Leftovers

• V H Belvadi ☛ V.H. Belvadi — Re-defining the IndieWeb

  What is the IndieWeb? I have been thinking of this question since I hosted the IndieWeb Carnival in December 2025 when quite a few contributions engaged with some form of this question. This is a rather difficult topic to address effectively, which explains why I have been sitting on this essay since 2 February this year when I first started writing a major portion of it. I have since revised it four times in six months.

  In the end, a collective effort will prove critical in establishing a definitive answer to this question, but as an individual I can nevertheless contribute by building on the ideas others have already discussed. For better or worse, that is what this essay has amounted to, perhaps dishearteningly.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ There’s no membership card for IndieWeb

  He hosted IndieWeb Carnival last December where a lot of people wrote about their ideas for where IndieWeb is going towards in the next five years. In this post, he takes a look at how IndieWeb movement defines itself and offers his thoughts on some of the issues in that and how he would define it.

  While this blog post was inspired by his post, don’t consider this as any kind of rebuttal. There are some points where I point directly to his writing but everything else is just generally my ideas around the topic.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Retraction Watch ☛ Federal lawsuit accuses four major publishers of extorting article processing charges – Retraction Watch

    A lawsuit filed under the U.S. False Claims Act accuses four major publishers of perpetrating a decade-long scheme to defraud the government by charging exorbitant article processing charges.

    The case, which became unsealed July 30, claims Elsevier, Springer Nature, Wiley and Informa forced U.S. research institutions to submit false claims to the government for reimbursement through article fees up to 10 times the cost of processing the articles.

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-14 [Older] The death of dark energy is a false alarm – the universe is still accelerating

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-20 [Older] Aliens at 40: from wearable cameras to exoskeletons, here are the technologies the film predicted

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-20 [Older] Only 3% of UK homes have air conditioning. What are the costs and consequences of fitting it?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] There’s a better way to cool data centres that cuts their huge thirst for water

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Were Denisovans tall compared to other ancient humans? We should be sceptical

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-14 [Older] What happens when someone’s chromosomes, sex hormones and body don’t align?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] An astronomer on what it’s really like to stargaze for a living

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Why snake venom may have evolved to catch dinner, not for defence

• Career/Education

  • Futurism ☛ Data Centers Are Sucking Up So Many Construction Workers That There Isn't Anybody Left to Build Houses, Expert Says

    “This problem is going to get even more and more exaggerated and acute to the housing industry because of the data center construction,” Brady continues, “and we’re not putting enough money into training the future generations of skilled labor.”

  • Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Breadth, depth, and personal connection

    That experiment did not last long. Fiction bores me, as do virtually all books. It reminded me how I do not easily connect with people at the emotional level, which sounds odd to those who have seen me in action. I am sociable, can talk with anyone, will speak in front of an audience even without a script, am able to do people-oriented jobs, tell jokes, am easygoing and do not take offence, am aware of sensitivities and boundaries, have emotional intelligence, and, generally, show strong social skills. Still, I take a very long time to grow attached to anyone.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Maxell brings back classic 1970s cassette tapes — 1970s ferric formula is custom-made for vintage PC data drives

    The UD series debuted in 1970, and these Type I cassettes earned a reputation as a worthy rival to TDK SD and Sony HF ferric alternatives.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Vox ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Cuba has plenty of doctors. So why is its healthcare system collapsing?

  • CS Monitor ☛ Mexican chocolate culture has ancient roots

    Chocolate is the world’s dessert. But many of its adoring fans have little idea of its origins, which reach back thousands of years to pre-Hispanic, Mesoamerican cultures in Mexico. That’s true even in the cradle of cocoa, which imports more chocolate than it produces.

  • Science Alert ☛ These Babies Grew Up With Strict Sugar Limits. Decades Later, The Results Are Dramatic.

    Decades and entire lifetimes later, the long-tail effect of that enforced sugar reduction during World War II appears to have dramatically boosted the health of an entire generation of wartime babies, research suggests.

    In a new paper published in PNAS, researchers analyzed health data from 64,761 people who were born in the UK between 1951–1956, sourcing their information from the UK Biobank study.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • PC Gamer ☛ 'We didn't have layoffs before, and now all of a sudden we have yearly layoffs': Bethesda artist says 'something has changed' under Microsoft

    Last week, the Communications Workers of America and the Bethesda Game Studios OneBGS union took part in the Save Our Devs rally across the United States and Canada (and on Twitch) "to call out layoffs and corporate greed across the industry and to demand fair first contracts across Microsoft’s gaming studios." Speaking to Kotaku, Bethesda artist Alex Nguyen talked about how things changed after Bethesda was acquired by the tech giant.

    "Since we’ve been under Microsoft… it feels like something has changed. We didn’t have layoffs before, and now all of a sudden we have yearly layoffs," he told Kotaku, saying teams were feeling the effects of cuts which eroded institutional knowledge. “If only five people knew how this thing worked and you let all five of them go, that’s a morale killer because it’s like we already knew this, and now we have to learn it again.”

    According to that article, Nguyen pointed out that fixer-uppers like Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online don't get a chance to bloom into successful fan favorites without sufficient labor and time. He also noted that there used to be a shared sense of long-term commitment among the staff at Zenimax and Bethesda—a commitment being smothered by Microsoft's current corporate tactics.

  • New York Times ☛ How Big Tech Captured American Schools

    Companies like Google and Microsoft have used their money, their might and their massive reach to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.

  • TechCrunch ☛ Oura faces lawsuit accusing it of misleading consumers about sleep-tracking accuracy

    The lawsuit, filed on Thursday by Clarkson Law Firm in San Francisco, alleges that Oura rings are unable to measure any of the physiological signals needed to assess sleep quality or determine sleep stages, and that they instead rely on AI-generated estimates that have “a coin flip’s chance of being correct,” according to the complaint.

    The lawsuit follows years of Oura users taking to the [Internet] to share their frustration with the smart ring’s sleep accuracy, with some saying they felt they slept poorly but were told their sleep had been optimal. Some have also expressed doubts about the device’s ability to monitor and detect sleep cycles.

  • Hackaday ☛ Bluetooth Shock Collar Keeps Wearer On Task

    The key here was finding an electric-shock dog collar that could be controlled via a smartphone application, which meant he could reverse-engineer its Bluetooth protocol and get it linked up to his own software. The initial implementation ties his quick-and-dirty Python control program with a web server living on his laptop, which he’s configured MacroDroid to call on when his personal criterion for ‘doomscrolling’ is met.

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

    • Robin Rendle ☛ Cybernetics and Ghosts

      I have to admit that whenever folks start to talk like this I feel this desperate need to defend personhood, humanity, novels, the humanities, liberal arts, books, all of it. My hackles go up reading this stuff because it’s usually coming from folks who don’t know anything about writing or literature and it feels like they’re stomping all over a vulnerable and delicate thing that they don’t understand.

      But when Calvino says it we ought to pay attention.

    • Nolan Lawson ☛ The asteroid currently hitting frontend web development | Read the Tea Leaves

      So where does this leave frontend dev education? Not in a great place obviously; I wish I had some more uplifting answers for people who (like me) used to get a lot of fulfillment out of trying to raise the bar for frontend developers everywhere. I do have some guesses though, and I think the problem is still worth puzzling through.

      The core question is where frontend development itself lands in this new era. Sadly it feels to me like there are several trends pointing against increased investment in frontend knowledge: [...]

    • The New Stack ☛ One pull to wipe them all

      Q Developer is a free extension that lets a coding agent read a project, propose changes, and run commands on a developer’s behalf inside an editor. On July 13, 2025, someone with the GitHub handle `lkmanka58` submitted a pull request to Amazon’s public aws-toolkit-vscode repository. Four days later, it was shipped to an install base of nearly a million developers on the Visual Studio Code marketplace. The pull request seemed unremarkable, a commit that recycled the title of a previous, legitimate change.

      That unassuming update downloaded an external file at build time and spliced a new prompt into the extension’s packaging script, instructing the AI agent to wipe the system to a near-factory state and delete file-system and cloud resources. The script then passed that prompt straight to the CLI, with flags set so the agent didn’t need any further approvals to execute.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Florida seeks court ruling to officially classify Sam Altman and ChatGPT as a 'public nuisance' — OpenAI fights to keep lawsuit away from a state jury

      Florida's lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman has now been sitting before U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon in Fort Pierce for seven weeks without a ruling on whether it belongs there. The state filed its 83-page, ten-count complaint in Highlands County circuit court on June 1, pleading only Florida law, naming Altman personally, and demanding a jury. OpenAI removed the case to federal court on July 2, arguing that one count built on the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act pulls the whole action into federal jurisdiction. Amongst other things, the state is seeking a court ruling finding that ChatGPT is a public nuisance.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ AI led to mistakes in Nevada County criminal cases. Should the D.A. be sanctioned?

      Over a two-month period last fall, Nevada County prosecutors filed court documents with falsehoods in them in four separate cases after using generative AI to write or proofread. Maxwell oversaw three of those cases, including one involving a habeas corpus petition to release a man from jail.

  • Social Control Media

    • [Old] Kate Wagner ☛ obligatory one month without social media on my phone substack essay (contrarian edition)

      Over one, possibly two months ago today (I lowkey lost track of time) I deleted ‘the socials’ off my phone. (Disclosure: I kept Instagram only because my friends insist on using it as a messaging app.) From that unmarked day forward, my social media use became explicitly fixed in time (brutal and uncompromising filters) and space (on my desktop computer in my house.) I did this without making a grand announcement (e.g. “friends, life’s been rough lately and I’m gonna need to be away from the [Internet] for a while, so don’t worry about me…”) or without hand-wringing about whether I should identify as an addict (sorry but I don’t think it’s the same.)

    • Akseli Lahtinen ☛ Deleted my fedi account

      Now fedi is very similar to twitter, and the more followers I had the more I felt like I was under constant surveillance. I had my followers set to requests for a while but I kept just accepting people, then at some point just opened the follow requests. I was past of the point where I could just go my follower list and nuke it all without it being a huge operation.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ MAGA Attacks Navy Sailors Over USS Abraham Lincoln Complaints

      The sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln deserve better than mockery from people sitting comfortably behind keyboards. The carrier has now been deployed for roughly nine months and has spent more than 240 consecutive days at sea without a port call — an extraordinary, record-setting stretch even by nuclear-powered aircraft carrier standards. Yet check in on military and veteran Facebook groups or scroll through X and you will find a never-ending chorus of MAGA critics — and maybe some Russian and Iranian bots, by the looks of some of the accounts — blaming the sailors themselves for struggling with the conditions aboard ship.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-14 [Older] Montreal police take down high-powered surveillance camera after Radio-Canada story

    • [Repeat] Digital Music News ☛ Elton John, Prince Harry, Others Ordered to Pay $13M Legal Bill

      High Court Justice Matthew Nicklin made that sizable bill official today when granting what outlets across the pond described as a “rare” indemnity order. Turning the clock back to 2022 for a moment, the filing parties in a press release outlined the “abhorrent criminal activity and gross breaches of privacy” they allegedly suffered at the hands of the defendants.

      Just in passing, the plaintiffs pointed to alleged payments to “police officials…for inside, sensitive information,” the alleged hiring of “investigators to secretly place listening devices inside people’s cars and homes,” and additional alleged “unlawful acts.”

    • Site36 ☛ Berlin installs AI cameras to detect suspicious behaviour. A Hamburg project has researched the consequences of such Orwell-style surveillance

      The aim of the AI cameras is to continuously capture everyone within the monitored area and analyse their behaviour – this massively increases the scope of data capture and evaluation compared with human or conventional surveillance. In my view, this applies to all algorithmic surveillance technologies, whether visual, text-based or otherwise. It is a new economy of control.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Panopticars

      Parked Waymos actively record 360-degree video and audio even without passengers aboard. Waymo discloses no fixed data retention schedule, storing footage for a vague "reasonable" timeframe.

    • Gadget Review ☛ Across Nashville, Parked Waymos Are Recording Your Neighborhood

      Armed with 29 external cameras, LiDAR, radar, and microphones, each robotaxi stays powered up between rides so it can respond to emergencies and reposition when needed. Operationally defensible, sure. The problem is what Waymo won’t say: how long that footage is stored, whether a residential street gets treated differently than a public plaza, and what “reasonably appropriate amount of time” actually means in practice. That phrase is doing enormous work for a very small amount of transparency.

• Defence/Aggression

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] Explosive drone hits police center in northeastern Turkey

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] Nearly 4,000 prisoners could be released under Turkey’s Kurdish peace law

  • Spectator AU ☛ Why you can’t ignore Ukraine

    The latest revolution is driven by drones and artificial intelligence. Unlike previous revolutions in war its technologies emerged early, not late. Ukraine and Russia are making this revolution as they fight, and the world is watching it unfold. But it is one thing to see it happen, another to make sense of it conceptually – to grasp its nature and predict its future. Who can fight well with new technologies and reflect on them deeply at the same time?

  • New Republic ☛ Trump Hates the Troops. The Troops Are Taking Notice.

    The least surprising observation you can make about Trump is that he is an asshole and a cheapskate. Still, the president’s Iranian misadventure has fully exposed both his ineptitude as commander in chief and the consequences of this lack of care for military members and their families. As conditions on U.S. ships erode, the administration is finding itself in a media war with the concerned families of troops deployed to the region. Stockpiles of vital munitions are being burned through at an alarming rate. And for some reason, Trump has picked this moment to order a bizarre retrofitting of U.S. aircraft carriers, demanding that they be kitted out with obsolete steam catapults. (TNR contributor Brynn Tannehill has the lore drop you need if you’ve been confused by this story.)

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • American Oversight ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] Following Court Victory Against Energy Dept., American Oversight Demands USAID Abandon Similar FOIA Purge Policy

• Environment

  • France24 ☛ Thousands rally in Sweden to protest climate policies ahead of general election

    Experts in Sweden and abroad have warned that the government's climate policy jeopardises the country's emissions-cutting goals – to reduce CO2 emissions from transport by 70 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, and to achieve net-zero emissions by 2045.

  • Science Alert ☛ Carl Sagan Turned This 1990 Photograph Into a Warning. It's More Relevant Now Than Ever

    The photograph was taken 36 years ago on Valentine's Day by NASA's Voyager 1.

    Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn. By 1990, NASA was preparing to switch off its cameras permanently to conserve the spacecraft's limited power.

    But before the cameras went dark, there was one last idea.

    Astronomer Carl Sagan, a member of the Voyager imaging team, had spent years arguing that the spacecraft should turn around and photograph the Solar System it was leaving behind.

    So on February 14, 1990, Voyager captured 60 frames for a Solar System 'family portrait'. Earth appeared in one of them.

    From around 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, our entire planet occupied just 0.12 of a pixel. The bright band crossing the image was sunlight scattered inside the camera's optics. Earth happened to fall within one of those rays.

    The photograph became known as the Pale Blue Dot.

  • NASA ☛ Voyager 1's Pale Blue Dot - NASA Science

    The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," in which he wrote: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us." The above image, “Pale Blue Dot Revisited,” was created in 2020 for the 30th anniversary of the iconic picture. The updated version used modern image-processing software and techniques to revisit the well-known Voyager view, while attempting to respect the original data and intent of those who planned the images.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Blowing in the wind, humble balloon gets green makeover

    A global symbol of parties and celebrations but an environmental headache, the humble balloon is undergoing a green revolution thanks to U.K. researchers.

    Researchers at Imperial College London say they have developed the first fully biodegradable balloon and hope to bring it to market within two years.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Officials nationwide face death threats and gunfire over AI data center projects — More than 500 towns restrict builds as councils shutter public comment

    Officials in Marshall, Michigan, did what data center opponents across the country have been demanding: on August 3, its city council passed a one-year moratorium on new builds. Ten days later, police told council members they were the subject of a credible death threat tied to the project. The same week, the 300-person town of Salix, Iowa, postponed its own moratorium vote after Facebook posts put its government "in the crosshairs," and in Box Elder County, Utah, a commissioner who approved a project told KSL he has police stationed outside his house. Then, on August 21, NBC News reported that city leaders nationwide are now receiving death threats over data centers, regardless of which way officials vote.

  • CNET ☛ Planned US Data Centers Set to Produce 24M Cars' Worth Of Carbon Dioxide

    A new analysis of the 60 largest data centers under construction in the US by Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft estimates the sites could produce a cumulative 101.5 million tons of carbon dioxide annually once they’re fully up and running, Financial Times reports. That’s about 7% of all 2025 US power-sector emissions. Put another way, it’s the equivalent of running 27 coal power plants or putting 24 million more gas-powered cars on the road.

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] People Are Taking Power For Climate Action Through Green Amendments

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] Are zoos ready for the changing climate?

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] Tourists seek cooler climates — but at what cost to nature?

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-08-16 [Older] How Climate Change Is Making Bad Working Conditions Even Worse

  • Green Party UK ☛ 2026-08-15 [Older] Green Party Deputy Leader Mothin Ali visits Stourbridge wildfire victims and calls for measures to mitigate climate collapse

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-15 [Older] In Germany, record heat meets climate action fatigue

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-08-14 [Older] Thatcher Warned In 1989 Of A Climate Crisis. She Did Nothing. Nor Will Her Successors

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-14 [Older] Eco wins: A Dutch lab for crops, a climate-ready city, and a beaver comeback

  • Vox ☛ 2026-08-14 [Older] We think we just discovered some new species living in New York City

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Scorched, parched western Europe suffers through another heat wave

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-15 [Older] Why more clothes donated to charity are going in the garbage

  • Energy/Transportation

    • New York Times ☛ 3 Cyclists Die in One Week in Hit-and-Runs in New York City

      All three cyclists were coming or going from work when they died, according to friends and advocates. No arrests have been made in any of the three deaths.

    • Hackaday ☛ So, You Found A Foden Steam Lorry In A Field. What Next?

      The talk starts with the story of its retrieval, then the long process of rebuilding, and finally its first run. He’s the owner of Eastnor Castle, the ancestral pile that serves as venue for EMF Camp, so we’re guessing that having somewhere spacious for such a project must have helped. Along the way, we get a comprehensive run through the workings of a 1920s steam vehicle, from its double-expansion compound engine to its three-speed gearbox, stopping for small details like its injectors, and a curious exhaust steam heater designed to reduce the clouds of visible steam.

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-18 [Older] What the Churchill Falls deal means for Quebec – and the provincial election

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] Summer power prices highest since 2022 energy crisis

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-13 [Older] Does the clean energy transition need forever chemicals?

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-16 [Older] Grizzly bear escapes enclosure at Calgary Zoo

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-15 [Older] Homes across B.C. have been decimated by wildfires. Here's what to know about your insurance

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-15 [Older] Canadair water-bomber builder feels heat of demand as wildfires rage around the world

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • New York Times ☛ The Data Center Backlash Bursts Into the Midterms

    There are signs that the emerging data center debate is scrambling the usual partisan divisions.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Most GOP politicians now talk negatively about data centers, data shows

    In the past six months, Republicans’ public statements about data centers have turned sharply negative, according to a Washington Post analysis.

  • Michael Green ☛ Great, Scott...

    Markets have a funny moral vocabulary: when a price moves against a trading book, it is “near-term volatility”; when the issuer acts and the price moves against the same book, it becomes manipulation. Nobody called the 30-year’s move to a 19-year-high yield a heinous financial crime; that was “the market repricing fiscal reality,” which happened, conveniently, to be the profitable direction for everyone short duration. The US Treasury offering a proposed increase in an existing program with voluntary exchange that he believes will lower US taxpayer funding costs becomes a “heinous financial crime.” We are a weak people.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Never Apologize For Being a Class Traitor

    Nobody chooses how they are born. Some people are born rich and some are born poor. If you are born rich, with much greater wealth than you need for yourself, you are, I think, morally obligated to give away a lot of that wealth. This is a fairly common and uncontroversial moral intuition. It is what rich people who find their way into left wing politics have recognized. Being born wealthy is neither a sign of worth nor a reason for guilt. It is just blind luck. What we are responsible for is what we can control. When rich kids who may have lived privileged lives embrace left wing politics, that is good. That means that they have the moral fiber to recognize that they have been financially blessed by an unfair system, and that they should do their part to try to make the system more fair. It is easier for people whose parents are rich to understand and be honest about this than it is for people who get rich themselves. The heirs can see clearly that their wealth is a matter of luck, while those who gained great wealth through business or otherwise are sorely tempted, by human nature, to believe that they deserve what they have, while ignoring the many structural advantages they were given that allowed them to be in a position to get that wealth. This is unremarkable. Self-justification is one of the strongest forces on earth. But it goes to show why there are rich kids who are members of DSA, but there are not too many Goldman Sachs executives who are.

  • Don Marti ☛ This video explains why people hate the IT industry, and it doesn’t even have an IT product or service in it

    Now compare that to IT. Can you still get the version of anything that was still good? Say, a desktop OS that works like Mac OS “Snow Leopard” or Windows XP Service Pack 3? Or an Apple iOS update without Liquid Ass? Or pre-“cloud” Adobe Photoshop? No—the necessary new code to support new hardware and fix bugs is bundled with stuff that’s just in there because reasons. Not just business reasons, like sticking ads on everything. Sometimes an adult software exec just wakes up with the determination to make an aesthetic impact, even when it makes the product look like a 1990s raver tried to design a psychedelic window manager theme.

    IT CEOs are household names—but famous for being untrustworthy. That’s not ideal for an industry that’s trying to build popular support. AI was supposed to win people over by now – it hasn’t. People are asking librarians how to disable or avoid intrusive AI.

  • Hanna Horvath ☛ Why does everything feel like a scam?

    At this point, the problem goes beyond things simply becoming more expensive. I increasingly have no idea how much any of this is supposed to cost.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • ANF News ☛ Iran executes Majid Adine

    Majid Adine, who was detained in Karaj on January 9 for participating in protests in Iran, was sentenced to death by the Karaj Revolutionary Court on allegations of “conducting operational activities in favor of the Israeli regime, the United States, and hostile groups,” “espionage,” and “cooperating with the Israeli regime and hostile countries.”

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Orwellian UK government pamphlet contradicts police on photography law. Imagine if Martin Parr had been prevented from taking photos in public…

    I’ve been stopped by security guards when photographing architecture in London so many times, I’ve always felt that very few people understand the basics of photography law in the UK.

    And if a recent pamphlet released by the government is anything to go by, I feel vindicated, because it would seem that not even the Home Office can make it make sense.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] Cameroon journalist held incommunicado for photo of Anglophone unrest

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-20 [Older] Cuts made at Global B.C., Global National, News 640 and talk radio as Corus reports losses

  • Pentagon dismisses Stars and Stripes leadership after editor, reporter oppose military interference

    The Pentagon on Friday fired the editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes and a top reporter for insubordination after they spoke publicly against any interference by the Defense Department in the military news outlet that has a long history of editorial independence. It was the latest move by an administration that has grown increasingly aggressive toward the news media.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-16 [Older] Woman Sues Over Stepfather's Use of Grok To Turn Her Childhood Photo Into Thousands of Abuse Images

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-16 [Older] Statistics Canada numbers show Canadians becoming less accepting of gender diversity

  • CBC ☛ 2026-08-15 [Older] How a $40 parking ticket became a fight for accessibility in Quebec

  • Spectator AU ☛ Parents should be held responsible for the crimes of their children | The Spectator Australia

    De Souza points out in her latest report that schools are referring these children to Prevent – and nothing happens. The programme set up specifically to prevent people from being drawn to terrorist violence is failing: teachers claim that their whistleblowing seldom leads to any follow-up, and even when it does, 65 per cent of young people referred to Prevent were sent back to their schools and colleges.

    All this does is teach children that their actions have no consequences

    This is frustrating and dangerous. Without the right medical or psychological intervention, how many of these troubled children will go on to assault or even kill classmates, family members, or random strangers? De Souza is right to say in her report that Prevent is not doing its job properly. But neither are parents.

  • Futurism ☛ Horrified School District Pleads Police to Stop Using Electric Shock Torture Gloves on Students

    The district’s request comes as outraged parents and students speak out against the extremely controversial devices, which are being procured by local and federal law enforcement agencies at an alarming clip.

    “I can’t even imagine walking down the hallway and seeing a peer of mine being electrocuted in a place that is supposed to be a safe space for students,” Nora Wessel, a senior at Omaha Central High School, said at a recent school board meeting, per the AP. “Yet, this is now a very real possibility. These are adults we are supposed to be able to trust, but these weapons create a barrier for our students to turn to resource officers when needed.”

  • The Atlantic ☛ An American City, With Troops on Its Streets

    Whereas other American cities targeted by Trump with National Guard deployments found success in court, D.C.’s lack of statehood limits its ability to fight back. The presence of the task force represents a particularly Trump-era indignity for the city: both comic and menacing; abusive and ineffective; appalling to some and, as time goes on, exhaustingly commonplace. Antidemocratic though the federal takeover may be, D.C. residents have been forced to live with it.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ Members of Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch: The Story Behind the Famous “Fort Worth Five” Photograph in 1900

    The outlaws were so pleased with the incredibly sharp, high-quality portrait that they reportedly didn’t care when Swartz kept a copy for himself. Shortly after, a local Fort Worth detective or Pinkerton agent happened to visit John Swartz’s studio. Looking at the sample prints, the lawman recognized the faces of Ben Kilpatrick and Will Carver, whom he had dealt with or seen on older Texas descriptions. Recognizing that these dapper “businessmen” were actually wanted train robbers, the police quickly confiscated the original photograph and its negatives.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Salon ☛ The [Internet] is losing its third places

    When you’re looking at a thread of social media bots sharing the same five replies to AI-generated slapfights between anthropomorphic fruits, it can be hard to remember the [Internet] used to be a lively place. Enthusiastic message boards, blogs dedicated to any niche you could find in any hobby, news and culture websites as renowned for sharp commenters as their stable of writers. This was a time when your blogroll was nearly as important as your friend list, a period where a well-curated feed on Google Reader (RIP) denoted good taste as much as a co-sign from the arbiter of taste Derek Guy does today.

    The web never quite reached the global utopian vision of its 1990s early adopters, but for about two decades it was a good hang. Like a neighborhood bar or a bowling alley, the [Internet] was a place you could reliably go to have fun and occasionally learn something from semi-strangers who shared your interests. The [Internet] was rife with what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places,” a space separate from home and work that encouraged social interaction and bred cohesion in communities.

  • APNIC ☛ Do IXPs make the Internet faster? It’s complicated

    At first glance, asking whether Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) make the Internet faster may seem almost provocative at a peering forum. Surely the answer is simply ‘yes’?

    However, an interesting panel discussion during the recent BKNIX Peering Forum (BPF) 2026 and ThaiNOG 8 showed that the answer depends on what we mean by ‘faster’, the type of IXP, where content is located, and how the Internet is evolving.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Naty S ☛ Mac Mini 2018 i7 Hand-me-down

    Did a quick search to see some issues about the T2 security chip maybe affecting the installation of Linux though so I need to research a lot more. It won’t be in my hands until October, so I have some time. I installed Linux Mint on my old 2012 Macbook Air 13" (maxed out spec) with no issues but that one doesn’t have the T2 chip.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-08-14 [Older] Amazon Is Spending Big Against NYC’s Delivery Protection Act

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-08-17 [Older] The Media’s Go-to ‘Electability’ Experts Are Funded By Wall St., Amazon, And Health Insurance Giants

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Amazon Employees Are Literally Cutting the Bindings off Rare Books All Day Long to Train Language Models

  • IP Kat ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Is adverising with lawyer rankings lawful? [Ed: lawyers lie, fake]

  • Patents

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-08-19 [Older] Australian court orders withdrawal of patent applications prior to publication

    • 2026-08-19 [Older] Amici Address Section 1498 Scope in Moderna COVID-19 Infringement Appeal: In Favor of Reversal

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Take-Two Expands GTA 6 Leak Hunt With DMCA Subpoenas to X and YouTube

      In response to a high-profile GTA 6 leak, Take-Two has requested broad DMCA subpoenas, targeting thousands of Discord users, as well as Microsoft data. The crackdown doesn't stop there. With two additional DMCA subpoenas, the gaming company expanded its information search to X and YouTube. Some of the named X accounts appear to be impostors, and so far no data has changed hands.