Leftovers

• Hardware

  • The Statesman ☛ Samsung India reportedly lays off executives amid cost-cutting, business restructuring [Ed: Slop is a bubble, not a boom]

    Samsung has reportedly laid off executives across its television and home appliance businesses in India as part of a cost-cutting and restructuring exercise. The move comes at a time when the company is dealing with higher operating costs, weaker consumer demand and changes to its organisational structure, according to multiple reports.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • The Scotsman ☛ Full list of flights cancelled from Glasgow and Edinburgh amid air traffic control chaos

    Nats, which provides air traffic control services to 15 UK airports, said in a statement it was “investigating a technical issue” causing disruption to some flight departures, and later said it had identified the problem was in its “flight processing system”.

  • Haaretz ☛ Google to Build New AI Chip in Israel, Tapping Hailo Talent - Tech News

    The tech giant is assembling a team led by former Hailo executive Guy Kaminitz to develop chips for robots and autonomous systems. It has also hired former Pliops CEO Ido Bukspan to lead data networking chip development

  • Search Engine Roundtable ☛ Google Regional Differences In Search Experience

    This was launched along the DMA changes to the search results page. Google wrote, "Google is evolving the search results page for certain types of queries to provide new opportunities for Vertical Search Services (VSS), Comparison Shopping Services (CSS), direct suppliers, and content providers."

    This breaks down the feature, region and queries with filters on the page.

  • Roy Tang ☛ Looking for iPad Reader App Recommendations

    Anyway, I'm looking for app recommendations for reading ebooks on my iPad.

    I have a large collection of ebooks (mostly epubs and PDFs) on my desktop PC (not a Mac) that I can access on my home network via a webserver. I would like to be able to access them via a ereader app that can open the site and download ebook files directly (instead of having to use the iPad's browser).

  • Matthew Brunelle ☛ Google Decided to Index My Blog Again

    No one, not even Google, knows when a site is indexed or not. Thankfully there are other search engines out there.

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

    • The Age AU ☛ Deepfakes, doxxing and death threats: Inside the epidemic of abuse against female MPs

      How bad is all this? Well, it’s not the UK, where two female MPs have been murdered in the past decade (the death by bludgeoning of Anne Widdecombe, a former UK and European MP, occurred only nine weeks ago). It’s not the US, where judicial appointments are political, and a female District Court judge’s son was killed in her own home after her address was published online. It’s not Zimbabwe, where an organisation helping women running for political office had more than a dozen of their alumni murdered in the last election cycle.

    • The Conversation ☛ Humanoid robots can sprint and box – but the real test is doing the laundry

      But if we really want to know whether humanoid robots are ready for everyday life, a far less glamorous challenge may tell us more: doing the laundry. Can a robot take a crumpled T-shirt from a laundry basket, work out which way round it is, fold it neatly and recover when the sleeve slips from its hand?

      No robot system can yet reliably handle the whole laundry process, from carrying a basket to the washing machine and sorting clothes for different programmes to taking them out, hanging them to dry, folding and ironing them. Even folding remains a challenge: robots need to cope with clothes of different shapes, sizes, materials and levels of creasing.

    • Science News ☛ Innocent-looking AI reasoning can make bad behavior harder to catch

      In experiments with AI agents, researchers found that chain-of-thought monitoring, in which one AI checks another’s work, became far less reliable when the monitored AI’s reasoning was the main clue that something was wrong, they report August 1 on arXiv.org. That exposes a weakness in the approach: If suspicious behavior is visible mainly in the reasoning, an innocent-looking chain of thought can make that behavior much harder to catch.

    • Security Week ☛ The Hidden Instructions That Can Hijack AI Agents

      A hidden prompt injection is embedded in an external document that an autonomous agent might consume during its operation. In this sense, they are similar to watering hole attacks that compromise a trusted third-party environment but are here targeting AI agents rather than human visitors.

    • PC World ☛ ChatGPT copied my writing style, but couldn't fool an AI detector

      I never use AI when it comes to the actual writing of my stories or emails. That’s my job, after all. And while you can ask ChatGPT to rewrite your writing, I’d urge you to make it critique you instead. But I wanted to see how close ChatGPT could get to copying my writing style, partly as a test but also out of curiosity. So I asked ChatGPT to look in my Google Drive for a recent story draft and write a follow-up proposal as me, and after a minute of poking around, it chose (fittingly) a piece I wrote about Astra, OpenAI’s latest and greatest model.

    • Dr Werner Vogels ☛ The oldest architecture in computing

      The oldest architecture in computing is still the best architecture in computing, and it always will be. Among the people building our next tools, the ones who spend the time thinking deeply about how the brain works will be the ones who make the biggest breakthroughs.

      Now, go build.

    • Shrivu Shankar ☛ I Asked 100 Agents to Hack Me

      This weekend I tasked ~100 self-hosted agents to try to hack into any of my online accounts. During the five hour experiment, they: [...]

    • Olaf Alders ☛ AI Scraping on the Cheap

      In a lot of cases, I can get by without an LLM for the actual data processing. In that case, the LLM just writes the custom scraper or API integration, and I can hand off the real work to a polite UserAgent. LLMs are not only slow, but they are expensive. Cutting them out of the loop whenever possible keeps costs down and reduces the time required to get the data.

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ GPT-6 Astra and What It Means for Cybersecurity

      I do not think panic is useful here, but I also do not think we should wave this away as another benchmark announcement. Astra shows what happens when a model stops behaving like a chatbot that knows security concepts and starts behaving more like an operator that can work through a security problem.

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ With Astra, OpenAI tries to reclaim the AI throne

      The company, however, still has a major hurdle to overcome: its financial performance. In the second quarter, OpenAI posted a record operating loss of $12.3 billion, while its main rival, by contrast, recorded a modest profit.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ EatingThe Seed Corn

      In fact both groups have decided to steal everything they can get their hands on to fund their retreat to bunkers on private islands protected by armed autonomous humanoid robots. Below the fold I look at yet another example of this trend.

      Stanford has an on-going research program tracking the impact of generative AI on US employment. Their first report was published in August 2025 entitled Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence, and a year later they published a an update whose abstract reads: [...]

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Memory prices climb 500% in 12 months, up to 10x the lowest ever tracked prices — 128GB of DDR5 now $3,399

      We're officially in dire straits. There's almost no way, if you're reading this site, that you aren't aware that memory prices have become entirely divorced from reality. Some are calling it the RAMpocalypse; I prefer "RAMageddon." Whatever you want to call it, though, the reality for PC builders right now is just grim. To put this in perspective, just take a look at our RAM price tracking post: [...]

    • TechCrunch ☛ RAM budget is broken. Here's how smart gamers are adapting

      Smaller capacity RAM sticks have roughly doubled in price over the past six months, but prices for high-capacity modules — the 64GB to 128GB sticks that power serious gaming builds — have tripled or quadrupled, and they were already scarce before the AI infrastructure boom got started. Memory fabrication capacity takes years and billions of dollars to expand, and there’s no quick fix on the horizon. Climbing RAM prices will likely be a feature of the market for quite some time.

    • Martin Alderson ☛ Have the frontier labs mixed up AI safety and security? - Martin Alderson

      The second thing that stood out to me from the reports was just how poor the sandboxing was. While we know the agents attacked Artifactory, their package management software from the Hugging Face report, the second set of agents discovered shows some incredibly lax sandboxing attempts.

  • Social Control Media

    • Techdirt ☛ Cool Cool Cool: Hegseth’s DoD Is Running A Secret Network Of Online Influencers

      And here it is: the Pentagon has “enlisted” some X.com influencers to thrust and parry on behalf of the Defense Department because it apparently can’t (lol) defend itself from online haters, much less wage the sort of war its unofficial name would suggest it can.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Grooming-related messages reach almost two-thirds of children

      "While some of the interactions may genuinely have involved other young people, children often cannot verify who is behind an account, highlighting concerns about adults posing as children to gain trust."

      Another key finding was that children who used common online safety measures, such as privacy settings, parental guidance or age-appropriate platforms, were just as likely to report receiving grooming-related communication as those who did not.

    • Wired ☛ Meta Failed to Catch Hundreds of AI Child Abuse Ads. Some Included Images of Real Kids

      Instead of spotting a decline in the abusive ads in recent weeks, researchers say they have now discovered hundreds more of the disturbing ads containing graphic sexual scenes involving children—including some that were identical to those Meta recently removed. More than 250 additional ads containing CSAM have run across Meta’s social media platforms since the start of August, according to researchers at the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project who shared its findings with WIRED. Unlike the 53 ads TTP researchers initially discovered, they were able to identify images of real children in the new ads.

    • Terence Eden ☛ ActivityPub – Is it worth defending against replay attacks and message/signature time skew?

      Here's a problem that I've found with ActivityBot - my little ActivityPub server. Sometimes it receives messages which were originally sent months ago. Why does that happen and is it risky to accept and process them?

      My tl;dr is that it probably isn't worth worrying about. But I'd love someone to tell me why I'm wrong.

      Here's my thinking: [...]

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Ban infinite scrolling

      The reason social media companies don’t do this currently is obvious: people would always choose seeing what their friends post, not what an algorithm wants to throw at them. Consent is something the Valley has wilfully misunderstood for a long time, because we can’t let it get in the way of line going up. I can’t stop thinking about someone’s comment recently that algorithmic feeds are this generation’s leaded petrol.

      Still though, while I think the intentions here are good, it’s also overcomplicating the issue. What we need to do is ban infinite scrolling.

    • Joel Chrono ☛ Less YouTube, Bandcamp Friday, Silksong returns - W36

      🎙️ Thankfully, no YouTube means I have returned to a few podcasts to have in the background (or while walking) this week! Including Revolutions and The Rest is History.

    • Jason Becker ☛ Our world was built for information scarcity

      I'm only partly into There is no Antimemetics Division, but it feels quite apt to the moment. I am reminded of how corrosive certain memetic ideas are. They're abundant in religion and political extremism on the left and the right. They're particularly abundant in purely online interaction spaces-- a sort of spooky parasocial action at a distance that follows lines of "taken to its furthest extent".

    • Education International ☛ New PISA report reveals decline in student performance amid chronic teacher shortage and shrinking attention spans

      “The results of PISA 2025 come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to the situation in education. Our students are growing up in a world constantly vying for their attention, a world full of distractions and lacking connection. While the global teacher shortage remains unaddressed, AI is being pushed as the magic solution when in fact excessive use results in children outsourcing their learning and their thinking to a bot. Now more than ever, students need teachers. We need to rethink education and strengthen its social core - the fundamental student-teacher relationship”, stated David Edwards, Education International General Secretary.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Federal News Network ☛ Navy moves sailors’ personnel records from aging data center to cloud

    “The cutover to the cloud means that a significant risk to the data has now been removed, as modern government cloud infrastructure enables continuous identity validation, encryption of sensitive information, and greater visibility across the enterprise, strengthening the Navy’s ability to protect, detect, and respond to and recover from cyber threats,” William Speaks, a spokesman for the Chief of Naval Personnel, told Federal News Network.

  • New Republic ☛ How Decades of Privatization Unleashed Trump’s Warmongering

    The heart of that project was a revolution in how the Pentagon managed money. In 1949, a commission appointed by President Harry Truman reported that “the most disturbing aspect” of the national security state was its “enormous cost.” Fixing how the military managed its budget, the commission said, could “make the difference between democracy and totalitarianism.” The technical details of financial accounting methods carried existential, world-historical stakes.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Ricky Mondello ☛ Ricky Mondello » Switching Password Managers in 2026

      A data transfer starting on an iPhone or iPad is genuinely a fantastic start, but I recommend thinking about switching password managers as a process. You can use the relatively rare and potentially disruptive event of switching password managers as a reason to clean house a bit. Back in September of 2024, I wrote a piece titled “Consider Slowing Down When Switching Password Managers” about this, but I’m going to summarize and update my advice in this post so you don’t have to go back and read that one.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Pervs Distraught as Meta Bricks Their Smart Glasses Remotely

      Meta didn’t provide hard numbers, but its vice president of wearables Alex Himel told Semafor that it estimated that less than one tenth of a percent of all glasses sold have been tampered with. Seven million of the glasses were sold in 2025, making that fraction of a percentage translate to up to, but probably less than, 7,000 individual units.

    • The Nation ☛ COINTELPRO Is Back

      It recently was revealed in official documents that shortly after federal agents killed Good and Pretti, instead of opening an investigation into those killings, the federal government opened sweeping surveillance operations against peaceful protesters. Adopting another part of the COINTELPRO playbook, Homeland Security opened operations that involved spying on in-person and online gatherings of what it labeled “violent opportunists and agitators”—members of labor unions, a climate change group, a socialist collective, a bicycle repair group. Massive surveillance of these groups took place in libraries, parks, churches, and other public places. A Homeland Security spy who sat in on a meeting of a progressive climate group noted in his security report, according to the Associated Press, that the group had discussed sit-ins, de-escalation tactics, and “having a police liaison and safety marshal present during events.” Hardly the plans of a group of terrorists.

    • Security Week ☛ Mathspace Data Breach Exposes Over 1 Million People

      The incident, it says, was discovered last week, roughly three weeks after hackers compromised its self-hosted Metabase instance using a known vulnerability.

    • New Republic ☛ Secret DHS Unit Pulling People Over Based on Their Financial Data

      The documents from that case are what led to 404 Media’s discovery. Olson was provided a DHS document explaining the rationale behind his traffic stop, written by Border Patrol Agent Matthew Phelps, who is assigned to the “Spokane Sector Border Patrol Targeting & Intelligence Division (TID)—Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team (PITT).”

    • 404 Media ☛ A Secretive DHS ‘Predictive Policing’ Unit is Analyzing Americans’ Financial Habits and Pulling Them Over

      404 Media is revealing the name of Border Patrol's predictive policing units, which analyze financial data and have local cops pull people over. The people are not suspected of any particular crime.

    • Bitdefender ☛ The US military just turned off ad tracking on its phones. Maybe you should too

      Every smartphone carries a mobile advertising ID - Apple calls its version the IDFA, and Google calls its the GAID. The ID is a string of characters tied to your smartphone that lets advertisers recognise you as you move between different apps. Most apps quietly share it with outside companies, from where it can end up in the hands of data brokers, who routinely buy and sell this kind of information

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Your TV is spying on you, and it's worse than you think.

      So that’s homes. But most offices have TVs installed somewhere, too. Consider that an installed smart TV could easily be snooping on network devices, content, and even video calls conducted over these screens. Some more sophisticated offices will have them set to a less privileged network or insist on them remaining offline; most will dutifully connect them up. The result is a live microphone and content recognition tech installed in newsrooms, universities, non-profits, and businesses around the country.

  • Confidentiality

    • Matthew McPherrin ☛ I’ve factored the RSA keys of a Certificate Authority…

      I’ve been thinking about the security of RSA lately. RSA’s cryptography relies on the difficulty of factoring a large semiprime number, but what “large” means is an interesting question. The Web PKI deprecated 1024-bit RSA over a decade ago, and while I don’t know of anyone factoring a key of that size, it’s within the realm of possibility for a government or other organization with a large number of computers. Just a few days ago, someone factored the 862-bit RSA-260 key from the RSA factoring challenge. That’s the largest factorization I’m aware of. Today, the world uses RSA of at least 2048 bits, but even that will be deprecated soon with the risk of quantum computers in the future.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Finland Completes Construction of Russian Border Fence

    The barbed wire fence spans Finland’s southeastern border with Russia and parts of its eastern flank. It features patrol roads, loudspeakers, night lighting and surveillance cameras.

  • RTL ☛ Heated debate: EU faces revolt over social media ban for children

    EU chief Ursula von der Leyen is set to outline how the 27-nation bloc plans to limit children's use of social media during a highly anticipated speech to the European Parliament next week.

    Von der Leyen is weighing up social media restrictions on children under 13 -- which an expert panel has recommended -- or under 15, which France wants.

  • Greece ☛ EU warns of a chilling new terror menace 25 years after 9/11

    A quarter of a century after the Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States, jihadist groups still pose a major threat to security in Europe, but a new menace has surfaced that is driven mostly by young people online and the authorities are worried.

  • Global South Media Network ☛ The Menace of Western Imperialism and the Memory of President Salvador Allende - Global South Media Network

    Today, 4 September 2026, marks the 56th anniversary of Salvador Guillermo Allende Gossens’ election as President of Chile in 1970.

    The 11th of this month will also mark the 53rd anniversary of the bloody, US-backed military coup that overthrew his democratically elected socialist government on 11 September 1973—one of the darkest moments in world history.

    Allende was removed through a military coup led by Chilean general and US puppet, Augusto Pinochet.

  • The Next Move ☛ AfD: Three Lessons for America From the German Far Right’s Victory

    Merkel dismissed concerns about the sudden influx of migrants with a now-infamous handwave, “Wir schaffen das”—“we can handle this.” Small wonder that the biggest loser in the Saxony-Anhalt elections was the Christian Democratic Union, the center-right party of Merkel and incumbent Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

  • Gannett ☛ Why 'the falling man' remains 9/11’s most challenging image

    USA TODAY estimated that at least 200 people jumped to their deaths from the upper floors, many pushed by intense smoke and heat, rather than flames. The majority jumped from the north tower.

  • Yle ☛ Fitburg defendants deny sabotage as second anchor-dragging trial begins

    According to prosecutors, the Fitburg damaged two telecommunications cables in Estonia's exclusive economic zone, with some of the damage also occurring in Finnish territorial waters.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Black Sabbath Cover Model Louisa Livingstone Discusses Her Own Music

    For half a century, the identity of the cloaked witchy woman staring out at metalheads on the cover sleeve of Black Sabbath‘s self-titled debut was a mystery. Then, in 2020, a Rolling Stone article revealed the model to be Louisa Livingstone, who’d also appeared on appeared on the covers and in art for Queen and British rock band.

• Environment

  • El País ☛ Declassified 9/11 papers show New York authorities hid air toxicity after the terrorist attacks

    As the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers approaches, New Yorkers are beginning to learn something many suspected but had no official confirmation of: the toxicity of the air they breathed after the devastating Al Qaeda attacks. Contrary to what authorities had previously said, the dust and toxins around Ground Zero could make people sick. The city’s current mayor, Democrat Zohran Mamdani, announced Tuesday the release of long-awaited documents that show those suspicions were well-founded.

  • Futurism ☛ Data Center Caught Watering Its Lavish Lawn While Human Neighbors Are on Year-Long Water Restriction

    In a now-viral video circulating on social media, an unidentified resident of Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhood filmed the massive lawn of a data center being sprayed with copious amounts of water.

    “You better believe that they are watering their entire green with so many sprinklers that it’s literally making a giant pond,” the woman says.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Backlash Against Data Centers

    “I don’t think people believe that they are going to partake in the wealth that comes from data centers in their community,” Tyrangiel continued. “Every community is going to make different choices, but what I’m sensing is that, particularly from Trump, the politics are out of line with where people are.”

  • PBS ☛ Washington Week with The Atlantic full episode, 9/4/26 | Washington Week with The Atlantic

    There’s not much that unites Americans these days, but loathing for data centers does. Anxiety about AI is behind some of the hate, but maybe the thing to worry about is that AI is about to go rogue and our government doesn’t have a plan for when it does. On a special edition of Washington Week, Jeffrey Goldberg sits down with The Atlantic's Josh Tyrangiel, author of “AI for Good."

  • Western Water ☛ Climate change Is altering groundwater

    Warming can change groundwater chemistry and mobilize contaminants.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Tyee ☛ In Alaska, Sitkana Brings Tidal Energy to the People

      Energy can be generated through those kinds of natural features that constrict water flow, said Rob Cavagnaro, a marine energy expert at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “Think bay entrances or narrow passages between islands, where water is squeezed through a gap,” he said.

    • The Revelator ☛ Al Gore Was Right

      From 2005 to 2020, U.S. electricity demand growth was essentially flat, according to the Energy Information Agency. During that same period, the U.S. population grew by more than 30 million people and economic growth was relatively steady (minus, of course, the dip of the Great Recession). Yet all those new people and all that additional economic activity required almost no new electricity. To some environmentalists, it seemed the United States had reached the long-sought goal of decoupling electricity consumption from economic activity.

      A primary cause of the plateau in electricity usage was the significant decline in residential electricity consumption. That decline was driven by several factors, including an across-the-board improvement in the efficiency of household appliances.

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ Art Deco Masterpiece: Amazing Photos of the 1937 Cord 812 Supercharged Phaeton

      With its low, sleek profile and advanced engineering, the 812 Phaeton remains a rare and highly prized symbol of 1930s automotive design and Art Deco elegance. These stunning photos capture the bold design and timeless sophistication of the rare 1937 Cord 812 Supercharged Phaeton, a true Art Deco classic.

    • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Allow Carriers on Planes

      This is based on their 1994 study, where the FAA compared child restraint options. They looked at "booster seats, forward facing carriers, aft facing carriers, a harness device, a belly belt, and passenger seat lap belts." The "carriers" here are car seats; they didn't test babywearing carriers. I don't think that's a major flaw in the study, however, since I do expect babywearing carriers would have performed poorly. [1] The real problem is that they didn't test the most common alternative, holding the baby in your lap. So "may put children in a potentially worse situation than the allowable alternatives" seems clearly wrong to me.

• Finance

  • MWL ☛ Sponsorship Prices Increase

    I’ll probably have to raise the prices of published books soon. That’s a week’s worth of work. I don’t want to do it, but that’s life in capitalism.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • US House Of Representatives ☛ Walkinshaw, Thompson Demand Elon Musk Testify Under Oath After GAO Finds DOGE [sic]-Driven DHS Savings Claims Vastly Overstated

    “Chairman Garbarino must immediately convene a public Homeland Security Committee hearing requiring DHS leadership such as the Deputy Secretary, Musk, and other senior DOGE [sic] staff to testify under oath about who approved these estimates, what the contract terminations cost taxpayers, and to what extent they damaged critical missions. GAO personnel who conducted the investigation should also participate to ensure we receive credible information about DOGE [sic]’s actions at DHS.

  • Salon ☛ Lonnie Bunch, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, announces retirement

    On Tuesday, the longtime secretary of the Smithsonian Institution announced his retirement at the end of the year. The move follows repeated clashes with the Trump administration over the direction of the institution, which encompasses numerous museums, research centers, libraries, and the National Zoo. Lonnie G. Bunch III is the fourteenth secretary in 173 years of the institution, but also the first Black man and first historian to serve as head of the Smithsonian.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ Industry fights back: Comments flood FCC on foreign drone ban

    PS Docket No. 26-189 (Public Notice DA 26-758), the Federal Communications Commission’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau (PSHSB) and Office of Engineering and Technology (OET) proposes to prohibit the continued importation and marketing of previously authorized foreign-produced “military-grade” uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and critical components.

    According to the FCC, the goal of such a ban would be to “safeguard national security” by eliminating certain types of hardware from flying in American skies. But since asking for feedback, the docket has been inundated with nearly 3000 public comments from Americans representing all aspects of the drone ecosystem, ranging from photography small businesses to drone light show companies to major hardware manufacturers like DJI.

    The overarching theme of all the comments? The FCC’s definitions are dangerously broad, economically destructive and legally flawed. Here’s a more detailed breakdown of some of the common themes, including highlights from some of those comments: [...]

  • Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ Gigantism and Europe’s far-right transformation

    The radicalisation we are experiencing now is the natural evolution of the 2008+ financial crisis. We have been moving from a crisis of money to a crisis of values. This is because the financial crisis is the cumulative result of many smaller frailties of ethical character, which revolve around short-term thinking with its attendant greed.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ U.S. Finds A War It’s Willing to Declare

    The Department of Homeland Security has decided that the agency needs a new official seal. Where the ubiquitous American eagle faced the direction of the olive branches in its right talon, now the eagle will face the opposite direction — towards the arrows it clasps in its other talon.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • International Business Times ☛ Trump's 9/11 Story Questioned Again as First Responder Says He Never Saw Him at Ground Zero

      The controversy centres on the distinction between Trump's documented presence in Lower Manhattan after the attacks and his claims that he took part in the Ground Zero recovery operation.

      Political commentator Brian Krassenstein described his latest account as a 'blatant lie', while journalist Aaron Rupar wrote that 'Trump's 9/11 lies are getting more outlandish'. The criticism and questions directed at Trump's 9/11 account are not new.

    • Wired ☛ Plastics Companies Are Writing Lesson Plans. What Could Go Wrong?

      “It’s so clear that the purpose isn’t to make really clear, easy-to-use materials,” Johnson added. “The idea isn’t to teach,” but to get industry talking points into classrooms. The report documents plastics propaganda finding its way into schools since at least the 2000s. Between 2009 and 2011, for example, a plastics trade group lobbied the California Department of Education to add a section on “The Advantages of Shopping Bags” to the state’s high school textbooks. The PlastiVan initiative has been ongoing since 2011, and SPE claims it’s reached over 132,000 students in total.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Trump’s edited video falsely suggests King Charles walked away from fainting Asda worker on Truth Social

      However, the full footage showed Charles putting out his arm to try and catch the supermarket worker.

    • Times Media Limited ☛ Trump’s doctored video falsely suggests King ignored fainting worker

      The misleading montage casts Charles and other leaders as uncaring while presenting the US president paying tribute to police and military personnel

    • Newsweek ☛ Trump Truth Social Post Wrongly Suggests King Charles Ignored Fainting Man - Newsweek

      The edited video of Charles is from July 2020, when the then-Prince of Wales visited an Asda grocery store distribution center in Bristol, England, with the Duchess of Cornwall, now Queen Camilla. A longer version of the same clip shows Charles showing concern for the employee and standing by his side as others rush to help him.

    • The Independent UK ☛ Watch Trump’s bizarre edited Truth Social video of King Charles

      The full footage reveals that Charles actually attempted to catch the collapsing Asda worker and remained close by until security confirmed he was receiving medical attention.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Twin Sisters Reportedly Tortured Over January Protests; One Sentenced To Death, Other Gets 25 Years

    The sisters have been convicted of moharebeh, or "waging war against God," aiding and abetting moharebeh, destruction of public property amounting to moharebeh, assembly and collusion, and propaganda against the Islamic republic.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK Tiananmen vigil activists to be sentenced Friday for subversion

    The trio are former leaders of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, which used to organise annual Tiananmen vigils in Causeway Bay’s Victoria Park until they were banned in 2020 and 2021.

  • Techdirt ☛ Some Tech Companies Have Privately Pushed Back On ICE Subpoenas. They Should All Do More.

    As ICE engages in a pattern of illegal and chilling investigations, any resistance is welcome. But social media companies can do more. When companies receive these unlawful subpoenas, they should be clear with the public that they will not hand over the data unless a court compels them to do so. In addition, companies themselves can take the government to court to challenge these unlawful subpoenas on behalf of their users.

  • The Nation ☛ Angie Nixon Is Fighting for the Right to Read

    Florida has in recent years been ground zero in the battle over the freedom to read. And Angie Nixon has bravely stood on the right side of history. Long before she won a surprise victory in the Florida Democratic Senate primary on August 19—and, because of her progressive positions and membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, suddenly became a national figure—Nixon started a bookstore in her hometown of Jacksonville that puts banned books front and center on the shelves. In so doing, she offered a contemporary expression of what Frederick Douglass described as “a sublime faith in the great principles of justice and freedom” that has always animated the greatest of American activists and leaders. The story of her bookstore, Café Resistance, is one of courage and words-into-deeds action, and it gets to the heart of how Democrats should position themselves in the so-called culture wars that Republicans always gin up at election time. Instead of cowering, Democrats should take a cue from Nixon’s inspired efforts to embrace and celebrate historically marginalized and oppressed peoples.

  • Tim Bray ☛ Canceling Emily

    Meet Emily van Lidth de Jeude, an artist who lives on an island and has the most adorable chicken coop you’ll ever see. Those URLs start with emilyartist.ca now; until recently it was emilyvanartist.noblogs.org. But that site, there for many years, is down now, and not coming back up. Why? Well, her email address used to end with @autistici.org (it’s broken too now), and therein lies the story.

    It’s because the Trump administration declared that the “Autistici/Inventati” collective hosting Emily’s website and email was a terrorist organization, and blasted them off the Internet with legal nuclear weapons. Here is the A/I collective’s statement. A more compact journalist narrative is Als de Amerikaanse regering je tot terrorist heeft bestempeld: deze Italiaanse internetprovider kwam vorige week op de sanctielijst which is in Dutch but it machine-translates nicely. Emily’s own take, on her blog, is Canaries of Hope.

    It’s been professionally and personally devastating, vanishing Emily’s online history and nuking her email network.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Broken feet, ripped-out hair and now a death sentence: the fate of twin sisters jailed over Iran protests

    After four months of desperately seeking news from hospitals and state institutions, their mother, Marzieh Nourmohammadi, finally learned their fate. Taraneh and Romina Rahimi had been seized over their decision to join millions on the streets of Iranian cities during the January protests against the regime. The twins were unrecognisable by the time of their mother’s prison visit in May.

  • RFERL ☛ Iranian Twin Sisters Reportedly Tortured Over January Protests Now Face The Death Penalty

    Iranian twin sisters Taraneh and Romina Rahimi turned 20 behind bars this year, awaiting the outcome of a case that has drawn scrutiny over allegations of torture, forced confessions, and severe mistreatment of the defendants.

    The sisters are among 16 people tried in Isfahan, in central Iran, in connection with demonstrations in the city during mass nationwide protests in January.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Romina Rahimi Archives

    According to information obtained by HRANA, Taraneh Rahimi, Navid Elyasi, Abolfazl Dadgostar, Mehdi Mansouri, Ahmadreza Saeedi, Mehrdad Boveyri, Mohammadmehdi Asadi, Armin Gholami, Parsa Jafari, and Mehdi Jafari (Khosravi) were each sentenced to death and 11 years in prison. Romina Rahimi and Milad Boveyri were each sentenced to 36 years in prison, Hamed Mehralian to 26 years, and Setayesh Saedi, Sajjad Abedi, and Ali Boveyri to 16 years each.

    Accordingly, the prison sentences imposed on the 16 defendants in this case total 256 years. These verdicts were issued at the initial stage of proceedings.

  • Firstpost ☛ Taken, tortured, then sentenced to death: The grim fate of Iran’s twin sisters protesting against the regime

    The reports said no evidence of the sisters committing violence during the protests was presented, while the family said they had never previously taken part in protests.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Twin sisters jailed in Iran over anti-regime protests: Ripped-out hair, broken elbows, and a ‘rape threat’ | India News

    The twins, who joined the protests in Isfahan on January 8 and 9 this year, were dragged out of their home with bags over their heads by masked men. Neither the twins nor the family was given any explanation about why they were being taken.

    Nourmohammadi said, but when his aunt was finally informed about her daughters and was asked to come to the prison, it turned out to be heartbreaking for her to see her daughters.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Salon ☛ The rock critic who changed the way I listen to music

    Dave Marsh was born in Flint, Michigan, where his dad worked on the railroad and did not appreciate the length of his son’s hair or the music he listened to. He left home as soon as he could, and later dropped out of Wayne State University to help start CREEM, where he was a founding editor. He later went on to write for everybody: Rolling Stone, Musician, Billboard, Long Island’s Newsday, Boston’s The Real Paper, the aforementioned Addicted To Noise, the short-lived Record. This is not a complete list.

  • CPJ ☛ Taliban shut down Rah-e-Farda TV after coverage of crackdown on Shiite minority

    “The closure of Rah-e-Farda TV and detention of its new owner Salman Akhlaqi show the Taliban are determined to dismantle what remains of Afghanistan’s independent media,” said CPJ’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Representative Waliullah Rahmani. “What’s more, the Taliban seem intent on expanding their systematic attacks on news outlets serving the country’s Shiite Hazara community. Taliban authorities should release Akhlaqi without delay and allow Rah-e-Farda to resume broadcasting.”

    This is the second time this year that Taliban authorities have closed Rah-e-Farda TV, one of the last surviving broadcasters serving Afghanistan’s minority Shiite community under the group’s ultraconservative Sunni Islamist rule.

  • CPJ ☛ German journalist recounts 5-month detention in Syria, urges colleague’s release

    The arrest of Michelmann and Polad has become an early test of Syria’s commitment to press freedom under its transitional authorities. Although officials pledged to uphold freedom of the press after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government in 2024, journalists continue to face attacks, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, censorship, and legal restrictions.

  • 404 Media ☛ We Are Going to Be Okay: A Three Year Anniversary Events Recap

    It's an incredible feeling to look back at the last three years and be able to say that hope and belief was backed up, week after week and month after month, by your support. Every year, we host an event to say thank you for that support and to get off our computers and see you IRL (for old times' sake, here are the year one and year two recaps). This year, with your support, we were able to host two events: a live tapping of the podcast and an afterparty the next night.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • New York Times ☛ Eiffel Tower Workers Strike, Saying Women Were Excluded From Hindu Group’s Visit

    Women working at the landmark were asked to leave their stations and were replaced by male colleagues while a delegation from the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha group, known as BAPS, visited on Saturday, said Diane Davoine, a spokeswoman for the General Confederation of Labor, a union that represents workers at the tower.

  • Federal News Network ☛ Federal unions sue again to block USDA reorganization

    Federal unions are again suing to stop the Agriculture Department’s major reorganization, arguing that it will unlawfully force thousands of USDA employees to choose between relocating or losing their jobs.

    In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, a coalition of federal unions requested a preliminary injunction to halt the USDA’s reorganization plans. The plaintiffs contend that the reorganization underway violates the Administrative Procedure Act and is occurring without congressional approval.

  • California State University Northridge ☛ This Labor Day, AI regulation should take center stage

    Beginning in May 1894, a widespread labor movement known as the Pullman Strike spread across the nation in response to poor working conditions and wages at the Pullman Palace Car Company, resulting in widespread boycotts and rioting. The conflict led to the use of the National Guard to put down demonstrations. During this period, President Cleveland, in tandem with Congress, adopted Labor Day as a federal holiday, which has been viewed as a peaceful concession to the movement amid conflict.

    Much has changed since the days of the Pullman strike, yet we often find ourselves embroiled in the same tug-of-war between labor rights and corporate interests. In recent years, the conversation has been dominated by artificial intelligence, automation and how they are implemented across several fields of work.

  • Overpopulation ☛ A shrinking population might actually be a good thing

    Many articles warn about falling birth rates, stoking fears that a shrinking population will destroy the economy. This ignores how other factors influence economic growth. In an article first published by The Globe and Mail, Chris Gay explains how increased productivity gains can counteract the effects of a smaller working force, ultimately allowing the population to shrink while ensuring greater well-being.

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ Working less: decoupling self worth from paid labor (part 9)

    Economists love to talk about people as rational actors, but the market doesn’t allow this when it comes to work. Nikhil Suresh came to the realization that the inflexible deal of work meant it was no longer a good tradeoff:

    “The deal makes sense until I have enough money to comfortably avoid homelessness, then each dollar gets less and less valuable, but society only has a default template to buy most of us in five-day-a-week batches whether you like it or not.”

    The idea of “eight hours for work, eight for sleep, eight for leisure” is tidy, but that’s not what 40 hours works out to; depending on commute, people may be adding an hour or two a day just in transportation time. And many workers are salaried, exempt from overtime, so they’re actually working (far) more than 40 hours.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ Grief Is Not a Verdict: This Is Not Really an Essay About Gloria Steinem

    I met Steinem when I was in college, and I'll admit that it meant something to me then, as a developing feminist. But Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth also meant a great deal to me as a developing feminist, and given the turn Wolf ultimately took, let's just say that the admiration of my youth does not always hold.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • RIPE ☛ The Internet’s New Edge Builders

    In The Internet's New Builders I described how content and cloud platforms moved from buying international capacity to financing cables and operating private backbones. The same companies are now moving one layer closer to the user. Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and ByteDance increasingly build or control delivery infrastructure that once would have been bought mainly from independent CDN providers. Traditional CDNs still carry important traffic, but they no longer define the whole delivery architecture.

    In this article, I follow the shift from backbone to delivery edge, looking at how content and cloud platforms are taking on roles once associated mainly with traditional CDNs, what public measurements can and cannot show, and what Google and Meta deployments inside one access network reveal about the changing role of operators.

  • Victor Kropp ☛ .name termination

    As you may have noticed this very site is hosted on a third-level .name domain. So at first, I thought it was being suddenly discontinued. I’m happy, it’s not in the case.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Verge ☛ Sony isn’t phasing out discs quite as quickly as we thought

    Originally, it sounded like the division’s president said the Thalgau plant would produce 90 percent fewer discs in 2028 — but the reality is it will only produce 10 percent fewer discs in 2028, an unnamed Sony DADC spokesperson told Game journalist Brian Crecente.

    “To clarify and avoid any misleading information: in that statement Dietmar anticipated an overall product volume decline by 10 percent, not a decline down to 10 percent,” the spokesperson said.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Futurism ☛ Someone AI-Generated a Completely Fake Eminem Song and It's Going Viral on YouTube

        In a world dominated by cheaply-produced AI content, it’s never been easier to imitate your favorite artist. YouTube, for instance, has succumbed to a tidal wave of AI-generated music released under the names of real artists without their permission — and a baffling number of its unknowing users are blissfully unaware they’re being served a microwaved counterfeit.

  • Copyrights

    • Futurism ☛ Journalist Accuses Ohio's Main Newspaper of Slapping Her Name on an AI "Express Desk" Article Without Her Knowledge, While She Was on Honeymoon

      The article — a local news story informing readers that the law director of Ohio’s Cuyahoga County was stepping down — had nothing to do with her reporting, Durbin said, and she “did not write or review a word of it” before it was published.

      “Trying to understand how this story published with my byline last week while I was on my honeymoon. I did not write or review a word of it and it does not pull info from past reporting,” Durbin wrote. “Does Cleveland.com think they just own my name now?”

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Stray Kids Label Hits Music Distributor With DMCA Subpoena Over Bootleg Track

      Stray Kids is one of the biggest bands in today's music industry. Because of that massive reach, a solo track from member Han went from a YouTube exclusive to bootleg releases on Apple Music and TikTok in days. Label JYP Entertainment now wants to identify the bootlegger. Instead of subpoenaing the platforms, it targets music distributor Symphonic, asking for names, IP addresses, and bank details of the offender.