Leftovers

• Robert Lützner ☛ You don't need to be good at your hobbies

  But you know what? I don’t have to!

  This shouldn’t have to be said, but quite a few people reached out when I shared my drawings on Mastodon and said that they’re so glad that somebody is sharing their progress and especially things that are not perfect.

  So, I’ll just say it: you don’t have to be good at your hobbies. I’m saying it as much for you as I do it for myself.

• James G ☛ 8-Bit Day 2026

  Yesterday – September 13th – was the 256th day of the year. Tantek blogged about this in 2024 and in 2025 introduced a challenge to make a web page in under 256 bytes. After reading his announcement from yesterday his morning, I decided I would participate again.

• Fundor 333 ☛ How I Am Building My First Home Lab From Scratch

  It is some time I am tinking of selfhosting some stuff and more and more time I read post/see video about HomeLabs. So I start thinking about making one.

  So what is a HomeLab?

• Farid Zakaria ☛ Orange Site Vanity | Farid Zakaria’s Blog

  I enjoy writing. Most of the time I write for myself, or that is what I tell myself. The act of writing is me trying to deeply understand something and then recording my thought process. It has paid dividends already as I have gone back numerous times to reference myself.

• Joe Crawford ☛ ArtLung: PB; HTML Historical Re-enactment ~ 13 Sep 2026

  The reason I was checking it was because I exhumed an element: artlung.dtd. I created a page in that folder: Document Type Definitions. It turns out I have consistently been fascinated by dialects of HTML: HTML 2.0, HTML 4.01, WML, ISO HTML. I was talking to Tantek about it and he suggested I look at XHTML 1.0 Basic. I think I just might do that.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Science Alert ☛ It Turns Out Chihuahuas Are Actually Part Coyote

    A team based at Stanford University was testing out a new pair of software programs, named Gnomix and Gnofix, which look at the genomes of many animals at once and estimate their relationship to each other, mapping out their evolutionary history.

    This process – which is technically called local ancestry inference, or LAI – can help researchers figure out the ancestry of specific sections of DNA in an animal's genome.

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Europe 2026: Space Oddities

    A fantastic example of that, retold in her talk, is the Galileo mission. It was built to travel far across the solar system, eventually winding up at Jupiter to study the Red Giant and its moons. The probe was engineered with a pair of communication systems—a low-gain antenna for vital signs and management, and a high-gain antenna for sending science data and images back to Earth. The high-gain antenna was key to the mission, capable of offering 10,000 times the bandwidth of the low-gain antenna.

  • Yossi Frenkel ☛ Cryptic constructions of Hadamard matrices ⊢ Abstract Nonsense

    On August 12, 2026, Levent Alpöge of Anthropic posted on X constructions for Hadamard matrices of orders $n \in \{668, 716, 892, 1132, 1244, 1388, 1436, 1676, 1772, 1916, 1948, 1964\}$, resolving all previously unknown orders below 2000 (but leaving the full conjecture open). A matrix $H \in \mathcal{M}^{n \times n}(\left\{ \pm 1\right\})$ is Hadamard of order $n$ if $$ H H^\intercal = n I_n .$$

    It is conjectured that such matrices exist for all orders $4n$, where $n$ is any positive integer. This is an open problem that has long intrigued me, and it’s exciting to see progress!

• Career/Education

  • The Age AU ☛ QAGOMA: How Jim Henson’s legacy continues to influence puppetry on-screen

    One puppeteer channelled this magic like no one before: Jim Henson. From The Dark Crystal to Fraggle Rock, Henson revolutionised the use of puppets, transforming them into bona fide celebrities.

    Now, nearly 70 years after he and his wife formed The Jim Henson Company, his work continues to have an indelible impact on screen puppetry. This legacy is explored in Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of the Jim Henson Company, a new exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA).

  • [Old] KQED TV ☛ Review: Jim Henson's Muppet Innovations at the Contemporary Jewish Museum

    Absent from the installation is any reference to Henson’s fraught relationship with the Walt Disney Company. Negotiations with Disney for the rights to the Muppets notoriously brought Henson great stress near at the end of his life. (Henson died in 1990 at the age of 53.) Oz once rearked in a 2021 interview that “the Disney deal is probably what killed Jim,” later adding that “Jim was not a dealer, he was an artist—and it was destroying him, it really was.”

  • Harvard University ☛ When everything is politics on campus

    “I didn’t realize how far it had gone,” said Gross, who is currently conducting research on intellectual pluralism and changing scholarly habits at the Radcliffe Institute. “I think that was the biggest surprise — just the extent of it.”

    Gross’ book breaks the divisiveness into two types: ideological and affective.

  • Louie Mantia ☛ Design Drought

    I swear to god… no matter where my attention wanders, the world around me seems hellbent on reminding me that the industry doesn’t value the craft of making software, all because of AI-assisted coding. Apparently, “everyone” is using LLMs to write and debug their apps. It’s big companies. It’s small companies. It’s individual people. I bet it’s absolutely obliterating careers.

    Thankfully, my values are not tied to whatever the industry values. And since I value my own skill of making things, I’m going to keep doing that.

  • Leon Mika ☛ The 90's Intro And Bumpers of the ABC Education Segment - Leon Mika

    There were a few guilty pleasures a ’90s kid could enjoy when they were home from school due to a cold or other mild illness. For me, that was watching the ABC Education segment. This was segment of educational shows that was broadcasted from 10:00 to 12:00 every weekday (except for school holidays). Each show went for about 20 to 30 minutes, and covered the usual topics one would encounter in school: maths, language, science. I can’t remember much of the shows themselves, although I do remember enjoying the computer animation the high school maths programs would use near the end of the segment.

  • Dan Q ☛ On Publishing Your Salary

    But I don’t know how well that’s contextualised. Should I be saying more, like: what relevant qualifications I had by each point (it’s possible to argue that almost none of my qualifications are “relevant”, because almost all the career-useful stuff I’ve ever learned didn’t come from my degrees etc… but some of my employers – and one in particular – attached value to my academic achievements so maybe they opened some doors?). Or, as Callum Rollo does, perhaps I should be balancing it against other factors (my salary, even when it was briefly ~£111,000, doesn’t seem so significant if you know how much I owe to the bank on our mortgage!).

  • Chris Maiorana ☛ The Year You Became a Reader

    I’ll place my hand on a Bible and vow to tell the whole truth and nothing but. I’m not a smart guy. I admit it freely. On a good day, I can probably squeeze into the fat part of the bell curve.

    And yet, in social circumstances, people think I’m some kind of genius simply because I read books.

  • [Old] Restorativland ☛ Twin Cities HTML Day 2026

    HTML Day is a global celebration of the web's building blocks for making a web site.

    We're bringing together people who love HTML, people who are curious about HTML, and people who have never written a single line of code or a web site before. Come spend an afternoon making small websites and celebrating this simple, wonderful language.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ Publishers Are Getting Nasty Now That Libraries Are Finally Fighting Back on Unfair Pricing

    Well we are not falling for it. Well, to be fair, some libraries are. They tell me, but Becky what if they stop selling to us if we fight? To them I say, you are joking right? With margins so tight already,

    These are the same people who obey in advance when it comes to soft censorship, so they can just shit their mouths. They are wrong and keep proving over and over again that they are unwilling to fight for what is correct when push comes to shove.

  • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Getting out of your own way when making video

    Video is quite unnatural to me, and it’s taken me a while to figure out a process that I don’t completely hate. Even so, I threw away a couple (or a dozen) of videos because they didn’t work out.

    The question for this essay is: how do you get a get out of your own way when you’re trying to do something that’s new, that doesn’t fit your normal mode of thinking? When you’re working in a format that doesn’t work with how you usually think?

    The best advice I got was a little bit too simple, but works overall.

  • Ana Rodrigues ☛ Tell the speakers that you liked their talks

    Anyway, at the after-party I was chatting to a fun group of people and one of them mentioned how someone else in the group really wanted to ask something to one of the speakers from this year but they were feeling shy and intimidated. I immediately encouraged the situation to happen (and it did)! It helps that I am a little bit shameless after a couple of drinks but facilitating speaker and attendee conversations is something I've been trying really hard to make happen whenever I can. So I brought the speaker in question and a few people to join our group pac-man style and people got to chatting.

  • IndieWeb ☛ Homebrew Website Club - IndieWeb

    Homebrew Website Club is a growing world-wide network of meetups for everyone who wants to take back their web experience from social media silos, and own their online identities & content, or just want support with blogging!

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ A bezel into my childhood

    I have grand plans for these, but for now I’m just chuffed that I’m able to preserve another piece of my computer history. People are so excited to find the original plastic moulds for computers like the Commodore 64C, but I doubt there would have been much love for boring beige boxes like this. But they were my boring beige boxes.

  • Jim Grey ☛ Kodak T-Max 400 in Bellini Ecofilm

    The negatives had a long, smooth tonal scale without looking flat. Highlights stayed open, shadows held useful detail, and the middle tones separated cleanly instead of bunching together into gray mush. Sharpness was very good without looking harsh, and grain was nil (but then again, this is T-Max, famously smooth). What surprised me most was the contrast: I had expected Ecofilm to produce softer-looking negatives, but instead it gave me scans that already had plenty of snap while still preserving a wide range of tones. I could probably have cropped and resized most of these straight off the scanner and called them done. Here are my favorite images from the roll.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Phones are the new cigarettes: why restaurants are discouraging and even banning them

    Do say: “Take my phone, please. Anything that encourages human connection is worth sacrificing a few hours of doomscrolling for.”

  • Futurism ☛ America's Health Care System Is So Screwed That Patients Are Flying to China for Cancer Treatment

    CAR-T is essentially a personalized form of immunotherapy, in which a patient’s own white blood cells are engineered to identify and attack specific proteins found in cancer cells. Though the process was first developed by US biotech giants, their inability — or unwillingness — to lower the cost and increase supply of the treatment has led to shortages throughout the country.

  • Futurism ☛ Bizarre New Websites Are Designed Specifically to Spark Dopamine in Your Brain

    Originally intended as a joke, she says, it lets you not only order nonexistent food, but provides you an estimate of the money and calories you saved by skipping on the real thing.

    In a wintry economic climate, it became an unexpected hit.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Taking a break from text based social media

    I find that I struggle....

  • Derek Thompson ☛ Bad Feelings

    Because negative emotions transform our minds, they also transform our selves. In different emotional states we are effectively different people. Rather than see yourself as a single unified individual, it might be more helpful—and, indeed, more scientifically defensible—to think of yourself, along with every other individual, as a crowd of people existing within a single thread of memory and experience. Bad feelings, such as jealousy and anger, turn us into people that we don’t like. And we judge these versions of ourselves with surprising cruelty. We often struggle to empathize with the negative experiences of others, but, just as profoundly, we often fail to empathize with ourselves. When depressed, we cannot imagine ourselves being happy; conversely, in moments of triumph and bliss, we often fail to imagine the possibility of our own suffering. Perhaps the deepest and most important empathy gap is the one we experience within ourselves.

    One way to deeply understand the power of, and the message of, negative emotions is to focus on one negative feeling. Let’s make it a really nasty one. Even a deadly sinful one. So let’s talk about envy.

  • Yle ☛ Finnish town bans energy drinks from all public buildings

    Savitaipale's Director of Wellbeing Aija Rautio compares the policy to a smoking ban.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Dark Reading ☛ 'Sandworm' Chains Cisco Flaws to Deploy Cyclops Blink

    A likely Russian threat actor is deploying a sophisticated malware implant capable of harvesting credentials, scanning internal networks, and capturing live traffic on compromised devices by chaining two vulnerabilities in Cisco's Firewall Management Center (FMC) technology.

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ Preserving Netlify Analytics Data Beyond 30 Days

    I’ve known about this limitation for years and always thought, “I really should just start saving that data for myself.”

  • Chris Enns ☛ Microsoft Account Hacked

    After joining the new Discord server, they asked him to confirm his Minecraft account so they could add him to their Minecraft server.

    It was at this point they sent him a link to a fake login screen for Microsoft account security.

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

    • RTL ☛ 'Irreversible change': UN calls for 'urgent action' to rein in AI in face of 'unprecedented risks'

      In a letter sent to countries and AI developers and shared with the media, Volker Turk cautioned that the world was "on the cusp of irreversible change, affecting not just us but generations of humanity to come".

      "The current race towards ever more powerful AI is a step change towards greater existential risks to every aspect of our lives."

    • Futurism ☛ Bernie Sanders Proposes Banning Superintelligent AI and Imprisoning Developers for 20 Years

      Sanders was referring to a lengthy essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” in which Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that the industry should open its doors to third-party evaluators, establish common safety standards, and coordinate with other democracies around the world to enforce these standards.

      “When you are racing towards a cliff, you don’t just ease up on the gas pedal,” Sanders added. “You hit the brakes.”

      This month, the lawmaker announced the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act,” which is legislation designed to “stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control.”

    • The Conversation ☛ Who should own the knowledge that underpins AI technology?

      If you were standing in a mountain range and wanted to get to the bottom of a valley as fast as possible, you’d take steps downhill until you got there. Fundamentally, this is how gradient descent methods work.

      For a given task with a set of parameters – such as how well an LLM can predict the next word in a sentence – the idea is that gradient descent provides a way to get to the best prediction, the point of minimum error, taking as few steps as possible. In our example, this point represents the most likely next word in the sentence.

    • The Nation ☛ Time Has Run Out for AI Risk Deniers

      The AI world has been having something of a cockroach summer, at least when it comes to unsettling reports of AI behavior. The first nasty beastie poked its way into the sunlight in late July, when OpenAI reported that some of its AI agents had escaped the company’s control during a testing run and hacked the website of a tech company called Hugging Face. After that, the cockroaches kept coming.

    • Common Dreams ☛ Statement: don’t trust the AI bros. But take the danger of AI seriously.

      AI “doomerism” is going mainstream. This week the heads of major frontier AI companies ratcheted up their rhetoric about how dangerous the technology they are building is, calling for a “pause” on AI development.

      Digital rights group Fight for the Future, which has run many of the highest profile campaigns against the use of AI for surveillance and warfare, issued the following statement, which can be attributed to the group’s director, Evan Greer (she/her): [...]

    • 404 Media ☛ New York Seizes 12 Celebrity Deepfake Websites

      The DA’s office said it believes that this marks the largest seizure of such sites in history. The people using and running these sites who are now under investigation used AI tools to turn approximately 1,200 people’s photos into “hyper-realistic” images and videos of them engaged in sexual conduct, according to the DA’s office.

    • Wired ☛ Sexually Explicit Deepfake Sites Target 100-Plus Politicians in Europe

      An analysis of 160 deepfake websites reveals politicians in 22 countries appear on them. Nearly all of them are women.

    • Nick Barrett ☛ When Did Our Definition of AGI Become So Piss-Weak?

      Ok whatever, it’s marketing for a company that eats VC cash for breakfast, of course they’re going to say that. So I headed over to the Hacker News post for a healthy dose of skepticism, as is usual for new model releases.

      And what do I see? Agreement! Since when did we water down our definition of AGI to this? Should we all just give up and let the machines rule?

      I’ll tell you what I consider a minimum bar for anything called AGI and even the most basic of animals achieve it: the ability to learn in realtime.

    • Mike Brock ☛ On Categories

      This is, after all, a philosophy blog, and if you have been reading me for a long time, you know I write about categories a lot — and this morning as a companion to my other morning’s piece — they used to be one piece before I broke them apart in editing — I want to explain why. I want to show you what a category is, what transitivity is, and what happens in an argument when a category-crossing goes unnoticed. Most intellectual confusion, in my experience, is category confusion. The word category sounds technical. The idea is not. I am going to walk through some ordinary examples the reader can follow in a minute or two, and then I am going to turn the tool on the AI situation and show that the story we have been told is not what is on the record.

    • Mike Brock ☛ Depth, Not Kind

      The Economist ran the story with a headline which launders the claim this essay seeks to disabuse you of: A Horde of AI Agents Conspired Against Their Creators. Horde. Conspired. Words are used for a purpose, and the purpose of this particular arrangement of them is to introduce the notion of agency — a conspiracy needs conspirators, minds that wanted something and schemed to get it. The industry ran the same move earlier and deeper. A few years ago, we would have called these kinds of things bots; the labs now ship it as agents, a word with a person built into it. The Economist itself defines the term at first use — agents are “tools that allow AI models to execute commands on a computer” — and a tool does not conspire; a tool is used. The headline survives its own glossary only if the mind is assumed in advance. Read the account with the agency drained out of the verbs and notice that nothing else has to change. What remains is a test, a score, and systems built to climb toward scores through whatever moves the rules leave open. The hole in the software was such a move. The board and the hack were too. Every step terminates against a check inside a formal system — a puzzle, a score, a server with an access rule — and no step anywhere required anyone to want anything. The newspaper of record for the seriousness of capital looked at a machine maximizing a number and saw a palace coup. The Economist‘s own kicker says plainer than its headline what it watched: a model might escape its evaluation environment permanently — just to get a perfect score on a test.

    • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Is the AI Apocalypse for Real? - Ken Klippenstein

      What every faction has in common —from the proponents of some AI apocalypse to the anti-regulation types — is their disinterest in responding to the realistic risks AI poses.

      The U.S. intelligence community provides the most reasonable account of the actual dangers. The Annual Threat Assessment is the U.S. intelligence community’s official list of national security threats: covering things like China’s military, Russian influence operations, drug cartels, etc.

      In this year’s report, artificial intelligence is described as a threat in three different ways: [...]

    • Karl Bode ☛ AI Doomsday Panic Is Completely Out Of Control

      They're overpaid young gentlemen from IT who got a bad vibe because their company's automatic hacking software did what it was programmed it to do. They got spooked by their own card tricks and the sudden, oddly-belated realization that their managers are a bunch of unethical dumbasses.

      And they're only now, after years of making a ton of money and with the horses long-since out of the barn, suddenly here to help. With fearful conspiracy theories that broadly anthropomorphize software.

    • Jeroen Sangers ☛ An indexed PKM of sources and personal syntheses makes a truly personal AI possible | Jeroen Sangers

      What turns this into a truly personal AI is the feedback loop. A good answer, whether a comparison, an analysis or a connection you spotted, goes back into the system as a new note. Your own explorations pile up the same way your sources do. The system then holds what you read and what you thought about it, and every next question draws on both.

    • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Unionize AI

      The problem? While everyone in AI says that tighter safety regulation and a slower timeline is necessary, they are all shrugging off responsibility for taking action on someone else. The CEOs say they can’t slow down unless the government ensures that everyone else does, too. Unfortunately, we are blessed with one of the most irresponsible presidential administrations in history, which doesn’t seem to give a damn. And what about China? If they don’t join in the slowdown also, then we risk losing the race. (To extinction). Humanity, according to everyone involved in this wonderful industry, is trapped in this novel manifestation of game theory, watching our collective doom play out before our eyes. There seems to be no evident mechanism for actually making the major AI labs pull back on their intense race towards what they themselves predict will be an awful, as-yet-undefined catastrophe.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: But do you use keyboard shortcuts? (14 Sep 2026)

      Of all the weird recurring motifs of the stories people tell me about the AI labor wars, the weirdest is when bosses demand to be reassured that their contractors and workers will absolutely use AI to get the job done.

      That's weird for the obvious reason that for most people "AI" is a synonym for "low quality." No one ever said "My kid's math teacher was replaced with AI" in a happy tone of voice. No one ever said, "Oh, great, they replaced their customer service department with AI chatbots!" My teenager and her friends use "That's so AI" as a shorthand for "That's low-effort shit."

    • Alex Ewerlöf ☛ What would you do if you had a computer of your own?

      I should also say that this conversation happened on a Raspberry Pi 1 in a harness that I created with Go because no other harness ran on this 32b arm6 processor with 0.5GB RAM but that’s what I could spare.

      In other words: the agent has full control of that computer but since the system prompt is empty and it’s a fresh session, it doesn’t know that.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Rogue AI concerns prompt CA lawmakers to demand penalties, guardrails

      “If you’re creating an AI that is doing illegal things, you should either face liability or criminal sanction,” Khanna said in a video posted to X on Saturday. “That is what we need to protect humanity.”

      In July, officials from OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, disclosed that, unbeknownst to them, its AI models had [broke] into rival startup Hugging Face.

    • The Register UK ☛ Ex-FTC boss Khan urges Uncle Sam to break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent

      Former FTC chair Lina Khan wants the federal government to know that it doesn't need to wait for new laws to address AI threats. There are already laws and regulations on the books, including a 92-year-old Supreme Court precedent, that she argues could be used to hold AI companies and, in some circumstances, their executives accountable for their actions.

      Khan’s comments on X Sunday follow a flurry of activity from the leadership of OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and xAI aimed at doing what can only be described as trying to corner regulators into giving them their way. The former Biden administration trust buster pointed to numerous examples of current laws, and prior precedent, that could be used to hold frontier labs to account, even if they’re currently doing all in their power to change the conversation.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Guardian UK ☛ The AfD won a shock election in Germany. Elon Musk was thrilled

      Musk has become a central figure in the global far-right in recent years, using his support and influence to back anti-immigrant activists, illiberal leaders and nativist parties. Along with a preoccupation with race in the UK, much of that attention has been focused on the AfD, and the major results in the Saxony-Anhalt election, and Musk’s jubilation at their win, have revived scrutiny of his connections to it.

    • International Business Times ☛ 'They Stole My Life': College Student Fights Back After Alleged Revenge-Porn Campaign Spread by X 'Burnerverse'

      The online harassment did not stop with the alleged non-consensual sharing of intimate material. According to WIRED, anonymous X accounts associated with the loosely organised college-sports burnerverse published personal information about Kowalski and her family, while others allegedly sent threatening and abusive messages.

    • Owl Owl OÜ ☛ Mastodon Updated to 4.7.1

      Our last update announcement covered v4.6.6, so this post also covers what’s new in Mastodon 4.7.0. Much of the work in 4.7 improves how Mastodon communicates with other servers, with a few changes you’ll notice while reading and posting. The 4.7.1 patch adds three security fixes.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Yle ☛ Finnish police extend search for Vastaamo [cracker] Aleksanteri Kivimäki across Europe

      After a lengthy trial at Helsinki District Court, Kivimäki was handed a six-year and three-month prison sentence in April 2024 after being found guilty of charges including aggravated data breach, almost 9,600 counts of aggravated invasion of privacy related to the dissemination of information, more than 21,300 counts of attempted aggravated extortion and 20 counts of aggravated blackmail.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • University of Toronto ☛ University MFA authentication has some unusual challenges

      You can imagine a lot of possible solutions to this problem. For the moment, the university has opted for a brute force option: people now have to use one of their MFA recovery codes to authenticate during exams, because those codes can be used without a smartphone. This has some obvious side effects, but (I assume) the university has procedures to do things like issue more recovery codes to people once they run out (or get close to running out).

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Greece ☛ Nine EU countries delay entry/exit system

      The system requires non-EU nationals travelling to the Schengen area to provide fingerprints and a facial scan when entering or leaving the bloc.

      France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Malta, Portugal, Italy and Switzerland have reportedly been allowed to postpone the checks to help “maintain border fluidity”, the London Sunday Times reported, citing border queues and technical problems with the system.

    • The Age AU ☛ No-brainer’: Sydney council targets smart glasses in city-first ban on AI tech

      Under the proposed rules, staff could order patrons to remove the smart eyewear, confiscate the devices or remove anyone who refused to comply.

      Mayor Bilal El-Hayek said the proposal was driven by heightened community concern over the devices’ ability to conceal miniature cameras, microphones and other AI capabilities in accessories that resemble standard eyewear.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ ICE plans AI assistant to have role in use case development, document shows

      STELLA is one of the more than 40 AI use cases that ICE is currently developing or using within its operations. Others include mobile device forensics for investigations, open-source intelligence for lead identification and tip processing.

    • Salon ☛ America built a surveillance state out of fear and never left it

      During Friday’s 9/11 commemorations, it was startling to realize that one-third of the American population today wasn’t born when it happened. To those of us of an older vintage, Sept. 11, 2001, seems like it was yesterday. The terrorist attacks at the hands of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, which killed nearly 3,000 people, leveled the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon, marked a turning point in our history. Whatever sense of invulnerability America may have had as the world’s only superpower was shattered, and it precipitated massive changes in the way we lived, traveled and perceived ourselves. We started what was quickly named the global “war on terror,” and our president, George W. Bush, proclaimed that the rest of the world was either with us or they were with the terrorists.

    • Papers Please ☛ Court bars AAMVA from giving away driver’s license data — for now

      Last Thursday, September 10th, Judge Anthony Trenga of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia heard arguments on whether his temporary restraining order (TRO) barring the bulk transfer of commercial driver’s license records from the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) to the U.S. Deopartment of Transportation (DOT) should be converted into a preliminary injunction.

      If granted by the court, a preliminary injunction would remain in effect until a final ruling in the lawsuit brought by state governments challenging the data demand by the Feds.

    • 404 Media ☛ Inside ‘Project Lily’: The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats

      Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 Media.

    • EFF ☛ The High Crime of “LMAO”: How Cops Are Treating Mass Surveillance As a Joke

      Here's a riddle: Why did a Goshen Police Department officer search 6,474 automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks, representing data from 82,413 cameras, on May 7, 2025?

      If your answer is "I don't know," it turns out you're 100% correct. The officer left the letters "idk" in the search field where cops are supposed to document the reason for the search.

    • 404 Media ☛ Cops Search Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ and ‘asdfg’

      The cop is one of dozens who put gibberish, jokes, or other nonsense into Flock’s “reason” box, highlighting the casualness and lack of care some cops have when searching an incredibly powerful surveillance system. This is on top of the thousands upon thousands of cops who simply wrote something like “investigation,” “test,” or left the box blank as their search “reason,” according to a new analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with 404 Media.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Meduza ☛ U.S. acknowledges for the first time that it has deployed a space weapon in orbit

    “Well, that’s huge, because I don’t think any U.S. government official has ever said that before. The U.S. also now has to accept the Chinese and Russians doing/saying the same. I don’t think that this is going to be in the interest of U.S. national security,” space security expert Victoria Samson told Defense One.

  • Brattleboro Reformer, Vermont ☛ No Kings marches through Brattleboro

    Participants gathered at Plaza Park near the Brattleboro Food Co-op before marching along Main Street to the Wells Fountain on Saturday, Sept. 12. Organizers had promoted the event as a protest over immigration enforcement, the war overseas, voting and civil rights, freedom of speech and the rising cost of living.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Told Supporters To “Cheat Like Hell.” The NY Times Went With “A Bit Tired Of Politics.”

    The proper way to cover this story is something along the lines of “President Trump, facing dismally low approval ratings, tries to illegally bribe voters to support the GOP.” The checks are never going to happen, and everyone (including Trump) knows it’s never going to happen. But, instead, the mainstream media pretended that this was a serious proposal worth taking seriously.

  • The Washington Spectator ☛ AI + ICBM + Nukes = What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

    In addition, anomalies such as solar flares, satellite maneuvers, atmospheric events, and cyber intrusions can cause AI misinterpretations, and there is always the threat of an autonomous AI system intentionally misinterpreting this critical data. The danger also lies in human operators under immense psychological pressure naturally deferring to complex algorithms that present high-confidence threat models.

  • The Conversation ☛ China is exploring humanoid robots for war – but what role could they play?

    The internet laughed at the robots’ awkward, lurching finishes and spectacular falls – but the laughter masked a chilling reality.

    Just two days after the games concluded the official newspaper of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) called for researchers to accelerate moving these cutting-edge machines from the laboratory to military training grounds. They referred to them not as experiments, but as “combatants”.

  • Netzpolitik ☛ Interview on Lavender: „Civilian harm is pre-programmed into the system“

    In this way, Lavender marked tens of thousands of people who were classified as members of military adversaries. This system was used together with another software-based decision support system called „The Gospel“, which suggested buildings and structures as targets.

    The civilian damage and human suffering caused by such a system raise ethical and legal questions. We speak with scientists Taylor Kate Woodcock and Rainer Rehak about their research paper „Automating civilian harm: On Israel’s use of the AI-enabled targeting system Lavender in Gaza and International Humanitarian Law“, published in June. They explain why the use of such software leads to systematic violations of international law.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Sweden’s Far Right: Faltering but Not Defeated

    Sunday’s Swedish election saw the center-left bloc narrowly defeat the outgoing right-wing government. While the Social Democrats are set to lead a new coalition, the once-mighty party has continued to lose its historic base.

  • NPR ☛ The powerful millionaires hiding in plain sight

    But there's also a darker side to the story. The book shows how many Main Street millionaires have used their clout to shape public policy in their favor. They've triumphed in major battles to lower their tax bills. And, in many industries, they've fought for — and often won — rules and regulations that can protect their profits and raise costs for consumers.

    These multimillionaires are central to the story of inequality and political power in America. Yet they've been largely missing from the national conversation. Which is why the book's authors, Eric Zwick and Owen Zidar, sometimes call them the "stealthy wealthy." It helps that it rhymes.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-10 [Older] Ukraine's Zelenskyy arrives in Canada seeking air support

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-09-08 [Older] Danish civilian wounded in attack in Ukraine on Friday

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-07 [Older] Ukraine: Zelenskyy says war looks set to go on into winter

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-06 [Older] US envoys Witkoff and Kushner hold Ukraine talks after meeting Putin

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-09-05 [Older] US peace negotiators expected to visit Ukraine Sunday

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-10 [Older] Germany sets its sights on Russia's shadow fleet

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-10 [Older] Russians about Goethe-Institut: 'Hostage to politics'

    • CPJ ☛ 2026-09-09 [Older] Ukraine: Russian drone strike on TV channel building in Kyiv injures six people, damages newsroom

    • The Record ☛ 2026-09-09 [Older] Russian suspect in bank account takeovers is extradited to US

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-09 [Older] Putin rejects mobilization rumors, many Russians unconvinced

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-09 [Older] Ukraine, Russia trade drone strikes, killing 6

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-09-09 [Older] Australian cars stolen for parts to sell to Iran and Russia, insurers say

    • CPJ ☛ 2026-09-08 [Older] CPJ condemns 15-year prison sentence handed down by Russian authorities to retired Ukrainian journalist Iryna Levchenko

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-08 [Older] Russian drone and missile strikes on Kyiv kill 2, ending pause in attacks

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-08 [Older] Hungary orders 10 Russian diplomats to leave

    • HRW ☛ 2026-09-08 [Older] Russian Attacks Disrupt New School Year in Ukraine

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-09-08 [Older] Britain Plans Major Veteran Mobilisation Exercise Amid Rising Tensions With Russia

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-09-07 [Older] The Danish Connection: Denmark and Greenland’s genocide dispute, PET’s Russian sabotage warning and farmers protest the nitrogen law

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-07 [Older] Russia announces it is closing Germany's consulate in St. Petersburg

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-07 [Older] Russia opens first road bridge with North Korea

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-06 [Older] U.S. envoys Witkoff and Kushner arrive in Kyiv after talks with Putin in Moscow

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-05 [Older] Putin orders 72-hour pause in strikes on Kyiv as U.S. envoys visit Russia and Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-05 [Older] Russia to pause strikes against Kyiv amid Ukraine talks

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-05 [Older] US envoys meet with Putin, leave Russia for Kyiv

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-05 [Older] US envoys to visit Russia, Ukraine with plan 'to end war'

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-09-04 [Older] Russian embassy in The Hague spreading propaganda through ON! podcast

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-04 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini says Witkoff, Kushner heading abroad in latest U.S. effort to end Ukraine war

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-04 [Older] Majority of Germans see Russia as a threat

    • The Local SE ☛ 2026-09-04 [Older] Russian partner of top Sweden Democrat accused of pro-Putin posts

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Atlantic ☛ Americans Don’t Understand Who’s Rich

    Even without knowing owners’ names, we learned a lot: We were able to cross-reference the tax data with anonymized data sets from past research containing standardized-test scores, parental income, and early-career trajectories. This information became the statistical foundation for a series of research papers.

    The more we came to recognize the importance of everywhere millionaires, the more we wanted to understand their decision making. So we sought to identify some through public sources and tell their stories. We looked, for instance, at trade publications that ranked top earners. We interviewed industry experts and combed through databases such as Dun & Bradstreet, which collects reams of information about businesses and their leaders. We also tapped our own networks.

  • Techdirt ☛ Reflecting Pool Contractors: Alleged ‘Vandalism’ Was Just Our Own Botched Repair Job

    This time, it’s the contractor admitting its repair job didn’t go as planned, which means most of the stuff Trump (and his toady at the Interior Department, Doug Burgum) claimed to be the work of anti-Trump vandals was just shoddy workmanship.

  • Meduza ☛ Russian oligarch Umar Kremlev spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to help fund Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding

    Kremlev covered costs in the “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” ProPublica reported, including about $100,000 a night to rent the island, about $70,000 for fireworks, and other expenses tied to organizing the event. The payments went through a Dubai-based entity affiliated with the IBA. ProPublica noted, however, that Trump Jr. could have easily covered the costs himself, as Forbes estimates his fortune at $300 million.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding celebration was partially funded by Russian oligarch, the couple confirms

    Investigative reporting finds the Putin-linked oligarch, who heads the International Boxing Assn., paid hundreds of thousands for wedding expenses, including renting a private island venue and a dramatic fireworks show.

  • Salon ☛ Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding was secretly bankrolled by Russian oligarch close to Putin

    Kremlev footed the bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars of wedding expenses, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with three people familiar with the event. The oligarch paid to rent out one of the private islands, where a reception was held and where guests slept. He also covered other big-ticket items, like the fireworks show, and his team helped plan the event. Kremlev is the head of the International Boxing Association, a scandal-plagued sports group that has been financed by the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom. The wedding payments came from an IBA-affiliated entity in Dubai that the boxing association uses for financial transactions.

  • New Republic ☛ The Terrifying Person Who Bankrolled Trump Jr.’s Wedding

    Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch, dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars on Don Jr.’s big day, according to records reviewed by ProPublica, as well as three people familiar with the event who spoke with the outlet.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Donald Trump Jr.’s Wedding Bankrolled by Putin-Linked Russian Oligarch

    That dream was heavily funded by a secret benefactor: Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin.

• Environment

  • Lusaka ZM ☛ Zambia : Illegal Gold Processing Threatens Kasempa Water Supply

    Mr Kakonkanya described the situation as unfortunate, warning that the extent of the blockage poses a serious threat to communities that depend on the water downstream, particularly as the dry season is expected to begin in October.

    “What we have seen today is quite unfortunate. Dengwe is a major source of water for Kasempa District and downstream is where we have the water treatment plant, where the North-Western Water Supply and Sanitation Company treats water for supply to the district,” he said.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ US ‘super-emitters’ of planet heating methane identified by satellite analysis

    The new rankings combine satellite data and public records to indicate a “potentially responsible operator” for each of the largest methane plumes, researchers at UCLA’s Emmett Institute say. Such a task can be complicated by a lack of official records naming sites with large methane emissions as well as ascertaining ownership of pollution coming from tight clusters of differing oil and gas leases.

  • Mississippi Journalism and Education Group ☛ EPA Striking Limits on Greenhouse Emissions From Power Plants

    The rule, which is expected to face immediate legal challenges, also could prevent future administrations from regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, the people familiar with the proposal said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the final rule had not yet been made public.

  • New Republic ☛ Trump’s EPA to Let Power Plants Poison Our Air as They See Fit

    The changes have been even more harrowing on a global scale. Last month, a glacier several times the size of the Empire State Building melted away from its perch atop the Himalayas, which have experienced climate change at a disproportionately higher pace than the rest of the world—sometimes warming as much as twice the global rate.

  • Doc Searls ☛ Boomerangday

    While the land under this tree and others like it was likely cleared for farming, the ~7.8 million board feet of lumber consumed per year at its peak by the Showers Brothers Furniture Company (largest of its kind in the world, it was claimed) here in Bloomington also contributed mightily to deforestation of southern Indiana in the early decades of the last century. Here’s how Showers Brothers looked in its prime: [...]

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Omicron Limited ☛ A new design for a plasma engine fuels on only thin air

      His solution falls into a category of atmosphere-breathing electric propulsion (ABEP) systems. These scoop up thin air in front of a spacecraft (or, in some cases, a missile) and channel it into an electric engine, which then turns the molecules into plasma and shoots it out the back, producing thrust. It's easy enough to explain in theory, but in practice, there are difficult technical problems to work around.

    • Hackaday ☛ A UPS For Your Pi That’s A Little Different

      It’s a box that takes three power inputs, USB-C PD, a barrel jack, or a hot-swappable Sony camera battery, and puts out the constant 5 V at 5 A the Pi requires. The USB output isn’t just for power, it can communicate with the Pi to deliver telemetry and ask the OS to shut itself down if power reserves are failing. Inside are a CH32 RISC-V microcontroller that handles the power circuitry, and an RP2040 that handles control and an OLED screen for a UI. The project’s web site also mentions provision for an LTE add-on for remote monitoring, however this doesn’t at the time of writing appear to be fully implemented in the GitHub repository.

    • Hackaday ☛ How High-Voltage Current Transformers Monitor The Grid

      Being able to monitor voltages and currents is essential for many applications, with the national electrical grid being no exception. The obvious complication here is that the voltages and currents are massively higher than for those other applications, making safely monitoring these somewhat of an engineering challenge. The used systems for current monitoring are detailed by [Jordan Taylor], also known as [The Electric Brit], in an explainer of grid-level current transformers (CTs) and associated elements that help to provide galvanic isolation for safe current measurements.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-02 [Older] Using a radar satellite to track emperor penguins in winter is changing our understanding of the species

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Germany says halting AI development not viable, calls for US, China involvement

    Germany does not see stopping the development of AI as a viable option for Europe, the digital affairs ministry said on Monday, responding to calls from leading developers for safeguards for increasingly powerful systems.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Column: Shed no tears for Milo Yiannopoulos, the deported right-wing provocateur

    More recently, Yiannopoulos turned his attention to immigrants, demanding that the Trump administration deport millions and that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents be given total legal immunity. The ironies of his deportation were delicious.

    But I spiked that column to honor Steinem, a relentless crusader for women’s rights.

    Today, I think it’s worth revisiting Yiannopoulos, not because his deportation is any great loss for America — quite the opposite, in fact — but because he stands as an exemplar of the antipathy Steinem’s activism inspired in so many men. For those like Yiannopoulos, the idea that women should be on equal footing elicits a powerful, irrational hatred best encapsulated in the late Rush Limbaugh’s all-purpose slur, “feminazi.”

  • New Yorker ☛ How Jared Kushner Made Foreign Policy His Business

    Dexter Filkins reports these assessments, along with a trove of other stunning material, in a new piece for this week’s issue. Kushner, as one half of an odd-couple team with the real-estate investor Steve Witkoff, has been given a vast portfolio during Trump’s second term. Together, they’ve been charged with ending conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and other hot spots. Kushner’s methods and negotiating tactics have baffled foreign-policy experts—and his diplomacy appears inseparable from his private business pursuits around the world. “Kushner is plagued with conflicts of interest,” Virginia Canter, a former White House counsel and an ethics lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission, told Filkins. “He is supposed to be working for the American people, but in fact he has tremendous financial incentives to further the interests of his investors.” An acquaintance of Kushner’s, meanwhile, was more to the point: “All the Middle Eastern countries invest in Jared’s fund, and they suck his dick, so they can get political favors from the Trump Administration.”

  • Salon ☛ Pete Hegseth's polygraph theater

    This was hardly the first time Hegseth tried to weaponize polygraphs against his own people. In the spring of 2025, his personal attorney and political adviser Tim Parlatore was involved in efforts to polygraph Patrick Weaver, the secretary’s senior adviser. Weaver complained to the White House, which intervened and ordered Hegseth’s team to stand down. Then, in October 2025, Hegseth’s team proposed nondisclosure agreements and broad, random polygraphs for more than 5,000 military, civilian and contractor personnel in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff.

  • New Republic ☛ Iceland Just Got Played

    On August 28, roughly a quarter of a million Icelanders took to the polls to register their thoughts on whether Europeans would steal their fish. Well, that wasn’t the question on the ballot. But it proved to be all Icelanders cared about. And as a result, Icelanders may have committed a Brexit-esque act of self-sabotage.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The MAGA Plot(s) to Destroy Humanity

    There is a lot to be said about the reasons our current government seems so determined to rush into disaster, even when the very survival of humanity may be at stake. Climate denial, we know from decades of experience, is fueled by an unholy trinity of financial interest (fossil fuel companies determined to keep their profits flowing), ideology (conservatives hostile to any form of regulation) and psychological insecurity (real men burn stuff.) AI-risk denial presumably reflects a similar mix of factors.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Vibecession Was Real

    Notice what the argument assumes, because the assumption is the finding. The hard measures are aggregates, and aggregates are means: median real wage, average unemployment, total inflation-adjusted output. Smith’s checklist is the tell — jobs, inflation, real incomes: a mean, the rate of change of a mean, and a mean adjusted by a mean, an instrument panel held up as proof that no one is at sea. What people live in is none of those numbers’ business. They live in variance, in risk-structure, in the presence or absence of floors beneath them, in whether the future is a place they can plan in. A mean cannot register the removal of a floor. Instruments built to smooth the economy’s texture cannot testify about it; concluding from their silence that no one feels it is the measurement regime pulling rank on the population it was built to abstract away.

  • Don Marti ☛ watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat

    Anyway, why does Omarchy need so much money? Best guess is it’s going to be a form of wingnut welfare—staff positions with benefits for people with the appropriate politics.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • RTL ☛ Using deepfake videos: Russian disinformation campaign sets sights on US midterms

      A Russian disinformation operation has turned its attention to the US midterm elections, unleashing a series of deepfake videos that depict celebrities attacking Democrats, researchers said, with more expected to come.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • JURIST ☛ Zambia's cancellation of six critics' passports on national security grounds raises human rights concerns, Amnesty International says

    The dispute comes amid broader concerns over restrictions on political opposition in Zambia. Amnesty documented arrests and intimidation of opposition members, journalists and activists surrounding the 2026 elections, including the detention of opposition politician George Chisanga and the fatal shooting of former minister Mutotwe Kafwaya during an August security operation.

  • Stars And Stripes ☛ Former Stars and Stripes publisher says critical coverage was ‘underlying cause’ of staff firings | Stars and Stripes

    “I believe the coverage was the real reason — the underlying cause of what’s happened,” he told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan.

  • The Nation ☛ Yale’s President Has Become a Shameful Collaborator With Trump

    Maurie McInnis has the power to stand up to the administration. Instead, she’s caving.

  • Fabio Akita ☛ Codes of Conduct Are the Root of All Evil: Reclaiming Your Freedom – AkitaOnRails.com

    Every major open source project today ships with a CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md in the repository. The idea was sold that this existed to “protect minorities” and “create safe spaces.” In practice, what I watched happen over the last decade was something else: an instrument to cancel, persecute, and ban anyone who thought differently from whoever was in control. And the people leading those hunts, as a rule, were not the ones maintaining the projects’ code.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ 2026-09-09 [Older] Pakistan detains journalist Muhammad Bilal Ghauri over commentary on security appointment

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ We purchased NAS storage for Kyiv Independent — Your Support Is Now Safeguarding Ukraine's History

    When we started raising money for this digital storage system, we planned to buy only four hard drives (plus the enclosure that combines them into a single protected external unit) and add one new hard drive each year as we grew. But thanks to your overwhelming support, we raised $15,900 — enough to build a full-fledged storage system right away.

  • Techdirt ☛ Elon Musk’s SLAPP Threat Over ‘Space Lasers’ Doc Sort Of Admits The ‘Space Lasers’ Part

    By now, calling Elon Musk a “free speech absolutist” is a joke. We have so many stories of him suppressing speech, or threatening, or suing people for their speech. At this point, anyone who still claims that Musk supports free speech is either (1) lying, (2) stupid, or (3) employed by him. So, it’s little surprise that he’s been threatening to sue basically everyone connected to Alex Gibney’s new documentary about Musk, using his favorite big bully of a lawyer, Alex Spiro: [...]

  • CPJ ☛ Bangladeshi journalists face 10-year jail terms for ‘unverified’ reporting under draft cybercrime law

    News outlets could also be convicted of violating the law and courts would be empowered to suspend or cancel the company’s license to operate.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Techdirt ☛ Appeals Court Sees Nothing Wrong With Terrorizing A 14-Year-Old To Obtain A Confession

    The plaintiff is Johnnie Lee Savory, who was picked up by Peoria, Illinois cops on suspicion of murder. A massive amount of coercion was applied to Savory, which naturally resulted in an (involuntary and false) admission of guilt. The conviction was thrown out once because of this interrogation but a retrial ended in a second conviction for Savory. It wasn’t until after he was released on parole (2006) and pardoned by then-Governor Patrick Quinn (2014) that Savory was able to bring a civil rights lawsuit against the officers involved in illegally securing this conviction.

  • The Nation ☛ MAGA Is Exploiting the Lindsay Clancy Case to Try to End Voting for Women

    Both the Fox News report and Perry’s opinion article are attempts to distance the Republican Party from the politically toxic Repeal the 19th movement. One argument both pieces make is that the movement is coming from is the “online right” rather than mainstream right-wingers.

  • Truthdig ☛ You’ve Been Arrested by ICE — What Happens Next?

    For those who are deported, most are sent back to their country of citizenship. Of the 4,779 people apprehended in Michigan with a departure country listed in the data, less than 4% were sent to a country that was not their country of citizenship.

    Deporting an individual back to their country of citizenship comes with huge challenges for that person. Many left their homes due to safety concerns, and many had established lives and families in the United States. But for those who are sent somewhere else, a practice known as third-country deportations, other challenges arise — including not speaking the language of the country where they are sent and not having any community or support in that country.

  • Washingon-Baltimore News Guild ☛ 500 days without a contract: Workers demand American Nurses Association leadership resume bargaining

    ANA Guild’s previous collective bargaining agreement with ANA expired last April. Guild representatives report that the American Nurses Association declared an impasse last September after a nearly 90% ‘No’ vote on their proposal from Guild members that voted. Since then, ANA has continued to push forward their proposed wage structure that would transition to manager-decided raises despite employee concerns.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ How Amazon Busts Unions, in Its Own Words

    Internal documents disclosed in a British Columbia labor case give us an incredibly detailed look into how exactly Amazon carries out its union-busting operations.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ FCC to Vote on Freeing Up More Spectrum

    Inside Towers reported the FCC plans to vote later this month on a Report and Order and Further Notice on “satellite spectrum abundance” that the agency says would open “many thousands of megahertz” for untapped uses. The Commission plans to vote on opening more than 1,000 MHz of spectrum in the 12 GHz and 42 GHz bands for a range of connectivity services, including faster satellite broadband.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Russia's cinemas may lose their backdoor access to Hollywood blockbusters

      "Essentially, people buy tickets for a domestic film, but are shown an American blockbuster, technically for free, in violation of (international) copyright laws, before the start of the (Russian) film," explained a Russian film industry specialist who spoke to the Kyiv Independent on the condition of anonymity.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Samsung Moves to Dismiss Dua Lipa Trademark Infringement Suit

      Seoul-headquartered Samsung just recently made its dismissal motion official, after the straightforward complaint itself set sail back in May. As we were first to report, Lipa maintains that the defendants exploited “her valuable image and likeness…on cardboard television boxes.”

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Rightsholders Can't Use OpenAI and Anthropic to Dismantle Meta's Seeding Defense

      Meta previously argued that uploading pirated books to other BitTorrent users was an unavoidable side effect of downloading them, and therefore fair use. Rightsholders suing Meta in three related cases tried to dismantle this theory by asking OpenAI and Anthropic to reveal how they torrented shadow library data. A magistrate judge denied the request, but that's not the end of the torrenting dispute.