Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ A Hot End And Material Database For 3D Printing

  The purpose of MeltCalc is simple—it collates data on hot ends and materials regarding factors like maximum flow rate, print speeds, and heater requirements. If you’re wondering whether a given hot end can flow a given filament at a given rate, for example, this tool is a great place to start. It features 64 different hot ends and 36 polymers typically used in the 3D printing world, and can spit out maximum flow rates and print speed estimations even accounting for fancy tech like Core Heating Technology (CHT) nozzles. It’s all based on thermodynamic modelling which [Robert] put together based on his experience as a chemist who works with polymers. His aim was to provide a tool with realistic flow rates for hot ends, so that end users don’t have to just rely on often-optimistic marketing numbers.

• Wouter Groeneveld ☛ A Beginner's Guide To Writing Snail Mail

  One of the first satisfying things I did this morning was donating a sealed white envelope into a red mailbox. I hope to receive a response in a week or two. Or three. Does it make a difference? The contrast between my awkward habit of F5-ing the digital mailbox couldn’t be bigger. Neither could the yielded satisfaction from utilising both systems. One is very fast, caters to my impatience and fuels my discontent when finally a new email appears that turns out to be yet another sloppy phishing attempt. The other gives me a perfect excuse to ink a nice pen, take the time to write, add a printed photo perhaps, or another physical trinket, and start the ritual of taking out the bike to sprint to the said mailbox.

  And thus here is a beginner’s guide to committing yourself to writing less of the former and more of the latter: hooray for snail mail, booh for electronic junk. If by any chance this text convinced you to start writing and looking for a postage stamp, but you don’t quite know who to address it to, please reach out and we can start a fruitful conversation on paper!

• Jamie Zawinski ☛ Amazon's Book Woodchipper Facility has a cartoonishly evil logo because of course it does

  We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

• Derek Sivers ☛ Building without predicting

  We’ve been living here full-time for a year and it’s really ideal. It feels like custom tailored clothing. Instead of generic “one size fits all”, it’s a house that perfectly fits our unique preferences and values.

• The Guardian UK ☛ Dickovers, baggravation and botiquette: 18 new words to describe our tech hellscape

  The “dickover” is the scourge of the modern age. Coined in May by John Gruber, a tech writer, it is defined as “a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user”. Essentially, it is the thing (or more often, things) you have to click away in order to read the thing you wanted to read. It is the “accept cookies” box, the “allow notifications?” box, the “sign in with Google” box, the pop-up video box, etc.

  We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that dickovers are the only terrible thing about technology in 2026. Until now, though, we have lacked the vocabulary to describe them, so here are some suggestions.

• Andreas Jaggi ☛ 18 new words to describe our tech hellscape

  Had to chuckle quite a bit while reading this article: Dickovers, baggravation and botiquette: 18 new words to describe our tech hellscape 😂

• Science / Retro

  • The Register UK ☛ Tim King, AmigaDOS royalty, dies aged 70

    Dr Timothy James King, the programmer behind the 68000 version of TRIPOS that became AmigaDOS, has died aged 70.

    According to an AmigaNews report, King's family said he passed at the end of July. King was a superb programmer – although he accomplished rather more than that.

• Career/Education

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Rise and Fall of the Elite University

    Such a description is instantly recognizable in the current crisis, with its senseless waste of academic talent, curiosity, and interpersonal devotion, threatening to eliminate both particle physics and French as fields of human knowledge in Britain, sacrificed at the altar of an entirely manufactured scarcity. Darkness could, in the words of the don, only be countered by a “party of light,” clear-eyed in its pursuit of a university that was a place not only of learning but also, in terms even more radical today than they were half a century ago, “of pleasure.”

  • Ryan Cheley ☛ What if Maintainer Burnout Isn't Burnout

    They weren't exhausted. Or at least, exhaustion wasn't the only problem. They were still showing up. The work was manageable. But they'd lost something. Silletti describes it as "quietly losing the thread of why the work mattered in the first place." 2 (emphasis mine)

    He says we're calling it burnout. But it's not burnout. Not exclusively. It's something else.

    Burnout is a specific psychological construct: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, diminished sense of personal accomplishment. It's a tank run dry. 3

    Languishing is different. The term was coined by sociologist Corey Keyes 4 and popularized by Adam Grant during the pandemic. 5 It's the space between mental illness and flourishing. Stagnation. Disconnection. Dimming purpose. The tank has fuel. You've just forgotten where you were going.

    Silletti puts it perfectly: [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Science Alert ☛ Acupuncture Seems to Rewire The Brain in Depression, Scans Reveal

    When comparing the brain scans of people who had been given acupuncture treatments against those on antidepressants or those receiving a placebo version of acupuncture, the researchers found something interesting: acupuncture seemed to be rewiring specific brain regions.

    "Acupuncture shows promise as an adjunctive therapy for depression, but its neurobiological mechanisms remain incompletely understood," write the researchers in their published paper.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Measles Cases Are Reaching Record Highs in America

    In other parts of the world that have let their guard down to vaccine-preventable diseases, long-forgotten scourges have roared back and killed and disabled children.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ This man died at a waterfall for what was likely a crap photo – sometimes it’s safer and better to compose landscapes from afar

    If only Mertens had looked at pictures of South Falls beforehand, or perhaps taken a second to appreciate how fantastic the falls look amid the surrounding nature, he might’ve realized that the better, and non-life-risking, option would’ve been to shoot it from afar.

  • Hackaday ☛ Smartphones And The Next Generation Of Hearing Aids

    Given how different the situation is today than even just five years ago it’s worth asking just what qualifies as a over-the-counter hearing aid, and how the shifting definition of these devices can inform the community’s efforts to develop open hardware solutions.

  • Ava ☛ thinking about friendships – ava's blog

    People love to complain about a loneliness epidemic, but at this point, I consider that many people just wanna be lonely and make no effort to change that, or are saturated with what they have, or don’t actually have what it takes to build and maintain a “village” (“It takes a village”, if you want a village you have to be willing to be a villager and help, yada yada). Me too, probably; there seems to be something wrong with me, it’s probably my autism. But at least I try, which is more than I can say for most people who live close.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Teleport puts developer Linux desktops under production access controls

    Engineers connect to Linux hosts running in cloud, on-premises and edge environments without opening a port. SSH keys no longer need to be distributed or rotated. Sessions run under the just-in-time access requests, live session monitoring and audit logging already built into the platform. Administrators can also apply device trust, which blocks any machine that has not been registered and cryptographically verified.

  • SQ Magazine ☛ Azure Data Breach Hits McDonald's, Vodafone, TCS, More

    A threat actor known as TheHatman is selling internal employee directories allegedly exfiltrated from the Azure and Entra tenants of McDonald’s, Vodafone, and seven other Fortune 500 companies, cybersecurity firm Hudson Rock reported this week. The McDonald’s dataset alone totals more than 1.7 million records.

  • University of Toronto ☛ A systemd mystery with a very slow session start

    As mentioned, this only happens on one system (running Ubuntu 26.04). Other systems, with the same software configuration and the same NFS mounted home directories, don't have anything like this slow login. The slowness has persisted over multiple reboots of the system (and a hostname change as it moved into production). Once a systemd user session exists because of an ongoing SSH login, further SSH logins run much faster. As far as I can tell, this isn't specific to my own login, it happens to other ones as well.

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

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Firefox updates Smart Window, a new in-browser AI assistant that can keep up with you

      Mozilla said it has partnered with Exa Labs Inc., an AI search company, to build relevant search results rapidly without taking you to a new tab. It will also quickly show you relevant tabs when you’re asking questions, providing you with everything you need in the chat to understand where you were and to pick up from what you were doing – after all, lunch shouldn’t break your concentration.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ We still don’t know how people are really using AI

      Reuel is co-lead of a new research project, called the AI Observatory, that aims to fill the gap. It’s a public platform that aggregated and analyzed real AI conversations with popular models like Claude and Gemini that were collected with users’ consent through seven existing datasets. The intent is to provide independent sources of information that can help researchers and policymakers assess how people are using generative AI. Highly consequential decisions about AI’s benefits and risks are currently being made on the basis of very limited data, says Reuel.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Americans under 30 are becoming more pessimistic about artificial intelligence

      There’s one thing uniting America’s warring generations: revulsion toward artificial intelligence.

    • Pew Reseach Center ☛ Young US adults are increasingly wary of AI, concerned it will take jobs

      Today, 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life – up from 37% in 2021. Another 9% are more excited than concerned and 37% say they’re equally excited and concerned, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 22-28, 2026.

      Concern about AI is up among younger and older Americans alike since we first asked this question in 2021. But while the rise was mainly in the first two years for Americans ages 30 and older, concern continues to climb for adults under 30 – whose skepticism of AI has made headlines in recent months.

      For the first time, a majority of adults under 30 (55%) now say they’re more concerned than excited about AI. About one-in-ten say they’re more excited than concerned, and roughly a third feel both equally. Their concern is now on par with those in their 30s and 40s, and those 65 and up.

    • Kevin Wammer ☛ The smell of AI

      I feel revulsion toward AI-created content.

      When any piece of art, no matter the format, has the slightest smell of AI, I'm out. It doesn't even matter if any AI was actually used; the mere suggestion of AI is enough. I'm aware this is unfair towards people that happen to talk/write/sound like AI, especially when it's their content AI was trained on.

      That is, unfortunately, collateral damage.

    • Joshua Blais ☛ If programming is dead why go all in

      “In 6 months, programming will be solved!”

      “Coding is dead!”

      We’ve been hearing for the last 2 and a half years.

      So - if programming is dead, if all the coding jobs are going to be automated away, why would I go all-in on studying Computer Science and Programming? Why would I choose to deeply study the low level, learn C and Zig - why would I think that’s a good idea?

      Let me tell you a story or two: [...]

    • Ben Frain ☛ Well done AI, that’s the end of the honest boxes – Ben Frain

      So the Internet honesty boxes are going. And I think the World is worse for it. In the future, people will never know how great it was, if only for a brief few years, to stumble across some persons blog, read about their approach to something, how they solved a problem, a technique they developed that you could adopt to your own needs and if lucky even exchange a few comments with the author. d

      It was digital, but it felt human in some way. Personal.

      And it feels like we need those kind of connections now more than ever.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Anthropic watermarks AI output — and the AI bros yell

      But the bros are screaming now that it’s in Claude. There’s a lot of so-called authors and so-called journalists showing their entire arses. They’re outraged that someone might find out what they’ve been doing instead of the writing.

    • Hackster ☛ Edge Link

      But Edge Link doesn't stop at moving data around. It combines data acquisition, industrial connectivity, edge computing, and machine learning in a single system at the machine level. Rather than streaming raw sensor data to the cloud for every decision, it processes data locally and runs multiple ML models directly at the edge, cutting latency, reducing bandwidth use, and keeping critical monitoring alive even when the cloud connection isn't.

    • NPR ☛ She told no one about her agony except ChatGPT. What her death reveals about AI risks

      Artificial intelligence companies are facing lawsuits by family members of individuals who died by suicide after prolonged interactions with chatbots. The lawsuits claim the chatbots led to or supported the individuals in their suicides. Reiley and her husband, Jonathan Rottenberg, chose not to pursue a lawsuit after their daughter's death. Instead, Reiley, a journalist, is telling her family's story and advocating for the AI industry to change.

  • Social Control Media

    • CBC ☛ Meta trial begins with states accusing social media giant of exploiting, intentionally addicting children

      A bipartisan group of 29 U.S. states is suing Meta, seeking potentially tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in penalties and changes to how Meta does business.

      Four lead states — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — accused Meta of designing Facebook and Instagram to hook young users, fuelling anxiety, depression and even suicide, and misleading consumers about the platforms' safety. All 29 states accused Meta of violating federal law by improperly collecting and using children's personal data.

    • NL Times ☛ Dating apps quickly falling out of favor with Dutch users

      Many apps are now also using AI to “help” users chat with each other or optimize their profiles. Lanzing thinks this will have the opposite of the intended effect. “Gen Z is increasingly turning against the use of AI, and they don’t think that is the solution for dating either,” she told NU.nl.

    • 404 Media ☛ X's Algorithm Feeds Off Ragebait and Impacts Democrats More, Study Finds

      X’s algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X’s feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site’s algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when it generated a user’s For You Page. It also showed that X serves more ragebait to people who say they are Democrats, although the exact reason for that is unclear.

    • 404 Media ☛ Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing

      People are quite mad about Anthropic’s watermarking system, and understandably so. Synonyms are sometimes interchangeable, but not always, as is pointed out in this excellent essay by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, and by journalism academic Jeff Jarvis, in which he claims Anthropic “devalues writing.” In making this choice, “Anthropic declares words fungible, language random, choice meaningless,” Jarvis writes.

    • Carlo Zottmann ☛ Carlo Zottmann - Creators *returning* to X

      Good on you for being able to overlook all the racism; the “LOL fascism” attitude promoted by both the network’s owner and his algo; the white supremacy shit; the goddamn misogyny…

      I could go on but it’s clear you’re fine with all of that.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • CS Monitor ☛ Cyberattacks on water facilities test US defenses, reveal gaps

      For those familiar with America’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities, the attacks were not a surprise. The country’s critical infrastructure, particularly water providers in rural areas, has long been vulnerable to cyberattacks. Foreign adversaries have attacked before, but federal and some state authorities have been slow to equip these utilities with the resources and training they need to protect themselves.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Medusa ransomware tallies hundreds of new victims, says updated advisory on group’s tactics

      “Medusa actors often use legitimate tools and living off the land techniques to evade detection. They may also leverage remote monitoring and management software and remote access services, including Remote Desktop Protocol, for lateral movement,” as updated sections of the advisory detail. “Once inside a network, they use common utilities and tools to support credential access, data exfiltration, and ransomware deployment.”

    • Dark Reading ☛ 'Ransom Busters': Ransomware Actor Poses as Recovery Service

      According to the GuidePoint Research and Intelligence Team (GRIT), a malicious entity referring to itself as "Ransom Busters" has sent an email to cyberattack victims, claiming to have infiltrated the servers of multiple criminal groups and discovering data belonging to the victim. For a fee, the email claims, Ransom Busters "can return your files to you and destroy all backups held by the group." The email claims the attackers have also gained access to encryption keys that can be used to help victims access their files.

    • The Record ☛ More than 200 victims of Medusa ransomware identified over the last year, CISA says

      Tuesday’s advisory warned that the group has focused its efforts on the healthcare sector and has become adept at exploiting “newly announced exploits within 24 hours.”

      The ransomware gang has “been observed to use exploits up to a week before public vulnerability disclosure,” the agencies added, citing a recent report from Microsoft about the trend of Medusa actors targeting victims using software that has not been updated to include new patches.

    • The Record ☛ Berlin cuts two state ministries off government network after security breach

      Both ministries remain operational, but employees have been cut off from their usual IT systems, including email and [Internet] access, forcing them to communicate by telephone, text message and fax, according to RBB.

    • [Old] Inside Higer Ed ☛ [Crackers] access data of 230K at University of Michigan

      Social Security numbers, names, driver’s license numbers, payment card numbers and health information may have been compromised, according to the university’s statement.

      The attack occurred from Aug. 23 through Aug. 27, with Michigan’s fall semester starting Aug. 28. To help ward off the attack, the university shut down [Internet] access to all three of its campuses during the first week of classes. Connectivity and [Internet] access were restored Aug. 30.

    • [Old] Twingate ☛ University of Michigan Data Breach: What & How It Happened?

      In August 2023, the University of Michigan faced a data breach when an unauthorized third party accessed personal information of various individuals connected to the institution. The affected individuals included those associated with the university in different capacities. The university detected suspicious activity on its campus network and took immediate action to contain the incident, launching an investigation with the help of third-party experts.

    • [Old] Scripps Media Inc ☛ University of Michigan says 230,000 people affected by August data breach

      Third-party experts helped the university investigate the incident and found that certain systems were breached from Aug. 23 to Aug. 27, exposing hundreds of thousands of people.

      The hack exposed the personal information of certain students, applicants, employees, alumni and donors. The compromised data includes social security numbers, driver’s licenses, financial information and health information that could be used for fraud.

    • [Old] CNN ☛ University of Michigan shuts down public inter following ‘significant’ cybersecurity incident

      Campus computers are generally cut off from the public internet, but students were finding workarounds via their cell phones. An updated statement Tuesday afternoon said staff had made progress in helping students access resources from off-campus computer networks, but that the recovery was ongoing.

    • [Old] Digital First Media ☛ [Crackers] gained access to personal info on up to 230,000 individuals, UM says

      The [Internet] shutdown extended into the first day of classes at the UM on Aug. 28 and affected the Ann Arbor and Dearborn campuses. UM's Flint campus was not affected.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • SQ Magazine ☛ GitHub Down: Thousands Report Outage Monday

    GitHub, the code-hosting platform used by millions of developers, went down for users across the US, India and other countries on Monday, August 17, 2026. Downdetector logged thousands of reports within hours, and GitHub confirmed the disruption on its status page.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Google buys Spirit Airlines data for AI training for just $10 million — purchase includes hundreds of millions of emails, Microsoft Teams chats, billions of flight pricing records, and anonymized passenger records

      Spirit Airlines, which declared bankruptcy and shut down on the 2nd of May this year, is selling all its assets in bankruptcy court auctions to pay off its roughly $8.1 billion in debt. According to Bloomberg Law, Google LLC beat out Mercor.io Corp. — an AI-focused recruitment firm — to the airline's data, with the AI tech giant offering $10 million, $2.5 million higher than the latter’s $7.5 million bid. Nevertheless, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York named Mercor.io Corp. as the backup buyer in case the Google deal falls through.

    • PC World ☛ Hackers want your nudes. Here’s how to keep your privates, private

      In its public service announcement, the FBI says sexual exploitation actors have been breaking into “social media and personal accounts” to download any saved explicit content. The stolen images and video then gets spread to criminal forums and marketplaces, often with personal details like name, email, phone number, social media username, and date of birth also shared.

    • Jim Mitchell ☛ Oh Hell No, Apple! Count Me Out...

      I have no words for this if it’s real, apart from I know that I won’t be making a purchase myself. Consider this post my advanced opt-out to being recorded by anyone who does choose to buy the product.

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ DOJ Used Pam Bondi's Trophy Arrests as an Excuse to Spy on Minnesota's Anti-ICE Community

      That filing works on three different levels. The first was tactical: to get a bunch of exhibits released showing wide-ranging and feckless surveillance. Both local and national media outlets picked up the filing on that level.

      At a second level, this was a motion for more discovery, which I’ll explain in this post.

    • Port Swigger ☛ CSS:the bomb inside your inbox

      Webmail has been around for decades and it's always had to solve a very difficult problem of taking untrusted HTML and displaying it to the user in a safe way. This is made even more challenging by each web standard evolving at a relentless pace. To solve this problem webmail uses sanitizers, they attempt to take the HTML provided and restrict it so that it can be displayed to users safely. Trouble is you can create discrepancies between what the sanitizer thinks is safe and what the browser actually renders. Some webmail clients go a step further by letting the browser parse the HTML and CSS first, then filtering the browser's interpreted output rather than the original source. Yet even this can be mutated into something malicious.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Paul Krugman ☛ A New Level of Trumpian Evil

    I know that Donald Trump does something new and terrible every day, sometimes several times a day. Yet his betrayal of South Korea in favor of his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un” stands out even among his many betrayals.

    Why? Because North Korea isn’t simply a bad government, just another murderous authoritarian regime. It is something that has become rare, even among dictatorships: a full-blown totalitarian state, in which the government controls every aspect of life and even thinking dissident thoughts is a crime.

  • Yle ☛ Broad support in Finland for banning social media for under-15s

    More than half of Finns support banning children under 15 from using social media, according to a poll commissioned by the Toivo think tank. Some 53 percent of respondents backed the proposal.

    Support was strongest among voters of the two largest right-leaning parties. Fifty-nine percent of both National Coalition and Finns Party voters favoured a ban. Among Green voters, 46 percent supported it, compared with 45 percent of supporters of the Left Alliance.

  • NPR ☛ AIPAC didn't always spend on campaigns. Now it faces criticism over money in politics

    The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has been getting a lot of attention this election cycle, with some Democratic candidates proudly declaring they've sworn off contributions from the group. In Michigan's Democratic primary for U.S. Senate this month, Abdul El-Sayed lambasted his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, for receiving AIPAC support.

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Russia's doomsday submarine sets sail for the first time

    Khabarovsk is the first of three submarines of a new class designed to carry Poseidon autonomous, long-range nuclear torpedoes. Its design is based on the hull of the Borei-class submarine, but it is significantly shorter because it lacks the section for ballistic missiles.

  • Site36 ☛ Secret services in some countries operate explosive drones via SIM cards. Now the technique hits Germany

    Drones controlled via mobile networks are equipped with commercially available modules for one or more SIM cards. This allows them to connect to the networks of any [Internet] provider. Pilots can send navigation commands and receive high-resolution video. Unlike radio-controlled drones, the distance from the area of operations is unlimited – as long as there is a mobile network there.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Apologies

    And I cop a plea to posting at least seven days a week, sometimes even more often.

    My excuse is we’re at such a dangerous point in the history of America and the world that I want to get you the facts, arguments, and analyses you need to take an active role in the resistance, and then in the rebuilding to follow.

  • El Constitucional ☛ Civil Guard officers warn that "swimmers continue to enter" Ceuta and demand 200 more agents

    The representatives of the corps demand a stable workforce, more vessels, and the extension of the Tarajal breakwaters, considering the pneumatic barrier installed in the sea insufficient

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Salon ☛ Trump sued the BBC — now Jared and Ivanka may pay for it - Salon.com

    Secret Service agents blocked the subpoena at the door, but Trump's suit could still force testimony

• Environment

  • Overpopulation ☛ Reality Check: We’re Still Overpopulated—And It’s Still A Problem

    The environmental establishment has apparently moved on—to technological solutions, social justice, and a host of other concerns, while population itself has somehow come to seem unfashionable. The cool kids have declared the issue settled: overpopulation, they seem to think, is a non-issue and one that’s also very “passé.” So 1970s or 1980s. Not something enlightened people concern themselves with in 2026.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Memphis Moves Forward on Proposed 12-Month Data Center Moratorium - 512 Pixels

    This evening, the Memphis City Council acted on a year-long moratorium on new data centers.

    It is not a done deal yet. If this passes, data centers already up and running will be allowed to continue operating under the agreement, but no new sites will be built — within city limits1 — while leaders spend a year studying issues related to these projects.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Data centres get too hot for Texas politicians

    Why’s Abbot doing this? Because in Republican Texas, even Fox News has Abbott only 1% ahead of his Democratic opponent, Gina Hinojosa. And you bet data centres are a major campaigning point. Hinojosa’s called Abbott’s letters “inadequate” and is calling for a proper legal moratorium on new data centres altogether.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ An Ordinance Declaring a Temporary Moratorium on the Acceptance, Processing, Approval, and Issuance of Zoning, Land Use, Building, and Other Associated Infrastructure Permits for Data Center Developments within the City of Memphis [PDF]

    SECTION 2. TEMPORARY MORATORIUM

    Beginning on the effective date of this Ordinance, the City of Memphis shall continue to accept applications for the limited purpose of docketing and completeness review, but shall not process, schedule, hear, approve, or issue any approval identified below during the moratorium. All review deadlines otherwise applicable under state law, the Memphis and Shelby County Unified Development Code, or administrative rule are tolled for the duration of this moratorium. The Memphis and Shelby County Division of Planning and Development shall not process the following for any new Data Center or High-Density Computing Facility located within the city limits of the City of Memphis for the duration of the temporary moratorium: [...]

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Barents Observer ☛ New rail link reconnects Finland and Sweden in North

      Finland is now plugged into the EU rail network. (Yle)

      State railways VR will run two return services between Oulu and Haparanda each day. The early-morning train is followed by a second service departing Oulu at 7.50pm and returning late in the evening.

      VR said timetables would improve next year.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Guardian UK ☛ England’s ancient oak trees dying in extreme hot and dry weather

      Woodland Trust says trees struggling in drought stress, with older ‘survivors’ disproportionately affected

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Inside the Fight to Save a 300-Year-Old Tree That Survived a Revolutionary War Battle

      A centuries-old “witness tree” that stood through a Revolutionary War battle in South Carolina is getting some much-needed care to help preserve it for generations to come.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ “I started screaming because I know what shelling looks like” – dolphin photographed performing extremely rare behavior

      The animal behavioralist and marine mammal expert explained that the dolphins use 'shelling' to hunt for fish; the shell becomes an implement in which to trap prey. The mammals then shake the makeshift tool on the surface until their prize slides into their jaws.

    • Tim Bray ☛ Five Views of the Wilcox Prairie

      Fools have said that the Prairies are boring. This cannot be true, because in the absence of hills and trees there’s more distance in each direction you might look. Also, Prairie landscapes include the skies above them which, whether blue, star-spangled, or cloudy, aren’t boring. Herewith photoevidence from the vicinity of Wilcox, Saskatchewan, with which I claim no other connection.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • CS Monitor ☛ What ‘Chinamaxxing’ says about Chinese soft power

      From welcoming a record number of foreign tourists – including growing numbers of U.S. citizens – to selling more hot-water thermoses, China is already reaping gains from its growing soft-power influence.

      State-run media and officials are eager to promote the trend, seeing it as complementary to the country’s growing hard power – showcased by breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, green energy, and e-commerce. In May, China’s ambassador to the United States, Xie Feng, described Chinamaxxing as part of an “unstoppable” force bringing the U.S. and China closer together.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ More than 80 young supporters of Russia’s antiwar Yabloko party were detained outside the Supreme Court as it upheld the party’s removal from the ballot. Five of them describe the day.

    On August 17, Russia’s Supreme Court upheld its ruling barring the liberal Yabloko party from this year’s State Duma elections. Just as on August 10, when the Supreme Court heard the suit against Yabloko at its Povarskaya Street building, large numbers of the party’s young supporters turned out for the appeal ruling. Police detained more than 80 people. Those who were 18 or older were released from police stations within a couple of hours; the rest had to wait for adult relatives to come get them. The independent journalists’ cooperative Bereg spoke with young antiwar Russians who believed until the last moment that they’d be able to vote for the party campaigning under the slogan “For Peace.” Some of them were among those detained. Meduza is translating this story in full.

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ ABC Lawsuit Accuses the FCC of Running a ‘Retaliatory Campaign’

    “The Administration has waged a retaliatory campaign against ABC for a single reason: it disapproves of what ABC broadcasts,” the company’s attorneys wrote in the court filing. “That campaign began in this Administration’s earliest days and has only intensified since.”

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Russia declares Norwegian organisation SmåRådina ‘undesirable’

    After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the organisation focused on anti-war activities. It holds rallies and pickets, organises actions outside the Russian embassy, supports political prisoners, and helps Ukrainian refugees.

  • NPR ☛ DHS defends investigating agency critics and giving them warning notices

    "They didn't even come back and try to say, 'Well, if you look at it in the right light, this could be a threat of violence that is not protected by the First Amendment,'" said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with FIRE who is representing Streever. "They effectively concede that this is protected political speech. And I think that should send alarm bells ringing, because now you have the government saying, 'Yeah, we acknowledge this is protected political speech, but it's critical that we issue warning notices about this.'"

    He added that such a stance is "alien" to the First Amendment.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • New Republic ☛ Trump Melts Down at Another Female Reporter

    His tantrum only got worse when the reporter revealed she was with CNN.

  • International Business Times ☛ Journalist Shot by Federal Agent Has Spent Nearly 300 Days in ICE Detention — Even After Judge Tossed Criminal Case

    Los Angeles journalist Carlitos Ricardo Parias is approaching 300 days in immigration detention, still held in a California facility even after a federal judge dismissed the criminal case against him with prejudice over violations of his constitutional rights.

  • 404 Media ☛ The National Park Service Is Using Flock. Rangers Are Pissed

    “Flock protects property, not people or parks. People should be free to recreate in ways that are respectful to the ecosystem — but the surveillance is a disrespectful invasion of privacy,” a current NPS ranger told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the ranger and others anonymity because they weren’t permitted to speak to the press.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • RFA ☛ Beijing resumes demolition of major Tibetan Buddhist academy, satellite imagery shows

    Chinese authorities in Tibet have over the past month continued and expanded demolition of the Larung Gar Buddhist Academy, satellite imagery analyzed by Radio Free Asia shows. It is the latest in a series of moves by Beijing to downsize the major center of Tibetan Buddhist learning which at its peak in the early 2000s was home to 40,000 Buddhist monastics.

  • ANF News ☛ PJAK:The fatwa issued 47 years ago failed; there is no path forward other than freedom and democracy

    The statement pointed out that: “The logic that had operated through centralist policies and the denial of Kurdish identity before the revolution became even more radical after the Islamic Republic seized the people’s revolution in January 1979. As a result, cultural assimilation and physical and cultural genocide reached their peak. These policies, aimed at erasing the Kurds’ language, culture, history and right to freedom, continue today through repression, securitization, executions and systematic use of the death penalty. At the same time, the Iranian Parliament is attempting to legitimize executions by approving legislation that imposes the death penalty on civil activists on baseless grounds such as ‘cooperation with foreign powers and states.’”

  • Yle ☛ Finnish companies experiment with shorter working hours

    A report published on Tuesday concludes that working life is continuing to change, with shorter working hours among the developments taking place. It says innovative and flexible workplaces could turn new ways of working into a significant competitive advantage.

  • Salon ☛ Trump’s destruction of national parks is just getting started

    Big Bend, bordering Mexico in West Texas, features volcanic dikes, dinosaur bones and stunning canyon views. In July, the Trump admin waived restrictions on construction, allowing bulldozing and parts of the border wall and roads to be built, drawing the ire of environmental groups and the National Parks Conservation Association, which has warned that the damage could last generations.

  • New Republic ☛ ICE’s New Electric Shock Gloves Are Billed As “Low Optics” Tool

    “Low-optics” is the key term there. The new gloves won’t stoke public outrage like traditional weapons and they don’t leave any marks—making them the perfect tool for dodging lawsuits for excessive force.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Capitalism Is Killing Summer

    Everybody loves summertime. But from climate change to budget cuts on public spaces like parks and pools to a lack of vacation time, capitalism is increasingly robbing us of our summer fun.

  • [Old] Cherokee Nation ☛ A New Chapter for Cherokee Language Education

    This transition is not about problems or dissatisfaction with our state partners. We have had our share of issues with the state, but this area is not one of them. It is about recognizing that Cherokee Nation is now prepared to exercise greater self-governance over one of our greatest responsibilities: teaching the Cherokee language to the next generation.

    Since passage of the Durbin Feeling Language Preservation Act in 2019, Cherokee Nation has invested more than $175 million in language preservation and revitalization. Those investments include the Durbin Feeling Language Center; expansion of the Cherokee Language Master/Apprentice Program; services for our elders who are fluent Cherokee speakers; technology programs; growing satellite campuses in Greasy and Kenwood; and the construction of a new $30 million Cherokee Immersion Middle School that will open this fall in Tahlequah.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • FilamentMap ☛ How the Ghost Gun Crackdown Could Affect 3D Printing

    The computers embedded in most consumer 3D printers lack the processing power to reverse-engineer G-code back into a 3D model, let alone compare it against a database of prohibited firearm designs. The only way to implement blocking, therefore, would be to either upload every print file to a cloud comparison tool — creating an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure — or lock every printer to a proprietary slicer application that performs the scan before generating G-code.

    Both approaches fail on their own terms. A determined user can trivially evade detection by making slight dimensional changes to a model, splitting parts across multiple prints, or modifying G-code directly. As the EFF notes, "It takes very little skill for a user to make slight design tweaks to either a model or G-Code to evade detection."

    Meanwhile, the collateral damage is severe. False positives will inevitably flag legitimate objects — movie props, children's toys, airsoft parts — that geometrically resemble firearm components. And every lawful 3D printer owner becomes subject to a de facto surveillance regime.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • Software Patents

      • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Relatable Patent Art

        The illustrations in this patent are great, they read like a silent children's book about a smirking creeper.

  • Trademarks

    • US Patent and Trademark Office ☛ Trademark search: Open Source Initiative

      The trademark application has been registered with the Office.

  • Copyrights

    • James Randall ☛ Someone still has to sign it - and the research says they'll stop reading

      Several of the big providers will now indemnify you against intellectual property claims on generated code. If someone alleges the model reproduced their work, they’ll defend it. But not one of them will indemnify correctness. To be clear these indemnifications are conditional and capped but nobody is offering to cover the cost of the change that took your production system down at three in the morning or the change that had your agents spend a day going round in circles burning your money.

      That asymmetry isn’t an oversight. IP exposure is boundable and you can model the claim rate, cap the payout, price it, it’s traditional cost of doing business stuff. Defect liability, and incorrectness more generally, is unbounded and correlated with your customer’s business, not with yours. They’ll take the risk they can put a number on and leave the other one on your desk.

      So the liability sits with you and at some point the rubber hits the road. That much I think is uncontroversial, but it doesn’t tell you anything you can act on.

    • Soylent News ☛ How copyright warped Earthsea

      Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea fantasy stories make a terrible surrender to artificial scarcity with the idea that a rune could be lost. In the stories, this Rune of Peace was engraved on a special ring. Fighting lead to the ring breaking in half, the break coming across the Rune of Peace. This somehow caused the Rune of Peace to be lost. How lost? After the ring was broken, was it that no one knew how to draw that rune? Apparently, there were no other copies of that rune in all of Earthsea? Or perhaps every copy of that rune magically became illegible? It's as if people could no longer use one letter of the alphabet. Suppose 'P' for peace was suddenly no longer available, everyone having a mental block that caused them to be unable to remember how to use or write 'P'. All they could remember was that there was such a letter, and that it was lost. Taken literally, the notion is absurd.