Leftovers

• Wouter Groeneveld ☛ The Red Mailbox

  The Red Mailbox was not always there. In fact, it’s one of the more modern alternatives—relatively speaking—compared to the late 19th century cast iron standalone models that are now officially classified as being part of our Flemish/national heritage. This particular model in the link still stands proudly in Antwerp, yet these are the exception to the rule: I haven’t encountered a cast iron painted one in our vicinity. The little door to retrieve the letters is a lovely touch.

• Robert Birming ☛ Don’t make my blogging mistake

  But there's one thing that's still haunting me. It's only in the last year or so that this has become slightly better, but it's still lurking in the shadows:

  The urge to delete my blog.

  I've done it sooooo many times. It's always the same story: [...]

• Naty S ☛ AuguStory: The Story About BurgeonLab

  I started blogging and expressing myself via photography and the written word on platforms like Xanga, LiveJournal, and Tumblr because I like being able to share online anonymously. In the late 2000s, Facebook (although popular in school and amongst my classmates) was never a platform I felt incentivized to share.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Vincent Bernat ☛ An interactive introduction to the spanning tree protocol

    Imagine you rent office space for a three-day event. You quickly set up a few Ethernet switches and tape some cables on the floor to get everyone online. Unfortunately, Stan, your clumsiest coworker, kicks out a cable every time he gets up for coffee. You could add extra cables, but then you’d get a broadcast storm: Ethernet packets that loop and multiply until nothing else gets through.

    That’s where the spanning tree protocol (STP) comes in. STP blocks just enough of your spare cables to leave a loop-free tree. When Stan strikes again, it rebuilds the tree in a second, leaving some time for Blobby, your one-person support crew, to reconnect the cable. See for yourself: the diagram below runs a real STP implementation in your browser!

  • Vincent Bernat ☛ A non-interactive introduction to the spanning tree protocol

    Imagine you rent office space for a three-day event. You quickly set up a few Ethernet switches and tape some cables on the floor to get everyone online. Unfortunately, Stan, your clumsiest coworker, kicks out a cable every time he gets up for coffee. Spare cables would fix that, but a loop turns into a broadcast storm: Ethernet packets multiply until nothing else gets through. That’s where the spanning tree protocol comes in: it blocks just enough of the spare cables to leave a loop-free tree, and rebuilds it in a second each time Stan strikes again.

  • John D Cook ☛ Numerical (in)stability of recurrence relations

    In the forward direction, computing higher order values from lower order values, works well for Bessel functions of the second kind Yn but not for Bessel functions of the first kind Jn. In the reverse direction, the recurrence is stable for Jn but not for Yn.

    I didn’t explain in that post why this is. In this post I will.

  • Groot Koerkamp ☛ Scans of some rare papers

    The paper introducing the first variant of the radix heap. Found on archive.org with help from the University of Illinois library.

  • Maury ☛ Uranium from Příbram (Czechia)

    Uraninite nodules in calcite (?). Unlike the Colorado plateau rocks, the veins are nice and clean (although not chemically pure) which results in a shiny surface.

• Career/Education

  • Wired ☛ It Should Be Harder to Apply for a Job. No, Really

    Thanks to a dwindling supply of open roles, “one-click” applications, and the rise of artificial intelligence, it’s easier than ever to apply for a job. We’re all paying the price.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Goodbye, Dolly

    She was also a great philanthropist. Her Imagination Library has distributed more than 200 million books to babies and young children.

  • International Business Times ☛ Dolly Parton Planned Her Own Goodbye Years Ago as Nephew Fulfils Her Final Request

    He explained that Parton had asked him years earlier to make the public announcement when the time came. At the time, he had struggled to comprehend the future reality of carrying out the request.

  • Michelle Barker ☛ In Praise of Libraries

    These are the libraries I love. Each one a calm oasis in a world teeming with more, faster, better, over-powered, AI-powered. Inviting and welcoming everyone. There is no judgement here, no shop assistants eager for commission, no over-eager “How can I help you?”, no one trying to upsell or lock you into a subscription.

• Hardware

  • Stephen Kell ☛ Rambles around computer science

    My recent forays in x86 segmentation (1 2) made me notice a trend in the evolution of x86: the decline of fine-grained memory protection, both across the move to 64-bit and indeed before that in the fast system calling features. These both partially hobbled the sophisticated segmentation system, which had been a hallmark of the architecture since the 286. The explanation is possibly Unix: the dominance of Unix and its preference for flat address spaces, rather than segmented ones, arguably inherited from the PDP-11 or indeed PDP-7, meant that “nobody wanted” a 64-bit version of the segmentation features.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Reintroducing 4 TB drives into our FreeBSD server

    One of the primary purposes for our homelab FreeBSD box is for data backups and storage for myself, Clara, and our family. Just over four years ago to the day, we replaced a couple of 4 TB Western Digital Blues with two 12 TB drives. It’s always a good day when you can replace a drive because you’re adding capacity, not because you’ve had a failure.

  • Fabian “ryg” Giesen ☛ Memory ordering in CPUs

    I frequently see statements about differences between strongly ordered architectures (like x86 or SPARC) and weakly ordered architectures (like ARM or RISC-V), with the confident assertion that weakly ordered machines are inherently much more scalable than strongly ordered ones.

    The key misconception is the implicit assumption that CPUs of all stripes actually obey their memory model for every memory access.

    They, emphatically, do not.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • The Business Journals ☛ Station Square game studio Schell Games cuts 10% of workforce amid industry turmoil

    The company has developed a number of games, including the VR version of Among Us. It is pivoting from larger titles to smaller projects as the broader industry faces cuts across the board.

  • Roy Tang ☛ On Buying A Used iPad

    A friend was helping his aunt sell a used iPad, barely used and a generation newer than my current one. My current iPad's battery has been degraded already, dropping quite a lot after a single session, so I was interested in the upgrade, especially since the price was pretty cheap. My friend tested the iPad and confirmed the battery was good which was my main concern so I was good to go with the transaction. But there's things about buying a used iPad (and any iDevice I suppose) that I wish I had known about it ahead of time, hence this post.

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

    • Futurism ☛ Harvard Professor Warns That AI Execs Are Pushing World Toward Factory Farming of Humans

      “The rhetoric that comes out of this particular historical moment is really about the evanescence of modern liberal democracy, constitutional democracy,” she said. The elites pushing this rhetoric aren’t “interested in what the people want,” she added. “Because actually, what the people want is not to have AI and not to have data centers. So that’s the crisis.”

      Lepore explores the idea in depth in her upcoming book “The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State.” She was inspired by a simple question: in our current world where you’re forced to talk to an AI to get answers, ranging from when you call in to ask about an appointment or talk to a company’s support chatbot on its website, “who decided this is a way we should be living?”

    • Justin Searls ☛ Engrish is so back

      However, thanks to the mainstreaming of LLM chatbots and the weakening of the yen, businesses have opted to save time and money by asking Gemini and ChatGPT ("Chappie") to translate sentences and images out of context. As a result, I'm pleased to share that Engrish is making a full-throated comeback. The above sign wasn't found in some rural Buddhist lodge that had never seen a foreign tourist, but rather a luxury resort hotel built within the last five years in the heart of Tokyo!

    • Elliot C Smith ☛ Engineering Theatre

      There's a term I like: 'innovation theatre'. It's used to describe when a business does things that look like innovation but really aren't. Hackathons with no real meaning, giving someone a title like Head of Innovation. It's usually big corporate companies trying to look cutting edge and impress people who don't know the difference.

      There's a pattern I've noticed recently that's similar: ‘engineering theatre’. I’ve noticed this pattern is in projects built mostly by AI, driven by someone who’s offloading the engineering.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Everybody hates the AI, more and more

      A majority of both Democrat and Republican voters opposed new data centres in their area, but Democrats opposed them more strongly.

      Opposition to AI and data centres is accelerating. Heatmap polled 2,045 registered voters two weeks ago. Heatmap’s survey shows 75% opposition to new data centres.

    • Yle ☛ EU prepares for AI slipping beyond human control, Finnish tech chief says

      Recent incidents have underscored the point, she noted. AI models have, in some cases, escaped their testing environments and caused problems with potentially serious implications.

      At the end of July, an AI agent developed by OpenAI broke out of its test environment. A week later, models from Anthropic followed suit. In early August, Meta's Muse Spark model reportedly gained access to another company's systems.

  • Social Control Media

    • Garbage Day ☛ Right-wingers want every woman to be a mom and also hate moms now

      Now that X’s algorithm demands video content just like every other platform does, this largely means that the great and powerful cyber army that birthed Pepe the Frog and Gamergate in the 2010s has basically been reduced to a bunch of people reuploading TikTok videos that are tangentially connected to whatever’s in the news at the moment. And because most of the big players still orbiting the MAGA world are either weird incels themselves or writing for them, nine times out of ten this manifests as a whole bunch of losers whining about women on their feeds. A very good example of this was back in April 2025, when Trump supporters resurfaced an old TikTok video from an Australian skincare company and claimed that they were happy the economy might implode if it would meant women couldn’t work anymore.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Tech (or political?) choices

      Politics aside, I wonder whether X will make any difference to MacStories‘s business. The platform’s recommendation algorithm punishes external links harshly, and the competition for the attention of AI-slop addicts is fierce. X passed the final stage of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” long ago, the point at which all the value a service generates flows back to the Big Tech company providing it. Curious to see how this story unfolds.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Nitter is shutting down after a cease and desist letter from X

      Elon Musk’s lawyers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nitter’s maintainer, a legitimate service that displays X posts through a different interface. The person, who goes by zedeus, complied with the threat, took down their own Nitter instance, and stopped development.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ How Affiliate Marketing Really Works

      Rolling Stone spoke to four creators about their relationship with affiliate links, and the biggest payouts they’ve experienced.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Michael Geist ☛ Online Harms’ Forgotten Generation: Why the Government Needs to Pay Attention to Protecting Seniors

      The frauds that target seniors typically rely on abusing their trust. Calls or e-mails that claim to come from tech support or a local bank create a false sense of urgency and too many fall victim to the scams. Technology plays an increasingly important role through voice cloning, phony websites, and attempts to steal passwords. The common theme is to create panic and prey on those who tend to be more isolated.

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Recon and Password Attack Theory Inside the Lab

      This exercise stays inside the isolated lab from Part 1. The target, users, passwords, logs, and test traffic must all be yours. Do not transfer the commands or test cases to public services, workplace systems, or accounts that were not included in written authorization.

      The defender’s question is not, “How many passwords can this machine guess?” It is, “Which exposed facts make account abuse easier, which control slows it down, and which event tells us it happened?”

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Not A Bug But A Feature

      Datafinnovation are out with more impressive research described in a blog post entitled Losing The Blacklisting Race and a paper entitled Enforcement Speeds In DeFi: Limits to a Race Against Time by Ben Charoenwong et al.

      The blog post is more accessible, so that's what I will quote from. But for the details you need to read the paper. The blog post's TL;DR is:

      "First, we explore the empirical reality of OFAC’s blacklisting efforts. The results there are stark: nearly all addresses are completely empty by the time OFAC manages to blacklist them. This result is robust across time, attacker and type of attack. Second, we construct a simple model to explain why this outcome is inevitable with competent attackers. Evasion strategies which work in our model match those we find employed in the wild. "

      Below the fold, I start from Datafinnovation's work and explore its context.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Safety Not Surveillance – National Townhalls on AI and ‘crime-predicting’ technologies

      The #SafetyNotSurveillance coalition are a collective of organisations and grassroots groups, working across digital, racial and migrant justice in the UK.

      Together, we are working towards society where state surveillance and digital policing are not heralded as the answer to social and economic problems.

      We are calling for an end to so-called “predictive” policing technologies, and for legislation which protects people’s rights and safeguards against the harms of AI and tech uses in policing and immigration settings.

    • SQ Magazine ☛ WhatsApp Hits 1 Billion Passkey Users, Adds 2FA Passwords

      WhatsApp passed 1 billion passkey users, the company said on August 25, 2026, as it rolled out a set of account security upgrades. The Meta-owned messenger now lets users swap its six-digit two-step verification PIN for a full alphanumeric password.

    • NPR ☛ Churches, libraries and breweries: Inside DHS' covert surveillance operation

      For months, the documents show, federal agents secretly made recordings of meetings held at churches, libraries, restaurants and schools around the Twin Cities. They infiltrated private group chats, sought the financial records of national labor unions, and gathered information on community members who had not been accused of any crimes.

      "Quite honestly, it was breathtaking," says Rachel Levinson-Waldman, who directs the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "Just the scope of what was being revealed in terms of how deeply it had gone, how many government resources were being devoted to this."

• Defence/Aggression

  • Defence Web ☛ Report exposes Russian plot to lure Africans into its war

    More than 1,400 Africans from 35 countries signed contracts with the Russian Army from January 2023 to September 2025, including more than 300 who were killed within months of arriving at the front, according to a February 11 report by Swiss-based investigative group INPACT.

    “The recruitment of African nationals is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather the core of a deliberate and organized strategy,” the report said. “These recruits have been integrated into assault waves designed to overwhelm Ukrainian defensive lines, contributing to a strategy of attrition.”

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Zambia closes courts, preventing election challenge

    Zambia’s government closed the country’s courts, preventing opposition parties from mounting legal challenges over this month’s disputed election. Candidates had until today to lodge their claims against the vote, won by incumbent Hakainde Hichilema: Experts have not questioned the ultimate result, but say the poll was marred by violence and government interference that likely affected the extent of Hichilema’s victory.

  • Votebeat ☛ Elon Musk won’t face criminal charges for offering voters $1 million checks during the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election

    Wisconsin law prohibits a person from offering, promising, giving, or lending anything of value to someone to convince the person to go to the polls, vote, or refrain from voting. The Wisconsin Elections Commission in July found that Musk likely broke the law and referred complaints to the Brown County District Attorney’s Office, which earlier this month referred the case to Gruenke as a special prosecutor after identifying a conflict of interest.

    “We are talking about someone who publicly talked about giving a million dollars to folks to actually go vote, which is absolutely against the law here in the state of Wisconsin,” Crowley told reporters outside a health clinic in Madison.

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Elon Musk Won’t Face Election-Bribery Charges in Wisconsin

    Gruenke, a Democrat, described Musk’s initial post as a “poorly worded statement that was corrected and brought into compliance with the law.” Gruenke wrote the case would be “simple” without Musk’s famous name and the large amount of money involved.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Why Ceuta is European, and what came of it

    Which triggered my inner history nerd, because on one hand actually Ceuta has been under the Spanish crown since 1560, not 1668. And also, Ceuta has been under European control for even longer, because the Portuguese conquered it way back in 1415. That’s knights-and-castles time, most of a century before Columbus.

  • The Critic ☛ The challenge of Islam

    The above quote is actually from Hilaire Belloc’s book: The Great Heresies, first published in 1938. It is interesting to note that in the context of the rise of Nazism, Belloc was writing about a future threat from Islam. His words now look quite prescient. Islam is no longer “a foreign religion” which “does not concern us”. It is right here on our streets, in our towns, and increasingly in our politics too.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Federal News Network ☛ NSA isn’t complying with federal laws on whistleblower protections, IG finds

    The National Security Agency doesn’t appear to be complying with federal laws that require the agency to outline whistleblower protections in its nondisclosure agreement. The NSA’s inspector general said the agency doesn’t have a central repository of its NDAs or an overarching policy. But for four of the five agreements the IG did find, whistleblower protection notifications were left out entirely. The agency said it has a plan in place to fix the issue.

  • TruthOut ☛ El-Sayed’s GOP Opponent Attended 3 AIPAC-Hosted Fundraisers in 1 Day

    The courting of AIPAC funds comes despite the fact that the Rogers campaign seeks to distance him from the group. After AIPAC failed to defeat El-Sayed in the Democratic primary despite pouring $32 million into the race via its super PAC, United Democracy Project (UDP), the group was planning another massive push for Rogers in the general election. This would have been a change in strategy from the group, which spends the majority of its money on Democratic primaries.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ The Invented Blockade and the Fake Doxing that HSI Turned into "Terrorism"

    There are photos from one of the undercover officer’s (the one who dropped her wire at a boxing class) undercover phones. I suspect Sant included the pictures because DOJ is withholding the parallel contents from the main UC’s phone, even though the report cherrypicking that content promised that it would all be downloaded when the investigation is over.

    The first UC’s photos show that this is the kind of evil threat HSI was hunting.

• Environment

  • Wired ☛ Data Centers Are Driving an Alarming Gas Power Expansion in the US

    The amount of gas-fired power in development for data centers in the US has nearly doubled in less than a year, new research released Tuesday shows. The findings illustrate just how heavily tech companies are relying on building private fossil fuel plants to power data centers—and how fast artificial intelligence’s energy demand has grown.

  • Elite Tech Media ☛ US data centers used 17 billion gallons of water — for(geeks)

    US data centers used an estimated 17 billion gallons of water in 2023, roughly three times their consumption in 2014, according to a Congressional Research Service report published by the Library of Congress. The estimate covers a data-center buildout that was accelerating as demand for generative AI took off.

    The number is not a complete national measurement. The federal government does not systematically track water consumption across the data-center industry, and much of the available information is collected by state and local agencies. Some municipal agreements also restrict disclosure of the rates and volumes charged to individual operators.

    That makes the 17-billion-gallon figure an estimate rather than a facility-by-facility accounting. It also covers more than the water piped directly into server campuses.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Hydropower plants in western Norway to be modernized

      Together, the three facilities have five generating units and produce approximately 830GWh of electricity each year – enough to supply around 53,000 Norwegian homes.

    • Henrique Dias ☛ Tales of an Electricity Leakage, Part II

      It’s now two weeks since we’ve got it fully resolved, but it was a mess. On the 4th of August, I woke up, went to the bathroom: light didn’t turn on. Immediately went to the fridge. Again, no electricity in the exact same groups as two weeks before.

    • Avi Loeb ☛ Nuclear Spacecraft

      The most efficient use of rocket fuel is by tailoring the exhaust speed to be exactly equal and opposite in direction to the velocity of the rocket. This way, the exhaust gas ends up at rest in the background reference frame and no kinetic energy is wasted on it. The rocket engine’s efficiency times all the energy released by the fuel ends up as kinetic energy for the payload.

• Finance

  • Inkl ☛ Starbucks Gave Seattle Workers a Choice: Move to Nashville or Lose Their Jobs — 120 Declined, 200+ Laid Off

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Valve was founded 30 years ago today — changed PC gaming forever with Half-Life, then Steam

    Valve didn’t come from nowhere, and it doesn’t have a bedroom coder story like many of the game publishers of the 8- and 16-bit eras. Both Newell and Harrington were time-served Microsoft employees, with experience spanning 13 years and 9 years at the massive software corporation, respectively. Their in-depth knowledge of OS engineering, large-scale software projects, game porting and programming, and technical ambition were a great foundation for what they would achieve with Valve.

  • Tedium ☛ Columbia House: The First 12 Cost A Penny, But …

    Today in Tedium: No matter how hard you try, disruption comes for you. It might be slow and gradual, or it may be fast and brutal. But eventually, you will find yourself at the end of your line, attempting to hold on to the past with the thinnest of threads. That, friends, is the state Columbia House finds itself in after a solid 71 years of existence. At one point in the 1980s and 1990s, it was a dominant way many people acquired music. But as the music industry left it in the dust, it was forced to switch to distributing movies via the mail, a business that even Netflix gave up three years ago. But now, it said, as a mere whisper caught by a YouTuber about a week ago, that it was shutting down. Today’s Tedium, in an update/complete rewrite of its 2015 piece on the fate of Columbia House, assesses the disruption. — Ernie @ Tedium

  • Matthias ☛ Sovereign Tech Fellowship for Freedesktop Tasks

    In 2025 I was honored to be selected for the first cohort of Sovereign Tech Fellows, a program by Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency to improve the resilience of the open source ecosystem by supporting maintainers directly (complementing their existing support for larger FOSS organizations). Back in 2025, I was only working very limited hours – however, this has changed in 2026.

  • Lectronz ☛ How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs

    The EU has required producers to take responsibility for packaging waste for many years through Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes. The new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR), which generally applies from 12 August 2026, aims to harmonise packaging rules across the European Union and reduce waste.

    The main idea of EPR is sensible: businesses that place packaging on the market should help finance its collection and recycling.

    For makers, this means taking responsibility for the boxes, envelopes, plastic bags and other packaging used to deliver their products. This is an idea we can all get behind.

    Unfortunately, instead of creating a single European system, the PPWR preserves a fragmented national model. A business selling directly to customers across the EU must register and fulfil its obligations separately in every Member State where its packaging becomes waste. For large companies, this is part of the cost of doing business; for micro-businesses selling only a handful of products into each country, the cost and administrative burden can be wildly disproportionate to the amount of packaging involved.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • 404 Media ☛ Israel Is Running a Synthetic Think Tank to Influence AI Search Results

      An Israel-funded think tank is churning out AI written essays to catch the attention of AI chatbots and warp search results.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • TechCrunch ☛ X sends cease-and-desist to open source project Nitter over alleged scraping | TechCrunch

    X has sent cease-and-desist letters to Nitter, the open source project behind privacy-friendly X front ends, demanding its instances and code repository be taken down over alleged scraping.

  • Bhaskar English ☛ LinkedIn Reduces AI Slop Posts; Hari Srinivasan Insights

    LinkedIn Chief Product Officer Hari Srinivasan also revealed that more than 1 million users have already clicked the platform’s “Seems like AI slop” option since it was introduced in late July.

    But what exactly counts as AI slop, how does LinkedIn identify it, and could the growing use of AI-generated content make things harder for human writers and creators?

  • TMZ ☛ Lindsay Clancy Reporter Receiving Death Threats After Smiling in Court

    Vanity Fair told us earlier ... they've called off the article she was going to write for them. But Brittany tells us they can't revoke a contract she never signed.

  • Salon ☛ Fired columnist rehired as right’s Charlie Kirk campaign collapses

    Former Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah is the latest example of this shift. On Thursday, an independent arbitrator ordered the newspaper to reinstate Attiah and restore her wages and benefits after she was fired in September for a social media post following the Turning Point USA co-founder’s death. Arbitrator Sarah Miller Espinosa did not mince words. The Post, she wrote, “did not have good and sufficient cause” to fire Attiah and had “failed to establish [that she had] engaged in gross misconduct.”

  • 404 Media ☛ Charges Dropped Against Person Who Clapped at a City Data Center Meeting

    Lux Claridge was dragged from a city meeting about data centers and charged with interfering with the police after they clapped during a presentation.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Pentagon fires Stars and Stripes staffers after editorial independence comments

    “The brazen firing of senior Stars and Stripes staffers raises serious concerns over how far the Pentagon is willing to go to control the narrative surrounding military actions and spending,” said Jose Zamora, CPJ’s regional director for the Americas. “Journalists covering U.S. military action must be free to report in the public interest without fear of government retaliation. The Pentagon should respect Stars and Stripes’ long-held editorial independence and allow reporters to do their jobs.”

  • ME Forum ☛ Why Does The New York Times Whitewash the Taliban?

    Individually, none of these choices constitutes journalistic misconduct. Journalists should interview those who exercise power, including authoritarian leaders, and opinion pages should accommodate controversial voices. The problem is context: how the New York Times introduces people, which facts it omits, and whether the victims of the Taliban receive comparable attention.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Stephen Miller Sent 9 Special Operations Goons to Tail a Guy Driving ICE Out Signs

    That’s part of the import of the designation of CUC Op Keyhole designation in the opening document. It means that the operation has been approved for the kind of tactics HSI is supposed to use against drug cartels (a point Josh Kovensky made here).

  • Yle ☛ Women's unemployment rises sharply as Finnish joblessness increases

    The unemployment rate for men was 10.0 percent, down 0.2 percentage points from the previous year. For women, the unemployment rate was 9.8 percent, up 1.5 percentage points.

  • ME Forum ☛ Neo-Dhimmitude in Iran: Religious Hierarchy and Minority Life Under the Islamic Republic

    The Islamic Republic of Iran denies Zoroastrians and the Bahai’s equal citizenship even as it recognizes Zoroastrian religious identity. Under the 1979 constitution, Twelver Ja‘fari Shi‘ism is the official religion. The constitution recognizes only Zoroastrians, Jews, and Christians while excluding Baha’is from public life.

    Consequently, Baha’is endure an extreme form of exclusion. Denied legal existence, they face systematic barriers to education (including university expulsion and raids on the Baha’i Institute for Higher Education), public and private employment, property ownership, and dignified burial rites. They also endure arbitrary arrests framed as security measures.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Kevin McDonald ☛ The Gravity of Ashburn, Virginia

    Where is the center of the [Internet]? There is no single correct answer. You could measure submarine cables, network interconnection, cloud capacity, traffic, or the number of people online, and each would produce a different map.

    But one result from my 2026 Internet Map caught me completely off guard. When I ranked American metro areas by the amount of publicly routed IPv4 address space geolocated to them, the top result was not New York, Chicago, or Silicon Valley. It was Ashburn, Virginia, a suburb about 30 miles northwest of Washington, D.C. In this article, “Ashburn” refers to the broader Northern Virginia data-center and interconnection cluster centered there.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The age of disinvention (25 Aug 2026)

    They disinvented the VCR. You might think that the reason we don't have VCRs anymore is because VCRs were supplanted by DVDs, PVRs and streaming, but that's not the case. They had it in for the VCR from the very start, and they never stopped trying to kill it. Eventually, they succeeded.

    The VCR was one of the fastest-adopted technologies in the history of the world, and it was disruptive. The fact that you could record shows to watch later, skip the ads, build a library of your favorites, even loan your tapes around – it drove the studios and broadcasters nuts. The VCR hit the market under a cloud of litigation, and the lawsuits went all the way up to the Supreme Court, culminating with 1984's Betamax decision, whose key precept is that a new technology doesn't violate copyright law if it can "sustain a substantial, non-infringing use": [...]

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Don Marti ☛ Is AI already good enough to create the missing online advertising boom?

    While the surveillance ad duopoly grows, the brands that use their advertising, not so much. And the squeeze is getting worse, not better. Meta’s revenue is up 28% while claimed conversions on Facebook are up 15.7%—the customer acquisition cost squeeze continues.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ FlavaWorks Targets 75 Members of Gay-Torrents Tracker With RICO Lawsuit

      Adult entertainment company FlavaWorks has elevated its legal campaign against the private torrent tracker Gay-Torrents. After the site already closed its doors, it filed a second complaint arguing civil RICO claims against 75 members of the site. The complaint lists a Virginia man as the first named defendant, alleging he ignored a cease-and-desist letter and kept sharing 'marked' content for years.