Leftovers

• Hardware

  • RTL-SDR ☛ RTL-SDR Blog V4L (Lite) Now Available for Purchase!

    We have recently secured a confirmed good stockpile of Rafael R828S chips via our contract manufacturer, which allows us to produce the new Blog V4L (Lite) design. Compared to the R828D, the R828S is a variant with one fewer RF input. This means that instead of a triplexed filtered input, we can only do a diplexed filtered input. Hence the 'lite' designator, as the design is identical to the original V4 models, except for the triplexed input filtering feature. This lack of filtering comes with a minor upside: improved sensitivity due to less filtering losses on the front end.

  • Hackaday ☛ Splitting A Ball Bearing To Cut Out Backlash

    Besides taking up more room, thermal expansion also means that it’s difficult to apply a consistent preload force between two ball bearings. Instead, to make a self-contained preloaded bearing, [Chronova Engineering] first disassembled a single ball bearing. The most difficult part of this is taking apart the ball cage; the two parts of this are normally riveted together, but he managed to find a crimped cage and pry it apart. After taking the bearing completely apart, he cut the outer trace in half along the circumference, then reassembled the bearing. The split outer trace makes it possible to press the two halves together, preloading it and removing slop.

  • Fabio Akita ☛ Intel's Comeback: ARM64 vs X86-64 Is Not What You Think

    Since January, when the first Panther Lake laptops hit store shelves, reviews keep repeating a sentence that would have sounded absurd five years ago: an Intel x86 chip going toe to toe with the Apple M5. Not in everything — I’ll get to the caveats — but in the category that matters most day to day, battery life, the game has flipped. And that gives me the perfect excuse to write about a belief I see programmers repeat without checking: that true efficiency only comes with ARM64, because x86 is old, heavy, and full of 1978 baggage.

    My thesis: that was true generations ago, when decoding x86 cost a relevant slice of the die. Today x86 is, in practice, a translation layer into micro-instructions — and what separates Apple, Qualcomm, and Intel was never the instruction set. Intel’s crisis was managerial and manufacturing, not architectural. Which is exactly why its comeback, now, makes sense.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Modern (x86) firmware can be really slow to boot, which can be painful

    We've recently wound up with some unusually big (x86) servers, from a vendor we don't normally get servers from. One of the unusual things about these servers is that they take a very long time to initialize on boot (at least by our standards). I haven't actually timed it, but I'm pretty certain there's more than a minute of staring at 'chipset initializing', and it may be as much as several minutes.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ New In-Box

    Papa’s got a brand new in-box. Picked up at thrift for $3.30.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The U.S. Healthcare System is Already Mostly Socialized

    Well, if that is the criterion then much of U.S. healthcare is already socialist. In fact, the government’s role is so large that U.S. healthcare is better described as partially privatized socialism than as anything resembling a free market.

    Let’s start with the raw numbers on health insurance, which pays the bulk of Americans’ medical expenses. Americans receive health insurance either from private companies or from public programs, overwhelmingly Medicare and Medicaid. Here’s what the breakdown of coverage and spending between private and public looked like in 2024: [...]

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Wired ☛ A Zoom Screen-Sharing Bug Let Anyone Take Over Other Devices on a Call

    As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets’ devices. Anyone on a call that involved screen sharing, whether participants or the host, would have been vulnerable to a silent attack that could be carried out with no indication and no interaction from the victim.

  • Sean Conner ☛ Gmail might partially be to blame for me receiving emails from other Sean Conners

    But the thread as a whole left me with the idea that there's still a lot of people out there that barely understand email and aren't even sure what their own email even is. Sad.

  • Nick Heer ☛ The End of Google Search as We Know It

    It is hard to reckon with the notion that Google was only incidentally a utility. It worked so well for so long and for so many different audiences that it now seems positively quaint to think of a time when I could use it for deep research into other stuff. It still is the best we have simply because of its longevity: there is no competitor with a usable index dating back to the 1990s. (Bing’s date picker, for example, was designed by someone who hates you, your family, and your friends.) But Google has abused the trust of publishers so thoroughly that it has effectively sabotaged its most specialized and helpful use cases. It is a shame.

  • J Wolfgang Goerlich ☛ Synced passkey security issues could allow account takeover

    Some have argued that the lack of sufficiently robust support processes actually weakens passkey capabilities and undermines the whole point of such systems.

    J. Wolfgang Goerlich, a member of the faculty of IANS and a longtime cybersecurity consultant, pointed out that the original FIDO2 spec eliminated credential theft by binding the private key to a physical authenticator. Synced passkeys reintroduced credential portability and therefore reintroduced the form of credential theft risk cited in the Palo Alto report.

    “A passwordless system is exactly as strong as the flow that re-establishes it,” he said. “Both serious techniques here start by forcing a device to re-enroll. Many security teams have never modeled, never monitored and never rehearsed a response to this.”

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

    • APNIC ☛ Finding zero-days with any model

      The prevailing narrative in AI-driven security claims that discovering novel vulnerabilities is a ‘frontier’ feature reserved for restricted models like Anthropic’s recently announced Mythos Preview. Recent high-profile reports highlighted the ability of these advanced models to uncover decades-old memory safety violations, such as the 1998 OpenBSD TCP SACK implementation flaw, framing these findings as a paradigm shift in the threat landscape.

      The reality differs. My research demonstrates that these capabilities reside not just in proprietary frontier models, but in the orchestration harness used to manage commercial models. I built workflows on top of my open-source IronCurtain framework to explore this. Using a specialized vulnerability discovery workflow, I replicated these frontier findings and autonomously discovered new zero-day vulnerabilities in foundational software with commercial models like Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6, as well as open-weight models like Z.AI’s GLM 5.1.

    • Sean Coates ☛ How We Got Here

      I don’t like the hype. The too-few-publicly-traded-companies holding up the economy, pretending there’s a boom, when really we normal folks are feeling the recession squeeze (“well, actually, we’re not technically in a recession!”). The every-product-must-be-AI anti-human behaviour. The can’t-have-nice-things unless they have an AI sticker on them nature of products/services, right now. This feels like everyone who failed at cryptocurrencies pushed their (unlimited because of our failure to govern) money into the next shiny thing. It’s exhausting, and it’s literally ruined things that used to be extemely reliable. The economic bubble will pop, and it’s going to hurt us all—but we’ve let the market become so unhinged that we can’t even do the rational thing to exit the public stock markets before it fails, because nothing works the way it was intended there anymore. (We can exit the market, as individuals, but it might be more valuable to not do that—especially too early.)

      I can’t abide the intellectual [sic] property [sic] theft. I do, however, find myself agreeing strongly with Cory Doctorow’s position of (paraphrasing) “it’s over-all beneficial to let systems ingest intellectual property to distill; if we didn’t we wouldn’t have web search”, but it sure is not okay to steal copies of everyone’s books to facilitate this ingesting.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI for Military Support

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI Genie in the Wild

      The story is from Australia. Someone named Andrew tasked OpenClaw to book gym classes for him. And….

    • David Rosenthal ☛ More On Robotaxis

      In any rational jurisdiction, six times worse than the competition even with a safety driver would get the regulators to force Tesla back to the drawing board.

      The New York Times article was the best I could find at the time but it was from 2006. We now have much better and more recent data. Follow me below the fold for one of the reasons why Tesla's numbers are bad, very probably even worse than six, and even some criticims of Waymo's numbers.

    • France24 ☛ Zuckerberg envisions 'superintelligence' for everyone in AI manifesto

      In a document derided by critics as fantastical, Zuckerberg said his company is working towards an era where everyone will have the tools to create new businesses, receive PhD-level tutoring and receive personalised lifestyle tips. His 8-year-old daughter, he wrote, can already code her ideas and quickly produce videos.

    • Neil Selwyn ☛ Teachers talking about GenAI in schools … more trouble than it is worth?

      Nearly four years on after the introduction of ChatGPT into schools, we are beginning to see signs that GenAI is starting to lose its lustre. A recent half-day session with some our research study teachers from Brookdale High School brought up a few interesting points that we were certainly not hearing at the beginning of our study in 2024.

      One point was a general sense that a lot of teachers are not really in the mood anymore to talk about GenAI. This means that GenAI enthusiast teachers are becoming quite wary of talking about their AI use to colleagues. As these two English teachers describe: [...]

    • 404 Media ☛ The Roboguard Revolution is Short-Circuiting

      Proof News found evidence of at least 21 security robot deployments since 2015. We contacted contract holders and combed news articles and determined that at least 13 of those programs have ended. Silicon Valley-based Knightscope secured the most security robot contracts, according to Proof’s analysis, and also suffered the bulk of cancellations.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Robot mall cops are being replaced by humans

      How is Knightscope dealing with its expensive robots not working?

    • Futurism ☛ Zuckerberg's Manifesto About the Glorious Freedoms AI Will Bring Was Completely Contradicted by His Own CTO During a Company Meeting

      Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg just dumped a lengthy manifesto on his utopian vision for an AI “superintelligence”-driven future. Called “The Future is for Everyone,” it’s so breathlessly optimistic about the technology that it ends up belying something that’s, instead, incredibly dystopian.

      But among all the deranged things he shared in the 6,500 word document, it’s Zuckerberg’s promise about how AI will unlock so much personal freedom for its embracers that’s the most hypocritical.

  • Social Control Media

    • Idiomdrottning ☛ The Mandatory Phone Addiction

      Because please, let me zoom out and reframe this issue a bit. Let’s look at the forest and not just this one tree.

      Algo silo media with vendor lock-in is wrong and evil. (I’ve said why a hundred times but overshortified: they proprietarized our communal infrastructure and exploited it for huge wealth gaps.) But it’s the corporations (and the politians that kept them legal) that did wrong, not you the user.

      Yeah, yeah, at some point one would’ve hoped that people would think for three seconds before signing up to the latest vendor-lock-in algo silo death trap, before it became a critical mass, but once it did become a critical mass I can’t blame any one single user when their friends, housing, job, and family depended on them being on Facebook/​LINE/​WhatsApp/WhateverTheHeck. I know such dependencies are possible. I have lost housing opportunities, jobs, friends (entire friend groups and even boyfriends) when I had a weird overly-stubborn, mentally-locked brain who refused to go on these silo sites even as that refusal was killing me. (I mean, going on the silo sites would’ve also killed me so it was lose/lose. Join the other lemmings and die from falling off the cliff or don’t join them and die of loneliness.)

      I can’t expect or demand anyone else be a weirdo like me and become an offline pariah. That’s not what this is about.

    • Rlang ☛ R-Community A moderated Google Group to share R knowledge

      I miss when I used Twitter and people had the “#rstats” hashtag that lead to a nice community. I closed my Twitter account when Mr. Elon Musk bought the platform, and similarly many users left to Mastodon, Bluesky, and other platforms. I thought Google Groups would be a good option as it does not require to configure an extra account as other technologies do (e.g., Slack, Discord, etc.). I also thought about moderation, as I received some trolling/bullying when I was a novice R user on Stackoverflow a few years ago.

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ ByteDance goes big - very big - on AI

      With 10 trillion parameters, the model would be more than three times the size of Chinese start-up Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, which has 2.8 trillion parameters.

      An AI model’s parameters refer to the numerical settings a model learns from data to recognise patterns, generate answers and carry out tasks. They are often used as a rough measure of scale, though not necessarily capability.

    • EPIC ☛ Tiktok, Google & Meta v. Bonta

      EPIC’s brief also explained why the Court should view NetChoice’s claim that the law regulates expression with skepticism. In Moody and Paxton, the Supreme Court said that social media feeds themselves are expressive products, but not every activity taken to create those feeds is itself expressive. For example, it is likely expressive when companies remove or downrank content that violates their content and community guidelines, such as racist posts. The Court found this similar to what newspaper editors do and likely expressive. But it is not likely expressive when companies surveil users’ every move to construct profiles of them, feed that information into algorithms, and tell the algorithms to show users whatever content similar users spent the most time engaging with. The Court explicitly called this out as a practice that might not be expressive in Moody/Paxton, and it is is what SB 976 regulates, so NetChoice’s citations to Moody are inappropriate.

    • EPIC ☛ Judges Sides with EPIC and AG, Telling Google, TikTok, and Meta Their Addictive Social Media Features Are Not 1A Speech

      Big Tech’s overbroad arguments that their addictive social media features are protected speech were dealt a major blow in an order issued Thursday in the combined TikTok, Meta, and Google v. Bonta cases. These cases involved First Amendment challenges against California’s SB 976, which prohibits companies from providing addictive social media feeds to minors. The legislation’s passage followed whistleblower reports and company leaks showing that the tech giants understood that adding engagement-maximizing features to feeds was a content-agnostic, harmful choice that was profitable for them but bad for users, especially kids. In this lawsuit, the tech companies claim that their use of surveillance data to behaviorally profile minors is First Amendment-protected speech.

      In February, EPIC filed an amicus brief on behalf of itself and 18 law and technology scholars explaining that the companies’ First Amendment arguments were meritless. The companies tried to conflate feed-curation activities that were clearly expressive, such as content moderation to remove hate speech, with feed-curation activities that aren’t expressive at all, such as content-agnostic engagement-maximization functions. The District Court agreed, citing EPIC’s amicus brief multiple times in its order.

    • Futurism ☛ Reddit Finally Found a Way to Make Its Mods Even Worse: Replace Them With AI

      The word “human” certainly does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. But whether AI bots fighting a barrage of other bots will ultimately improve the situation as the internet drowns in AI slop remains to be seen. Reddit, one of the last — and far from perfect — bastions of human-generated content on the web, has been under siege for years now, in a tragic mess that the company may not be able to AI itself out of.

    • Rob Knight ☛ Shutting Down EchoFeed

      Last night, after a few months on and off of problems with EchoFeed from my side and general feed problems I made the decision to shut it down. As of right now, this is what I've done: [...]

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Ransomware group hijacks hospital system’s Facebook page amid ongoing cyberattack fallout

      The Gentlemen has become one of the most prolific ransomware-as-a-service groups since it emerged in the second half of 2025. It is believed to have been founded by a former affiliate of the Qilin ransomware group who uses the moniker “hastalamuerte.”

      According to the cybersecurity firm CheckPoint, its ransomware was used to extort 332 victims in the first five months of this year alone. In the second quarter of 2026, the group claimed 125 attacks on industrial organizations, the operational technology firm Dragos said — the third most among ransomware groups.

    • The Register UK ☛ Ransomware attacks spike as world distracted by AI

      Those numbers should come as no surprise given what pentesting firm DeepStrike reported about the most frequent payers of ransomware: Manufacturing, education, healthcare, and financial sector firms are the most likely to pay out a ransom, the firm says, with even the least likely (finance) still paying ransoms 51 percent of the time. Ripe targets, in other words.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Record ☛ Kids’ online safety bill faces dim prospects of passage this session despite progress

      The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) advanced out of the Senate Commerce Committee last Wednesday, drawing applause from lawmakers, families and advocates who have long fought for the bill. But those same supporters acknowledge a long road ahead for legislation that, despite mounting political pressure to act, many think will be difficult to pass this session.

      While certain differences will kill the bill if left unresolved, experts and advocates are still cheering the compromises they have won from lawmakers who have flipped positions and agreed to tougher standards on some issues.

    • GreyCoder ☛ StartMail Review 2026: The Privacy Email for People Who Use Email Clients

      StartMail describes its storage as “zero access” — meaning they cannot read your decrypted mail content once stored. That’s technically true, but the critical caveat is: the initial encryption process happens on StartMail’s servers, not on your device.

    • Futurism ☛ Parents Horrified as Boomer Mawmaws Gift Children Blatant AI Slop Picture Books

      As Wired reports, moms and dads across the country are having AI-generated children’s books inflicted on them by the tots’ well-meaning grandparents, sometimes creating tensions within the family.

      Grandma and grampa think it’s cute to use AI to churn out a picture book with their grandchildren in it. But the parents often aren’t impressed, on top of being horrified by the implications of their kids being fed into an AI model in the first place.

    • Futurism ☛ USA Today Journalists Horrified by Newspaper's Partnership With Palantir

      “While [Reed] championed this partnership as a way to drive revenue, we believe it threatens to undermine trust in our news outlets and raises serious questions about the data security of our readers,” the statement reads.

      “We have significant ethical issues with Palantir, whose artificial intelligence software has been used to advance widespread surveillance and power immigration crackdowns,” the union wrote. “Not only does partnering with Palantir, a major player in the news we cover, create an inherent conflict of interest, but it fails the journalists who have been assaulted and falsely arrested while covering immigration enforcement actions and protests.”

    • Futurism ☛ Flock's Secret Surveillance Plan Will Make You Gasp

      As 404 Media reports, the controversial company drew up plans to use the dashcams installed in Uber and Lyft drivers’ cars to scan the license plates of every vehicle that drove past them — in effect turning hundreds of thousands of rideshare and delivery drivers into a network of what the reporting describes as “roaming surveillance vehicles.”

    • Don Marti ☛ substitution effects

      Likewise, whatever W3C ends up standardizing on, the attribution reports will have to agree with the ad placement decisions already made by the Facebook and Instagram algorithms, by Google’s Performance Max, and by whatever Apple is going to be doing as they continue to enshittify over there. Imagine an attribution report that contradicted the optimal placements decreed from above, and gave credit for sales to legit independent sites instead. That would be like writing a biology paper contradicting Trofim Lysenko back when he was a big shot.

  • Confidentiality

    • John D Cook ☛ Manually unbreakable cryptography

      If you told someone about RSA encryption, for example, you’d lose them right after you said “First you find a couple 1000-digit primes.” But there’s no need for using 1000-digit primes if no attacker has a computer. You could use 100 digit primes. Could you use 10 digit primes? If you chose primes just big enough to make the method unbreakable by hand, could someone implement it by hand?

• Defence/Aggression

  • Robert Reich ☛ Stop AI Before it's Too Late

    Wealth inequality is already at record levels, and wealth at the top is quickly morphing into political power.

    AI is creating a vast wave of campaign money. OpenAI’s superPAC “Leading the Future” has amassed over $140 million to influence upcoming elections, while Anthropic’s superPAC “Public First Action” isn’t far behind.

    As the great jurist Louis Brandeis is reputed to have said, “America has a choice: we can have great wealth in the hands of a few, or we can have a democracy, but we can’t have both.”

    AI is pushing us further toward the first option.

    Meanwhile, there’s the planet to consider.

  • Meduza ☛ Russians are being arrested for photographing soldiers’ graves. Some face treason charges.

    Russian security officials have stepped up demonstrative detentions of people photographing graves at cemeteries, Dmitry Treshchanin, an editor at the independent Russian news outlet Mediazona, said, and have forced residents in several regions to record video apologies afterward.

  • Futurism ☛ Global Warming Is Rapidly Accelerating, New Paper Finds

    "If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5 degree C limit of the Paris Agreement before 2030."

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Moronic Bullshit of the "Third Way"

    Well, I find it deeply troubling that faux centrist groups are declaring war on progressives in the pages of The New York Times, without the Times revealing who they really are.

    If you bother to look at the funding sources of Third Way — those that have been made public, that is (Third Way is structured as a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that’s not legally required to publicly disclose its donors) — you’ll find a Star Wars cantina of billionaire megadonors, Fortune 500 CEOs, corporate dark money bundlers, and giant corporations.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Is There Anyone Who Can Respond to My FOIA Requests?

    Asking the federal government for public records didn’t always feel like a shell game. But bounced emails and broken portals seem like the new normal.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Code The British Government Doesn’t Want You To See (Any More)

    Governments like to do things which at least sound open and honest. It makes them look like Thoroughly Good Eggs, when maybe the truth might be a little murkier. They also like to quietly roll back those things when it suits them, and so it is that [Jonty], of Electromagnetic Field fame, has assembled a list of code repositories quietly disappeared by the UK Government. Naturally, being thorough about such things, he’s also kept copies.

  • Naveen Srinivasan ☛ Finding Hidden Internal Apps Through Public Certificate Logs

    IMO, one of the easiest ways for folks to get CT logs for any given domain is to use something like https://sslmate.com/help/reference/certspotter_authorization_api (this API provides a throttled, free tier), which provides all the certificate entries (and believe me, lots of these domains are open on the public internet). Think of this like Shodan, but instead of searching with an IP or CIDR range, the bad actor can use a name. Once they get the hostnames, they can start searching for vulnerabilities or open applications.

• Environment

  • India Times ☛ Memphis AI data center pollution: Memphis AI data center fuels pollution fight in Black neighborhood

    The stench of rotten eggs and burning debris fills the air in Boxtown, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Memphis. Just a few miles away, a power plant fuels one of SpaceXAI's data centers, which are popping up all over Tennessee.

  • Futurism ☛ AI Data Centers Are Causing Unfathomable Amounts of Air Pollution, and It Gets Worse With Each New One They Build

    And as more data centers crop up throughout the US, that problem — of rising emissions linked to the accelerating demand for any kind of electricity — is only going to get worse.

    According to reporting by the New York Times, the US currently has at least 82 data center-linked gas generators either in development or in the proposal stage. These are massive facilities which rival public electrical generators in size and power, only they’re not managed by the government, and the power they generate isn’t meant for citizens.

  • Western Water ☛ Banking water underground for the next drought

    Storing water underground during wet years can soften the blow of drought, but it cannot promise a full supply when a dry spell drags on. That is the central finding of a studyOpens in a new tab. published in the August 2026 issue of the journal Groundwater for Sustainable Development. The University of Arizona Water Resources Research CenterOpens in a new tab. announced the research on August 7, 2026, last week.

  • The Register UK ☛ As datacenters expand, so does public opposition to them

    A recent Gallup survey found the majority of Americans are now opposed to datacenters being built in their area, many so strongly opposed that they would sooner see a nuclear power plant built nearby.

  • Wired ☛ Scientists Used AI to Create 16 New Viruses

    The creation of these entirely new viruses was based on Evo 1 and Evo 2, foundational AI models developed for computational biology applications. Both algorithms were trained on millions of genomes from all domains of life, with the goal of identifying and learning complex evolutionary patterns, including how genes are typically organized, which sequences are conserved, and the biological constraints that allow an organism to remain functional.

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Warn That New Satellites Could Cause Eye Damage for People on the Ground

    Critics of the FCC’s approval of Reflect Orbital’s plans pointed out the risk of eye damage to the regulator, which wound up being deemed irrelevant and too “small” of a factor compared to the “benefits of permitting American companies to test innovative technology in space.”

    As The Verge points out, astronomers won’t even be warned of when and where the mirror satellite will be in the night sky, which could result in them gazing at it inadvertently.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ Fixing A Dead Makita Battery With A 20 Cent Part

      Using the open source PocketOBI tool it’s possible to query the battery, which showed that one of the internal thermistors reported the battery being at a chilly -30°C while the other a more reasonable 28°C. After popping open the pack and measuring the thermistors, the faulty one registered as infinite resistance thus confirming that it had failed.

    • Futurism ☛ Texas Data Centers Suffer Brutal Collision With Reality

      The scale of the proposed data center buildout is staggering. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) alone has a queue of over 1,800 projects that would draw over 474 gigawatts of electricity. According to the regulator, that’s over five times the Texas grid’s record for peak demand.

    • The Texas Tribune ☛ New Texas data center projects frozen until state audits them

      Abbott’s letter to the PUCT and ERCOT directs them to conduct the audit on all data centers advancing through ERCOT’s interconnection queue, or the line for energy intensive projects seeking connection to the electric grid. ERCOT is currently tracking more than 1,800 projects in the queue, representing over 474 gigawatts of electricity, or more than five times the grid’s record for peak demand, according to ERCOT. Approximately 90% of the new power requests are data centers, Abbott said.

    • Truthdig ☛ Trump Is Blocking Billions of Dollars of Grants to Fix the Grid

      According to an April report from the DOE Alumni Network, a group of former agency employees, the DOE has announced the termination of 356 awards totaling $12.5 billion since January 2025 and has threatened to terminate 303 additional awards worth $12.2 billion.

      Moreover, the DOE has also stalled projects for ​“a large number of awardees who have never appeared on any list,” the report found. ​“This means the agency is not moving forward to resolve disputes, finalize conditional awards, or respond to continuation applications, leaving projects in administrative limbo and functionally freezing promised funds.”

    • Inside Towers ☛ House Bill Requires Data Center Water, Power Tracking

      U.S. Representative Hillary Scholten (D-MI) recently introduced two bills to bring more transparency and accountability to data centers’ water and energy use. Data Centers nationwide consumed about 4.4 percent of U.S. electricity in 2023, and that figure is projected to climb as high as 12 percent by 2028 as AI-driven demand accelerates, according to Berkeley Lab.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: Hummingbird hawk-moth

      I could hear this moth before I could see it; its wings are so loud! Then I looked up and thought it was some kind of massive wasp. It's a very strange-looking creature if you don't know what it is. I grabbed my 35mm lens as that's the only thing I have that will close-focus, and chased it around the house for a while. Took so many pictures, and managed to get one framed and in focus. I even shut the door it came through so I could have some more chances to get a picture.

  • Overpopulation

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Water quality, not just scarcity, may shape future competition for a limited resource

      "Think of the U.S. and Europe, where population growth will level off in the long term, with consequences for water demand." At first glance, this is good news for households. "But that doesn't mean these areas are out of the woods," the Utrecht scientist said. "Yes, a reduced supply of freshwater will likely be compensated for by reduced household demand. But the increased likelihood of heat waves will cause available river water to be too warm for cooling purposes, possibly compelling power plants and factories to shut down their processes."

      The research is published in the journal npj Clean Water.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Nick Heer ☛ X’s Advertising Business Continues to Tank

    Similarweb’s data is janky as hell, and this number is a long, long way from SpaceX’s self-reported monthly active user count of 550 million on X alone. I am not saying either number is reliable, only that a gulf of 248 million users is an error not easily explained by rounding or estimation assumptions. Pre-takeover, Twitter had about 338 million monthly active users, according to an estimate by Insider Intelligence; in four years, the platform either declined by around 36 million monthly users or grew by over 200 million.

    By the way, how is X doing from a financial perspective?

  • Kevin Lawver ☛ Stop feeding the algorithm, stop feeding the billionaires

    There was a study that popped up in the news recently that 90-something percent of posts on Instagram are ads. It doesn't take long scrolling it to see that, even if that number is inflated, it's not that inflated. Spend any time on Facebook or LinkedIn and the story is the same. Your friends no longer show nearly as often as "suggested" or "sponsored" posts. Social media has lost the social, and it's all about the algorithm.

    There was another study that since Elon Musk bought twitter, spending literally any significant time on it can move people further to the right.

    The evidence is clear the algorithmic social media is bad for us. It makes us depressed, feeds us non-stop bullshit, and exists only to enrich people who don't seem to care about the harms they cause.

    The good news is that doing the right thing for democracy and the planet is also the right thing to do for ourselves!

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ TikTok to close Nashville office, lay off 250 employees

    The move is a retrenchment from the social video company’s expansion into Nashville in 2024 and comes as many tech companies are reevaluating their workforce amid the growth of artificial intelligence.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Great Moral Sorting

    Moral character presents the same measurement problem, and the last decade of American politics accidentally ran the same solution at national scale. Everyone in public life professes a floor: the thing they would never vote for, sign, platform, defend, or attend. Professed floors are free. The only datum with informational content is what a person did when his floor was tested at a price, and the Trump era’s distinctive contribution to American moral epistemology is that it priced everyone. Office, a primary, a donor network, an audience, a book deal, a friendship, a career: every actor on the right and everyone adjacent to it was eventually asked what their stated principles cost, in public, on a date, and the answers were recorded. The era was many things, most of them corrosive. It was also the largest natural experiment in revealed moral preference ever run on an American elite.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ The Odyssey and the Bronze Age Collapse

    Instead, the end of the Bronze Age was followed by a centuries-long Dark Age, with regression much more complete than after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Greek civilisation, centred on the Mycenaean palace culture, collapsed almost completely, to the extent that writing was completely lost. Homer’s account of the Bronze Age was written centuries after the event, and with nothing but oral tradition to go on.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Tibet conference in Nepal pushed online

    Nepal’s government denied that it had ordered the change, though the country is acutely aware of how sensitive the issue of Tibet is to its giant northern neighbour China.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ How ideas of a vast censorship network moved from the online fringe to Trump policy

    Narratives about a “censorship-industrial complex” spread in right-wing circles for years; then they took hold of Washington. What—and who—is behind them?

  • New Republic ☛ Feds Gave False Information About Journalist Arrested for Covering ICE

    In at least 15 search warrant applications, Homeland Security Investigations said that Fort was chanting with protesters when they entered the church, a claim that the Department of Justice later admitted was false. Prosecutors tried to argue that the mistake wasn’t consequential because it wasn’t mentioned in Fort’s indictment.

    Fort’s lawyers want more information about what prosecutors told the federal grand jury before it decided to indict the journalist, because they could have mentioned other false details.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • RTL ☛ 'Only for men': Torment of Afghan fathers as daughters deprived of education

    The Taliban authorities justify the ban -- the only one of its kind in the world -- on their interpretation of Islamic law.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Anguish and hope: why a Tibetan set himself on fire in New York

    The shocking incident barely registered in the US news, dominated that balmy July 2 night by the wedding of pop superstar Taylor Swift at Madison Square Garden on the other side of Manhattan.

    But Rangzen’s fellow exiled Tibetans, who have struggled to win international attention for their opposition to Chinese communist rule, greeted his passing with anguish — and respect.

  • New Republic ☛ Trump’s Terrible July Jobs Numbers Only Hurt Women

    In fact, more than double the number of women have left the labor force than men since the start of the year. A total of 845,000 women have left the workforce since January, while 406,000 men have left.

    It’s hard not to see these startling statistics as part of the Trump administration’s broader campaign to undermine women’s rights and autonomy.

  • TruthOut ☛ First Came the Flock Cameras. Now Local Cops Want Autonomous Drones.

    As of February, more than 1,000 law enforcement and public safety agencies had received waivers from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate autonomous surveillance drones as part of so-called “drone-as-first-responder” (DFR) programs, according to public records obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and released in July. While the list of waiver recipients includes fire departments and other first responders, the vast majority are law enforcement agencies, including police in cities large and small.

  • Michael Geist ☛ Canada's Campus Antisemitism Crisis: National Survey Finds Antisemitism Nearly Everywhere and University Responses Nowhere

    I have been an academic for nearly 30 years, working in an environment where inclusion and safe spaces for all students to be their best were unquestioned priorities. Backed by a supportive University president, dean, and advisor on antisemitism, I still believe that to be the case. But this survey confirms that the vast majority of Jewish students encounter antisemitism on campus. If this were any other group — 95% of Indigenous students reporting discrimination or 70% of BIPOC students reporting mental health harm — this would be viewed as a major crisis requiring immediate action. But when 95% of Jewish students report encountering antisemitism, 70% report harm to their mental health, a majority hide their identity, and students report threats of violence and Holocaust denial, the response from some quarters is to ignore or take issue with the survey data.

  • ANF News ☛ Two Kurdish researchers remain detained in Orumiyeh prison

    They were interrogated there for several weeks while being denied access to a lawyer and family visits, before being transferred to Orumiyeh Central Prison.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Sony Removing Purchased Content

    You might try to avoid this problem by purchasing physical discs, but movies and TV shows no longer always make it to that medium. And the same will be true for games.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Surveillance vs guillotines (11 Aug 2026)

    In 2013, it wasn't immediately apparent how these two works connected with one another, but in the years since, I've grown increasingly convinced that Snowden and Piketty can only be properly understood as describing two aspects of the same phenomenon.

    Piketty's landmark volume was grounded in a detailed analysis of 300 years' (!) worth of global capital flows, painstakingly compiled by a large team of grad students from a massive set of heterogeneous records. The book's conclusion is the statement that "returns to capital exceed the rate of growth over the long term" (abbreviated as "r > g").

    This may sound innocuous, but it is explosive. If r > g, then the most wealth will inevitably accumulate in the hands of people who start with the most wealth, irrespective of whether they do anything productive with that money. This means that the alleged heroes of the market system – the entrepreneurs who found and manage the firms that increase public prosperity – are doomed to play second fiddle to the mere plumbers of money, people who "contribute" by accumulating.

    [...]

    Take Bill Gates: his ideological projects have been a catastrophe. A patent maximalist, he funded the lobbyists who successfully blocked South Africa from producing its own AIDS drugs under an IP waiver program, and then deployed them again to stop the Global South from making their own covid vaccines:

    [...]

    This is where Piketty and Snowden converge. When the Snowden leaks broke, there was a lot of talk about the mechanics and the legality of the NSA's global digital surveillance, but precious little consideration was given to the reason for all this surveillance. In 2013, the idea that this spying was about "security" was so obvious as to be self-evident. The questions at the time were whether spying could produce security. We weren't asking why things were so insecure.

  • Patents

    • Software Patents

      • Digital Camera World ☛ Panasonic scores a major win against Red’s controversial compressed RAW patent

        A Japanese court has upheld the invalidation of key claims within Red’s Japanese “Video Camera” patent, finding that significant parts of the claimed invention lacked the necessary inventive step because they would have been obvious to someone skilled in the field and familiar with existing technology.

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Deseret Media ☛ Tech experts warn against using AI clone of murdered woman's voice in court

        Lovell is currently scheduled to be sentenced again by a jury next February. Weber County prosecutors previously asked a judge for permission to play AI-generated simulations of Yost's voice to the jury.