Questions about data storage and how long and who has access to it […] you're gathering data on every single car vehicle that goes in and out of the city of Norman, regardless of if they've committed a crime or not, and then that's stored for 30 days on some kind of database? Who has access to it? How secure is it? Those are the questions we have that were kind of deal breakers for us [...] 30 days seemed like a long time to sit on that much data. There were some council members that were like, ‘It should only be an hour. Thirty minutes.’ Why do you need it any longer than that? Why would you need to keep it for 30 days? How is it accessed? How secure is it?”

    • It's FOSS ☛ Illinois Just Told Every Operating System to Start Reporting Your Kid's Age

      Illinois has become the latest U.S. state to pull operating systems into the age verification pool. Governor JB Pritzker has signed HB5511, the Children's Online Social Media Safety Act, putting forward a new age verification framework for every device sold or used in the state.

      The bill imposes age check on "covered manufacturers," a category that lumps device makers, operating system providers, and app stores together.

  • Confidentiality

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Python Now Has a Post-Quantum Encryption Library

      Remember, the reason to do this now is because there’s no emergency. And because you will make your systems crypto agile, which is always a good idea.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Truthdig ☛ Why Nagasaki Was the Last City Bombed

    “One of the most surprising things about the ‘decision to use the atomic bomb’ is that there wasn’t one, and Harry Truman didn’t make it,” writes nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein in his definitive history of this period, “The Most Awful Responsibility: Truman and the Secret Struggle for Control of the Atomic Age.” “That is, no singular ‘decision’ to use — or not use — the atomic bomb was ever actually made by anyone, much less Truman.”

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-01 [Older] Germany widens deportations to Afghanistan

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • NPR ☛ An arts school where Epstein allegedly preyed on students reveals decades of abuse

    Together, Busch's perspective and the report's observations shed light on a decades-long history of sexual abuse at a school that was built for children and teenagers who aspire to be artists but were often unprotected, due to what the report called "gaps in oversight" and a "permissive environment."

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-01 [Older] How crypto miners are stealing power in Southeast Asia

    • Salon ☛ Trump calls Texas’ data center opposition a “mistake”

      The moratorium, which Abbott announced Monday, will require state regulatory agencies to audit proposed data centers seeking connection to the state’s electric grid and find out whether they’re receiving tax breaks, how much power and water they will use, what kind of cooling they will use, what efforts they’ve made to reduce community impacts, and who owns the facilities.

    • Hackaday ☛ Building A Bicycle Dropper Seat Post

      Though 3D printing could be used for a cursory test the mechanism, properly machined parts are needed to handle the loads running through a typical seat post. But instead of machining everything from scratch, [kane] reused the lower post and bushings from a broken post. To fit everything together, the lower post got thread milled so the entire mechanism can be threaded into the seat post as a replaceable cartridge. The upper telescopic section consists of aluminum tubing and a custom machined seat clam mechanism press-fit together.

    • Hackaday ☛ The Physics Of Keeping Thermal Power Stations Cool

      Thermal power stations – also called power plants – come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, ranging from old-school coal- and gas-fueled power stations to modern nuclear power plants. Something like a concentrated solar power (CSP) station is also a thermal power station, as all of them have a heat source that’s used to generate electricity from, whether that’s a boiler, nuclear reactor core or a big vat of sodium heated up by the Sun via massive mirrors or oil-filled tubes in parabolic throughs.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ I’m a heat-pump dryer convert: they’re amazing

      Heat-pump dryers maintain the spinning drum of their resistive cousins, but dry clothes with a glorified reverse-cycle air conditioner. Rather than generating resistive heat, heat-pump dryers transfer it from the environment. When the clothes dry, the water is condensed into either a water tank you can empty, or you can connect it to the drain as we elected to do.

    • Gigi ☛ Crushed

      That’s what bothers me the most right now: one developer. Like, what the fuck? How can the development process of a company be this negligent? No review? No proper commit messages? No making sure that the most important code path of the whole thing actually executes? And once more: why is there a low-entropy fallback in the first place? All the fancy features don’t matter if the main functionality is broken.

    • Connor Tumbleson ☛ Travel Blog: Kansas City (3)

      It had been a long set of years, but I was finally returning to Kansas City (my hometown) for my own bachelor party. I am getting married in November of 2026, so it was my turn for a little bachelor party of my own. The trip started on Thursday August 6, with Alyson dropping me off at the airport for a 9:55am flight. Like my luck it was delayed until about 10:35am so I started off the weekend with a very tiny delay.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ After severe 76% electricity price hikes due to AI data centers, Virginia requires firms to pay for all dedicated upstream electrical infrastructure — state regulators crack down, governor says move will save civilians ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’

      Virginia currently has the greatest number of data centers across the U.S., with the state hosting at least 570 sites. Because of the massive power demand of these sites, the state has been experiencing issues with electricity price hikes, with one county even asking its employees, including schools, to conserve power. PJM Interconnection, which distributes power to the state, has increased prices by 76%, with Monitoring Analytics, the independent watchdog keeping an eye on the utility company, saying that this is mostly due to AI data centers.

    • Yle ☛ New rail link reconnects Finland and Sweden

      Passenger rail service between Kemi, Tornio and Haparanda was discontinued in 1988, leaving the border region without a direct rail link for decades.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-01 [Older] Greece battles wildfires, including near Athens

    • Wired ☛ Why Each Octopus Arm Has a Mind of Its Own

      Each of these powerful appendages can move in any direction and taste and feel with exquisite sensitivity. A nerve ring connecting all eight arms enables explorations of the seafloor that is not always governed by the central brain upstairs.

    • Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Not Quite Macro

      As my interest in the micro-wildlife on our terrace has grown I have found myself wanting to know more exactly what I am looking at. I don’t have any way to catch things, but I do have a macro lens on my camera. Problem is, the focal length is quite short, which means that in macro mode the subject can be about 1cm from the front of the lens. In addition to sometimes blocking the light, it alarms most insects. It’s fine for things that aren’t moving, and though the auto-focus is reasonably quick, even a gently waving flower can defeat it. So, yes, I have taken some good close-ups with it, but that’s often more a matter of luck than judgement. It lives on my camera because quite apart from the macro capabilities, it is a great lens for out and about photography.

    • Antonio Santos ☛ Bird photography is like real-life Pokémon

      I’m just starting out with bird photography, and I’ve compiled a short-list of birds I want to take photos of, to have some sort of goal when I’m out there and what to look out for. It also helps if I have a few birds I’ve looked up to be able to say “oh cool, that’s a gray kingbird!”

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-01 [Older] Germany weighs the future of minijobs

  • Old VCR ☛ UPS finally refunded the overcharged tariff

    Last November UPS mistakenly charged me a $684 tariff on $355 worth of computer parts shipped from Europe. It was shortly afterwards reduced to $51.30, but I had prepaid the tariff to avoid warehouse fees, so UPS owed me $632.70. They finally issued the refund in July after repeatedly E-mailing their accounting office in India approximately monthly. (Phone number? Ha ha ha.)

  • BoingBoing ☛ 1991 Mars Bar highlights shrinkflation and inflation alike

    The shrinkflation of the product is exceeded by the inflation in price per gram. In 1992, the 62.5g bar would have cost 25p (70p in today's money) or more, while the 40g bar now costs £1.20 at Tesco. By weight, it is nearly three times as expensive as it used to be.

  • BBC ☛ Mars Bar from the 1990s found during house clearance

    Victoria Gordon, who runs the cleaning service, posted a photo on social media of the 62.5g bar alongside one of today's Mars Bars, which is 40g.

    "It was nearly as big as my hand, which was kind of why I noticed it," she said.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Dark Reading ☛ Outdated Cybercrime Laws Put Security Researchers at Risk

    DEF CON 34 – Las Vegas – Security researchers hunting for vulnerabilities could face prison time under a 1990 United Kingdom law that doesn't distinguish between malicious hackers and those working in good faith. But change may finally be coming.

    Cybercrime is accelerating rapidly, requiring a holistic approach to curb threats. Security researchers who responsibly disclose vulnerabilities are one way to address burgeoning risks against governments, businesses, and individuals, but many countries have not updated their policies and laws to reflect that, Katharina Sommer, NCC Group's director of government affairs and analyst relations, tells Dark Reading.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Enemy Is the Platform

    That is Reaganism: a performance of moral clarity by a decent confabulator, scripted by the business interests that trained him, made coherent by an enemy that did him the favor of being genuinely evil, with no doctrine underneath that could survive the performer’s exit. The modern party still calls itself Reaganite while inverting every position the man held. Reagan signed the 1986 immigration act that legalized nearly three million people. He warned in 1988 against “the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends... all while cynically waving the American flag” — a warning so on the nose that when Ontario’s government built an anti-tariff ad out of Reagan’s own recorded words in 2025, Trump called the ad fraudulent and suspended trade talks with Canada. Reagan’s own arms-control officials now watch the party accommodate Putin and say so on the record. A party that reveres a man while reversing him has inherited the only thing it ever actually valued: the storytelling, minus the good faith. Reagan confabulated sincerely; his successor’s ghostwriter coined the phrase “truthful hyperbole” to dress the same behavior in knowingness. The exaggeration became a strategy. The kind heart became optional, then embarrassing, then gone.

  • Rlang ☛ Institutions Are a Package Deal: What a Correlation Can’t Tell You About the Rule of Law

    This post builds on that analysis by asking how institutions should be conceptualized and analyzed: can the rule of law (and other institutions) sensibly be examined one at a time, or do they need to be treated as parts of an interdependent system? Using the six dimensions of the WGI as a proxy for institutional strength, results suggest dimensions are indeed bound together. Countries that score well on the rule of law also frequently score well on government effectiveness and corruption controls, year-to-year movements are positively linked across most dimensions and a common measure (or cause) accounts for the bulk of the variation between countries.

    None of this will surprise anyone familiar with the literature and the analysis isn’t intended to prove institutions matter or that the WGI measure them. The point is narrower: to show why the rule of law can’t be examined in isolation and the risks of coming to the wrong conclusions when we try. It also sets up later posts in the series which will look at how the rule of law is connected with other national characteristics, such as economic growth.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Top Russian Court Bars Anti-War Party From Upcoming Elections

    The August 10 decision, in a hearing held with hundreds of mostly young Russians outside the courthouse, dashed hopes of opponents of the war that they would have an outlet for their views in the September 18-20 elections.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ The Ever-Defiant Chicks Announce 'Taking the Long Way' Reissue

    When the Chicks released Taking the Long Way in 2006, it became the ultimate musical guidebook for how to stick to your beliefs and not capitulate for the sake of sales or better airplay. In the wake of their infamous 2003 statement on stage in London, when they criticized then President George W. Bush, they were essentially blacklisted from Nashville and the country music establishment: their CDs burned, their music kicked from radio playlists, the band members even living under constant heightened security after numerous threats to their lives.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ welcomes dismissal of defamation lawsuit against journalist Jeff Stein

    “The dismissal of this lawsuit is a victory for press freedom and a reminder that courts must not be used to punish public-interest reporting,” said José Zamora, CPJ’s regional director for the Americas. “Strategic lawsuits to silence journalists have no place in a democracy. Reporters must be free to investigate powerful figures without fear of baseless legal retaliation.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ For college students, GOP's $20-burrito debate is about more than lunch

    “I’m Mexican, so I grew up with free burritos at home, anytime I wanted. $20 is pretty steep,” she said. “I’m expected to eat three times a day. If I’m spending $20 per meal and I work eight hours, then that means I’m only really getting paid five hours.”

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Prop. 39 would turn Trump conspiracy into California law.

    Today we’re talking about California’s Proposition 39, a bid to turn Trump’s election conspiracy fantasies into California law, and a proposal so disingenuous it’s caused Democratic legislators to sue the Democratic secretary of state in an attempt to stop the misinformation surrounding it.

    [...]

    Sofia is exactly the kind of voter that Proposition 39 is actually aimed at. This is a voter suppression law, plain and simple, and it will harm women with name changes, naturalized citizens, young people, older people and virtually anyone who cares about not returning to Jim Crow-style laws that push people out of voting with subterfuge.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • Off Guardian ☛ 2026-07-15 [Older] You Can’t Patent a Trench: The Real Biotechnology the Green Revolution Forgot

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-07-17 [Older] US Congress faces its own debate about a "patent ban" for plants

    • 2026-07-23 [Older] USPTO Requires Foreign-domiciled Patent Applicants and Owners to Be Represented by USPTO-registered Practitioners

    • 2026-08-06 [Older] Moderna Appeals District Court Infringement Judgment over COVID Vaccines

    • 2026-08-06 [Older] Arbutus Responds to Moderna’s Appeal of District Court Infringement Judgment over COVID Vaccines

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-08-04 [Older] The most important part of a patent specification is … the pictures (at least for design law)

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-08-03 [Older] [Book Review] Pharmaceutical, Biological and Chemical Patents: A Handbook

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-07-31 [Older] [GuestPost] SEP licensing when the patent landscape changes

    • 2026-07-22 [Older] Extremity Medical, LLC v. Nextremity Solutions, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2026)

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-07-18 [Older] The growing trend of Delegate-raised invalidity grounds in Australian patent oppositions

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-07-16 [Older] European Patent Litigation Certificate returns to train tomorrow's patent litigators

    • 2026-07-13 [Older] In re Magnolia Medical Technologies, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2026)

    • Software Patents

      • 2026-07-21 [Older] PTAB § 101 Affirmance Rates Dip under Director Squires

  • Copyrights

    • Creative Commons ☛ 25 Years of Partnership: CC at Wikimania 2026

      With both Wikipedia and Creative Commons turning 25 this year, our participation in Wikimania 2026 felt especially meaningful. A quarter-century in, both organizations have evolved from scrappy experiments to global infrastructure. Our community has grown through a shared commitment to openness, access, and knowledge. The weeklong conference reaffirmed that commitment as AI is reshaping how we access knowledge and share online.

    • CopyrightLately ☛ Inside the Strange Copyright Fight Over America's Most Famous Home Movie | Copyright Lately

      The original reel sits about 1,200 miles away, in a cold-storage vault at the National Archives outside Washington, D.C. When I need to explain the counterintuitive idea that owning a physical object isn’t the same as owning the copyright in it, I’ll sometimes use the Zapruder film as an example. The government owns the reel; the Museum owns the rights. And those rights have had a long and improbable history. Abraham Zapruder sold both the film and the copyright to Life‘s publisher, Time Inc., for $150,000 in 1963. Time sold them back to his family for a dollar in 1975.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ EU Study: Block Live Sports Piracy in 30 Minutes, Across DNS Resolvers, VPNs and CDNs

      Three years ago the European Commission rejected calls for binding anti-piracy legislation, issuing a 'recommendation' instead. A new study commissioned by the European Parliament concludes that this soft approach has fallen short. It calls for a binding EU Regulation built around the 30-minute blocking clock popularized by Italy's Piracy Shield.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Youtube's joke of a fair-use appeal process, Total Eclipse of the Content ID Robots Edition

      "Good news! Your dispute wasn't reviewed within 30 days, so the claim on your YouTube video has now been released."

    • David L Farquhar ☛ The first pirated MP3

      MP3 piracy was born August 10, 1996. That day, a pirate using the handle of Netfrack released a copy of Metallica’s Until it Sleeps for free download on IRC, an Internet protocol intended for chat, not file sharing. It’s appropriate that the first pirated MP3 was a Metallica song, given Metallica’s litigious attitude toward MP3s just a few short years later.