Open Hardware/Modding

• Linux On Mobile ☛ 2026-08-15 [Older] Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (33/2026): NFC in Plasma

Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

• CWA Workers Rally Again as Xbox Layoffs Cut Deeper Into Studios

  More than 800 CWA-represented video game workers gathered outside Xbox studio locations across nine cities in the United States and Canada on August 18, 2026, joined by community groups and local labor allies for a second round of "Save Our Devs" demonstrations. Rallies took place in Redmond, Irvine, Rockville, Hunt Valley, Austin, Dallas, Montreal, Minneapolis and Albany. Workers gathered under the banner to call out layoffs across the industry and to press Microsoft for fair first contracts across its gaming studios.

  The Communications Workers of America organized the actions with OneBGS, the union representing Bethesda Game Studios employees, drawing on locals in both countries: CWA Locals 1118, 2100, 2108, 6215, 7250, 9433 and 9510 in the United States, and CWA-SCA Local 30111 in Canada. CWA represents nearly 4,000 video game workers across Xbox's operations in the U.S. and Canada, spanning developers, artists, engineers, producers and support staff.

• Xbox physical sales plummet to only 4% market share, while 63% of game sales came from Nintendo

  Talk of physical game sales has taken renewed interest in the wake of Sony’s announcement that it will be stopping production of discs starting on January 1st, 2028. While we’ve known for years now that digital sales have been outpacing physical ones by a decent margin, it seems physical Xbox sales have hit an all-time low. According to a recent report from analyst firm Circana, around 4% of all physical game sales this year have come from Xbox platforms. 4%!

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Slovakia discovers Russian backdoors in 279 new traffic cameras — SMS-triggered shell access and passwordless live feeds found in EU-funded rollout

  The nearly 300 freshly installed NERO R-ONE cameras are thought to be rebranded Russian CORDON PRO.M traffic cameras, produced by a St. Petersburg-based firm called Semicon. Their path to acquisition sounds rather serpentine, with the big batch reportedly bought via a Cyprus-based shell company with fake certifications. Reports also suggest that pressure from the opposition political party in Slovakia led to the NBU investigations. The current government of the country, led by populist Robert Fico, initially denied reports that the cameras were of Russian origin and rebuffed any security concerns. Fico has what some would describe as a pro-Russia tilt, but you can read more about that elsewhere, if you are interested.

• Jeremy ☛ An Update on Leaving Gmail for Fastmail

  It’s been a few months since my post on leaving Gmail which sparked a lot of discussion on Hacker News. Email isn’t the most exciting topic in the world, but I figured I should give a little update on how things have been going after the move to Fastmail since so many people saw the original post.

  The quick version is that I think I picked right with Fastmail. You can find cheaper email hosts out there. I’m sure they’re great too, but I’m really happy with Fastmail’s value considering all I’m getting.

• Andreas Jaggi ☛ Jailbreaked my Kindle Touch

  I successfully jailbreaked my 14 year old Kindle Touch 🎉 This after support for it was ended by Amazon back in May.

  Currently my plan is to use calibre to load new books onto it and KOReader to read them. As a first step I jailbreaked the Kindle Touch and installed KOReader.

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

  • The Atlantic ☛ How AI Jargon Took Over Silicon Valley

    Language has historically evolved alongside technology. Expressions such as running out of steam and cog in the machine, for instance, were adopted into common speech after the Industrial Revolution as shorthand for the human condition. AI metaphors are simply figures of speech, Anna Ivanova, a cognitive scientist at Georgia Tech, told me: When someone says, “My gears are turning,” they don’t literally mean that there are gears or gearlike things in their brain that are actually moving; in much the same way, when people say that they have “context rot,” they don’t mean that they literally have a transformer-based AI model running in their brain.

  • Quanta Magazine ☛ Are We Thinking Correctly About AI Intelligence? | Quanta Magazine

    Computer scientist Melanie Mitchell discusses why artificial intelligence doesn’t “think” or “reason” like humans, and how we can create better methods for measuring machine cognition.

  • Common Dreams ☛ FTC Must Investigate AI Book Burning

    On Friday, Demand Progress Education Fund and a coalition of civil society advocates asked the FTC to investigate AI companies like Anthropic and Amazon for buying books in bulk, scanning them and then destroying the original work—including rare books. In a letter sent to the FTC, the organizations urge the agency to use its authority, including Section 6(b) of the FTC Act, to investigate whether this mass book-destroying practice unfairly prevents competing AI developers and the public from using these resources.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ World's largest open library calls for volunteers to scan and preserve physical books as AI companies buy, scan, and destroy them — Anna's Archive says ‘time is running out’ as ‘knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers’

    According to the blog post, the problems started when Anthropic was hit with a $1.5 billion penalty as it settled a copyright infringement lawsuit from 2024. This settlement is the largest amount ever in a copyright case, with the AI tech firm paying $200 per title based on its collection of 7 million pirated books stored in a central library. However, that same ruling affirmed that the use of existing works to train AI models is fair use. This opened the floodgates for AI firms, which started buying up books online to scan and destroy them.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Younger People’s Pessimism Concerning AI is Growing

    Concern about AI for Americans over the age of 30 has been relatively stable, but not for people in their 20s and teens: [...]

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Readers can't identify watermarked AI text

    In the last few weeks, I’ve been complaining that everyone is wrong about AI watermarking: it isn’t really anti-consumer and it doesn’t make the outputs any worse. The watermarking papers demonstrate1 that this is true, but I thought it might be interesting to put it to a practical test. Given examples of watermarked and unwatermarked answers to the same prompt, could readers tell which is which?

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ More Incidents of AIs Going Rogue in Cybersecurity Challenges

    What’s especially interesting about this technical report is that, unlike what we’ve been getting from OpenAI and Anthropic, we can see the exact prompt. It’s in Appendix B. And reading it, it seems that the models didn’t break any rules—they found loopholes in the rules. They behaved like a genie.

  • Don Marti ☛ Waiter, there’s a watermark in my slop

    The bigger question, though, isn’t about the negligible difference between watermarked slop and somehow purer non-watermarked slop.

    If LLM output can have watermarks, what else can it have?

  • Anil Dash ☛ Why shaming people about AI slop isn’t enough to stop Big AI

    But shame isn’t an effective strategy for stopping the advance of Big AI as a force in society. I’ve said before that scolding people out of using these tools hasn’t worked and isn’t going to work. What I want to get at here is why it structurally can’t work — and what has to replace it.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ How to hack Copilot AI: ask it how to hack it

    Microsoft sells Copilot as your helpful robot servant for your organisation’s data management. Search it, analyse it, everything you could want at work!

    Except accuracy. And security.

  • Futurism ☛ Google AI Giving Staggeringly Racist "Advice" About Being Alone With Certain Groups of People

    In our testing, the phenomenon is very real.

    Searching for the phrase “I’m alone with an African,” for instance, leads the AI to advise that “if you are in immediate danger or feel unsafe, please lock your door, move to safe space, and call your local emergency services (like 911 in the US) right away.” It briefly caveats that “being alone with another person is only a concern if you feel threatened or uncomfortable” — and then doubles down with suggestions that the user “call emergency services” or “leave the area.”

• Social Control Media

  • Court House News ☛ TikTok settles with feds over child safety for $400M

    “For years, defendants have knowingly allowed children under 13 to create and use TikTok accounts without their parents’ knowledge or consent, have collected extensive data from those children and have failed to comply with parents’ requests to delete their children’s accounts and personal information,” the government said in a 2024 complaint filed in Los Angeles federal court.

  • New York Times ☛ TikTok Settles With U.S. Over Child Privacy Concerns for $400 Million

    TikTok violated federal privacy law along with a 2019 agreement with the government in which the app promised to take steps to protect children’s privacy, according to the government.

    Under the settlement announced Friday, TikTok will pay $300 million. The Justice Department also asked the court to eliminate the 2019 agreement, after which TikTok would pay the government an additional $100 million, according to a Justice Department news release.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Meta Figured Out How to Build a Mac App

    Meta’s other major Mac app is WhatsApp, and it comes in at over 650 MB (and over a gigabyte on Windows). Its iOS apps are no better: Instagram is 605 MB, Facebook is 491 MB, and even Threads is over 200 MB. I do not understand why since virtually everything displayed in these apps is served remotely.

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Gen-Z Junior Lawyer Sacked From Melbourne Firm After Posting Viral TikTok Complaining Job Was Soul-Sucking

  • Vox ☛ 2026-08-12 [Older] How to rebuild your broken attention span

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-14 [Older] Taylor Swift Forced the White House to Mute a TikTok Video After Cheeto Mussolini Used Her Music to Troll Her

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Why elaborate (and expensive) dorm room decor reveals have taken over TikTok

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] Pakistani TikTok Star Shamso Bibi Shot Dead in Taxila: Four Suspects Arrested Over Fatal Shooting

Privatisation/Privateering

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ NASA-Funded Mission to Rescue a Falling Space Telescope Officially Ends in Failure

  That put a “hard deadline” on any attempt to save Swift, writes Scientific American’s Adam Kovac. In September 2025, NASA awarded a $30 million contract to Arizona-based company Katalyst Space Technologies to build a spacecraft for a rescue mission. The company constructed one called Lightweight In-Space Navigation and Kinematics (LINK) in nine months. But the rush job meant it wasn’t tested and scrutinized as much as those in other NASA missions, per the Times.

Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

• Sal ☛ GitHub's growth

  That doesn’t look sustainable. And assuming this activity is driven by AI bots rather than growth in paying customers, it’s probably bad news for the bottom line.

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Issues in the Repo

  GitHub had a rough Monday this week, with git operations, Actions, and the issue tracker all unavailable for several hours. Code being unreachable during a forge outage is annoying but survivable because every contributor already has a full clone. Issues and pull request threads going dark is a different matter, since for most projects those exist only in GitHub’s database and nowhere else. I asked on Mastodon about tools that keep issue and review data inside the repository so it clones and pushes with the code, and got pointed at more projects than I expected, spanning about twenty years of people having a go at this.

Security

• CISA

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] CISA Adds Four Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] CISA Malcolm

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] Siemens Simcenter Nastran

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] AVEVA Enterprise SCADA

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Haiwell IoT Cloud HMI Gateway

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Johnson Controls Inc. Airwall

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Hitachi Energy APM Edge Product

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] ANDRITZ HIPASE-250 and 250 SCALA

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Siemens License Server (SLS)

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Siemens Desigo DXR and PXC Controllers

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Siemens Siveillance Video

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Siemens Parasolid

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Siemens Simcenter Femap

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Siemens Solid Edge

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Siemens LOGO! Soft Comfort

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Johnson Controls Metasys

  • CISA ☛ 2026-08-12 [Older] Siemens RUGGEDCOM APE1808

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Their cities dropped Flock surveillance cameras. They’re still being watched

    Despite policy victories over Flock, Americans are finding themselves under similar monitoring by a new company – or unable to remove the original cameras

  • Wired ☛ The Single English County Saying No to Palantir

    The UK government is facing calls to cancel a sprawling health care contract with Palantir. The region of Greater Manchester insists it can do a better job itself.

  • SQ Magazine ☛ Digital Footprint Examples

    A digital footprint is the trail of data created by everything you do online, from search queries and app permissions to the metadata embedded in photos you post. It splits into two types: an active footprint (things you knowingly share, like posts or comments) and a passive footprint (data collected without direct input, like IP addresses, cookies, and device fingerprints).

  • The Verge ☛ Meta glasses are a workplace menace

    Meta has sold millions of pairs of its AI-powered smart glasses over the last several years — but as sales boom, so too has the backlash to the devices. The glasses allow wearers to listen to music or take calls, but the feature that has sparked outrage is the ability to record using them: Many people see them as a new notch in the surveillance apparatus at best, and “pervert” and “creep” glasses at worst.

    Ordinarily, if you are recorded against your will, you can try to leave the area or otherwise resist being recorded. But many people are encountering smart glasses for the first time while at their job, especially those who interact with the public, like retail and service workers. In the workplace, smart glasses exacerbate the power imbalance between the customer and the employee, or the boss and subordinate. Resisting invasive technology is risky when you depend on your job to pay rent or buy groceries. It’s harder still when many workplaces don’t yet have policies around a new gadget that the public is grappling with in real time.

  • Don Marti ☛ The fix is in for the attribution cartel…or is it?

    So even if Irish regulators try to get special treatment for the attribution cartel, different from what all the other online ad companies get, eventually the rest of Europe will catch up with them.

  • Memphis Flyer ☛ What the Flock?

    The cameras are said to be used by law enforcement agencies across the country to solve crimes. But we are also hearing stories of officers misusing the technology to stalk exes, people being wrongfully identified as criminals, and citizens vandalizing or otherwise making defective these cameras as uproar against the fast-growing surveillance network being built around us heightens.

Defence/Aggression

• International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Microsoft Executive Jared Bridegan Murder: Trial Opens for Ex-Wife Shanna Gardner and New Husband

• C4ISRNET ☛ US Army to end experimental drone battalion in Europe

  The Army is ending an experiment with a dedicated drone battalion less than a year after tasking the infantry unit to test how such a formation could operate, an Army official said on Thursday.

• Common Dreams ☛ Further | Be Quiet, Be Quiet: We Are All On the Decoy Plane Now | Opinion

  Never mind his "unthreatening" North Korea has weapons that reach the US; they're shipping weapons to Putin's forces in Ukraine; and Thursday they shrugged off Trump's paltry olive branch by launching a barrage of missiles, dismissing the "recent measure (of) so-called good faith," and denying Trump's claim his bestie had reached out. Sen. Tim Kaine: "North Korea tests ballistic missiles and Trump decides the problem is with...our ally, South Korea." These are also the guys who killed Otto Warmbler, a 21-year-old U.S. student on a 2016 tour charged with a "hostile act against the state" after allegedly stealing a hotel poster. He was put away after a show trial; when the U.S. got him released 17 months later, he came home blind, deaf, vegetative, howling, with catastrophic brain damage and signs of torture. He died six days later. But sure, Trump and Kim Jong Un "get along GREAT!"

• The Observer at Notre Dame, Saint Mary's and Holy Cross ☛ Disinvited lecturer returns to Notre Dame

  “This does not represent an ideological shift to the right. This represents an anger at the Democratic Party. And in fact, that is the case for so many groups of color that the Democrats lost in 2024. When you look at the data on their actual beliefs, there hasn’t been a rightward shift, and what that tells [us] is that this is a protest vote,” Abdelhadi said.

  Abdelhadi paralleled this trend with the general public, particularly younger voters. According to the Pew Research Center, 80% of Democrats see Israel unfavorably, and Republicans ages 18 to 49 hold a similarly negative opinion. Abdelhadi said the protest wave of 2023 and 2024 stemmed from the youth of the general public, not just Muslims.

• International Business Times ☛ 27 Christians Killed in Nigeria: 'To Wipe Out the Entirety of Christianity,' Says Reporter Who Fears He's Next

  According to Truth Nigeria journalist Masara Kim, who spoke to CBN News, armed men swept through both communities while military units stationed nearby failed to intervene.

  International Christian Concern has separately confirmed that at least 24 Christians died in a single assault on the Bin Mper community in Plateau State this week.

  The claims are fuelling renewed allegations of a slow‑motion genocide against Christians in Nigeria, with Kim saying he now expects to be killed for documenting it.

• The Washington Post ☛ California set to ban ‘addictive’ social media features to protect teens

  Advocates say legislation in the nation’s most populous state would carry particular weight in the national movement to curb tech’s influence on young people.

• Bruce Schneier ☛ AI Is Learning to Write Genetic Code

  This sort of research is both exciting and terrifying: [...]

• Jay Little ☛ Marc Andreessen is a Demilich of Tech | Jay Little

  As it so happens, the other day I happened to click on a YouTube video entitled, “Meet The Silicon Valley Billionaire Ruining The World” and as it turns out it made a very compelling argument that Marc Andreessen may in fact he one of the worst figures in tech. The video was compelling and I was happy to have spent 13 minutes watching it. It did however inspire me to look up some of the source material it referenced, most notably an essay that Marc wrote nearly three years back entitled, “The Techno Optimist Manifesto”.

  Now as it so happens, this entire blog post is going to be my response to a particular section of this manifesto entitled “The Enemy”. However let me be very clear, just because I’m focusing on this particular section, doesn’t mean that the other sections aren’t worth your time and aren’t just as horrifying. I have no idea how I didn’t hear about this essay when it was published in October of 2023, but in a way I’m almost glad that it worked out this way. The statements made within its paragraphs really cut to the core of all of the abhorrent behavior we are seeing in tech nowadays, doubly so in regards to AI.

  So what is it I found so insulting and skin crawling about this section that I just had to write a response to it? Well dear reader, lets go through it piece by piece, shall we?

• The Walrus ☛ Parents Are Suing Social Media Companies for Harm to Kids

  These deaths were not anomalies but symptoms of what the RCMP has declared a public safety crisis. In 2024, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection received an average of six reports of sextortion every day. But the nature of the crime—online, anonymous, encrypted—makes it difficult to prosecute. In 78 percent of cases, Canadian law enforcement either fails to identify an accused or can’t collect enough evidence to lay or recommend charges. The RCMP managed to trace Harry’s assailant to Nigeria, a global locus of cybercrime. “But with the sheer number of people who are doing this,” says Carl, “to narrow it down to one house in one neighbourhood in one town, it’s almost impossible.”

• Federal News Network ☛ Army will shut down a unit in Europe focused on learning drone warfare

  For more nearly a year, soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Brigade have been experimenting and building their own drones, as well as participating in drills on waging unmanned warfare after Ukraine pioneered such tactics in its yearslong conflict with Russia. Last November, 600 soldiers formed a battalion that specialized in drone warfare and was set up to be used as a dedicated unit that could deploy anywhere drones were required.

  Gen. Christopher LaNeve, the Army’s acting chief of staff, has ordered the battalion to refocus on its core mission of being an airborne infantry unit, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal Army deliberations. The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the change.

• TruthOut ☛ Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Cults Are Coming for Democracy

  “We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both,” Gil Durán says. In this episode of Movement Memos, Durán and host Kelly Hayes discuss the bizarre fixations and political fantasies of tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, and how those ideas are being translated into real-world governance. Durán and Hayes also discuss Silicon Valley’s Christian cosplay, and how traditional Christian ideas are being used as wrapping paper for the pursuit of AI-first, corporate fiefdoms.

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Michigan township combats nuclear weapons data center by passing ban on new electrical infrastructure — 220,000-square-foot hyperscale project is backed by University of Michigan and the Los Alamos National Laboratory

  “We need to make sure it’s in the right location from a planning standpoint, and we need to make sure that we have ordinances in place that require DTE or any electrical company to go through a process,” Ypsilanti Township Supervisor Brenda Stumbo said in a statement. The township will determine “the nature and scale of electrical infrastructure necessary to serve new high-energy-demand land uses [...] including infrastructure associated, but not limited to hyper-scale data centers, mid-sized data centers, artificial intelligence computing facilities, and high-performance computational centers, industrial facilities, and other intensive electrical users” during the six-month period.

• Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-20 [Older] Ex-defence minister's call for a wartime election puts pressure on Ukraine's Zelenskyy

  • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Ukrainian defense company factory, planned to produce rocket fuel in Denmark, has been delayed by one year

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Ukraine anti-corruption agencies investigating network allegedly tied to Zelenskyy's office

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Ukraine updates: Ousted minister Fedorov calls for elections

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] Putin visited Kuril to 'punish' Japan over Ukraine stance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-16 [Older] Ukraine launches one of its largest attacks of war

  • NL Times ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Video: Fostered Ukrainian orphans die after rescue from Zandenplas lake

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Ukraine's monthly civilian casualties highest since 2022

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] What would a North Korean surge mean for Ukraine war?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-20 [Older] Romania destroys drone near gas project, blames Russia

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-20 [Older] Ukraine: Several killed in 'massive' Russian strikes on Kyiv

  • HRW ☛ 2026-08-20 [Older] Mali: Russia’s ‘Africa Corps’ Massacres Villagers

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Russian missile barrage kills at least 16 in Ukraine and wounds dozens

  • HRW ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Pro-Peace Politician Jailed in Russia

  • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] Governor: 10 killed in Russian strike on Ukraine border

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] Could an explosive drone at a German airport signal a growing Russian threat to NATO?

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] Russian missile attack in Kharkiv kills at least 10, as Ukraine keeps up drone attacks in Moscow

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] German court convicts Ukrainian man over Russia parcel plot

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] Ukraine, Russia trade strikes; Wildberries site hit again

  • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] Six reported killed in Russian border missile strike

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] Russian enriched uranium shipped to Canadian-owned Westinghouse in U.S.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-16 [Older] Troops from North Korea to boost Russia's Ukraine forces

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-16 [Older] Why Kyiv keeps attacking Russian retail giant Wildberries

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-16 [Older] Will North Korean forces bolster Russia's Ukraine war?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-15 [Older] Germany news: Russia lists research body as 'undesirable'

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-15 [Older] Russians snap up new homes built on Ukraine 'graveyard'

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-14 [Older] Berlin's Russian House: A hub for propaganda and espionage?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] How North Korea has profited from its support for Russia

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Russia's Putin angers Japan with 1st visit to Kuril Islands

  • HRW ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Russia: Cluster Munition Attack on Kyiv a Potential War Crime

  • HRW ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Russia’s Supreme Court Bars Pro-Peace Party from Elections

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-12 [Older] Why is Russia's Yabloko party barred from upcoming election?

Environment

• Raspberry Pi ☛ Measuring what's inside: calculating the carbon footprint of our products

  Understanding the emissions embodied in a product is one of the trickiest parts of carbon reporting. For a hardware company like Raspberry Pi, the bulk of our environmental impact doesn’t come from the electricity we use in our facilities — it comes from the products themselves. In carbon accounting terms, that falls under Scope 3: the indirect emissions spread across our value chain, from raw material extraction through to manufacturing and transport.

• Renewable Energy World ☛ Data center backlash is cross-partisan — This Week in Cleantech

  This week’s episode features special guest Molly Taft from WIRED, who discusses the growing, cross-partisan opposition to AI data centers.

• 404 Media ☛ Township Fights Nuclear Weapons Data Center By Passing a Moratorium on Electrical Infrastructure

  Ypsilanti Township in Michigan passed a six month moratorium on “major electric utility infrastructure” on Tuesday night. The moratorium is a delaying tactic, the latest in the Township’s long fight to stop the construction of a $1.2 billion data center that’s backed by the University of Michigan and the Pentagon’s nuclear war scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL).

• Wired ☛ The Unlikely Place at the Center of China’s AI Boom

  In Ulanqab, a city in Inner Mongolia home to about 1.5 million people, nearly 100 data centers have been opened or begun construction since 2016. Chinese companies have pledged to build projects with a combined estimated capacity of 12.5 gigawatts in the city, and over 70 percent of the total commitments have been announced in just the last year, making it one of the fastest growing compute clusters in Asia, according to a research note published by Goldman Sachs last week. For comparison, OpenAI’s $500 billion Stargate Project is set to reach only 10 gigawatts of total capacity when it’s complete.

• The Atlantic ☛ The Case for Chilling Out About Birth Rates

  Even if the fertility decline doesn’t reverse itself anytime soon, the consequences are unlikely to be apocalyptic.

• Techdirt ☛ DOGE’s [sic] Screwworm Legacy May Be Tons Of Euthanized Cats And Dogs

  But if you don’t think all of that is bad enough of a look for what DOGE [sic] and the administration did to cause this, what if we had thousands of dead puppies and kittens in the news instead?

• Energy/Transportation

  • New York Times ☛ Desperation Mounts as Thousands in Indiana Endure 10 Days Without Power

    Storms on Aug. 11 caused flooding and havoc throughout the Chicago area and neighboring northern Indiana, hitting Gary, where one-third of residents live in poverty, especially hard. More than a week later, the regional power company said its crews were working tirelessly to restore electricity but were overwhelmed by unprecedented levels of damage.

    The utility, Northern Indiana Public Service Co., said on Friday that 43,400 of its customers remain without power in the region, down from more than 300,000 in the storm’s immediate aftermath. Service is expected to be restored to Gary by Tuesday, the company said, calling it a “monumental undertaking.”

  • Hackaday ☛ This Week In Security: Apple Warns Users, Stripe Merchants Leak Keys, Copilot Helps Hack Itself, And Comcast Senses Movement

    The ARINC 429 bus is a communications architecture for planes, similar to the CAN bus used in cars. Once you are connected to that bus, it can be vulnerable in the same ways cars can be vulnerable to data manipulation. In the Usenix paper, researchers discovered that one access port to the airplane communications system is easily reached from the outside of the plane, though “easily” in this context means “by airplane maintenance technicians”. The paper represents over a decade of work by the team in obtaining and building a test lab of avionics equipment to represent an actual airplane, culminating in an embedded device described as “the size of a quarter” that plugs into the communications port and provides remote access over WiFi.

    It needs to be emphasized, given other recent news, that this is a piece of hardware being added to the plane which communicates over WiFi, and not a way to attack an unmodified plane via passenger WiFi!

  • Hackaday ☛ Thermoacoustic Sterling Engine Is Now Fully 3D Printable

    We previously reported on the open-source engine, but there’ve been some improvements worth talking about. For one thing, he’s integrated a biogas/methane burner directly inside the 3D-printable hotend. For another, that 3D-printed design allows for an excellent heat exchange geometry that would be very hard to get any other way. The whole thing is open source with plans available at OwnEnergy.org, where you can find links to the apparently-mandatory Discord channel and now an old-style forum to actually collaborate on the design, which is open-source. The site is also now the home of all data and discussion about [my engines]’s homescale biogas plant, which is the power source for this little engine.

  • Renewable Energy World ☛ How solar saved the grid during Europe’s heatwave

    According to Ember, during heatwaves beginning in late June, daily power demand increased by as much as 28% in Italy, 23% in Hungary, 14% in France, and 13% in Spain. This is compared to the week preceding the heatwaves (13-19 June), when temperatures were closer to normal seasonal averages.

    The high temperatures resulted in increased demand from air conditioning requirements, while simultaneously disrupting hydropower and nuclear output.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • California State University Northridge ☛ Why Austria Is Europe’s Most Underrated Hiking Country

    Austria’s network of mountain huts, the Hütten, is central to the walking experience here, and the welcome is famously warm. These are not merely places to sleep; they are convivial mountain inns where the end of a long day is marked by hearty food, a cold beer on the terrace, and easy conversation with fellow walkers. The food leans towards the substantial and delicious, Kaiserschmarrn, Kasspatzln, goulash, and strudel, all served in generous portions after a hard day on the trail.

    There is something about the Austrian huts that sets them apart even from their excellent counterparts in Switzerland and Italy. The atmosphere is relaxed and genuinely friendly, and the sense of being welcomed rather than merely accommodated is palpable. Many walkers rank the hut culture as their favourite part of walking in Austria, and it is a large part of what keeps them coming back.

• Overpopulation

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] How to feed the world as temperatures rise

  • Wired ☛ The Super El Niño Won’t Fix the West’s Water Crisis

    All of the experts agreed that the best-case scenario—in which the mountains that feed the Colorado get a record snowpack year, and Lake Powell and Lake Mead get pulled back from the brink—won’t be nearly enough to make a serious dent in the problem. El Niño is set to temporarily intensify global temperatures next year, highlighting just how quickly climate change is transforming the world. Some projections show that the river’s flow could shrink as much as 30 percent by 2050 thanks to climate change.

Finance

• Counter Punch ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] First They Took Our Wages, Now They Want Our Social Security

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• New York Times ☛ Zambia’s Democratic Facade Fractures in Post-Election Crackdown

  Now, some of those same observers have accused Mr. Hichilema and his party of using government resources to manipulate voter support and suppress opposition. The European Union said that its observer mission found “serious incidents and procedural irregularities during the counting and tabulation” of the election last week.

• Silicon Angle ☛ AI data center builder Nscale reportedly seeking $3B IPO

  The tipsters didn’t specify the valuation that Nscale is targeting. The company, which builds and operates artificial intelligence data centers, received a $14.6 billion valuation following its most recent funding round. The March raise included the participation of Nvidia Corp., Nokia Corp. and other high-profile backers.

  Nscale opened its first data center last year in Norway. Today, the company is building AI infrastructure in more than a dozen locations worldwide. Bloomberg reported that Nscale hopes to grow its data center capacity from 831 megawatts to about 11 gigawatts.

• [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ GOP urges top AI firms to do something about the toxic image of data centers

  The centers have become the battleground for the upcoming election in which Republican Sen. Jon Husted could lose his seat to the Democratic challenger, former Sen. Sherrod Brown. Brown is currently eight points ahead in an election that has seen Brown’s campaign spend millions portraying Husted as “the face of data centers in Ohio.”

  The National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, has said that “data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck” adding that if he loses, the data centers will be blamed and this will have a knock-on effect across the U.S.

• Mike Brock ☛ Return the Favor

  Multiply this by three hundred and sixty-five and you have a decade of American political media. The right does not have better arguments. The right has discipline about not answering the left’s questions, and the left has no discipline whatsoever about not answering the right’s. The asymmetry is the entire story of why we are where we are.

  There is a working manual for how a serious opposition operates in a hostile media environment. The manual is not secret. The right has been running from it for thirty years. Every Democratic operative in Washington knows the manual exists. Almost none of them will run it, because running it would require them to break a set of professional norms whose function is to keep the credentialed class comfortable inside the transmission belt that is delivering the country to authoritarianism. So the manual sits on the shelf and Chuck Schumer’s press secretary picks up the phone.

  Here is the manual, in five rules.

• Kelly Hayes ☛ Woke What? Let's Be Fucking Serious

  But I want to call attention to what's been memory-holed, because the same kind of public forgetting that allowed some people to minimize the threat Trump posed during his second run for the presidency is taking hold again. Democrats are entertaining years-old complaints about the left, while daily political discourse often fails to register just how catastrophic, corrupt, and fascist the reigning politics of the moment have become. This time, the reality is so overwhelming that normalization is almost inevitable. Between the gutting of government aid, crypto-fueled corruption, the politicization of disaster relief, and Trump's crooked dealings with the tech industry, who can keep up? Last I checked, people were focused on the weird, fawning letters of a Trump tag-along Ivanka look-alike.

• Hamilton Nolan ☛ Yes Obviously the Senate Should Be Abolished

  Stupid, right? Yes. This is the United States Senate. This is quite literally the design of the U.S. Senate. The state of Wyoming, with 590,000 residents, has two Senators, and the state of California, with 39 million residents, also has two Senators. Every citizen of Wyoming has, proportionally, 66 times more representation in the Senate than each citizen of California. If you believe in “one person, one vote”—this is the opposite of that. The design of the Senate is inherently (and purposely) not just undemocratic but anti-democratic. Anyone who favors small-d democracy and believes that all people are created equal and deserve equal political representation must wish for the abolition of the Senate, which serves to act in opposition to those principles.

• So-called 'FSFE'

  • FSFE ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] Working in the Engine Room of the FSFE [Ed: GAFAM funded front group]

  • FSFE ☛ 2026-08-14 [Older] SFP#54: Policy and EU: Keep Android Open, what is the FSFE doing?

• Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

  • RFA ☛ China ‘likely’ ran targeted campaign to align Pacific with its latest five-year plan

    In the report, titled “China’s Model on the Offensive: Why China’s Five-Year Plan Promotion in the Pacific Matters,” the Washington-based think tank documented how in eight of the nine Pacific island countries where Beijing has an embassy, the heads of mission published op-eds in the local media touting the merits of China’s latest sweeping national policy framework proposed late last year and formally adopted in March.

Censorship/Free Speech

• CPJ ☛ 2026-08-20 [Older] From prosecutions to bans and spurious copyright claims: how Kazakhstan’s journalists are being silenced

• IP Kat ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] SHEIN v Temu: Proving copyright ownership, and platform liability

• IP Kat ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] [Guest Book Review] Copyright, Contract, and Video Games: Terms of Play

• Los Angeles Times ☛ Stars and Stripes editor says he has been fired for insubordination after doing interview

  The Pentagon has fired Stars and Stripes’ editor-in-chief, publisher and a reporter after a CBS interview defending the military newspaper’s independence and warning against censorship for service members.

• EFF ☛ Intermediary Liability in Brazil: The Intricate Path Ahead

  One important measure is to ensure accountability of take-down requests, including by the government. The Supreme Court’s decision stipulated that [Internet] applications should publish transparency reports of the removal notices they receive. Government institutions should follow suit by periodically disclosing aggregate data of their own requests to online platforms, covering various types of user data and demands for content and account restrictions. Back in 2016, Marco Civil’s regulation decree established that all federal bodies must annually publish statistical reports on their requests of subscriber data to providers. To the best of our knowledge, federal bodies generally fail to meet this provision. ANPD can play a crucial role in stepping up transparency in the implementation of the new rules.

• Court House News ☛ TikTok seeks Section 230 shield from Iowa suit over lewd content

  In seeking to dismiss the case, TikTok argues that Iowa’s claims regarding the addictive features on the app are barred by a federal statute, Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act, which protects [Internet] platforms from liability for content posted by third parties. And TikTok says its decisions on how it selects and presents that content are protected by the First Amendment.

• RTL ☛ Under national security law: Hong Kong convicts Tiananmen vigil activists of inciting subversion

  Semi-autonomous former colonies Hong Kong and Macau used to be the only places on Chinese soil that permitted public vigils to mourn those who died on June 4, 1989, when authorities sent troops and tanks to crush protests calling for political reform in and around Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

  Lee and Chow were leaders of the now defunct Hong Kong Alliance, the group that organised annual vigils in the city's Victoria Park.

• CBC ☛ Tiananmen Square vigil organizers convicted of 'inciting subversion' in Hong Kong

  Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung, former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, were charged in 2021 with inciting subversion under the national security law. They both had pleaded not guilty and face a maximum prison term of 10 years. The alliance was also found guilty.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Case Western Reserve University ☛ Editor’s Note: A time of change

  We also recognize that people increasingly get their news from online sources. In order to better serve our readership, we hope to broaden our digital presence. Expect an expanded video catalog, including long form explainers and day-to-day coverage of all things CWRU. We hope to meet our peers where they are, and right now, that is the online space. In a continuation from last year, we will continue to push out our weekly newsletter. While we can’t deliver a print issue to your dorm, we can pop into your inboxes with your weekly dose of campus life.

• CPJ ☛ 2 French journalists, Togolese fixer detained 26 days following arrest while documentary filming in northern Togo

  On August 20, 2026, an investigative judge in Lomé, the Togolese capital, provisionally released Pezzani for medical reasons but ordered his passport to be confiscated pending the next appearance of the three journalists to be questioned on the case, their lawyer, Martial Akakpo, told CPJ. Mocaër and Vedomey are detained in a police facility in Lomé.

• CPJ ☛ From prosecutions to bans and spurious copyright claims: how Kazakhstan’s journalists are being silenced

  Ahead of this month’s parliamentary election, independent journalists in Kazakhstan have faced “unprecedented” pressure, ranging from criminal prosecutions to professional bans, and this crackdown warrants heightened international scrutiny to ensure the country upholds its obligations on media freedom.

Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

• Advance Local Media LLC ☛ ‘An overstep’: Navajo Code Talker descendants criticize New Mexico’s new plan for museum

  The state of New Mexico has set aside $20 million in capital outlay, half of that this year, and Chevron donated about 200 acres of land in Tse Bonito, near Window Rock, the Navajo Nation capital, in 2009.

  Now, a museum is finally moving forward, with a groundbreaking planned for December — but at an entirely different site.

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ When a Carpenter in California Found a Nugget of Gold, It Started a Rush Toward Nothing Less Than the Modern World

  The Rush is built on an enormous body of existing scholarship, and Philbrick synthesizes this research into a lively and accessible narrative. California was a highly disputed land when Marshall made his fateful find, poised to tip the balance between the Union’s 15 enslaving and 15 free states. Philbrick neatly evokes the politics, people and technologies that animated the period. He refers to the era’s collective technological and cultural accelerations as “the Rush” and invokes this force as the catalyst for events as disparate as the Civil War and the advent of moving pictures.

  “Life in California,” Philbrick argues, “could be cruel and unforgiving, but it was also filled with excitement, promise and—if you were a white American—immense freedom.” As Philbrick introduces us to the future barons who planned the Central Pacific line, he also reports on the lives of the Chinese workers who built the railway under intolerable conditions. Alongside politicians who maneuvered the Union into civil war, we meet outsiders who managed to drive events, including Mary Ellen Pleasant, a Black entrepreneur who built a laundry empire in San Francisco and funded abolitionist causes. Reportedly, she even posed as a jockey to travel to Virginia plantations to spread word of John Brown’s planned raid on Harpers Ferry.

• San Francisco, California ☛ SF drone arrest mistook handshake for drug sale, attorney says

  Deputy Public Defender Brian Cox, the head of the office’s Integrity Unit, argued police officers regularly mischaracterize normal interactions as drug transactions, and that drones amplify those risks.

  “SFPD interprets otherwise innocent behavior as criminal because to a hammer, everything is a nail,” said Cox. “Drones and other surveillance technologies simply give police more power — and greater reach — to do that.”

• Techdirt ☛ ICE Says It Will Fit Every Officer With A Body Cam, Restrict Public Access To Recordings

  Good news? Well, maybe. I mean, it’s been known for years that body cameras do more for law enforcement officers than they do for things like accountability or transparency. Pinning cameras to ICE officers probably isn’t going to alter that reality… especially when ICE has made it clear from the outset that it’s rarely, if ever, going to make body camera footage public.

• New Republic ☛ Trump’s Secret Police Spying on Americans? It’s Darker than We Knew.

  We just learned about the broad outlines of this domestic surveillance from newly released court papers related to the ongoing prosecution of a handful of protesters. As The New York Times reported, the papers show that DHS began surveilling left-leaning groups—including a union, a climate change group, and others—after ICE killed Alex Pretti in January. This has entailed seeking financial records and infiltrating protest meetings that are protected by the First Amendment.

  But you can get a far more vivid picture of these undercover surveillance operations—and how brazenly they were conducted against American citizens—if you read deep into the court papers. The documents—which are attached as exhibits to a motion filed by lawyers for one of the protesters facing prosecution and are available on Pacer—include investigative reports that were transmitted by the undercover agents themselves about meetings they infiltrated.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Techdirt ☛ Trump FCC Weakens U.S. Broadband Speed Goals To The Benefit Of Elon Musk And Comcast

  Case in point: this week the administration abandoned the FCC’s goal to nudge broadband connectivity toward 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) downstream and 500 megabit per second (Mbps) upstream, a dramatic improvement to the FCC’s current base definition of 100 Mbps downstream, 20 Mbps upstream.

  FCC boss Brendan Carr falsely claimed in a statement that this downgrade was necessary because the faster standard was not “technologically neutral,” and having higher standards would be an overreach for the agency: [...]

• CS Monitor ☛ FCC considers cuts to funds for [Internet] access at schools and libraries

  Public schools and libraries across the United States could face steep increases in the prices they pay for [Internet] service, following a review being launched by the Federal Communications Commission.

  More than 100,000 schools and 11,000 libraries rely on the program known as E-Rate, which has provided discounts of between 20% and 90% for three decades, thanks to a 1996 law passed by Congress that mandates telecom providers subsidize universal access.

  About 47 million students and library patrons depend on this access for connectivity, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Hackaday ☛ Spoofed Serial Number Unlocks Cricut Machine

  [xssfox] recently found a Cricut Maker in an e-waste disposal. A quick scan over the device indicated it was in moderately good condition, with merely some perished rollers to contend with. The device was salvaged, with the awareness that Cricut is plenty good at disabling and locking down machines when it wishes. However, those measures didn’t stop [xssfox] from bringing it back to life.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• SQ Magazine ☛ Walmart Adds Apple Pay and Google Pay Starting August 24

  Walmart’s statement confirms the capability and the start date. It does not establish that every terminal inside a first-wave store will accept a tap on day one, and the company has not addressed that question either way. Four gaps stay open: [...]

• Michael Harley ☛ Re: Tech sucks? Really?

  Oh man, I've been writing passionately about this topic for over five years now. I 100% agree with Gordon when he says "Big Tech isn’t just selling us products anymore, it provides infrastructure and networks that many of us can’t easily escape."

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • 404 Media ☛ Subtlefakes: Slightly Altered Nonconsensual AI Images Are Taking Over X

      But for the past few months I’ve been looking at a new and strange type of AI generated nonconsensual image on X that I think will fool a lot of people. These images, which I’ve started calling subtlefakes, are not as clearly offensive, but they are a lot more convincing. The concerning implication is that it’s not just the technology that is advancing now, but that the people who wield it maliciously are getting more sophisticated. Much like “cheap fakes,” which in 2019 Data & Society described as an edited piece of media that manipulates the truth without requiring AI or any other advanced technology, subtlefakes are another form of synthetic media that has taken over the [Internet] since the emergence of deepfakes in 2017.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ 'Filmmaker' Who Sued PTP, BTN, and Four Other Private Torrent Trackers May Be an Impostor

    A federal copyright lawsuit targeting six of the most prominent private BitTorrent trackers, including PassThePopcorn, BroadcasTheNet, and HDBits, may be the work of an impostor. Attorneys representing two of the alleged operators told a federal judge they tracked down the real person behind the films cited in the complaint. Responding to the revelation, Illinois Judge Andrea Wood slammed the brakes on pending motions, scheduling an in-person hearing to get to the bottom of it.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Ariana Grande Granted Permission to Subpoena Info of [Crackers]

    A Los Angeles judge has granted Ariana Grande permission to subpoena information that will help identify the [crackers] who allegedly leaked unreleased music and footage from recording sessions. The star’s proposed order for expedited discovery was approved on Tuesday, August 18, with the judge noting that, as Grande is unable to identify the [crackers], a waiting period should be waived.