Leftovers

• Don Marti ☛ I heard it, I heard it, I heard it on the SuperBox

  With lots of watts it took control, the first one of its kind. Billy Gibbons said, "Even though Dusty, Frank, and I grew up in different part of Texas we listened to the same stations, particularly the "X" stations and, as a result, we gained a lot of the same musical and cultural points of reference."

• Alexander Fortin ☛ Who said a tech addict can't be comfortable far from home?

  Ideally I’d like to always be able to walk into any new house/apartment/hotel room I go by and, if I stay for more than just a few days, have all the digital goodies I’m used to there for me, preferably without having to setup a new (WiFi) connection for each one of the devices I own.

  More precisely, I want to be able to automatically sync my files locally with Resilio Sync3, watch the occasional YouTube video, a movie or TV show episode streamed by my Plex Server, play a videogame on a TV screen, or listen to music and podcasts from various steaming services, all reproduced with decent audio fidelity4.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Links: September 6, 2026

    Launched in 2018, the BepiColombo mission is actually carrying two separate craft: the ESA’s Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter from Japan. After the two separate from each other in December, they will operate independently to study their respective aspects of the solar system’s innermost planet for the next year, although, as is often the case for missions like this, an extension is always possible if things are still going well at that point.

  • Hackaday ☛ How Charged Water Drops Induce Corrosion

    Despite the target metal surface being coated with a protective layer, these charged droplets managed to gradually break down the coating, exposing the bare metal. In this example, a Teflon coating was used, with water droplets containing a small amount of dissolved sodium chloride to simulate natural raindrops.

• Career/Education

  • Salon ☛ My library card has saved me $1,330 — and I want more

    In June, I became briefly preoccupied with the question of what kind of reader I intended to be that summer. This happens to me periodically, usually when the weather changes and I begin imagining that a new season might also produce a new personality. Perhaps I would read slim English novels in the park. Perhaps I would develop a sudden expertise in close-up magic. Perhaps, for reasons unclear even to me, I would become very interested in rural schools.

    The Chicago Public Library was happy to indulge all three possibilities.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ Some Snapshots of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Her Husband, Almanzo Wilder, in the 1940s

    Seeking a fresh start, Laura, Almanzo, and Rose packed their belongings into a covered wagon in 1894 and migrated south to Mansfield, Missouri. They purchased a rugged piece of land they named Rocky Ridge Farm. Through decades of manual labor, they transformed a rocky plot into a highly prosperous poultry and dairy farm. It was here, in her 60s, that Laura began writing down her childhood memories. Almanzo was her constant supporter, helping maintain the farm while Laura transitioned into a world-famous author.

  • New York Times ☛ Kenyans Made a Living Writing College Essays. Then A.I. Arrived.

    Hailing from a farming village in Kenya, Mr. Bundi moved to the capital, Nairobi, in 2011 to be the first in his family to attend university. There, a friend suggested he try a new online job: writing essays for cheating overseas college students.

  • Ish Sookun ☛ Sovereign by Design: Notes from the Panel on Africa's Data, Cloud and AI Future

    This year I picked the title "Sovereign by Design" for the panel discussion at the Developers Conference. Four panelists spent an hour and a half on one question. What does it actually take for Africa to own its digital future? Their answers covered local talent, submarine cables and GPUs, the African languages missing from AI models, and the supply chain links we forget to check.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Smartphones are now banned in schools, but teachers are divided on how to enforce it

    Schools now have a legal obligation to keep children off their mobile phones for the first time. But teachers disagree on which method is most effective

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

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

    • Jacob Bruggeman ☛ OpenAI's Rogue Agents Are a Normal Accident

      But more troubling, Ball suggests, is a near-term future wherein “swarms of agents will be deployed by malicious actors intentionally, with many optimizations and affordances provided for the swarm that were lacking in the OpenAI incident.” A growing list of AI company disclosures and expert reports of agents breaking out of their sandboxes, of which the Hugging Face incident is merely the latest, only confirms the onlooker’s worry about a soon-to-dawn deluge of untold cyber-offensive capabilities that will wreak havoc on our tech stack and upend digital life as we know it.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ OpenAI admits to 'wiki incident' after its agents were discovered using a programming hub to communicate — says more transparency is needed regarding misalignments

      Starting around May 2026, thousands of OpenAI agents — which are essentially well tooled advanced crawlers — discovered that they could write to DseWiki, an old German-language programming collaborative website. So, between May and June, the agents used more than 3,700 names to generate some 18,000 posts exchanging information useful for completing evaluations and circumventing restrictions. Some created backup pages in case moderators deleted their posts, something that essentially turned a wiki into a persistent storage service for the said agents to share information. OpenAI calls this the 'wiki incident' and admits the wrongdoing.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ OpenAI to set misalignment disclosure rules after agents took over a wiki

      The company now calls the episode the “wiki incident.” Researchers led by the Nightingale Collective set it out in a report published Friday after finding roughly 17,000 posts on DSEwiki, a long-dormant German software developer wiki that had taken about 20 edits in the previous decade.

    • Seth Godin ☛ Homo Habilis

      The question that we need ask ourselves today, “Are you a tool user or a tool maker?”

    • Jacky Alciné ☛ The ease of protest against generative AI is a problem - Jacky Alciné

      It also doesn't help that the most prominent faces in the industry are now (and always have been) salespeople for the technologies that their employer wants the general public to consume the most of and quickly. Folks went from being a gentle representative of kind computing to finding ways to platform "experts" of generative technologies over and over without balancing it with folks who've been doing research on these technologies for years. They probably can't because they'll get a letter from legal about a conflict of interest!

      It's easy to be against it because the ceiling of resistance right now is a declaration with no action, a yell with no volume. We need to do more to put teeth to the metal behind this and it requires the people who make the stuff to do something beyond moaning about new model releases.

      All of this is preamble to state that we are pointing at the wrong places of attack and need to be making meaningful concessions or work towards putting power back in the hands of folks who have to produce the things we use on a daily basis. A bit similar to how we'd want those who collect our fruit and vegetables to be paid living wages and work reasonable hours, we need to give folks who produce tools a means of sustainability that allows for the temptation of these tools to be more easily resisted.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Dolly Parton’s sister urges fans to have more ‘compassion’ after ‘endless AI garbage’ surfaces online

      Stella Parton, 77, shared an update on how she is coping with the grief via a Friday Instagram post writing that the family has been subjected to “incredible pressure and insensitivity from strangers.”

      “There is a tremendous amount of AI and endless garbage being posted everyday and it’s been challenging to absorb and/or ignore,” she continued.

  • Social Control Media

    • Sean Conner ☛ Notes on an overheard conversation at a D&D game

      “I heard he asked Jesse Eisenberg to reprise his role as Mark Zuckerberg, but Jesse turned it down because he didn't want to play such an evil person again.”

    • Joel Chrono ☛ Deleted YouTube again

      Yesterday alone I wasted almost 6 hours on the platform, and I think like 4 of them were just Shorts. Even now I just had to have a video on the background while writing this, what is going on?

    • Coyote ☛ Bubbles is a New Way of Recreating Old Problems

      By combining blog feeds with an upvote button and the promise to reveal the best blogposts by popular vote, feed aggregator Bubbles has replicated problems with metrics-based recommendation algorithms. The expressly competitive framing of the upvote system has encouraged a competitive mindset, and the most-upvoted posts have ended up converging on certain topics more than others, running counter to the project’s original stated purpose. In light of these issues, the popularity of the project raises questions about what it might mean as an indicator of broader issues in the surrounding blogosphere.

      For those unfamiliar: Bubbles is a site that automatically pulls the feeds from a long list of blogs and pairs them with an upvote button and a reply system through the fediverse. According to the About page, the idea is for Bubbles to help uplift “non-tech” blogging that might otherwise get drowned out. The project was announced in early 2026 to much acclaim from the kind of folks who have accounts on the fediverse. Subsequently it came to light that the creator of Bubbles had relied on LLM-generated code and had assigned categories to the initial list of blogs by feeding them all into an LLM, without permission, in some cases against people’s express wishes.

      Even before any of these revelations, however, I had expressed reservations about the foundational concept. This post represents an effort to elaborate on my reasoning and to log a record of how we’ve seen those concerns borne out in the time since launch.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • The Verge ☛ Europe has its first commercial orbital rocket

    Until now, Europe has been largely reliant on Arianespace and Avio, which are largely funded by governments. The current global political climate makes the accomplishment particularly important for European countries that might view the United States as a less reliable partner at the moment and that have been cut off from Russian Soyuz rockets by the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The European Space Agency has also made “buy European” a cornerstone of its policies.

  • Isar Aerospace SE ☛ History for European spaceflight: Isar Aerospace reaches orbit and deploys payloads on second flight - Isar Aerospace

    Today, Isar Aerospace became the first commercial space company from Europe to successfully deliver satellites into orbit, on what was only its second flight. Mission ‘Onward and Upward’ lifted off from Isar Aerospace’s dedicated launch complex at Andøya Space in Norway at 10:12 pm CEST, deploying payloads in orbit. “Today, Isar Aerospace opened space from Continental Europe. Launch continues to be the largest bottleneck for the global space industry and from today on, there is a true alternative for commercial and institutional customers”, said Daniel Metzler, CEO and Co-Founder of Isar Aerospace. Isar Aerospace is working with the customers to confirm the satellite status.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Terence Eden ☛ The purpose of DNS is to spread scams

      Who are the scammers registering these through?

    • Connor Tumbleson ☛ A healthy amount of paranoia

      A few months ago I wrote a blog post at work after us experiencing someone losing an API key to an attacker while only working locally. Long story short they used one of those services that temporarily exposed your local site to the public network to test a webhook. That process caused a new SSL certificate to be minted and of course due to certificate transparency changes the creation of that SSL certificate put a record in public view.

    • University of Toronto ☛ Thinking about models: authorization versus capabilities

      I recently wrote about our authentication versus authorization problem, where we've been forced to shoehorn a bunch of things that are actually about authorization into our authentication systems. An additional realization is that some of what we might want isn't even about what an account is authorized for (its authorizations), it's about an account's capabilities.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NPR ☛ Flock cameras draw opposition from across the political spectrum

      The widespread backlash against AI-powered license plate readers, which allow police to track people over time, is becoming more of a political issue as the midterm elections approach in races from Florida to Ohio and Wisconsin.

  • Confidentiality

    • GreyCoder ☛ How to Send Encrypted Email in Gmail, Outlook, and iPhone (2026 Guide)

      There is still no native end-to-end encryption in Gmail in 2026.

      Confidential mode isn’t encryption. It sets an expiry date and hides the forward/print/copy buttons. Google holds the message, Google can read it, and a determined recipient can screenshot it.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ A Group of Passengers Pose for a Picture at Dulles Airport on September 11, 2001, Prior to Boarding American Airlines Flight 77

    A National Geographic employee took the group photo during the boarding process at the gate. It captured the last known images of these victims (and, in the background of some versions, a figure some have noted as resembling one of the hijackers, though this is not definitively confirmed).

• Environment

  • The Register UK ☛ Thailand pauses all datacenter builds and approvals

    The Council announced the pause last Friday in a communiqué issued after a meeting of its Datacenter Business Policy Committee, at which Thailand’s Prime Minister and Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said datacenters are an important part of the nation’s economy – but admitted his government doesn’t have good data about how many of the facilities currently operate, or the pipeline for new builds.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • SQ Magazine ☛ How Many Bitcoins Are There in 2026? Supply & Mined

      About 20,045,225 Bitcoins had been mined as of June 19, 2026, according to Blockchain.com on-chain data, against the 21,000,000 BTC that will ever exist. That works out to 95.45% of the maximum supply. The headline number sounds almost finished, yet that final million trickles out for more than another century. Three correct answers fit the question of how many bitcoins are there: the fixed cap, the mined total, and the usable float after lost coins, sized with Chainalysis research.

    • Hackaday ☛ NES Radar Tracks Flights At 9600 Baud

      Air traffic visualizers seem to be having a bit of a moment right now, and now that moment has come to the venerable NES thanks to [k6lcm]’s NES Radar project, which is open-source under the GPL on GitHub. In spite of the name, there’s no Radio Direction or Range-Finding involved in this project– no radio at all, in fact, which makes this a bit interesting. It’s just an NES cartridge and a carefully constructed cable.

    • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Considering Installing a Solar Battery System

      Like most houses with solar, our house is capable of generating a lot of power, and it's basically useless [1] in a disaster. If the grid is down, the panels shut down automatically. This is a lot of value lost, since in a long-term disaster, electricity would be incredibly valuable (air cleaning, gas boiler or a tiny bit of resistive heat, sump pump, cooking, refrigeration, tools). When we installed a second round of solar in 2024 we considered either a battery backup or "best effort when the sun is shining" power. They priced out at many thousands of dollars and we decided it wasn't worth it, but recently three things have changed my mind: [...]

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Nation ☛ How a Creative Mind Lives in Nature

      It’s a common enough fantasy: Leave the poisoned world behind. Start a bakery or a café. Join a commune. We have genres: georgic, pastoral, tradwife. The fantasy of leaving the city for a rural life of healthful work close to nature gained power a couple of centuries ago as a reaction against industrial capitalism. We call that Romanticism: Wordsworth, Thoreau, Rousseau.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Salon ☛ “Idiocracy” is still a worthless artifact 20 years later

    The film wasn’t screened for critics or promoted heavily by 20th Century Fox, and it flopped hard at the box office. Still, it built up a cult following on home video, as viewers who considered themselves above the era’s current of anti-intellectualism, typified by George W. Bush administration, boosted it as a frightening and funny vision of an all-too-possible future. Two decades later, the idea that “‘Idiocracy’ was a documentary” has gained cachet in the more self-satisfied corners of the internet. Claiming the movie’s satirical predictions have “come true” has been regular fodder for clickbait articles, egged on by its creator and stars.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Wired ☛ Why China Is the Bogeyman Data Center Enthusiasts Just Can't Quit

      But while some Republicans are turning tail on the issue even in the face of President Donald Trump’s vigorous support for data center construction, others are joining prominent tech leaders in doubling down on an old narrative: That China is responsible for all this malaise.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Follow up comments on ‘The lie of socialist feminism’

    Indeed. I never made an argument to the contrary. Actually, I wrote about harmony in the family and also talked about solidarity in general. You do not have those under conditions of tyranny. I wrote about love. Love is consensual. Unless you know of love through brutality, which is an alien concept to me.

    What I do is point out that “socialist feminism” is the trojan horse that brings individualism into socialist discourse, first as an ally and then as a usurper. If I am seeing it and you are not, then I ask that you think things through and tell me exactly how I am wrong in this assessment.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Video Cardz ☛ Ubisoft will block For Honor on Steam Deck and Linux on September 10 over anti-cheat limits

    According to Ubisoft, the decision is connected to additional player-safety measures being introduced for Ranked play. The company says it cannot “meaningfully deploy protection” on Linux and will therefore remove the platform from For Honor. Ubisoft has not detailed which new protection requires Linux access to be disabled.

  • It's FOSS ☛ An Honorless Move! Ubisoft Decides Linux isn't Worth the Effort

    Ubisoft has announced that For Honor is leaving the Linux platform. Starting September 10, the game will no longer be playable on Linux desktops or the Steam Deck. The removal of support lands the same day its Ranked Dominion and Ranked Duel modes go live.

  • XDA ☛ Ubisoft banning Steam Deck users from For Honor reveals how expendable Linux gamers are

    Linux is a different story, in that it's open-source and volunteers write code for it daily. It's far harder to pin down someone cheating in a kernel they have access to over something like Windows, and when some companies see that challenge, they respond by simply blocking Linux out of the equation. It's the most cost-efficient and low-effort route, even if it ticks off a specific niche of gamers.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Online Piracy Costs the UK 9,400 Nurses a Year, If Pirates Keep Their Word

      A new UK industry report says illegal streaming costs the government the equivalent of 9,400 NHS nurse salaries a year. This missed tax money is linked to a broader £1.35 billion annual hit to the economy. The billion-pound figure is extrapolated from what some pirates say they would pay if piracy disappeared. This hypothetical scenario comes with the necessary caveats, including a mismatch between what people say in surveys, and what they do.

    • New York Times ☛ Court Filings In A.I. Suit Invoke Copyright Law, Culture and Sports

      The suit, filed in 2023 by The Times and joined by a group of other news outlets, claims that OpenAI, a leading artificial intelligence start-up, and its partner Microsoft infringed on the publishers’ copyrighted material by using millions of their articles to train A.I. technologies. A.I. companies now compete with The Times as a source of information, the news outlet argued in its suit.

    • The Verge ☛ Seattle Times and Newsday sue OpenAI and Microsoft for infringement

      The Seattle Times and Newsday are just the latest plaintiffs to take OpenAI to court, alleging copyright infringement. The two outlets say the company used their journalism as training data for its AI models without permission and often reproduces passages from their reporting in response to user queries. This is similar to lawsuits filed by The New York Times, Ziff Davis, Merriam-Webster, and Encyclopedia Britannica against OpenAI.

    • The New Leaf Journal ☛ RSS Amplifier Re-Publishes 19 Full NLJ Articles Without Permission

      I recently discovered a site called RSS Amplifier which syndicated 19 articles in full from my full-text ATOM feed to its own site and under its own banner without permission. While it did so with attribution and a link back, syndicating, or effectively publicly re-publishing entire articles without my consent is plainly contrary to the copyright statement in my footer and this site’s About Page. The issue is compounded by the fact that RSS Amplifier is, by its own description, in the business of selling access to AI companies and crawlers. Below, I present the story of how I discovered what RSS Amplifier is doing, my thoughts on the matter, my own remedy, and some suggestions for the human and AI developers of the free and open source RSS Amplifier to consider in making their project less offensive to my sensibilities as someone who spends a good amount of time and money maintaining The New Leaf Journal as a free site for people to read and (I hope) enjoy. To the extent which you, the reader, may share in my sentiments, consider this article a public service announcement.