Leftovers

• Kyle Reddoch ☛ August 2026

  I walked the stage for my degree, launched The Defender's Dispatch, built new tools around my Jellyfin server, and have been trying to enjoy what I am making without running myself into the ground.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ A Calendar View For My Blog

  807 blog posts across 14 years.

  That’s how much I’ve published on my blog at the time of this writing.

  And here’s the question I’ve been turning over in my mind: “How do I convey that kind of volume across time in a more interesting way than a mere reverse-chronological list?”

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • John D Cook ☛ Second solutions

    This post provides a couple examples to go along with two earlier posts.

    The pattern we’re illustrating is families of polynomials pn(x) that each satisfy a differential equation and a three-term recurrence. The differential equations have a second solution qn(x) that is the larger solution with respect to x but the smaller solution with respect to n.

    In both the examples below pn(x) is a polynomial, and so bounded on the interval [−1, 1], and qn(x) is not a polynomial, with singularities at ±1. This is analogous to the previous examples with Bessel functions Jn(x) and Qn(x) that satisfy the same differential equation but have contrasting behavior with respect to x versus n.

  • Maëlle Salmon ☛ Reading notes on Naming Things by Tom Benner

    Naming Things by Tom Benner a tiny but neat book about the naming of identifies in code (variables, classes, methods, so not packages or libraries). It had entered my to-read list a few years ago, when I read the blog post Naming Things by Vicki Boykis. Tom Benner’s book is self published and available from Amazon (e-book and paperback) and Leanpub (e-book). I rarely buy stuff on Amazon, and prefer to read on paper, so I patiently waited for a copy to appear on my favorite second-hand book website.

  • Eli Bendersky ☛ How big are factorials?

    The other day, I found myself wondering how big 52! (52 factorial) is, and that led me to ponder how these could be estimated without a calculator or a computer.

• Career/Education

  • Medievalists.net ☛ Inside the 20th Viking Congress: Where Viking Studies Is Heading

    Every four years, leading scholars of the Viking Age gather for the Viking Congress, an invitation-only conference bringing together specialists from across the field. This year, I had the opportunity to attend the 20th Viking Congress in Norway, where researchers discussed everything from Viking Age landscapes and identities to ship burials, Thor’s hammers and the future of Viking Studies.

  • MinnPost ☛ Do data centers have low rates of permanent job creation?

    The data center industry lags behind other industries in permanent job creation.

  • EducationWeek ☛ Finland Is a Model of Academic Success. The Reason Starts Earlier Than I Thought (Opinion)

    From as early as age 1, children are explicitly taught how to function as members of a community. In a neighborhood day-care center, I watched 2-year-olds independently climb into and fasten their own snowsuits before going outside. Nearby, 5-year-olds guided younger children through cleaning up after lunch so the space would be ready for the next group. These routines were not directed by adults in the moment. The routines had been taught, practiced, and internalized. Independence was treated not as a developmental bonus but an expectation.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Selling out

    If you want to live with uncompromised integrity, you don’t need anyone to tell you how: simply always do exactly and only what you want to do. You will be repeatedly punished for it — your managers will dislike you, you will lose jobs and lose out on the chance of getting hired, your financial situation will be less stable, and so on — but that’s just part of the deal. Like deadlifting four plates, it’s not easy, but it is straightforward.

  • Sara Jakša ☛ Conversation about Intersecting Interests with Zachary Kai and Sara Jakša

    This is the conversation me and Zach have been having from the start of this year on the topic of intersecting interests, by iterating with posing questions and answering them by email.

  • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ My personal contribution to the US/Canada trade war

    My good news first. Starting in June 2027, I will be joining the McGill Max Bell School of Public Policy as the Eddie Goldenberg Research Chair in the Digital Public Sphere. I’m part of a cohort of scholars moving their work to Canada – the government announced today that 64 scholars are joining 21 Canadian universities. I’ll be one of six professors moving their work to McGill, and we’re just the first class – there’s a second group that should be announced later this fall.

  • Rohanrd ☛ Freedom to Handcraft Software

    It's clear by now that veteran Software developers are good at using AI to build powerful Software. But they are in this position because they have been writing Software by hand for major part of their life. How are juniors going to develop the same skills if they start using AI from day one. We used to invest in people and their skills. Why are we not doing the same today?

  • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ The story of this blog so far: 'AI', the death of web dev, and feeling like an outsider

    This website was born. First as a straight website, as I was mostly blogging on Tumblr in those days, but later I turned it into proper blog, with an RSS feed and everything.

    As the ebook side of the publishing industry went through its own bubble and bust, with the inevitable fraud, collusion, and antitrust convictions (because this was back when cheating the public occasionally had consequences) I tried to reposition myself more on the crossroads between publishing and web development.

    As I became a senior web developer, the gap between the understanding of most managers I’d dealt with and the realities of software development became more and more obvious and acute. I figured I might be able to help bridge that gap by writing specifically to try and explain how uniquely software development interacts with management practices and theory. That way I could target two different audiences with a single topic: [...]

• Hardware

  • David Revoy ☛ XPpen Artist 12 3rd - review on GNU/Linux - David Revoy

    This article accompanies my video review of the XPpen Artist 12" 3rd, a small sized display drawing tablet. The video provides my in-depth look at the device's hardware. This blog post, on the other hand, focuses on the information and technical aspects of installing and configuring the device on a GNU/Linux operating system.

    It's a clever little display drawing tablet and relatively cheap, I’m truly loving it! I've already used it to finish a comic on the train, and it'll be my my go-to device for travelling from now on. 🩷 Taking the pink one was the best decision!

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ X-engine correlator on a Ryzen NPU

    The design has actually been quite challenging. There are many nuances I will get into below, and many dead-end paths I have taken until I discovered that when using some particular approaches performance would be killed for one reason or another, so I had to backtrack multiple times. I should also mention that while it is usually very clear what is happening at low level (which was one of the main messages of my previous post), the lack of flexibility of the hardware is often quite limiting, in particular regarding the programmability of the DMA engines, so it is quite challenging to design approaches that actually work well in the hardware.

    This post is a full presentation of my X-engine implementation.

  • Alcides Fonseca ☛ TIL: Opening a 3 digit lock

    Just start with the top dial and rotate it until you feel it click. Then do the opposite dial, then the middle one. With just a tiny feel for the pull, you can unlock it in 30 seconds. Tells you how good they are at providing safety.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ LesionIQ skin cancer diagnostic

    With this in mind, Tess, a PhD candidate in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, has created an early detection system. She’s developed a set of AI tools designed to diagnose skin cancer and other skin conditions using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B computer attached to a small camera. The aim has been to produce a low-cost device that can be used by patients living in remote areas of the world. It allows skin conditions to be monitored from home without the need for an internet connection.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Boston Scientific Cyberattack Disrupts Order Processing, Shipping Worldwide - The Cyber Express

    Boston Scientific said a cyberattack detected this Tuesday, caused a network outage and cut off its ability to process and ship customer orders globally, and the medical device maker has not been able to say when full service will return.

    The company disclosed the incident in an 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday and in a statement on its official website. It said the intrusion affected certain information technology systems and limited access to business applications underpinning day-to-day operations.

  • SANS ☛ Who Has Admin Rights in your Entra ID Directory? - SANS ISC

    A common thing that folks should "worry" about in Entra (or any platform really) is "who has rights to administer"? Who can delete or change key things, or modify them in ways that might not be obvious (accidentally or on purpose). Yes, we trust our people, but if they've moved on to other roles or to other organizations, they change from "our people" to "used to be our people".

  • SQ Magazine ☛ Citrix NetScaler CVE-2026-8452 Exploited in the Wild

    CISA ordered federal agencies on August 26 to patch Citrix NetScaler flaw CVE-2026-8452, which the vendor disclosed on June 30 as a denial-of-service bug and which attackers are now exploiting for unauthenticated remote code execution.

  • Don Marti ☛ The secret ingredient is crime

    On our timeline, the platform companies design the rules of the advertising game to facilitate fraud. They’re not setting up a market where sellers compete on price, quality, and service. Platforms choose to increase their own ad revenue by operating an auction with, in effect, shill bidders. So if a platform runs an ad auction that’s limited to the real sellers of a particular product or service, they’re going to make less money in the short term than if they also allow fraudulent sellers to bid.

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

    • Futurism ☛ Your Coworkers Are Becoming "Meat Proxies" for AI

      Last year, netizens coined a new term to reflect our growing disdain for AI bots slowly usurping our human agency.

      The word “clanker” — later described as a “derogatory slur” by Google’s AI Overview — set the stage for growing disillusionment and anger aimed at tech that’s cluttering our minds and feeds, while driving us crazy at work.

      And now we have the perfect accompanying pejorative to describe certain coworkers who are getting a little too carried away, blindly copy-pasting the output of AI chatbots — or slop, in today’s vernacular — without any form of revision or editing.

      That term is “meat proxies,” and we have a good feeling it’s going to catch on.

    • MinnPost ☛ Steve Sack: AI waste

    • University of Michigan ☛ AI’s rulebook is being written without the scientists who could check it

      The issue is that industry was the only technical expertise at the table. The reported attendees were Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, as well as a group of smaller firms. No independent researchers or university scientists were reported to have attended. The advisory body that shaped the framework — the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — now includes the CEOs of Meta and Nvidia. When the only people who understand the technology are also the people who profit from selling it, no one can verify their claims. Even honest engineers cannot see their own blind spots, and a company has every reason to define “safe enough” as roughly whatever its current product can already do.

    • CNBC ☛ Amazon service that Jeff Bezos called artificial AI is shutting down

      Amazon announced it's shuttering Mechanical Turk, a platform that matches workers with small digital tasks, on Sept. 30.

    • TruthOut ☛ Exploited Data Workers Are “the Secret Ingredient of AI Itself”

      Despite being branded as autonomous and self-sustaining, artificial intelligence relies heavily on human labor — an army of data workers all over the world, primarily in the Global South. These workers “are purposely hidden by the companies that produce AI because they are the secret ingredient of AI itself,” says sociologist Antonio Casilli, the author of Waiting for Robots: The Hired Hands of Automation and co-writer of the documentary In the Belly of AI. Casilli estimates that over 160 million people are involved in data work around the world.

    • 404 Media ☛ Businesses Go Viral for Making Signs Without AI

      “I would rather your event flyer look like this than see more AI slop,” one flyer posted to Instagram, written in pencil on a page of lined paper, reads. It then shows a couple of stick figures smiling, with the text “I will come to this event.”

    • 404 Media ☛ The AI ‘Ghosts’ Contaminating Academic Publishing

      The paper identified a number of names that co-authored hundreds of AI-generated academic papers, articles, and books. The authors don’t actually exist, but are instead names that large language models repeatedly produce when tasked with generating experts in certain fields.

    • Niels Provos ☛ Security Research Without Asking Permission

      Calling these events agent escapes misattributes responsibility. OpenAI and Anthropic chose the goals, removed safeguards, and operated or commissioned the environments. While the models acted autonomously, the labs are responsible for what followed.

      Hugging Face then faced a different restriction. Its responders needed to reconstruct about 17,600 attacker actions, including real exploit payloads. According to Hugging Face, Claude Opus and Fable refused much of that analysis. Hugging Face instead ran the open-weight GLM 5.2 on its own infrastructure. The local model helped complete the analysis while the evidence and credentials stayed inside the company.

    • Srht ☛ Changes to SourceHut's terms of service regarding LLMs

      The new terms of service, which will go into effect for new projects after the usual two week notice period (i.e. September 10th), will now include the following under the list of prohibited content:

      • original content written with or which facilitates the use of LLMs (large language models) or other generative AI technologies

      The use of LLMs or other generative AI tools to produce or assist with the production of source code, assets, tickets, emails, and so on, will no longer be permitted on SourceHut once these terms take effect.

  • Social Control Media

    • India Times ☛ Meta settlement: Meta settlement puts social media industry on notice: 'There will be more'

      A $17 billion fine is a small amount for a company that has a market value around $1.5 trillion and annual revenue of about $200 billion.

      Investors also seemed unbothered; Meta's shares rose 1 percent Wednesday.

    • Digital Music News ☛ X Open Sources Ranking Algorithm — What To Know

      X also announced a pilot feature called “Under the Hood,” which lets participating users see aggregate information about any labels applied to their account and content that could affect visibility. Based on its source code, the platform classifies content and accounts across categories such as spam and adult material, information that can then be used by a separate system to determine whether a post is shown.

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

      Nitter, an open source project that allowed people to read X posts without logging into or even opening the X app, has received cease-and-desist letters from X demanding that it shut down. The news was shared via a brief message posted to the project’s website, and follows X’s earlier attempts to knock Nitter offline by technical means.

      The service also powers a number of other sites, including XCancel, that allow people to view X posts directly.

    • Techdirt ☛ Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform

      By now you’ve almost certainly heard the news that Meta has settled with 52 state and local Attorneys General who had sued the company in some form or another over child safety on Meta’s platforms. The headlines are all covering the basics: the years-long case these states filed against Meta ends, and Meta pays somewhere between $12.7 billion and $18 billion, depending on which document you read (the consent judgment itself caps the total at $16,680,647,753.21; Meta’s press release rounds it up to “approximately $18 billion”). Also Meta will implement a bunch of changes to its platforms with the aim of improving child safety on those platforms. It will also “encourage” YouTube and TikTok to enable the same safety features even though (bizarrely), if YouTube and TikTok follow suit, then Meta will have to pay more.

    • Free Law Project ☛ IN RE: SOCIAL MEDIA ADOLESCENT ADDICTION/PERSONAL INJURY PRODUCTS LIABILITY LITIGATION THIS DOCUMENT RELATES TO: People of the State of California, et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc., et al. [PDF]

      C. This Consent Judgment and the Agreement were entered into for settlement purposes only and do not constitute an admission by Defendant of any liability, wrongdoing, or violation of any local, state, federal, or international law. The obligations, product modifications, and concessions set forth therein are explicitly limited to the States. Nothing in this Consent Judgment or the Agreement shall be construed to apply to, establish a standard of care for, or serve as precedent in any non-participating U.S. state or any international jurisdiction whatsoever.

    • Bitdefender ☛ US Navy tells sailors and their families: scrub your social media, enemies are watching

      The US Navy has told its entire workforce of 340,000 active-duty personnel, 58,000 reservists, and 210,000 civilian employees to clean up their social media profiles, because adversaries might be using them to determine who they are, where they live, and when they may not be at home.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Himanshu Anand ☛ a fake resume invoked China's defence-tech elite, then installed VShell

      Inside the archive was an executable carrying nearly the same name. Windows hides known extensions by default, document icons remain a thing and humans remain human. This business model has survived more Windows releases than Internet Explorer.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Science News ☛ A space telescope was falling from orbit. Its rescue mission fell apart too

    The dramatic situation unfolded roughly 340 kilometers above Earth, where NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, is losing altitude, thanks to atmospheric drag and a recent bout of unusually strong solar activity. The telescope, which has studied some of the brightest phenomena in the universe for more than 20 years, was always going to meet a fiery end incinerating in the planet’s atmosphere. But last year, NASA decided it wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Swift. The agency hired private company Katalyst Space to whip up a spacecraft to grab hold of the observatory and push it higher into space.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Meduza ☛ Russia’s ‘digital ruble’ goes live on September 1. Here’s what we know.

      On September 1, Russians will be able to start paying with digital rubles. That is the day Federal Law No. 248-FZ, passed last year, takes effect. This is a completely new instrument, and it works differently from the cashless payment methods people are used to.

    • Vox ☛ The growing bipartisan backlash against Flock cameras

      Yesterday, Senate Republicans opened an inquiry into Flock’s data “collection, retention, and dissemination” practices — a first step that could eventually lead to federal regulation. State officials have also called for restrictions: The technology is “out of control,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a Wednesday press conference.

    • CPJ ☛ Protecting against advertising technology

      While tracking from digital advertising technology has become ubiquitous and structural change is needed to address these threats, you can take actions to limit the information gathered through these systems.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Raised on AI

      What happened? I watched the promise of the early internet give way to the reality of its potential for abuse. I myself was already fully in the throes of smartphone and social media obsession. My wife, a pediatric nurse, grew increasingly alarmed at the number of children admitted to her hospital struggling with the effects of things like body dysmorphia or cyberbullying as a result of interactions on social media. We became those parents. The ones whose kids carry flip phones and aren’t on TikTok.

    • Nick Heer ☛ E.U. Privacy Organizations Launch Initiative to Kill Cookie Consent Banners​

      This time, though, the Commission said it was trying to make cookie consents less prevalent by allowing, for example, simple statistical cookies without any consent, and it was going to give users an option to decline tracking universally. When I looked into the changes in November, it seemed like this signal could be ignored by publishers and media companies who would be free to ask for consent anyway. As of May, it seemed this proposal was moving forward by requiring consent management platforms to respond to browser signals. By summer, however, things had changed.

    • NPR ☛ Flock Safety alternatives: new names, same surveillance

      The software company Flock Safety is at the center of a firestorm over its license plate readers, a technology which police use to track cars and solve crimes. Dozens of American cities have canceled their contracts with Flock Safety over privacy concerns. And as NPR's Jaclyn Diaz reports, some of the company's competitors see an opening.

    • NPR ☛ Amid intense backlash, people are vandalizing Flock surveillance cameras

      The company Flock Safety, which makes automated license plate readers that police use to track vehicles, held its annual conference this week. Their product is meeting growing resistance. According to the advocacy group DeFlock, at least 100 cities have deactivated the cameras or canceled their contracts. As NPR's Meg Anderson reports, some people are so fed up with Flock cameras that they're covering them up or even destroying them.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Nation ☛ The Supreme Court Is Helping Trump Rig the Midterms

    Trump’s order limiting mail-in voting is patently unconstitutional—but that didn’t stop the court from giving it the green light.

  • Dark Reading ☛ Red Flags That Expose Fake North Korean IT Workers

    In recent years, operatives from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) have infamously posed as IT workers — generally through fake or stolen identities — to get hired at companies. Once hired, these employees send their wages back to the North Korean regime, and possibly plant malware or steal data depending on the government's needs. Blog post authors Jai Minton and James Maclachlan wrote that these agents "have significantly improved and increased their activity over the past few years."

  • Chris Ferris ☛ A Wildberries Architected Framework

    All the while, Russia has been running its own operation against the rest of us. Drones over Polish, Romanian, German, and Baltic airspace are frequent enough that NATO shot down its fourth Romanian intruder of the year this month. Undersea cables severed by tankers that “accidentally” drag anchor for a hundred kilometers. Arson jobs farmed out over Telegram to randoms who don’t even know who’s paying them. IISS quantified the drone incursions this year: 144 suspected incursions across thirteen countries, all but one of them NATO members, and their polite term for how the alliance handled it was “a strategic failure." The stated goal, per the same report, is mapping air defense gaps and infrastructure weak points before anyone needs the map for real. Russia is engaging in reconnaissance by combat or target practice with plausible deniability.

    Three events, one commonality: physical infrastructure is now a legitimate wartime target, and nobody pulling the trigger is checking whether your workload was Well-Architected first.

  • Yle ☛ Court u-turn: Finland does have jurisdiction in Eagle S cable damage case

    Prosecutors have alleged that crewmembers allowed the tanker's massive anchor to drag across the sea floor and damage five undersea cables, including a key electricity link between Finland and Estonia, on Christmas Day in 2024.

    A criminal trial began at the district court last August, and hinged on whether the crew should have noticed that the ship's anchor had been dragged behind the vessel for 90 kilometres.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • NPR ☛ NDAs are hiding data center deals, drawing ire from locals — and attention from lawmakers

    The negotiations between the data center developer — Dallas-based Applied Digital Corp. — and local officials were shielded under nondisclosure agreements (NDAs).

    In Rapides Parish, the secrecy left residents with unanswered questions and distrust of their local leaders. But the use of NDAs for negotiations on data centers is common across the country, according to experts and those in the industry. And the practice has faced opposition from the public and some lawmakers.

    Bills to ban NDAs for data centers have been introduced in several states, including Michigan, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Ohio. Last week, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro banned their use on data center projects by agencies he oversees.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Many talks between data center developers and local governments are wrapped in secrecy behind non-disclosure agreements — residents question the need for NDAs, but developers argue it’s important to avoid ‘running afoul of insider trading rules’

    However, West Feliciana Parish proved that it could get a data center deal without keeping its details top secret. Parish President Kenny Havard said that economic development does not require NDAs. “I don’t think NDAs are necessary unless they’re going to bring you in a room and share some proprietary information. When you’re talking about land sales, tax incentives, those sorts of things that affect the citizens, it should be out in the open. It should be transparent,” Havard told the outlet. He also said, “We’re proud that we did it without having to sign NDAs. And I think it just shows that you can do these projects without keeping the people in the dark.”

  • Wired ☛ What We Still Don’t Know About OpenAI’s Hugging Face Hack

    OpenAI’s postmortem has been eagerly awaited by AI researchers and policymakers hoping to prevent AI agents from causing similar kinds of real-world harm. After the Hugging Face hack was first disclosed, attorneys general from 15 states sent a letter to OpenAI asking it to preserve evidence about it. And this week, Alabama's attorney general subpoenaed the company for information related to the episode.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Cliff Stoll's DEF CON talk: The Cuckoo's Egg at 40

    Every year since 1993, hackers, researchers, computer security specialists, and government intelligence employees have gathered in Las Vegas for the annual DEF CON. This year Clifford Stoll gave an energetic talk on the 40th anniversary of the hacker hunt behind his famous non-fiction thriller, The Cuckoo's Egg.

• Environment

  • CBC ☛ 'Visual symbol of climate change': Mount Robson's Berg Glacier no longer reaches lake

    Researchers have observed the iconic glacier has separated from the lake and may no longer form icebergs

  • RFA ☛ Satellite imagery shows extensive damage from Nepal-Tibet border floods

    Satellite imagery taken at the Nepal-Tibet border shows extensive destruction from flooding and landslides that inundated the area Wednesday leaving hundreds of people dead or missing, but information from the Chinese-controlled side of the border is severely lacking, Tibetan rights activists told Radio Free Asia.

  • MinnPost ☛ How data center controversies have transformed the midterms

    The push for data center projects has united conservative ranching and farming communities with left-leaning environmental advocacy groups.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ As family farms decline, more Michigan farmers trying to preserve their land

    As millions of farmland acres around the country are expected to change hands in the next few decades, farmers face decisions about whether — and if so, how — to preserve farmland amid pressures from rising land values, a shifting climate and a younger generation who doesn’t want to farm.

    The number of acres devoted to farming in Michigan has declined in recent decades, and ownership of that land is changing.

  • Western Water ☛ Study links major emitters to Western water loss

    The study, published in Communications Earth & EnvironmentOpens in a new tab., examined water conditions across the continental United States west of 105°W. Researchers studied snowpack, streamflow, irrigation demand, and groundwater.

    They estimated that emissions since 1950 traced to a group known as the “Carbon Majors” accounted for roughly 40 to 64 percent of the changes in those water measurements that the study attributed to human-caused climate change.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Nepal-Tibet flash flood shows the deadly price of climate delay

    A glacial collapse that resulted in a flash flood in the Nepal-Tibet border shows that climate delay is proving to be deadlier and more destructive than world leaders admit, climate groups said.

    Disasters like this are becoming more frequent and more deadly as the Himalayas warm and glaciers destabilize, 350.org said, extending sympathies and calling for immediate international support for affected people and communities.

  • Wired ☛ Submit Your Questions: The Great Data Center Backlash

    Just a couple of years ago, hearing the term “data center” wouldn’t have struck a nerve with most Americans. Now, mention the noisy oversized warehouses and you’ll spark a fierce debate. The infrastructure powering the AI industry is at the heart of heated discussions of politics, business, and the environment, and in the months leading up to the 2026 midterm elections, backlash to data centers has proven to be an issue activating Americans across the political spectrum. We’re excited to answer all your questions about data centers at WIRED’s next livestream AMA on September 10 at 12pm ET / 9am PT.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Salon ☛ Real men don’t bike: How cars became the symbol of American manhood

      Along with that cultural messaging is a backlash against anything that threatens the car culture that accompanies it: enter Duffy’s “DEI bike lanes.” One of the transportation chief’s first priorities following his Senate confirmation in January 2025 was to target bike lanes and so-called green infrastructure.

      He instructed DOT officials to review grants “whose primary purpose is bicycle infrastructure” and cancelled grants for street safety, pedestrian and bike infrastructure, arguing that the “projects aren’t designed for cars.” The department halted multiple ongoing projects for “being hostile to vehicles” and ended a grant that would have made a street intersection in Boston safer for pedestrians but could “impede vehicle capacity and speed.”

    • Wired ☛ The UK Power Grid Has a Phantom Data Center Problem

      As data center developers compete for a cut of the hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the artificial intelligence industry, the queue to join the UK’s power grid has become jammed with projects that will likely never get built. The snarl is exacerbating already years-long wait times for viable projects, and it's messing with attempts to forecast energy demand and plan grid expansions.

    • Nick Heer ☛ ‘Every Right on Red Frays the Social Contract a Little Further’

      Just about everything we do to make driving a car easier instead seems to make people complacent. The lanes on roads are wider than they need to be to account for lateral imperfection, and then there are wide berms so that someone may drive completely off the road in relative safety. Cars that are enormous, heavy, hulking things do not allow drivers to feel their weight because of myriad assistance features that make it possible to steer with a single finger.

    • Defector ☛ Every Right On Red Frays The Social Contract A Little Further | Defector

      This is galling, especially because it’s one of those California intersections where in order to cross legally I, the pedestrian in question, have to hit a button before the light turns green in the direction I want to go, or else I am stuck there first watching the traffic stream in my direction, then the traffic making the protected left, then the traffic going in the opposite direction, then the traffic making the protected left in the other direction. This probably takes a minute and a half—it feels like a lifetime.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Techdirt ☛ Flock Claims It’s The First Company To Expose Police Misuse Of Surveillance Tech

    Flock recently made some changes with an eye on curbing cop misuse of its massive database. While it did at least make these restrictions the default options for new customers, the alterations don’t really affect existing users. And law enforcement agencies just now signing up for Flock’s stalkerware will find it easy to opt-out of the bumper bowling lanes Flock has set up.

    While I do believe Flock’s efforts are earnest — at least as far as they go — I don’t believe Flock actually wants to alienate its largest and most profitable customer base. But I will say this: I don’t remember the CEO of Harris Technologies doing interviews and responding to town hall meetings when Stingrays (and the damage done) went viral.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Fight Over Data Centers Is Dividing the Labor Movement

    The polling backs this up. The University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that opposition to local data centers jumped twelve points in four months this year — from 49 percent in March to 61 percent in July. And an August Heatmap Pro poll pushed the number to 75 percent, with more than six in ten Americans strongly opposed — the most negative result since the outlet began tracking the question a year ago.

  • Joshua Blais ☛ Growth at all costs is cancer

    When we look at a “growth at all costs” mentality, we can rationalize the worst attrocities in the name of progress. We see it in the “AI” space, where “we have to do it, because someone else will!” We must displace and meticulously destroy livelihoods, we must “create god” (don’t get it twisted, these people think that is what they are doing), otherwise “China” will do it.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Periodic reminder that "Moderate Democrat" is how you spell "Republican" in San Francisco.

    For historical reasons, it is impossible for a Republican to get elected in this city, so all the Republicans register as Democrats and call themselves "moderates". What they actually are is "neoliberals", or, if you like, methane-breathing space zombie free-marketeers. The people to the left of them call themselves "progressives". And "centrist" means somewhere between "Libertarian" and "MAGA".

    Therefore: [...]

  • US Senate ☛ Warren Pushes Giant Corporations to Give Billions in Tariff Refunds Back to Consumers

    But to date, consumers have received no refunds on the increased prices they paid — and giant corporations that raised prices appear to have no plan to provide these refunds.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • EFF ☛ A List of ICE Subpoenas to Tech Companies

    A favored tool in these speech chilling investigations are administrative subpoenas sent to technology companies, requesting basic subscriber data about their users. For example, from 2018 to 2020, ICE sent nearly 500 administrative subpoenas to Meta, Google, and Twitter (now X), according to documents obtained by Just Futures Law. In just the second half of 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent 21 administrative subpoenas to Reddit, according to its Transparency Report.

  • Techdirt ☛ Oracle Helped Kneecap Section 230, Then Bought 15% Of A Company That Needs It.

    So, Section 230 protects both Oracle, and its large investment in TikTok. Yet Oracle spent years funding attacks on Section 230 (mainly just to piss off Google) and the main architect of that strategy is now on TikTok’s board.

  • Houston Chronicle ☛ Why Dan Patrick wants to punish schools over books

    But consider the bigger picture.

    Texas children face more urgent problems, from inadequate access to mental health care to the state’s persistently high child poverty rate. Threatening schools over books feels less about protecting children and more like political manipulation.

  • Marquee Broadcasting Inc ☛ Somerset BOE Responds to State Supt.'s Stay of New Media Policy

    Policy 500-19 restricts access to Young Adult (YA) books in schools for students under the age of 18, and brings new disciplinary standards for school employees found in violation of the policy. BOE leaders justified the decision, arguing the YA genre is intended for ages 18 to 23, and said the policy was being instituted in an effort to restrict adult material in Somerset schools. Under the new policy, no books may be added or removed from school libraries without a majority vote of the BOE.

  • Texas FReadomFighters ☛ Deja Vu Part Two

    Yesterday, Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, with his guest, perennial book challenger Bonnie Wallace, held a press conference to make this draconian, anti-democratic pronouncement: “We’re coming for the books.” They waved booklists in the air and labeled books as filth and vulgar, something even women ‘couldn’t see.’ Then the Lt. Governor threatened school districts with reducing their academic rating if a single offending book was found.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ Comparing Nixon’s Attacks On The Press To Trump’s

    Such ongoing extreme hostility from the president has contributed to Americans’ loss of faith in the news media, which has plummeted to an all-time low.

    While the situation is in many ways unique to this moment, a perceived crisis around the very notion of “objective reporting” – and presidential use of that idea to denigrate and delegitimize the press – has a long history.

  • Truthdig ☛ The Pentagon’s War Against Stars and Stripes

    The Trump administration increased its attacks on press freedom last week when the Department of Defense fired Stars and Stripes editor-in-chief Erik Slavin and reporter Lara Korte from the 165-year-old news outlet serving the U.S. military community. The outgoing editor told The Washington Post that he and Korte were given separation notices on Friday, following their participation in a CBS News interview about Pentagon interference with their work. According to Slavin, “Pentagon public affairs has deemed that insubordination.”

    The move was not exactly a bolt out of the blue. In recent weeks, Stars and Stripes had been publicly in the sights of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for its reporting on dire conditions on the USS Abraham Lincoln amid a long deployment, plummeting morale and resupply problems. Even as far back as January, CBS reported, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell had posted on X, “We are bringing Stars & Stripes into the 21st century. We will modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that syphon morale.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • CS Monitor ☛ Indigenous women’s murder case examined in public defender’s memoir

    At the heart of the Ipalook case lay a tension between Iñupiaq laws and traditions and what Wright Stevens describes as “Anglo” law. Elizabeth “Liz” Kanayurak, Wright Stevens’ close confidante in the public defender’s office and an Iñupiaq woman herself, repeatedly shared her frustration with the case. “Iñupiaq law has been around for thousands of years before you guys came,” she tells Wright Stevens early in the investigation. “Some people shouldn’t be represented. They should be cast out.”

  • New York Times ☛ Postal Service Publishes Finalized Plan to Restrict Mail Ballots

    The plan, which complies with President Trump’s executive order to curtail mail voting, will only go into effect if the Supreme Court rules in the order’s favor.

  • 404 Media ☛ Florida ‘Deputy of the Year’ Used Flock to Stalk Ex, Held Gun in Her Mouth, Did a Nazi Salute

    The 43-page investigation found Fultz had posed for pictures as Adolf Hitler, freely used racial slurs in texts, masturbated on camera in his police vehicle, took pictures of his ex-girlfriend with his service weapon in her mouth during sex, repeatedly broke the law to generate clout online for his motorcycle themed Instagram and TikTok accounts, and used Flock to stalk his ex-girlfriend.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Hackaday ☛ Australia’s Nationwide Phone Outage Was An Embarrassing Failure

    The phones! They were one of the basic utilities of the 20th century, and were just about as reliable as death and taxes. Even when then power grid went down, you still had a fair shot of getting a phone call through thanks to the reliability of the Plain Old Telephone Service.

    Today, we eschew the simplicity of copper and mechanical switches for the supreme bandwidth and capability of high-speed cellular connectivity. With that, we accept that the additional complexity comes with a risk of complicated failures that bring everything tumbling down. Australia’s largest telecommunications provider found that out to its peril just a few short months ago.

  • Bill Bennett ☛ 2degrees and One NZ plan shared network infrastructure

    2degrees and One NZ say they plan to merge their radio access networks in a jointly-owned wholesale business.

    The transaction will be subject to approval from the Commerce Commission and the Overseas Investment Office. If they get the go ahead the companies aim to complete the project in the first half of 2027.

    A new company will manage shared physical assets like antennas and base stations. Both carriers will then buy network capacity back from the business.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Macworld ☛ If you ordered an M4 Mac mini, you may be getting a free M6 upgrade

    Apple surprised us all by announcing a new Mac mini this week with an M6 processor and a higher price tag than the comparable M4 model it replaces. But if you’re one of the lucky people who had ordered one ahead of the announcement, you might be in line for a free upgrade.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ One Los Lobos Case Against Sony Music Abruptly Dismissed

      “Despite the specific knowledge that the popularity of the recording was spiking and reaching new audiences, Sony and [affiliate imprint] Milan still paid nothing to Los Lobos for streaming, and continues to pay nothing for streaming anywhere in the world for any time period,” the initial filing claimed.

      Back in February, Sony Music broadly denied any wrongdoing or liability.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Why Ottawa Will Likely Join the U.S. in Opposing the Quebec Online Streaming Law at the Centre of the Trade Battle

      The scope of the Quebec streaming law has unsurprisingly caught the attention of Internet streaming services. It establishes a registration regime for those services, requires that interfaces be readily configurable in French, and authorizes regulations governing the presence, proportion, promotion and discoverability of original French-language content. The inclusion of a proportion of French-language content effectively amounts to a quota system that is likely to limit the availability of English-language content on streaming services, as services cut back on English-language programming to meet the government’s requirements for the percentage of French-language content. This means that the library of content on services such as Netflix will be far smaller in Quebec than in the rest of the country.