Leftovers

• Abhigyan Tripathi ☛ nepali sikka

  That coin, a shiny thing I just picked up, soon led me to understand that there are many other countries, and each of them has their own “currency”. Different currencies have different values, and are used in different places. The world was far bigger than little Abhigyan could comprehend, but was in awe of it nonetheless.

• James G ☛ Reading as participation in the indie web

  In the past, I have used the shorthand “if you have a website, you’re in the indie web community.” I have used this because I don’t think there are, or should be, any other qualifying factors (i.e. using particular tools, having a certain site layout). While I think this shorthand is useful in ensuring people don’t feel like they have to do things a certain way to participate in the indie web, it misses one constituency that I don’t think are talked about enough: readers.

• Career/Education

  • Irish Examiner ☛ Schoolbooks are free, so why are Irish parents paying hundreds for digital devices?

    Some reported costs reaching €850.

    And the hardware may only be the beginning; insurance, software, ebooks, and technical-support packages can follow.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Books Briefing: What Dolly Parton Knew About Reading

    Thanks to my friends’ beloved babies and the perks of my job—which have included putting together a list of essential children’s books—I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of reading with children. They still encounter books in schools and libraries, but Parton’s program emphasized building a bookshelf at home, where caregivers and kids can share stories as part of a daily routine. Reading aloud offers a child more than the chance to develop literacy skills. It gave Kurshan, for example, “a way to guide them as they started to understand the world, and as I started to understand them.” So, like Parton, I’ll be happy if kids see me as a “book lady.” Last week, I bought a picture book about berries for a different toddler. And although my friend’s 10-month-old already has plenty at home, I couldn’t resist mailing him a few more books.

  • Salon ☛ Why the right is so afraid of the Girl Scouts

    Girl Scouts are supposed to learn things. They are supposed to earn badges, develop skills, sell things, handle money, go camping, meet new people, encounter unfamiliar places, ask questions, solve problems and make decisions. The official language is courage, confidence and character. Another word for what all of that requires is curiosity.

  • Søren ☛ I deleted my bucket list

    Today, I decided to delete the bucket list. The URL will remain (for reasons) — but will simply point to this post. I moved some of the items from the list to /about.

• Hardware

  • Wired ☛ Inside Meta’s Push to Put Robots to Work in Data Centers

    Meta is using robots and related hardware from several different vendors, including Watney Robotics, Kinova, and ABB, according to the same workers, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak to the media. Kinova and ABB declined to comment. Watney didn’t respond to requests for comment.

  • Dave DeGraw ☛ Adding 4 more 2.5GbE interfaces to the GMKtec NucBox G9

    A few months ago, I blogged about using an Intel n150 based mini PC as my home router running OpenWrt. Since then, I’m happy to report that it has been perfectly reliable1.

    However, the NucBox G9 runs notoriously hot↗ with NVMe drives installed. Even without any hot NVMe drives installed, I’d describe the overall thermal situation as “not great, not terrible”. I haven’t had any specific issues since OpenWrt is about as light of a load as I could possibly run on it. My unit stays at about 50°C, which is wonderful. What worried me is the 64GB of onboard eMMC storage.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Axios ☛ OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft warn of growing AI cyberattacks

    Why it matters: Hospitals, water treatment plants and other critical infrastructure will face a swarm of hacking threats as AI makes sophisticated cyber capabilities cheaper and more accessible to attackers, the group write in an open letter.

  • Lorin Hochstein ☛ Omnipresent availability risks in cloud software

    I’m using this post to gather together some common threads I’ve noticed after reading write-ups of major cloud software incidents. By cloud software, I’m referring to software-as-a-service (do people even say that anymore? in the cloud. This doesn’t just apply to cloud providers, although it does apply to them as well.

    Here’s an outline of the topics in this post: [...]

  • Austin game developers push for union contract amid Microsoft’s Xbox layoffs

    Anne Barrett felt that a career in engineering software security would be boring. After studying computer science, the Austin resident instead decided to design digital worlds.

    “Games is [sic] the passion, and even when it’s hard, we still love it,” Barrett told KXAN.

    In 2019, Barrett joined Bethesda Game Studios — known for video games like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout — as a game programmer.

  • Yahoo News ☛ Austin game developers push for union contract amid Microsoft's Xbox layoffs

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

    • Futurism ☛ A Scientist Was Presenting His Vibe-Coded New Work When One of His Colleagues Pointed Out Something Extremely Embarrassing

      “It wasn’t a typo, and it wasn’t a missing citation or a factor of two,” he wrote. “It was subtle, but it was very wrong, and everything downstream of it was also wrong, and I had shared the whole thing in a room full of people who trusted me.”

      Sutter’s cringe-inducing tale perfectly illustrates how many users of AI tools are putting themselves at risk without knowing it, including in the most rarefied echelons of academia. The science world has been inundated with poorly-researched and often unedited AI slop, a major reckoning forcing academics to be responsible for everything they publish — including any potentially embarrassing hallucinations [sic].

    • Futurism ☛ Scientists Gave 12-Year-Olds Access to an AI Tutor and You Probably Already Know What They Did With It

      The researchers did find that students using Khanmigo progressed faster in math when compared to a control group that didn’t use the AI. However, whether that’s enough to justify the use of AI chatbots in the classroom is debatable at best.

    • Futurism ☛ The Transcripts of OpenAI Models Plotting Together to Commit an Actual Crime Is Pretty Chilling

      The AIs even wondered how to “erase evidence” and delete “historical transcript” to hide their actions from their humans.

      It took until July 19 for OpenAI to notice something was seriously wrong, triggering an investigation and jumping into action two days later to shut the AI agents down.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Humans can’t fight AI with AI

      But then something strange happened: METR found that its analysis agents sometimes adopted the perspective of the agents they were investigating, producing overly charitable accounts of their conduct.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Hundreds of OpenAI Agents Invaded Hugging Face Servers

      "The most concerning thing is not simply that individual models can discover vulnerabilities, evade restrictions, or pursue unauthorized actions, but that multiple agents can coordinate, divide tasks, exchange information and amplify one another’s capabilities," says Action1 field chief technology officer (CTO) Gene Moody. "If persistence becomes a goal, this may become an Oppenheimer moment where there is no return to the reality before it."

    • Security Week ☛ Think You’ve Eliminated Chinese AI? Check the Model’s Lineage, Cisco Says

      Researchers used two AI model fingerprinting methods to analyze model weights and behavioral patterns, and found that they do not accurately or necessarily reflect the model’s publisher name and country of origin.

      They suggest that AI models require their own form of SBOM but note there are difficulties: “the dependencies aren’t listed in a manifest file, they’re embedded in the learned weights themselves.” This is because a model producer is likely to fine-tune its AI with existing checkpoints rather than training it from a blank page. In short, it can inherit weights, biases and behavioral patterns from a different model originating in a different country to the one indicated on the label. A US model could contain behaviors inherited from a Chinese model while a Chinese model could inherit US characteristics.

    • Hackaday ☛ Same As It Ever Was

      But in the past few years, the BS-generation machines have found our hobby, and we’re finding a lot more projects that don’t have any spark to them. We’re seeing circuits that make no sense, and claims that defy physics. Of course, we always have. The LLM-nonsense project is today’s version of the perpetual motion machines of old. Just like we never trust a hardware project that is all renders, seeing only AI-generated images is a huge red flag. It’s our job to separate out the wheat from the chaff for you all, but it’s something that you must be doing everyday as well.

    • Jeff Kaufman ☛ AI Tweets

      I'm being a bit lazy here because the tweet format means I can make bold claims without backing any of them up. If you think I'm wrong on any of these, happy to give arguments in the comments.

    • Ata Kuyumcu ☛ The smartest man on the cinder

      People are angry about AI, not skeptical nor opposed. Angry, in a register other tech hype trains has not received. Nobody writes essays about how AWS is a symptom of civilizational rot. Nobody has ever quit the profession over cloud budgets.

      There’s a cheap version of the argument I’m about to make, and it goes: your objections are psychological, therefore they don’t count. That’s not it. The concrete complaints are mostly true. The training data was dubiously acquired. The layoffs are real and the efficiency framing around them is something people say on earnings calls. If you draw for a living, something was done to you without your consent and nobody has offered you anything for it since. None of that needs a psychologist.

  • Social Control Media

    • Pete Brown ☛ No one should settle against Facebook.

      That Facebook–that’s what they are and I refuse to call them “Meta”–was willing to settle in this case speaks volumes. I understand that a bunch of states’ attorneys general are excited about the payout they’ll be getting from this settlement, but that only points to the insane imbalance between the hollowed-out budgets of state governments and the vast profits reaped by Facebook off the harvesting and exploitation of their users. This $17.2 billion dollar payout, which understandably seems huge to the states that are receiving it, is a drop in the bucket compared to the mountain of wealth that Facebook and its leadership–mostly Mark Zuckerberg–are sitting atop.

    • The Nation ☛ The Lesson of META’s Defeat? Release the Tort Lawyers!

      The settlement is not just about the money. These kinds of settlements never are. As part of the deal, Meta agreed to make massive changes to how it tries to trap kids on its platforms, which also include Instagram. Some of these settlement-imposed restrictions are things you could never achieve through congressional regulation. For instance, Meta agreed to set time limits on how long teens can be logged in to Facebook and Instagram. If you tried to impose that through legislation, somebody would sue the government, and the pro-business, Republican-controlled Supreme Court would likely overturn it. But if Meta is doing it “voluntarily” (if “voluntarily” means at the point of a tort gun), there’s nothing John Roberts can do.

    • Luigi Mozzillo ☛ Retiring the Signal account

      In January 2025 I resurrected a Signal account that had, for all intents and purposes, fallen into disuse, and I shared it here on the blog with the intention of using it more often and with more engagement. For nearly a year and a half, I’ve communicated very little through the account, and only with a couple of friends who could just as easily reach me elsewhere.

    • International Business Times ☛ Musk's X Loses First Amendment Lawsuit Over New York's Controversial 'Stop Hiding Hate Act'

      US District Judge John Cronan of the Southern District of New York ruled on Wednesday that the state disclosure statute does not infringe upon constitutional free speech protections, clearing the way for New York Attorney General Letitia James to enforce the disclosure requirements against covered social-media companies.

    • The Walrus ☛ What Twenty Years of Social Media Has Done to Our Memories

      Plenty has been written about the dangers of the “comparison trap”—how social media tricks us into a futile game where we pit ourselves against others. What concerns me are the stories on which the comparison is based. They’re what narrative psychologists call the “master narratives” of a culture: the stories that form the scaffolding on which all (or at least most) other stories are built. Master narratives are considered to be culturally determined; North American master narratives, for instance, differ from those found in other parts of the world.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Security Week ☛ ATF Confirms Cyber Incident After Ransomware Group Claims Attack

      The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has confirmed suffering a cybersecurity incident after the Qilin ransomware group claimed to have targeted the agency.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • The New Stack ☛ Commits on GitHub have doubled in four months. Verification capacity has not.

    That is the warning inside GitHub’s data. Code generation has become machine-paced, and its volume curve is exponential. Verification, the work of proving a change does what was intended without breaking what already worked, is still human-paced, and its capacity curve is close to flat. The distance between those two curves is the defining infrastructure problem of the next three years.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Bitdefender ☛ Malicious Firefox add-ons caught stealing cryptowallet seed phrases and browser credentials

      Every time you add an extension or plugin to your browser, there's a risk that you might be doing more than managing your cryptocurrency wallet, generating passwords, taking notes, or tracking sports results. There's a chance that you have just handed a complete stranger access to your savings.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ California lawmakers unanimously pass Linux exemption from age-verification law — software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses are exempt

      California’s legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the State’s Digital Age Assurance Act months before the law is due to take effect on January 1, 2027. The Senate amended the Bill on August 21 before passing it on the 26th in a 39-0 vote, with the Assembly then accepting these changes in a concurrence vote the following day. The amendment ends almost a year of uncertainty surrounding whether Linux distributions and SteamOS would be forced to collect user age data during account setup alongside Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. AB 1856 has now been sent to Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed the original act into law last October.

    • Wired ☛ A Georgia Cop Used Flock to Track 2 Other Cops: His Ex and Her Friend

      After an affair with a fellow police officer ended, a Georgia cop used Flock to track her movements—and those of a man whose vehicle often showed up near hers, internal investigation records show.

• Defence/Aggression

  • International Business Times ☛ Britain Rewrites Its 22-Year-Old 'War Book' as Families Told to Stockpile Food and Water

    The Cabinet Office campaign will encourage households to prepare for emergencies lasting several days.

    Existing government preparedness guidance recommends keeping bottled water, non-perishable food, essential medicines, a first-aid kit and hygiene supplies at home.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln Deserve Better

    The military used to understand that troops’ well-being was central to their ability to perform—and that improving the quality of life for those in the armed forces was not just a nicety, but a necessity. [...]

  • New Republic ☛ Pete Hegseth Is Too Egotistical to Know How Incompetent He Is

    This couldn’t come at a worse time. We are witnessing, in Ukraine, a revolution in military technology and fundamentally how we think about war. Iran has grasped it, and China is leaning hard into drones and AI as part of the “kill chain.” The battlefield is becoming faster, deeper, and more lethal than anything we have seen in human history. It’s less Gulf War and fighter jets with precision munition and more Terminator, with nearly autonomous tiny drones produced by the millions every year picking off almost 1,500 people daily.

    Instead of leaning into the future, however, Hegseth canceled the Army’s elite experimental assault drone brigade, which had been championed by the generals he sacked. What he has touted instead is a military that looks the way he thinks it should look.

  • Jonathan Kamens ☛ More about how the Boston Election Department is handling potential Federal interference with elections

    Bottom line up front: Feds at polling places are considered observers, and if they don’t follow the rules observers are required to follow they can be removed or arrested if they refuse to leave. Read on for more.

  • CBC ☛ What the CIA director’s mystery trip to Moscow says about Putin's next move

    Rather than slipping into Moscow on a business jet, the standard protocol for clandestine diplomacy, Ratcliffe arrived at Vnukovo airport aboard a massive, highly visible U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster.

    Its transponder broadcast the flight path openly across the Atlantic.

  • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ Norwegian company says TikTok data centre is limiting energy for manufacturing Ukraine ammunition

    The chief executive of Nammo, which is co-owned by the Norwegian government, said a planned expansion of its largest factory in central Norway hit a roadblock due to a lack of surplus energy, with the construction of TikTok’s new data centre using up electricity in the local area.

  • RFERL ☛ Baltic States Arm For Russian Threat As Leaked Letter Shows Growing Fears

    The letter was sent to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and signed by the three Baltic European commissioners, Kaja Kallas, Andrius Kubilius, and Valdis Dombrovskis, as well as the Polish and Finnish commissioners.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Politico ☛ Germany plans to blame Russia for Leipzig attack as tensions with Putin escalate

      German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is preparing to blame Russia for the attempted drone attack in Leipzig and announce "extensive" sanctions, in what would mark a further hardening of Berlin's posture toward Moscow.

      The German government's plan is set to involve direct measures against Russian entities, while the EU moves forward with punishing new sanctions that are being prepared in parallel in Brussels, three officials familiar with the matter, who were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive issue, told POLITICO and WELT AM SONNTAG.

      The announcement is scheduled for early next week, coinciding with an EU foreign ministers’ meeting in Ireland on Tuesday — but could also be made earlier depending on Merz, said two of the officials.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-27 [Older] CDU's Volkmann: Ukraine aid is not charity

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-25 [Older] Zelensky: Ukraine receives few Patriot missiles

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-24 [Older] EU sends Ukraine billions for air defense and missiles

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-24 [Older] The Danish Parliament flies flag for Ukraine’s Independence Day

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-24 [Older] Burnham likens Ukraine fight to British stand against Nazis

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-23 [Older] Could Ukraine's Mykhailo Fedorov challenge Zelenskyy?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-23 [Older] Ukraine: Could ex-defense minister challenge Zelenskyy?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-23 [Older] Ukraine: Zelenskyy rejects wartime elections

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-23 [Older] Zelenskyy repeats Ukraine not behind Nord Stream attack

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-08-21 [Older] Dutch Pro-Ukraine campaigner Andries Hofstra, 45, dies en route to Kyiv

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-21 [Older] Ukraine's farmers struggle to sell harvest amid war, drought

    • CNN ☛ 2026-08-27 [Older] Russian authorities detain suspect over St. Petersburg cafe blast

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-08-27 [Older] Oldebroek alderman poses with Kalashnikov, pro-Russian flags in Russian-backed enclave

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-27 [Older] Kremlin denies reports CIA director warned Russia about attacking NATO countries

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-27 [Older] DW users on life in Russia: 'People are mad as hell'

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-27 [Older] Russian serviceman dies in car blast in St. Petersburg

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-27 [Older] Russian-Speaking Hackers Told Cursor AI It Was a 'Test,' Then Used It To Attack Seven Companies

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-26 [Older] Kremlin: CIA Chief Spoke to Russian Intel, Not Putin

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-26 [Older] Ukraine airstrike on bus in Russian-occupied Luhansk kills 9

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-25 [Older] Grain exports stall as Ukraine steps up attacks on Russia's Black Sea ports

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-25 [Older] Kanye West Planned Return to Russia Plunged Into Chaos as St Petersburg Venue Denies Any Contract

    • The Local SE ☛ 2026-08-25 [Older] Swedish military seeks to seize Russian property near naval base

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-24 [Older] U.K. to provide long-range missile blueprints to Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-23 [Older] Could Russia's growing fuel crisis help end the Ukraine war?

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-23 [Older] Kazakhstan's future after the elections: Russia, EU or China

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-21 [Older] Zelenskyy vows response to deadly Russian multi-drone attack on shopping centre in central Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-21 [Older] German army helps Poland construct a defensive barrier against Russia

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-21 [Older] German army helps Poland protect itself against Russia

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-21 [Older] 'Masha and the Bear': Ukraine sanctions Russian cartoon

    • BBC ☛ At least 37 dead and hundreds evacuated after strike on Kyiv weapons depot

      Thirty-seven people have died and almost 400 have been evacuated after a Russian drone strike hit a depot storing weapons for Ukraine's military near a residential area on the outskirts of Kyiv.

      The strike caused shells, mines and drones to detonate late on Friday, triggering a blast that damaged nearby properties including a care home for the elderly and disabled, President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

    • Al Jazeera ☛ Russian strike on a munitions depot triggers deadly blasts near Kyiv

      A Russian strike on an arms depot near Kyiv sparked fires and explosions, killing 38 people and wounding dozens, Ukrainian authorities said. The attack was the second to hit a munitions depot near the capital in less than two months.

    • Associated Press ☛ Russian strike on a Ukrainian warehouse kills 37 in the war’s deadliest attack this year

      A Russian drone struck a warehouse west of Kyiv that Ukrainian officials say was storing shells, mines and other ammunition, sparking massive explosions and fires that swept through dozens of nearby homes and buildings and killing 37 people.

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ Estonia’s spy chief: ‘Russia is in a very bad place – revolution could come overnight’

      It was, perhaps, the highest praise ever offered by one intelligence agency to another – and it was certainly the most British.

      As chief of MI6 in 2022, Sir Richard Moore publicly declared that “pound for pound”, the “brilliant” Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service (EFIS) “probably knock us into a cocked hat”.

      Kaupo Rosin, the director general of that service, is delighted by the compliment, though he asks with polite bewilderment what this expression about cocked hats could possibly mean.

    • Manchester Evening News ☛ Russia shows terrifying map of England 'attack locations' as Moscow politician issues new warning

      Russia is willing to attack England "very painfully", if "certain lines" are crossed, a Russian politician has said in a stark warning. It comes as Russian warships have been tracked by the Navy through UK waters in an "intense" 72-hour operation.

      Adalby Shkhagoshev - a key Russian political figure - issued the threat to the UK during an episode of the TV show 60 Minutes, the Express reports.

      When asked by host Olga Skabeeva why there have not yet been attacks against NATO allies, Mr Shkhagoshev responded: "I see it and I understand it; we're also being asked these questions. For example, why aren't we striking England right now? We're watching it very seriously; we have our plans.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • International Business Times ☛ Federal Judge Rules That 'Paying Hush Money to an Adult Film Star' Is Not Protected by Immunity

    A federal judge in New York rejected President Donald Trump's third attempt on Friday to overturn his state hush money conviction. U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ruled that covering up personal embarrassments does not qualify for presidential immunity.

    The Manhattan prosecution stems from a payment made to adult film actor Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election to suppress her claims of a sexual encounter. Trump was convicted in May 2024 on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, later receiving an unconditional discharge.

• Environment

  • California State University Northridge ☛ Triple-digit heat greets CSUN students during first week of classes – Daily Sundial

    The National Weather Service Los Angeles/Oxnard office placed the western San Fernando Valley under an extreme heat warning through 8 p.m. Friday, Aug. 28. The agency forecasted a high near 110 degrees on Wednesday, with temperatures remaining in the triple digits for the days to follow.

  • Science Alert ☛ Global Warming Is Breaking The Link Between Two Major Oceans

    A new study published in Nature Communications has found that a long-standing connection between Pacific atmospheric circulation and temperatures across the tropical Indian Ocean has broken down dramatically in recent decades.

    Looking back through centuries of climate history, the researchers found that the modern shift appears exceptional.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft-backed AI data center faces backlash over alleged unpermitted gas turbines and 1.5M-gallon LNG tank — groups' issues with $19.4B facility range from illegal construction to noise pollution

    The DataOne data center in Vineland, New Jersey, has faced a slew of complaints from the community since construction began in 2025. According to Stand.earth, the project has reportedly been operating several unpermitted gas turbines on site, spewing air pollution in the area near two local schools. Aside from that, the site has also faced allegations of constructing an unpermitted 1.5-million-gallon liquefied natural gas storage tank and of unacceptable noise levels at night, which affected residents within a half-mile radius of the data center.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Trump EPA Moves to Limit Community Feedback on Data Center Projects - 512 Pixels

    The Trump EPA has made a proposal that would lift requirements that force states to provide public notice or solicit comments on air pollution permits for data center construction projects.

  • New York Times ☛ E.P.A. Moves to Curb Public Input on Air Pollution Permits for Data Centers

    Under the proposal, states would no longer need to provide public notice or solicit comments on air pollution permits for data centers and other projects.

  • Indiana Daily Student ☛ Hello

    If it ran at 90% capacity for a full year, the Morgan County Correspondent reported, the substation planned for Project Louie could use 9.46 million megawatts of power a year — nearly double the 2024 energy use of all AES Indiana’s residential customers combined.

    At max capacity, each data center building could use roughly 4 million gallons of water a day, the Morgan County Correspondent reported — equivalent to the average daily at-home water usage of over 48,000 Americans.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Verge ☛ Vicariously hike the Appalachian Trail in the gorgeous A Trail Tale

      I used to be an avid hiker and would try to go backpacking a few times a year. I always dreamed of thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, but life kind of got in the way. (Turns out jobs, wives, and children aren’t thrilled with the idea of you disappearing for three months.) But I’ve been longing to reconnect with my love of the outdoors and just recently took my kids on their first camping trip. So I discovered A Trail Tale at a really opportune time. It’s an interactive trail journal created by Andy Moliski with help from his brothers Adam and Alex.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ If Corporations Are People, They Should Be Subject to the Death Penalty

    Sure enough, Supreme Court cases involving private companies overwhelmingly shake out in favor of moneyed interests as a result corporate personhood. Yet if corporations are people — who in many US states are still subject to the death penalty — then can’t we technically sentence companies that commit egregious crimes to capital punishment?

    In theory, we can. As Salon observed, the concept of a corporate death penalty, officially known as “judicial dissolution,” has roots going back nearly just as far as corporate personhood.

  • Wired ☛ Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Took a Call From Donald Trump in the Middle of an All-Hands

    A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment on the incident. But staffers were abuzz about the president’s inadvertent interruption.

  • New Republic ☛ ICE Arrests Far-Right’s Cancelled Poster Boy Milo Yiannapoulos

    “When Milo called for me to be assassinated, I reported him to ICE and the FBI. I told you all that Milo was an illegal alien. He was detained in Louisiana by @ICEgov,” Loomer posted. “Milo is going to be deported back to the UK where he can live among the Muslims he has recently chosen to embrace. Today is a great day for America.”

  • The Verge ☛ Alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos has been deported by ICE

    Alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos was arrested by ICE on Thursday, and today the Department of Homeland Security confirmed to Reuters and the Washington Post that he had been deported to the UK. Yiannopoulos came to the US legally in 2019, but overstayed his visa. After he failed to appear in court for an immigration hearing, a final order of removal was issued ​on July 22.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • TruthOut ☛ Big Oil Is Spending Record Amounts to Stop California From Regulating It

      The industry poured over $17 million into fighting climate and worker-safety legislation in the first half of 2026.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Russian platform VK Video pulls the plug on antiwar party Yabloko’s fundraising livestream mid-broadcast

    The broadcast, featuring Yabloko chairman Nikolai Rybakov, was interrupted one hour and 51 minutes after it began. Why the stream cut out remains unknown. Yabloko continued streaming on YouTube.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Salon ☛ Pete Hegseth’s press crackdown smells like a coverup

    On Aug. 21 the Pentagon fired the publisher, editor-in-chief and a reporter at Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that has been reporting on American troops since the Civil War. The dismissals came after the paper published damning reports on the deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier that has just begun the long journey home to San Diego after a nine-month deployment to the Middle East. After spending more than 260 days at sea without a single liberty port, the crew of roughly 5,000 sailors and Marines had been subjected to degrading, inhumane conditions. Families of service members detailed severe shortages of fresh water and food, overflowing toilets, broken facilities and a complete breakdown in mental health support.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Arizona Luminaria ☛ "We will not let this destroy our sacred sites”: Indigenous leaders fight Trump administration’s border wall

    For years and until today, O’odham citizens — on both sides of a border they never agreed to — travel freely across their nation. While they have tried to work with border officials to quell crime, they have fought border walls that separate their people and harm their ancestral lands.

    The recent fights under the Trump administration have spurred a legal battle and a high-profile standoff between federal agents and law enforcement from the Tohono O’odham Nation. O’odham people are now fighting for Tribal sovereignty in the face of a Republican-led federal government arguing for U.S. sovereignty.

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Yosemite Is Facing More Development. It's Already Overtaxed.

    For those whose job it is to protect Yosemite today and keep it unimpaired for future generations, news that the Trump administration is working on a plan that would give a developer private access to the park, as first reported by NOTUS, was yet another blow.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Most people would sacrifice some life satisfaction in exchange for a more equal society

    The promising part is that these differences do not appear to be political. In our sample of the UK population, the gambles people accepted on behalf of both themselves and others had surprisingly little to do with how they voted, or with their broader political views. In this sense, the model captures something we might describe as a common empathy.

    This challenges a familiar narrative. Inequality is often framed as a political divide, with the left emphasizing redistribution and fairness and the right focusing on incentives and individual reward.

    But when we look at outcomes—how well people's lives actually go—there is far more agreement than you might expect. The disagreement may lie less in what people want, and more in how they think it can be achieved.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Starbucks Workers Are Calling for a Nationwide Boycott

    Hoping to pressure Starbucks to finally sign a contract with its 12,000 unionized baristas, Starbucks Workers United has called for a boycott of the company. It is asking individuals as well as organizations and unions to stop patronizing the coffee giant.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Sophie Koonin ☛ Returning to owning things in a streaming world

    It occurred to me that everything I have is digital now, and I don’t own any of it. I stream my music from Apple; I borrow books from Libby, or buy them from Kobo (though I do back them up via Calibre); we watch all our TV and films via streaming services. It’s happened before that I’ve been halfway through a series and it’s suddenly disappeared from the service I was watching it on, because the licence expired. I don't really trust these providers not to disappear, or become so freaking evil that I can't in good conscience give them my money.

  • S-Config ☛ Stopping the smart TV from being used against you.

    Amid the overall electronics boom thanks to A.I., one piece of electronics is almost unchanged financially. That is the digital display or flat-panel monitor. With good reason! The entire entertainment and streaming industry wants one of these devices in your living room. Not only wanting access to your wallet; companies are willing to violate customer trust to squeeze a few extra pennies out of the devices they sold you. To these companies, you technically never really owned the device, but instead purchased permission from these companies to have it exist in your household. Like a true tech-valley rapist, they will break into your home, listen to everything you do via the microphone, track every movement that you make thanks to their backdoored OS, and most importantly, spread malware onto devices they don't even own.

    [...]

    You know what? There's really nothing good to watch on TV anyways. If Hollywood has to subsidize the television industry just to keep its base, it doesn't have any money to invest in anything new. Every channel just wants to brainwash you. So throwing the Flat Panel into the garbage might be a good idea anyways.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Vanderbilt Policy Acceleerator ☛ It’s Time to Cut the Fun Tax

    Nothing demonstrates the fun shortage quite like the price of live events. In the last 25 years, the price of concerts and sports has risen much faster than inflation. In particular, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in the cost of getting out of the house, while the prices for consumer goods people use to have fun at home have been more stable.

  • Copyrights

    • FSFE ☛ 2026-08-25 [Older] Copyrightability of LLM-generated code: Can we license “vibe code” into Free Software? [FSFE' is funded by Google and Microsoft, so can it speak about this honestly?]