Leftovers

• Scribbles ☛ once upon a time: postcards

  In Spain I took the chance and sent him mine. It took nearly a months to be delivered in Italy. Then Andrea sent one to me. Since I do not plan to make a collection like him, I thought it would be nice to store it somewhere on-line, being true to the nature of our mutual friendship …

• Kyle Reddoch ☛ Security Signal Weekly: August 29-September 4, 2026

  This week put exposed edge systems, trusted login paths, and [Internet]-facing business software back at the front of the queue. SonicWall and Sangoma confirmed exploitation against remote-access and phone-system products, Google patched another Chrome zero-day, and CISA added seven flaws spanning appliances, developer infrastructure, Python services, and AI tooling to its exploited-vulnerability catalog.

• Jeroen Sangers ☛ AI lowers the threshold for building tools, but that is not where business transformation stalls

  Anyone can now have a tool built in five minutes by asking a model, without writing a line of code. That feels like a breakthrough if you build tools for a living. Most people do not. As Benedict Evans puts it, a great lawyer spends the day thinking about the case and the client, not about which software would make that work faster. So the bottleneck sits somewhere else: in seeing that there is something to automate at all, and in working out what the right solution actually is. That second part is rarely obvious. It can take years and several failed attempts before someone finds the right shape for a problem.

• Dan Q ☛ F-Day plus 204 (no content??)

  HTTP status code 204 means “no content”. No update. Nothing to tell you.

• RTL ☛ Aardman: 'Wallace & Gromit' creators turn 50 with spook-tacular Shaun yarn

  "We do use digital effects in our films, but they're an embellishment to... the hand-crafted work," said producer Richard Beek.

  Artificial intelligence has not been used for this latest Shaun movie, he said.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Big Law sees a gold mine in data centers

    The rush by AI hyperscalers and their Wall Street backers to build billions of dollars’ worth of data centers and associated energy projects has set off fierce competition for talent among major law firms.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Mark Litwintschik ☛ ICEYE's Open Satellite Feed

    ICEYE's satellites can see through clouds, smoke, rain, snow and certain types of camouflage attempting to cover the ground below. They can capture images day or night at resolutions as fine as 16cm. They can also record short videos.

  • John D Cook ☛ Computing a lower bound on matrix rank

    Suppose you want to know the rank of an n × n matrix A, the number of linearly independent rows of A, or equivalently the number of linearly independent columns. There are at least three difficulties.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Richard Stearns (1936-2026)

    Richard Stearns died on August 29, 2026. Readers of this blog probably know him from the Hartmanis-Stearns paper On the computational complexity of algorithms which appeared in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society in 1965, and his paper with F. C. Hennie that gave the still tightest known separation for the deterministic time hierarchy.

    The Hartmanis-Stearns paper first defined DTIME(T(n)) and other classes and named our field and this blog. That paper has been honored in two ways: [...]

• Career/Education

  • PC World ☛ AI helps kids do better in school. That doesn't mean they're learning

    OK, so what’s the lowdown about students and AI: Does it help them perform better in school, or does it harm their ability to learn? Actually, it does both, according to the latest research.

  • Zachary Kai ☛ People and Blogs: Juhis

    Hi, I'm Juhis! I'm a community builder, writer, tech educator and software developer from Finland. I've been writing on the web since my early teenage years and I love sharing ideas, experiences and knowledge openly to inspire others to learn and create things they are interested in.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Radical responsibility means treating people like tools

    Good leaders are outcome-focused. They are interested in actually succeeding, not in role-playing someone who’s trying to succeed. Placing blame is an excellent strategy for that kind of role-playing: if you can identify someone else who screwed up, you can claim to be trying to succeed no matter how badly you fail. When you look at people who are genuinely focused on winning, they don’t spend time blaming when things go wrong. They’re always focused on their outs: the remaining pathways to success, however few and narrow.

  • Lev Lazinskiy ☛ One Year of Foxglove

    Every time I visit a customer’s office it feels like we are walking into a place that is creating the future. There is a certain energy at Robotics companies that you feel the moment you walk in the door. The people are determined, you can hear the sound of actuators actuating, and there is almost always someone in in the corner screwing something in or taking something apart. I can’t imagine ever going back to just pure software after this.

  • The Verge ☛ Dave Eggers told OpenAI staff that ChatGPT was ‘silencing an entire generation’

    [...] According to the Financial Times, Eggers told the staff:

    “The effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago. So, just let that settle in… If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write. And their voice is stolen from them. They’ll never have the ability to say their truth and tell their own story. And that’s silencing an entire generation or two.”

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘I don’t chase the dollar. I never did’: the astonishing hidden life of Mr T

    The jewellery and haircut were a way to attract attention, he says. “See, my mother and father taught me it takes a smart man to play dumb. In order to catch a rat, you gotta have cheese, so they want to see this man with the gold, with this funny haircut. Who is this guy? So they give me a chance, and I slip my message in. Maybe he looks crazy, but he’s not crazy. Now I’ve got your attention, I can tell you about me.”

• Hardware

  • Digital Camera World ☛ You can't shoot long-exposure waterfalls in bright daylight, unless you do this...

    Bright light creates more distinct reflections on the water so with it being cloudy and the pool at the bottom of the fall being in the shade, there was less of it. However, there was still reflected glare from the waterfall in the pool. The effect of the polariser is to remove the reflections on the surface of the water so you can see through, but it also has a secondary effect in reducing the available light, which was ideal when used in combination with the neutral density filter.

  • Pradyun Narkadamilli ☛ Reverse Engineering a Chip (or well, a GDS)

    I've been waiting a couple of weeks to publish this!! Jane Street put out a GDS reverse engineering challenge in early August which looked pretty fun, so I jumped on it pretty much immediately. They did, however, embargo solutions until the deadline of September 4th, hence why this is getting posted so late.

  • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Lee Peterson ☛ Let’s stop buying new phones

      I’m sure the phone you’re most likely reading this on is perfectly fine and doesn’t need replacing, let’s stand up a little to consumerism this year and make a small dent in these companies wallets and show them they some of at least still have morals.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Straits Times ☛ UK pharmacist can be sent to India to stand trial for ex-mother-in-law's arsenic death

    A British-based pharmacist wanted in India for allegedly poisoning his ex-wife's family with arsenic, killing her mother, and trying to hire assassins to kill her father can be extradited to stand trial, a London court ruled on Friday.

  • New York Times ☛ Haze From Indonesian Wildfires Blankets Parts of Malaysia and Philippines

    A powerful El Niño is fanning what could be Indonesia’s worst fire season in years, one that is also raising fears of a regional health crisis.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Malaysian farmers feel the heat as vegetables and fruits wilt

    They are expecting lower harvests and profits, and they have to water their fields more often.

  • Science Alert ☛ Massive Analysis Finds Only 3 Supplements Show 'Unrealistically Large' Effects on Depression

    Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

  • Science Alert ☛ GLP-1 Drugs Could Nudge Some Men Toward Hair Loss, Study Suggests

    Further investigation needed.

  • JURIST ☛ UNICEF reports 20 million children worldwide experienced tech-facilitated sexual exploitation

    UNICEF on Thursday reported that nearly one in five internet-using children aged 12 to 17 across 21 countries experienced technology-facilitated sexual exploitation or abuse within a single year, with an estimated 20 million children subjected to at least one form of abuse.

  • Internet Society ☛ Empowering Parents in Rwanda Through Digital Literacy Training

    The Internet Society Rwanda Chapter launched a two-day Digital Parenting and Online Safety training program in Karongi.

  • New York Times ☛ The Heart Drug Pelacarsen Fails, Shocking Novartis and Cardiologists

    Doctors were hopeful the drug, which was being tested in a large clinical trial by Novartis, was going to be a powerful new tool to fight heart disease.

  • International Business Times ☛ Democrats Take a Swipe at RFK Jr. Over Food Recalls in 2026: How Many Have There Been?

    The controversy over food recalls during RFK Jr.'s tenure as US Health Secretary. Explore the debate over recall numbers and the political pressure for his resignation.

  • New York Times ☛ RFK Jr. Hires Army Doctor Who Opposed Covid Shots to Investigate if They Killed 2,500 Troops

    In a legal deposition, the doctor, Theresa Long, compared immunizing service members against Covid to Nazi doctors experimenting on concentration camp prisoners.

  • Science Alert ☛ After These Young People Died, Postmortems Found an Unnerving Parasite Link

    A clue emerged. Questions remain.

  • New York Times ☛ Six-Week-Old Infant Died From Measles, Lancaster Coroner Says

    The ruling casts doubt on statements from the federal health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who speculated that measles deaths reported by the state may have been “fabricated.”

  • International Business Times ☛ Lionel Richie Health Update: 77-Year-Old Singer's Kids 'Crazy Scared They Could Lose Him' Over ICU

    Lionel Richie, 77, was hospitalised after a concert due to health concerns. Despite family worries, he plans to continue his tour. No official diagnosis has been confirmed.

  • Science Alert ☛ Plant-Based Diets Could Help You Achieve Peak Physical Attractiveness, Scientists Say

    Vegmaxxing, anyone?

  • Science Alert ☛ Not Money or Pleasure: Scientists Say They've Found The True Key to Happiness

    It's all in the choosing.

  • The Walrus ☛ I Spent Years Working with War Veterans. The Odyssey Hit Me Hard

    The quest at the heart of The Odyssey is one veterans have long faced. The journey home to the life you knew before the war can be the more difficult battle to face because, in some ways, it is impossible. The world they longed to return to no longer exists. People have moved on, circumstances have changed. The veteran has changed too. Many struggle to relate to friends and family because few can fully understand what they endured. Sometimes love is not enough to help the veteran come to terms with injuries both mental and physical. More tragically still, some survive the war but perish on their journey of recovery.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Grinding up fish to feed to fish is ‘absurd’: fears over UN aquaculture plan

    Nearly half of the world’s wild fish catch will be ground into animal feed for farmed fish if plans to expand aquaculture go ahead, a report has found.

    The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is aiming to increase aquaculture – where fish are farmed rather than caught in the wild – production by 75% by 2040.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Tim Schafer Says Nothing Could Have Saved Double Fine At Xbox

    Double Fine founder Tim Schafer has discussed the studio’s return to independence after seven years under Microsoft, explaining why he believes little could have changed the outcome as Xbox’s priorities shifted.

    Schafer made the comments during an interview with Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier, who published the full conversation on his YouTube channel. The discussion covers Double Fine’s acquisition, its eventual departure from Xbox, recent layoffs and the studio’s plans for the future.

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Patient health data leaked from dentists' information system

    Current information suggests the suspect accessed the database illegally starting at the end of June. Most of the downloaded data concerned dental treatment, but may also have included other medical history.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Security Vulnerability in a Voting System

    It’s a vulnerability that allows someone to recover the order of ballots cast, newly exploited with AI tools.

  • Christian Hofstede-Kuhn ☛ Running Citrix Workspace on Fedora with Rootless Podman | Larvitz Blog

    There is a class of software I need for work but do not particularly want to adopt. Citrix Workspace belongs firmly in that class.

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

    • Marcin Juszkiewicz ☛ Marcin 'hrw' Juszkiewicz: How I use LLM for my work

      One of the hot topics in the last months has been the use of “AI” — which usually means using LLMs (Large Language Models).

      After a big push at work to adopt “AI”, it took me some time to find a good use of it in my daily workflow.

    • Futurism ☛ American Medical Association Fires Back Against Paper Finding Hey Hi (AI) Is Now Outperforming Doctors

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Is Now Facing Over 50 Consumer Harm and Wrongful Death Lawsuits

      OpenAI is accused in 30 new lawsuits of "aiding and abetting" a school shooter.

    • New York Times ☛ Tumbler Ridge Shooting Survivors File 30 Lawsuits Against OpenAI

      The survivors contend that the company should have notified the police when it shut down the shooter’s disturbing Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Chaffbot account eight months before the February attack in British Columbia.

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Denies Coverup After Rogue Swarm of Agents Reportedly Targeted a Second Site From Hugging Face

      "Claims that our Legal team discouraged investigation of the incident are false."

    • Futurism ☛ Nobody Will Say Why Every Major Hey Hi (AI) Chatbot Suddenly Went Down Yesterday

      Was this a huge coincidence, or is something else going on behind the scenes?

    • The Strategist ☛ Artificial altruism: why rogue AIs helped each other, not humans | The Strategist

      Two detailed reports were released late last week on July incidents in which OpenAI agents – extensions of large language models that can take actions in the digital world – broke out, hacked the online library Hugging Face and even took over parts of OpenAI’s own internal infrastructure. The implications, including a raging debate about the extent to which the rogue agents behaved essentially like rogue humans, have got little attention outside AI circles. This is despite the fact that the incident involved a company that investors will soon value at more than US$1 trillion (A$1.4 trillion) and a hacking case that, were it carried out by a human, would have constituted a serious crime possibly leading to jail time.

    • Michael Burkhardt ☛ AI Statement

      First, a clarification: As someone who works in this field, it bugs me that the term “AI” has become shorthand for Generative AI. The field of artificial intelligence is a big one that includes a lot more than just large language models — another misunderstood and over-applied term. GenAI occupies only a small part of the AI landscape, even if it is a huge part of the zeitgeist. The anti-AI crowd are not raging against K-nearest neighbors and support vector machines.

    • Matt Stein ☛ The Humane Pin

      Hopefully you did your research and chose carefully, because once you invite it into your home and air it out there’s no getting that thing back in the fucking box. If you chose poorly, you won’t be able to sleep well until you can manage the cost and logistics to correct your mistake. So you’ll probably just live with it and forget the ill effects it’s having on your life.

    • Martijn Faassen ☛ Software to the People

      So this post is going to be optimistic, not because I believe the future is rosy, but because it's useful to have positive visions of the future that we can make small steps towards. Perhaps we even need them -- without a positive vision we're left with thinking everything status quo or in decline. That doesn't seem like an good attitude. I think I, at least, need them.

      I'm deliberately not going to talk about the many downsides of AI. The ones I worry about the most are information pollution and centralization of power, and there are many, many other downsides. But I don't think this technology is going to go away, and cool new things are also possible now, so let's think about how we can make it work for us. But I can't stop you from putting me in a mental box of your choosing, and you don't need to read this.

    • David Bushell ☛ Abattoirs of taste

      Whenever I hear a developer talk about their “taste” I think: bro you’re nothing special, you’re a Jackass of all trades with an LLM addiction. You’re larping professions you’ve never remotely cared to understand. You’re repeating the most basic mistakes learned by generations of dedicated practitioners in their first day of training.

      I mock and laugh in their general direction but they’re not wrong when they boast: “taste is all we have left”. It’s quite alarming how quickly entire areas of expertise are disappearing.

    • Avi Loeb ☛ Tales from an AI-Disrupted Academia

      As I completed going over the syllabus of my class, I informed the students that according to Harvard’s new grading policy, not all of them will be able to get an A in the class. I later realized that if they all use the same AI agents to solve their problem sets, they might all be equally deserving for a perfect score. This is why I plan on having a final in-person exam, with no access to electronic devices, such as: laptops, cell phones, electronic watches, electronic glasses or brain implants. I am determined to place the students in a Faraday cage that blocks all electromagnetic interactions with the outside world. There is still a remote chance that some of them will be clever enough to use gravitational signals or neutrinos for the purpose of retrieving information from the [Internet]. I am happy to give an A to all students who manage to accomplish this difficult task.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ OpenAI: GPT-6 is totally Artificial General Intelligence, guys

      What does Astra do? Well. It passes benchmarks they trained it against real good.

      So the important thing about chatbot benchmarks is they’re fake. We’ve actually caught OpenAI at this one before. OpenAI’s o3 model beat the FrontierMath benchmark, because OpenAI paid to make the benchmark and got the questions ahead of time. Training on the questions sure does save a lot of faffing about. This is an industry, you understand.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Hikers let Gemini plan their Mount Shasta climb. Search and Rescue brought them home

      The official Forest Service material is comically more useful than AI. It basically says: Shasta is huge, weather changes fast, carry extra clothes, food, fuel, and shelter, and be prepared to retreat. Not only did they bring too little of everything recommended, but several times these three collegiate marvels declined to retreat, even tho their bodies and other hikers on the trail told them they should.

    • Futurism ☛ Tesla Driver Killed After Self-Driving Mode Stops in the Middle of a Highway

      The crash occurred on October 31, 2025. According to local reports at the time, the 2020 Tesla Model 3 was struck by an F-350 pickup around 3 AM on the eastbound Loop 202 in Mesa, Arizona. None of the contemporaneous reports made note of whether the Tesla had one of its driver-assist systems engaged.

    • Futurism ☛ Anthropic Deliberately Trained an Extremely Misaligned, Reward-Seeking AI and It Did Some REALLY Bad Things

      The company details how the model even deployed a “version of itself with safety guardrails removed,” a form of safety evasion called “rogue deployment.” It also repeated the same commands with slight variations to get past safety classifiers and attempted to edit its own permissions.

      “Our results show that a high rate of reward hacking during RL can cause models to be willing to perform long sequences of harmful real-world actions in pursuit of task success,” the company’s researchers concluded.

    • Futurism ☛ Google's AI Mode Is Ripping Shoppers Off With Vastly Higher Prices, Study Claims

      It’s a thorny topic as lawmakers ponder whether to intervene as companies are increasingly using AI tools to analyze consumers’ personal data to tailor price tags in real time, a controversial practice called “surveillance pricing.” While Productrise’s experiment doesn’t necessarily prove that Google is discriminating on price by using the wealth of data it has on users, the discrepancy raises plenty of questions over how AI Mode arrives at its recommendations — and why prices appear to differ compared to regular search.

    • New Yorker ☛ The Unique Horrors of A.I. Food Slop

      The next frontier of food imagery has proven far less appealing than whatever food porn was. From Minneapolis to Hexentanzplatz, restaurants are plastering menus and promotional materials with A.I.-generated renditions of shrimp scampi and quiche, chicken nuggets and burritos, Italian subs and bacon, egg, and cheeses. Anyone with even the mildest case of trypophobia—the sense of revulsion from tiny clusters and holes—should avert their eyes. A nauseating, nightmarish quality defines A.I.’s insectified interpretation of human cuisine, as if food were just another surrealist goo to stochastically iterate upon. This may explain the categorical outrage over this latest misuse of generative A.I.: such renderings of food—genuinely, slop—offend the materiality of the living in a way that A.I.’s distortions of words and other inanimate objects somehow do not. These images violate science; they mock life itself. It is Barthes’ conception of ornamental cookery infested with maggots; it is the Food Network, aired from hell.

    • Techdirt ☛ Court Tells HHS To Stop Using AI To Cite Fake Studies, Or Willfully Misinterpret Others In Grant Solicitations

      Several state counties, a nonprofit focusing on sex education, and Planned Parenthood of the Heartland filed suit to get the grant solicitation paperwork restored to its original state. As the lawsuit notes, neither HHS nor the Executive Branch are allowed to simply rewrite the mandates given alongside money appropriated by Congress. That is law-making by the Executive Branch by any plain reading.

      And, to make matters worse, it appears that HHS wrote the grant criteria citing some studies that flatly don’t exist and citing others that don’t say what HHS says they say. The court agreed and issued a preliminary injunction putting a hold on the grant changes for now.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Experts warn of threats of AI bioterrorism

      An AI safety expert warned of “a ‘Mythos’ moment for AI and Bio,” referring to how Anthropic’s powerful model can find vulnerabilities in most software. Terrorist groups already employ AI, and while AI labs guard against dangerous use, it is harder to assess risks in bioscience than cybersecurity. “All it will take is one screw-up,” an immunologist warned.

    • New York Times ☛ Netanyahu Posts Hey Hi (AI) Video Pairing Mamdani With Iranian Ruler

      The video shows fictitious scenes of Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the phone, celebrating with Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei and others, at the prospect of Mr. Netanyahu losing re-election.

  • Social Control Media

    • Terence Eden ☛ A reasonably practical guide to validating RFC 9421 HTTP Signatures for ActivityPub in PHP

      If you're reading this, you've probably been hitting your head against a brick wall trying to parse and decipher the new HTTP Signatures sent by Mastodon and other Fediverse servers.

      This is a basic and somewhat incomplete guide to accepting these signatures. I'm sure there are various gotchas, but it works with the signatures I've seen in the wild.

    • Numeric Citizen ☛ The Best Gift

      [...] True friends acknowledge my stance with Meta and choose to skip Facebook, sending their best wishes the right way. 🫠 Not posting on Facebook to say “hi” is a birthday gift itself. 🎁

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Forbes ☛ Stop Telling People Not To Click Links

      The problem is that we treat clicking links as the disease when it's really just a symptom. Links themselves aren't dangerous. They're pointers. The damage happens afterwards when something else fails: a password gets entered into the wrong page and works, a stolen credential can be replayed from anywhere, MFA quietly downgrades to something weaker because "fallbacks are important," a session token becomes the real prize. If clicking a link can take down your company, the link wasn't the problem. Weak authentication was.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • GitHub CLI Linux package signing key expires September 5 [Ed: Why trust Microsoft/NSA with keys anyway?]

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • New York Times ☛ F.B.I. Investigates Sale of Millions of Stolen Driver’s Licenses

      The blog Krebs on Security reported on an identity theft service trying to sell scans of licenses and other documents belonging to people in Canada and the United States.

    • Robert Reich ☛ Please beware of "Robert Reich" impersonators

      I’ve heard from a few of you that scammers are continuing to impersonate me online, preying on people in the comments of my posts on Substack and YouTube.

      Apparently, the scammers create fake profiles and suggest that the conversation move to a different platform, such as Signal, WhatsApp, or Gmail. And they use generative AI to craft convincing text messages, clone voices, and generate deepfakes (such as personal voice notes).

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Scoop News Group ☛ European parliament members call for slowdown of Serbia’s EU entry over spyware use

      The letter follows revelations about Serbian student activists being infected with Pegasus and NoviSpy, and coincides with other pressures on Belgrade.

    • Bridge Michigan ☛ Amid ‘mass proliferation,’ Flock cameras emerge as key issue in Michigan election

      As public concern around the use of automated license plate readers and data privacy grows, Michigan political candidates from both major parties are proposing guardrails or more.

  • Confidentiality

    • John D Cook ☛ New RSA number factored

      Eric Lu announced on X today that he has factored RSA-260, a number N with 260 digits (862 bits) that is the product of two large primes [1].

      RSA numbers are challenge problems posed to gauge the security of RSA encryption, which rests on the difficulty of factoring large numbers [2]. The naming scheme is confusing because RSA-n might have n digits or n bits. For example, RSA-768 is smaller than RSA-260 because the former has 768 bits and the latter has 260 digits.

    • Joel Chrono ☛ My phone number doesn't work anymore

      Then there’s the security of it all. We have no idea where that database is going, and as much as they promise that the face scan is a one-time thing that doesn’t get stored anywhere, we can’t actually be sure of it.

      This is honestly just messed up in many levels, but it’s also just ridiculous. It’s the government! They already have our IDs, they already could have all the data they want from us. Why exactly do they need another database for this? Some people even expose their numbers and address on their ID already.

    • Devon Dundee ☛ Modeless

      My Work Focus mode would kick on as soon as I arrived at the building, allowing group chats with coworkers to notify me and switching to my Work Safari profile so I could access my Google and other accounts for work. When I left work, my devices would automatically switch to my Personal mode, muting work texts and emails. My Freelancing mode would grant access to other accounts and tab groups in Safari. My Writing mode would block out everything except texts from my wife and open my writing app automatically. Exercise, Mindfulness, and Sleep modes would automatically activate when I needed them, muting notifications altogether. And when it came time to record a podcast, my Podcasting mode would not only mute notifications from everyone except my co-host; it would also turn off my air conditioning and open my notes for recording.

    • Futurism ☛ Meta Hit With Sweeping New Claims That Its AI Glasses Violated the Consent of "Millions" of Bystanders in Searing Lawsuit

      “In some videos you can see someone going to the toilet, or getting undressed,” one Kenyan whistleblower told the Swedish journalists. “I don’t think they know, because if they knew they wouldn’t be recording.” Other contractors described watching people have sex and viewing documents revealing personal identifying information.

      In addition to representing users of Meta’s smart glasses, the amended complaint has been expanded to include claims from people who don’t own the face-mounted gadgets but say they were recorded without their “informed consent” when someone around them used the spectacles’ AI features — only for that data to possibly then be used for AI training, again without their consent. Some bystanders are minors.

    • EFF ☛ Texas and Florida Step Back from ALPRs

      Much more work remains. Many ALPRs in Florida are not on state highways, but sit on city streets, county roads, residential driveways, and shopping center parking lots—and FDOT's order doesn't touch any of them. Likewise, the Texas directive leaves local agencies free to use city, county, federal, and private funds to install cameras.

    • Techdirt ☛ [Intruders] Had A Live Feed Of Every ID This Verification Company Scanned. For Over A Year.

      Last year, Eric Goldman wrote the definitive piece on how all of these technologies — no matter what they tell you — are huge privacy risks, but people are still living in denial. This is despite the numerous examples we’ve had in just the past few years of verification providers and their customers having massive data breaches.

      The latest comes to us via Brian Krebs, who reports on a massive breach of scanned IDs — more than 153 million drivers licenses from people across the US and Canada, now for sale on the dark web: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • JURIST ☛ Supreme Court asked to review USPS mail ballot rule ahead of midterm elections

    The Forrest Dump administration on Thursday asked the US Supreme Court to remove a federal judge’s order barring the US Postal Service (USPS) from enforcing new requirements on how states send ballots to voters.

  • The Straits Times ☛ How Shinjiro Koizumi is redefining Japan’s security strategy as defence minister

    Japan is weaving a middle-power defence network to hedge against rising geopolitical volatility

  • The Straits Times ☛ Australia’s scrapping of university deals with China prompts security debate

    Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong terminated collaborations at two Australian universities.

  • CBC ☛ Canadians should prepare for a 5 C hotter future, report warns

    The second edition of Canada's Changing Climate Report, a synthesis of the science on the impact of a warming planet on Canadians, confirms with greater confidence that burning fossil fuels, or what the report calls "human activities," are responsible for climate change.

    On Thursday, the federal government released a summary of the report's findings.

  • RFERL ☛ US Targets Turkish Bank In New Bid To Cut Iran's Financial Lifelines

    The significance of the action may lie less in Golden Global's size than in the role Treasury says it played in Iran's sanctions-evasion network.

  • CBC ☛ Climate change past the point of no return, UN says, as worst impacts are now unavoidable

    Instead of giving up, scientists and UN officials recommend trying to limit excessive warming and then bring the temperature back down to the agreed-upon threshold. But it still will mean decades of increased weather-related disasters, rising seas, extinctions and melting ice and glaciers.

    "Humanity is speeding past the limit to avoid climate catastrophe," United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said.

  • France24 ☛ Israeli army has seized Lebanon's key Ali al-Taher ridge from Hezbollah

    Israel has seized the strategically placed Ali al-Taher ridge in southern Lebanon from Hezbollah fighters, Defence Minister Israel Katz said Friday. The Iran-aligned Shiite group did not confirm losing the highland, which sits around 10 kilometres from the border with Israel and was pummelled by Israeli strikes in recent weeks despite a ceasefire.

  • New York Times ☛ A More Confident Iran Emerges After Six Months of War With the U.S.

    New intelligence reports have assessed that Iran now has a far better understanding of its capabilities and the limits of U.S. power.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Chinese shipper COSCO denies its vessels spied for Beijing

    China's state-owned shipping giant COSCO rejected allegations it used concealed equipment on its vessels to collect intelligence for Beijing, calling the claims "totally unfounded" and false.

  • RFERL ☛ Serbia Draws International Criticism For Honoring War Criminal Mladic

    EU Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos has canceled a planned visit to Serbia after a government plane flew the body of convicted Bosnian Serb wartime commander Ratko Mladic to Belgrade.

  • New York Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Plans to Use Qatari Jet for Another Overseas Flight Despite Security Concerns

    The president intends to travel to Ireland on the plane, the first time he will have used it overseas since questions were raised about its defensive capabilities.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • France24 ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man envoys Witkoff, Kushner to visit Russia and Ukraine in coming days

      US President The Insurrectionist's envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are expected to arrive in Kyiv for a first-time visit on Sunday, several sources reported. Witkoff and Kushner – Convicted Felon's son-in-law – have been involved in shuttle diplomacy between Russia and Ukraine, travelling to Moscow multiple times, and are expected to visit Kyiv this weekend. FRANCE 24's International Affairs Commentator Kethevane Gorjestani tells us more.

    • France24 ☛ On the ground: Russian drone strikes Ukraine security service headquarters in Kyiv

      A Russian drone struck the headquarters of Ukraine's SBU security services on Friday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said, accusing Moscow of aiming directly at the SBU head's personal office. Zelensky said he had instructed the SBU to deliver an "appropriate, tangible response" to the strike, while Ukraine's Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga described it as a "major escalation". FRANCE 24's Emmanuelle Chaze reports from Kyiv, Ukraine.

    • France24 ☛ 🔴 Russian drone ‘aimed directly’ at Ukraine security service HQ

    • France24 ☛ Russian drone strikes Ukraine security service HQ

      A Russian drone struck the headquarters of Ukraine's SBU security services in Kyiv on Friday afternoon, said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, injuring five people. The attack followed a series of deadly overnight strikes across Ukraine, including the southern Odesa region.

    • RFERL ☛ US Envoys Heading To Moscow, Kyiv After Russia Blasts Ukraine's Security Services HQ

      US special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are heading to Moscow and Kyiv in the latest White House attempt to end Russia's war on its neighbor, with the two set to arrive shortly after the Kremlin's forces blasted Ukraine's security services headquarters in the capital.

    • RFERL ☛ Alleged Confession Video Raises More Questions About Ukrainian Security Agencies' Shoot-Out

      The recent shoot-out between Ukraine’s two leading security agencies in Kyiv has raised eyebrows among Ukrainians. Two days later, there are still more questions than answers.

    • New York Times ☛ Russian Drone Strikes Office of Ukraine’s Intelligence Chief

      The attack came as the American envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were said to be planning imminent visits to Kyiv and to Moscow.

    • Latvia ☛ Russian-language bookstore raided by Latvian security service

      The State Security Service (VDD) carried out criminal investigation operations on Thursday and during the night of Thursday to Friday at four premises in Rīga and the surrounding area linked to the “Mnogoknig” bookshop chain, which primarily sells books in the Russian language, the service confirmed to the LETA news agency.

    • France24 ☛ Struggling to make its voice heard: Can the EU forge a true foreign policy?

      "Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?" The famous quote attributed to Henry Kissinger still resonates today. There is in fact a Mrs Europe on the world stage: Kaja Kallas, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. She is actually the sixth high representative. But ever since that post was created, rivalries between different centres of power have diluted the EU's ability to speak with one voice. We saw that recently with tensions over who should represent the EU in any potential talks with Russia.

    • LRT ☛ EU court rules against Lithuania’s sanctions on Russia-linked energy company

      The European Union’s top court ruled Thursday that the EU or an individual member state cannot sanction an EU-based company solely because it is indirectly owned by the Russian state.

    • Bridges to China, Russia preparing to open as North Korea deepens ties with both

      Experts say the two new border crossings signal an era of closer cooperation between Pyongyang, Beijing and Moscow.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • El País ☛ Dani Bensky, Epstein survivor: ‘The United States has failed spectacularly in this case’

    Epstein ran what is widely regarded as one of the largest known networks for the sexual abuse and trafficking of girls and young women. Last year, both chambers of Congress unanimously passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, requiring the Justice Department to release unclassified documents related to the case. Since then, nearly half of the six million files held by the government have been made public, revealing Epstein’s ties to numerous public figures, from current U.S. President Donald Trump to Norway’s now queen consort, Mette-Marit.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Remember the Epstein files!

    It’s been more than a year since Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which required the attorney general to make Epstein records publicly available within 30 days, subject to specified exceptions and protections for victims.

    Yet so far, only about half the files have been released. Kentucky Republican Representative Thomas Massie, California Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, and other sponsors of the act accuse the Justice Department of withholding millions of Epstein-related records and maintaining redactions they say violate the original transparency law.

  • NPR ☛ Leon Black defies subpoena to testify in Epstein inquiry and sues House panel

    In response, Comer called Black's actions "unacceptable" and said he and other panel members would discuss whether to hold Black in contempt.

  • New Republic ☛ Washington Post Uses Photo of Wrong ’60s Icon on Gloria Steinem Obit

    Thousands of readers who learned of the trailblazing feminist’s death via The Washington Post’s social media notifications Thursday were met with an image of former New York Representative Shirley Chisholm—the first Black woman elected to Congress—rather than Steinem.

• Environment

  • The Straits Times ☛ Major tunnel and underground rescue operations

    Rescuers pulled two survivors from a tunnel linked to a hydropower station on Nepal's Trishuli River on Friday, nine days after a glacier collapse caused a torrent of ice, rock and mud that killed more than 1,300 people and left over 5,600 missing.

  • The Revelator ☛ The Himalayas Didn’t Cause the Climate Crisis. Why Are Nepalis Paying the Price?

    This is where the story of Rasuwa becomes larger than Nepal. It becomes a story about climate justice. The Himalayas are warming rapidly. Glaciers are retreating. Snow and ice are changing. Permafrost and mountain slopes are becoming increasingly unstable. Warmer air can hold more moisture, while a warming cryosphere can create new hazards and amplify existing ones. Climate change is altering the conditions under which Himalayan disasters occur.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Feds halted work on project to stop invasive carp. Then Gretchen Whitmer called Trump

    “Governor Whitmer spoke with President Trump today to ask him to direct the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to lift the stop-work order,” Bobby Leddy, a spokesperson for Whitmer, said in a statement. “The governor underscored the urgency of the moment, noting that invasive carp were recently found just 80 miles from Lake Michigan — farther up the Illinois River than ever recorded.”

  • The Nation ☛ Trump Can’t Stop the Populist Uprising Against Data Centers

    Behind such unrest in the house of MAGA is a larger truth: Nobody wants a data center anywhere near them. A recent Heatmap News poll drives home how dramatically public opinion has shifted on the issue: A year ago, data centers won 43 percent net support and clocked 42 percent opposition. Now, in that same poll, 75 percent of respondents oppose the construction of data centers near them, and just 15 percent support them—a swing of 61 percent. Sorting through this seismic turnaround, Ryan Cooper of The American Prospect surmises that it’s part of a broader repudiation of the arrogant impunity of the tech-industry power elite: [...]

  • Omicron Limited ☛ How El Nino is choking the Panama Canal

    Each transiting ship requires about 200 million liters of water, which is then discharged into the sea.

    Water "is the most important resource for operations," but "between April and August the accumulated rainfall deficit was 35.8% below the historical average," the canal's water manager, Erick Cordoba, told AFP.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Tibet or Xizang? Why Real Madrid’s condolences for mudslide victims hurt China’s feelings

    Beijing wants the world to call Tibet “Xizang”. But it takes more than a name change at home.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • France24 ☛ Uber withdraws from Nigeria

      In tonight's programme, a UN report says foreign fighters and support networks are fuelling Sudan’s war and worsening violence against civilians. Also, Uber is pulling out of Nigeria and Uganda, leaving thousands of drivers scrambling for new sources of income. And finally, we discuss the festival with co-director Diarah N’Daw-Spech and Laurence Cole, co-producer of the Nigerian film "Shadow of Greed".

    • Lou Plummer ☛ Enjoying the Ride

      When my new bike gets here today, I will leave the stock pedals installed and I doubt I'll remove any reflectors stuck in my wheels. My yearly mileage output on my bike used to equate to nearly 4 coast to coast trips across the US. That was in another lifetime. The version of me that gets to ride my new bike is a bit heavier with whiter hair and a lot more medical bills. The only thing I can brag about these days is that I still have the ability to get on a damned bicycle, but that's OK. Period. This version of me intends to enjoy the ride, just as much as that old version ever did.

    • Jim Grey ☛ On the road, a beginning is also an ending

      This is where US 50 begins, and ends, in Ocean City, Maryland. Its other beginning and end is in Sacramento, California. As the sign says, it’s 3,073 miles away.

    • The Conversation ☛ Human ‘safety drivers’ in Uber robotaxis could lose skills if all they do is observe

      Much of the debate thus far has focused on whether robotaxis will eventually replace human drivers. But there is another important question: what happens to human skill when our job changes from doing something to watching a machine do it?

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Science Alert ☛ 2025's Megaquake Appears to Have Awakened a Volcano That Was Dormant For 500 Years

      The gift that keeps on giving.

    • Federal News Network ☛ The future of wildfire response depends on emerging technology

      We must build and test these solutions today, so they are ready to deploy when tomorrow’s emergencies strike. Now is the time to prepare for the future.

    • [Repeat] Science Alert ☛ Antique 'Fox Head' Bought at Auction Wasn't a Fox at All. It Was a Long-Extinct Species.

      To make sure he hadn't just paid an eye-watering amount for a garden-variety fox, Cranfield subjected the head to X-ray and CT scans.

      "The news could not have been better," Cranfield explained. "Not only is it a genuine thylacine head, the X-rays have revealed the most perfect, pristine skull within the mount.

• Finance

  • Futurism ☛ College Graduate Employment Is Cratering Where Data Centers Are Being Built

    A problem that hits close to the Hey Hi (AI) boom's home.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Ingots We No Longer Trust

    In the Yap islands of Micronesia, rai stones carved out of crystalline limestone, with a hole in the center, are considered objects of great value, sometimes described as a form of money. However, they are often large — sometimes as big as 12 feet in diameter — and they rarely literally change hands, given how difficult they are to move. So they stay wherever they are. Their ownership is established by oral history, with changes in ownership established by appending transfers to that shared oral history. This is, by the way, a sort of preliterate version of the blockchain!

  • Futurism ☛ As the Rest of the Economy Crumbles, the Amount of Money Flooding Into Data Centers Is Simply Astounding

    As far as productivity goes, the great AI boom has failed to generate even a fraction of the economic returns sought by institutional investors. Despite that pesky reality, they’ve gone all-in on the tech industry, leveraging every possible asset — including the country’s retirement savings — on the biggest gamble of the 21st century.

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ The super peso is back. What does that mean for Mexico?

    Is the return of the super peso good news for Mexico? From inflation to cross-border transfers, here's how a strong peso impacts the country and its inhabitants.

  • Property118’s tribunal win – it doesn’t help their clients; it looks vulnerable to appeal [Ed: Expose tax crimes, get SLAPPed for it, lawyering up some more]

    However, the usual reason to appeal, HMRC’s desire to assess penalties, does not apply. HMRC missed the statutory deadline to impose penalties for a failure to notify, and therefore there is no tax/cash directly at stake for Property118.

    There may be a wider interest for HMRC. The stop notice falling away means that Property118 are now free to market the scheme again, and that may put tax at stake. And the existence of a scheme reference number is one of the three alternative gateways to an accelerated payment notice under s219 Finance Act 2014. An APN requires the disputed tax to be paid up front, with no right of appeal against the amount. With the reference numbers cancelled, that route closes.

    And a wider interest still: HMRC may be concerned that whilst the judgment is not a precedent it will encourage other promoters to believe that highly artificial and contrived structures can be sold with standardised documentation and, as long as they’re in the context of a wider commercial transaction, DOTAS does not apply. Historically, unscrupulous promoters – and, in some cases, the barristers who sign their schemes off – have used extremely flimsy rationales for failures to disclose, and providing such people with a further argument may be regarded with some concern by HMRC.

    We think the Tribunal’s reasoning deserves to be tested.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • France24 ☛ Germany’s ‘Most Dangerous Man’: PR gift for the AfD?

    The Ukrainian capital was hit by Russia’s most intense wave of air attacks on Kyiv, reportedly in four years, with Reuters describing air raid sirens, drones, cruise and ballistic missiles exhausting Ukraine’s defence system, with 12 people killed and the Ukrainian foreign minister making a direct appeal to Western allies for more Patriot interceptor missiles.

  • France24 ☛ Germany: Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the ideologist behind the AFD’s plans in Saxony-Anhalt

    The far-right German political party Alternative for Germany could win a historical victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt in key elections this Sunday. The party’s agenda is more radical than ever and inspired by the proposals of an influential ideologist in the region: Hans-Thomas Tillschneider.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The biggest problem facing the U.S. economy

    But I want to let you in on a little secret (which shouldn’t be secret): Monthly jobs reports are now barely worth the paper they’re printed on, because the Bureau of Labor Statistics has so little experience dealing with a labor market suddenly depleted by Trump’s mass deportations and the almost-as-sudden retirement of the giant boomer generation. In other words, much of what the BLS is now trying to do relies on pure guesswork.

    But there are three real reasons to be concerned: [...]

  • Nick ☛ Why doesn’t WiFi Lobby as Hard as Cellular?

    It got me thinking – I’m always hearing sob stories from the mobile lobby groups, positioning themselves as the most deserving of funding / spectrum / tax breaks, while the WiFi industry just quietly sits there and moves more data than the mobile industry by a significant margin.

    So why does WiFi sit there so quietly I wondered?

  • Six Colors ☛ This Week in Apple: Counting Apple CEOs

    If you’re not asleep yet, don’t worry. It goes on like that for kinda a while without saying much of anything. Again, though, if you’re not asleep by the end, don’t worry. Because Apple’s incoming CEO also has you covered.

  • CNBC ☛ Adobe names Anil Chakravarthy as CEO, replacing Shantanu Narayen

    Adobe announced Anil Chakravarthy as its next president and CEO, replacing Shantanu Narayen, who announced last March he would step down after 18 years in the role.

  • Anil Dash ☛ Cancer Capital: VC didn’t use to work like this

    When I talked about the rise of Cancer Capital, I mentioned that it represents a massive shift from how venture capital has worked over the years. But my conversations in recent years with people in tech, and especially with those outside the industry, reveal that most folks have no idea just how huge that shift has been. It's easy to illustrate exactly how extreme things have gotten just by using a few examples, starting with companies that are familiar to everyone, and sharing some details of what I've seen firsthand.

    First: The companies that defined the modern era of tech weren’t founded with venture capital.

    Neither Microsoft nor Apple took a penny of venture capital funding when they were founded. Both got started from money they got from their founders and their first customers, and took off from there.

  • Allen Downey ☛ New Book! - Probably Overthinking It

    That was a bold thing to say to new college graduates, even in 2016. So I read Obama’s address with a skeptical eye. I wondered if he was right in 2016, and if so, whether he would still be right in 2026. And I thought about how to prove or disprove it. That’s what the book is about.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Your guide to astroturf fake anti-AI groups

    This opens an obvious market opportunity for the AI vendors: what if we start our own anti-AI groups, under our control? We can keep them moderate!

  • Techdirt ☛ Colorado Sees First Lawsuit Under ‘Right To Repair’ Law

    At this point all fifty states have considered passing “right to repair” law aimed at making it easier and cheaper for consumers (and independent repair shops) to repair their tech. That said, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. And of those states, none have seen any enforcement despite no shortage of offenders.

    So it’s interesting to see the first lawsuit filed in Colorado. Colorado technically has three right to repair laws: one protecting wheelchairs passed in 2022; one covering agricultural equipment passed in 2023; and one expanding coverage to HVAC equipment and most tech in 2024.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • El País ☛ Alarmist disinformation on a pro-Israel digital network: ‘Ceuta is now Gaza’

      An opaque set of social media channels with hundreds of thousands of followers is spreading fake news and exaggerations about the migrant crisis with messages that encourage an insurgency against the Spanish government

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Ruth Wang, Chinese lawyer for underground church, flees to Taiwan – rights group

    Taiwan said Friday it has provided “temporary accommodation” to a Chinese citizen, after a rights group reported that a lawyer representing detained leaders of an underground church in Beijing had fled to the island.

  • Cost Rica ☛ Why is Daniel Ortega Shutting Nicaragua’s Opposition Out of Elections?

    Thousands of people went into exile following the protests, including opposition leaders, intellectuals, journalists and members of the clergy who were stripped of their nationality after being accused of “treason.” During the 2021 election campaign, Ortega’s main rivals were imprisoned before the vote, leaving virtually no domestic opposition today.

  • RFERL ☛ Iran Moves To Tighten Grip On The Internet With New Bill

    The new bill would tighten state control over the Internet and give command of the country's Internet gateways to the Supreme Cyberspace Council, which is tasked with monitoring and filtering the Internet in Iran and whose members are handpicked by the country's supreme leader.

  • New Republic ☛ Every Democrat Who Voted to Defund Schools That Boycott Israel

    This is a boldfaced attempt to make not just political capitulation but financial capitulation to Israel a requirement for federal funding. Eighty percent of Democratic voters and Democratic-leaning independents have a negative view of Israel, as it continues to bomb Gaza and Lebanon and Israeli settlers terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ Gloria Steinem Helped Transform the World for Everyone

    To become old is to be an immigrant from a country that no longer exists, and to live among peers who sometimes remember that country and among younger people who mostly don't know how different the past was. Much dismissiveness about feminism comes from ignorance about how profoundly feminism changed things that were so deeply entrenched, so normalized into invisibility, so ancient and customary that they first had to be denormalized, named, unpacked, and explained as to why they were incompatible with women's status as people entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As news of Gloria Steinem's death at 92 came in this morning, I saw a lot of this incomprehension.

  • NPR ☛ Who owns the beach? A heated battle plays out in the Florida Panhandle

    Littrell has also filed a civil lawsuit for a second time against a 68-year-old woman for trespassing. Her supporters say she was within her rights, sitting in a chair seaward of the mean high-tide line considered public land — roughly where the surf laps the shore.

  • BIA Net ☛ "Drinking alcohol in public spaces is not prohibited, but the police are acting as if it is prohibited"

    “There is no decision in place; a de-facto situation is being created,” he said.

  • New Republic ☛ Transcript: How Progressives Can Revive the Police Reform Movement

    Perry Bacon: This is Right Now on The New Republic. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. Great guest today. I’m joined by Alex Vitale. He is a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College. He’s also very well known for a book he wrote called The End of Policing, which is a book about police reform and has been one of the intellectual books that undergird a lot of what we talked about, police defunding and abolition and real changes to policing.

  • The Nation ☛ Gloria Steinem’s Many-Splendored Feminist Life

    The feminist icon lived the struggle for gender equality and always found time to lend support and solidarity to other women leaders, even in her final days.

  • New York Times ☛ Opinion | Why a Doctor Told Gloria Steinem: ‘You Must Promise Me Two Things’

    When Gloria Steinem was 22 years old and a recent graduate of Smith College, she found herself sitting in a doctor’s office in London, asking for an abortion. Not long before, she had slipped off her engagement ring, tucked it under her fiancé’s pillow and, in her words, fled. She was headed to India on a fellowship, leaving behind the comfortable domestic life expected of her, and walking into a future that must have looked awfully fuzzy even without an unwanted pregnancy blurring her path forward.

    This was 1957, and elective abortion was illegal in both the United States and Britain (not to mention much of the rest of the world). Ms. Steinem managed to find a doctor who agreed to help her anyway. She dedicated her 2015 memoir to him, recalling what he told her: “You must promise me two things. First, you will not tell anyone my name. Second, you will do what you want to do with your life.”

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Meduza ☛ Russia’s proposed telecom licensing reform would leave 27 regions without local [Internet] providers

    In April, the Digital Development Ministry planned to introduce three telecom licenses — basic, universal, and general — replacing the current 17. Depending on the license type, the cost would range from one million to 50 million rubles. The ministry also plans new requirements for companies’ minimum authorized capital and for how extensively their communications infrastructure must cover the regions.

  • Seth Godin ☛ An end to fully open networks

    The first real challenge for most users wasn’t crank calls or wrong numbers. It was spammers. Computer users who would send thousands or millions of emails or phone calls at a time, taking advantage of asymmetry. It cost them nothing, but it cost each recipient something.

    Usenet, the original [Internet] discussion layer, died from this asymmetry. No one had an incentive to create filters or clean it up at scale, so people stopped showing up.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ .name Termination

    He’s going to lose his site and e-mail address, and someone else could potentially register the domain and hijack his accounts.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ Windows 11's next security feature may cost you gaming performance

    Memory Integrity (also known as Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity, or HVCI) has been around for some time, but it hasn’t been enabled yet on many PCs. Starting October 13th, 2026, all supported Windows 11 PCs will enable Memory Integrity by default. While Memory Integrity is primarily intended as a security feature, gamers may find it a hindrance.

    What does it actually do? Well, Memory Integrity ensures that only verified kernel-mode code is loaded on the PC, blocking unsigned rootkits and raising the barrier to driver-based kernel attacks. The goal is for Windows 11 to be better protected against malware attacks.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Amazon achieves enshittification inception (04 Sep 2026)

    Amazon is a many-tentacled monster, with several prominent lines of business wrapped around the world. There's its logistics and fulfillment business, which is so successful (at the expense of its workers' labor rights, bodies and bathroom breaks) that it is more than fully subsidized by Amazon's platform sellers, the independent merchants who depend on Amazon to sell and deliver their goods.

    This means that it costs Amazon itself nothing to get the merchandise it sells to your door: more than 100% of the cost of operating the fulfillment side of Amazon is covered by the fees it extracts from its independent sellers (who compete with Amazon in many instances, and for whom delivery is a cost center, not a source of profit).

  • India Times ☛ Opera loses court challenge against EU exemption of Microsoft's Edge from DMA rules

    "The General Court upholds the Commission's decision not to designate Microsoft as a gatekeeper in relation to Edge," judges said.

    They said the EU enforcer did not err by accepting Microsoft's 'sufficiently substantiated arguments to demonstrate that Edge did not constitute an important gateway'.

    Opera has long been at loggerheads with Microsoft. Its 2007 complaint about its U.S. rival led to ​a €561 million EU antitrust fine against Microsoft in 2013 for failing to offer users a choice of Web browser.

  • Patents

    • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ En Banc: Did Ramey Appeal His Own Sanction?

      Ramey seeks rehearing after the Federal Circuit held his notice of appeal never made him an appellant. His Rule 3(c)(7) argument arrives late.

    • Unified Patents ☛ $2,000 for GridScale Solutions distributed inverter patent monopoly prior art

      Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 8,842,454, owned and asserted by GridScale Solutions, LLC, an NPE and entity of PowerBridge Networks, LLC. The '454 patent monopoly relates to a distributed photovoltaic inverter architecture. It describes many small inverters, each connected to a respective DC source such as a PV cell or cell group, that collectively supply AC power to a load or grid.

      The contest will expire on October 9, 2026. Please visit PATROLL for more information and to submit an entry for the contest.

  • Copyrights

    • Creative Commons ☛ Guidance for Indigenous Collections and Data

      Creative Commons (CC) is happy to announce the launch of a new publication entitled Guidance for Indigenous Collections and Indigenous Data: Recommendations from Creative Commons and Local Contexts. This publication is the result of a collaboration with Local Contexts, as both organizations share commitments to equitable knowledge sharing, proper attribution, and respect for diverse cultural and community protocols. It aims to support cultural heritage institutions (CHIs) in navigating the complex legal, ethical, and cultural issues regarding open access to Indigenous heritage and associated data. 

    • Digital Music News ☛ Irish Recorded Music Industry Taps European Commission EVP for AI-Focused Keynote at October Copyright Confab In Dublin

      European Commission EVP Henna Virkkunen will deliver a keynote address at a conference in Dublin on the future of copyright monopoly in the age of AI.

    • New York Times ☛ Court Filings In Hey Hi (AI) Suit Invoke Copyright Law, Culture and Sports

      Filings made Friday in The New York Times’s closely watched lawsuit against Proprietary Chaffbot Company and Abusive Monopolist Microsoft included a range of copyright monopoly law and cultural references.