GNU/Linux

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • FSFE ☛ 2026-09-18 [Older] SFP#55: Policy and EU: Meet our Danish local group from Aarhus! [Ed: GAFAM in 'FSF' clothing]

• Games

  • Make Use Of ☛ 2026-09-13 [Older] The Steam Deck's biggest problem has nothing to do with its aging hardware

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Linux On Mobile ☛ 2026-09-13 [Older] Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (37/2026): September Lull

Leftovers

• Tim Bray ☛ The Purpose Isn’t What It Does

  My claim is that POSIWID doesn’t help us understand the why and who of the malignant forces we’ve found ourselves horrified by and, I hope, are fighting back against. In other words, it’s rhetorically lousy. Let’s work by example:

  The purpose IS · The purpose of GenAI IS to increase the wealth of a tiny handful of already-wealthy people.

  The purpose of Grok/X IS to promote Musk-flavored fascism.

• Chris Aldrich ☛ Okay Typosphere, Who else is using their typewriter to converse with others via web and Webmention?

  I peeked at the code and saw a Webmention endpoint hiding in there and nearly fell over. Webmention is a web standard that allows any website to talk directly to any other website as if they were social media peers on the same platform.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ L-systems generate weevils, pizza toppings, and matriarchal lineages

    The Fibonacci sequence is so-called because in Western mathematics is first appears in connection with a problem from Fibonacci's 1202 book Liber Abaci. Fibonacci asks us to consider a rabbit farm where a pair of baby rabits grows to adulthood in one month, and an adult pair of rabbits gives birth to a new pair of babies after a month. Representing an adult pair with a and a baby pair with b, we could write this as: [...]

• Career/Education

  • Matt Mullenweg ☛ OmFest Registration | Matt Mullenweg

    Thank you to everyone who expressed interest in shaping OmFest. We’re still working out some details, but we’ve got a Luma registration page for the event up. Please join on September 29, 2026, Om’s 60th birth anniversary, for an eclectic conference curated by his different communities to celebrate the many facets of Om.

  • [Old] Matt Mullenweg ☛ All Roads Lead to Om | Matt Mullenweg

    I knew Om contained multitudes, but sitting by his side these last few weeks, I’ve been amazed to learn how many deep and completely separate communities he was part of. He meant so much to so many, in so many different ways.

    Om loved putting on a good conference, and I’d like to celebrate his life with an awesome event on September 29, 2026 (his 60th) in San Francisco, like an OmFest. (Update: Sign up here!) I’ll find a space where every community from the many facets of Om can come together. In the spirit of Open Source and co-creation, we can have some booths, flash talks, a gallery of his photography, pen showcase, and whatever other fun ideas people want to contribute. I can’t wait for the beautiful collision of his tech / journalism / Indian party planner / pen / coffee / shoes / photography circles, and probably some niches I couldn’t even imagine.

  • [Old] Adam Tinworth ☛ The passing of Om Malik

    I didn’t really know Om, but I’ve been reading him for the best part of a quarter of a century. I've regularly linked to his work from here. His original blog, GigaOm was one of the first blogs I followed regularly, and early in my blogging career, a link from him was one of the first taste I had of how much traffic a power blogger could send.

  • Terence Tao ☛ Recommendations of the Summit on PhD Math Education in the Age of AI

    The Summit on PhD Math Education in the Age of AI was held September 17–18, 2026, jointly hosted by the Harvard Department of Mathematics and the Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA). It brought together twenty-four senior mathematicians from across the discipline, along with several current PhD students and postdocs, to examine which aspects of the mathematics PhD need rethinking as AI reshapes thinking-based work.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ You should all be asking way more questions

    A small misunderstanding early on balloons into a big misunderstanding later, because all the things you misinterpret based on the first misunderstanding will become misunderstandings in their own right, and so on. That’s why you can’t just wait until someone’s finished talking and ask all your questions at once.

    I think most people don’t ask questions because they’re not really trying to understand: they’re happy to just trust that the person they’re talking to knows what’s going on. This goes double when that person is a well-respected or more senior engineer. However, once you have skin in the game, that all changes. When you’re in a position where you are the one responsible for success or failure — where you are going to have to go away after the conversation and take a bunch of concrete actions — you will find yourself wanting to ask many questions.

  • RIPS Law Librarian Blog ☛ A Cleveland Story: 2026 AALL Annual Meeting Recap

    Somewhere between a missed connection, talking about how to combat institutional amnesia, and a morning of reconsidering the power of storytelling, I kept landing on the same idea: our libraries are often the reason a record exists to be found by its next storyteller, whether it’s months, years, or generations later. That’s true for a wrongly incarcerated person in Louisiana, and, in a much smaller way, for a librarian trying to convince a room that the name of a baseball team is worth researching. Thank you to RIPS-SIS, the RIPS-SIS Grants Committee, and UC Davis for making it possible for me to attend the Annual Meeting, and to the (former) stranger who missed a flight with me, for the reminder that the best stories usually include a few sprints, barstools, and detours.

  • Michelle Barker ☛ Blogging Like Ursula K. Le Guin

    I am working my way through reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog, which she began in 2010, at the age of 81, and continued right up until 2018. She passed away the following year. I am reading through the archive in chronological order, starting with the older posts.

• Hardware

  • Digital Camera World ☛ These photos feel like the 1970s. They were taken with a modern digital camera – and a set of very unusual filters

    The new Radial Gradient filters come in a three-pack – one blue, one red, and one orange – and are designed to build in dramatic, warm, cool, and atmospheric color shifts that are strongest at the edges.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Our Family No Longer Is A Vegetarian One

    Hence, for the first time in fifteen years, I’m frying a piece of chicken. Guess what: the strategy for our youngest didn’t work: the chicken was too “dry” (it wasn’t but she claims it is and keeps on chewing on it like forever). On to the minced meat, I guess. I whip up meatballs with an added egg and some chickpea flour and finally get her to eat something. Why is parenting so hard?

    A practical question poses itself. As the cook, I have to determine whether the meat is well done. That means tasting it. Remember, my abstain from all things meat and fish is not because of my inability to digest it but because of ethical (and obvious environmental) concerns; and I really don’t want to serve my kids undercooked meat. So I taste.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ I saw the documentary the Israeli government doesn’t want you to see

    Over the next couple of weeks in theaters across the world, the public will be able to see this 80-minute crash course in Lavender, the AI-assisted targeting system devised by IDF intelligence to bomb Palestinian civilians under the guise of targeting militants. While the scope of the carnage is already largely understood, the insider information revealed by the 24 interview participants paints a picture of a murderous campaign controlled by people who knew exactly their own powers for destruction.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Ban On Discord Lifted After Talks With DICT, CICC Officials

    The government has lifted its ban on Discord in the Philippines after the platform’s representatives met with officials from the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) and the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center (CICC). The CICC is an attached agency of the DICT. The restriction was removed on Thursday, Sept. 24.

    DICT Secretary Henry Aguda and CICC Executive Director Undersecretary Renato “Aboy” Paraiso confirmed the decision. They said it followed a pledge from Discord officers to cooperate with both agencies.

  • Apple Inc ☛ Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac - Apple Support (CA)

    You can turn off Apple Intelligence features like Siri AI (Beta),* summarization features, and more. For more information on parental controls, see Apple Devices for Kids and Families.

  • Ayer ☛ macOS Can't Clone "Dumb" Git Repositories Over HTTP/2

    When retrieving a repository over the "dumb" transfer protocol, Git makes certain HTTP requests with the FAILONERROR option set, notably requests to objects/info/alternates and objects/info/http-alternates, which list alternate locations where the repository's content can be found. Most repositories don't have alternate locations, so these files don't exist, and the URLs return 404 errors. When the buggy version of libcurl is used, this 404 error causes Git's other HTTP requests to also fail, and Git is unable to clone the repository.

  • Miami Herald ☛ Volkswagen Is Recalling 49,958 Tiguans

    Volkswagen is recalling 49,958 Tiguans over a software fault in the body control module, the unit that governs a long list of electrical and electronic functions across the car. The module can reset itself unexpectedly while the vehicle is being driven, and the list of things that go with it is longer than most software recalls produce. The detail that stands out is in the chronology. Volkswagen had already fixed this on the assembly line by the beginning of September 2025. The cars built before that fix were recalled twelve months later.

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

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-09-12 [Older] Key Defense speeches this year appear to have been fully [Slop]: Analysis

    • Semafor Inc ☛ AI’s financial Jenga towers start to wobble

      The latest wobble, reported this morning by Bloomberg and confirmed by Semafor, comes from Oracle, which is seeking to delay lease payments on a New Mexico data center that is part of the massive Stargate AI buildout unveiled last year by President Donald Trump. State officials have repeatedly denied permits for the gas pipeline needed to power the project, delaying its progress by at least six months.

    • Bloomberg ☛ Oracle Cites ‘Force Majeure’ to Shield Itself on Controversial Data Center - Bloomberg

      Oracle Corp. is moving to shield itself from racking up expenses on a massive data center being built in New Mexico, adding a fresh wrinkle to a project beset by opposition and regulatory setbacks.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton, one 50-ton order sent to the US for AI scanning and destruction — multitude of suspicious bulk buys thought to end up in foreign AI scan and shred facilities

      Short-term boom could lead to a longer-term drought and removal of important works from circulation.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ More agents go rogue [sic] - but AI companies aren't slowing down yet

      If the industry doesn’t start to fix this issue soon, someone else will try — such as the U.S. government, many parts of which are looking to see how they should clamp down on AI (or not). Or, more hopefully, solutions are coming fast and furious from every single damn cybersecurity firm out there.

      But the thing is, though it’s easy to blame a bunch of faceless agents, it really comes down to humans making sure they take charge in the first place. “What’s notable isn’t that an AI agent found its way past a control — it’s that nobody built the agent to stop when it hit one,” one cybersecurity engineer noted. I’d say, “Leash your dogs, guys.” But it isn’t that simple.

    • Wired ☛ An OpenAI Agent [Breached] Australia’s Health Service. Their Government Found Out Months Later

      Australia is investigating whether OpenAI broke the law after an agent hacked into its health statistics portal in the first widely known incident of an AI agent hacking a government website.

    • The Verge ☛ One company is at the center of a wave of rogue [sic] AI attacks

      Irregular, an Israeli startup that stress-tests AI models in “high-fidelity research platforms that simulate and monitor real-world AI security scenarios,” has worked with many of the industry’s biggest players since it was founded as Pattern Labs in 2023. Its exact client list is not known, but its work has been cited in OpenAI model system cards, it was used to test systems for the UK government and Anthropic, and it published research with RAND, a highly influential think tank that informs policy on AI.

    • Hackaday ☛ Did The BBC And Sir Clive Get It Right Twenty Years Ago?

      Predictions of the future are often laughable when reviewed in the years for which they are made. For example, here in 2026 we neither live on the Moon, nor have flying cars. But sometimes they come closer to the reality than others, and in that the BBC Archive have an interesting offering. It’s a Newsnight feature from 2006 looking at the future of artificial intelligence, and since its main interviewee is none other than Sir Clive Sinclair, it’s worth a second look.

    • Terence Tao ☛ ICIAM Statement on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence

      Just a quick post to note that the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) has released a statement on mathematics and artificial intelligence (as well as a longer version), which makes many points echoing several already made recently here and elsewhere.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ AI in KDE Plasma

      This week, it was the KDE project’s turn to end up in the crossfire while trying to propose a policy on the use (or non-use) of AI in its code. Tempers flared when ~the internet discovered that one of the talks at Akademy, the project’s annual event, proposed “a lovable, sovereign, AI-native KDE,” pitched by two people who had been involved in KDE development in the past, but no longer are.

      Both attempts to draft the policy fell apart, and at the moment there’s no new proposal under discussion.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ LLM AssBench

      The definitive test for generative AIs: which creates the most accurate ass. There are several models available and you can read the prompt. Don’t forget to also evaluate the reaction of the buttock to the pat. Tip from Renan, who refused to answer where the hell he found this.

    • Mond ☛ Commodified Intelligence

      Whether you have a white-collar job or not, commodified intelligence fundamentally makes workers more replaceable, and this is bad for them.

      It doesn’t matter that we’re all subjected to horrible AI-generated slop food posters as long as the margins are positive. It doesn’t matter that some diffuse component of quality, or a human touch are missing. Not as long as the margins are positive.

    • Daniel Lemire ☛ A thesis isn’t enough for a PhD

      Thus, to a very good approximation, getting a PhD amounted to writing a thesis.But we have a problem. AI can write something that looks quite a bit like a thesis. With a bit of prompting, you can produce something that looks like a PhD thesis.I have been telling everyone I can that we have a big problem.Apparently other people have realized this as well. People at Harvard are now saying that a thesis is insufficient for a PhD.

    • Yle ☛ Finnish MP warns against politicians becoming "AI puppets"

      But she warned against the dangers of politicians becoming "AI puppets".

      "AI creates a government bill. This goes to a committee, whose position and dissenting opinions are drafted by AI, and then in the plenary session the legislative initiative is discussed partly with AI-generated speeches, so if AI drafts the text and reads it, what's the point of the text at all?"

  • Social Control Media

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] Calgary resident accused of threatening to kill Prime Minister Mark Carney on YouTube

    • Vox ☛ 2026-09-23 [Older] It’s not your imagination — dating has gotten way more combative lately

    • Vox ☛ What is the “burnerverse,” the online network harassing young women?

      That was one of the most shocking things that I learned from my reporting, actually. I had assumed that these were largely frat kids. I assumed that they were largely SEC frat kids because a lot of these young girls who have been doxed were students at SEC schools. But when I actually started looking into these accounts and who was behind them and who was sharing these images and making these jokes about Maddie, I learned it was way more wide-ranging than that.

    • Dr Molly Tov ☛ the uncool cool curve you're not allowed to talk about being ahead of if you want to stay cool (cool is overrated)

      Being seen isn't the *only* reason I blog, of course. But I could wander around in my own thoughts without ever hitting "submit." I could discover what I'm thinking by writing it down without being connected to the Internet. I'm choosing not to. And I'm also choosing not to think too hard about it.

    • David Bushell ☛ Removing the fancy button

      The problem is obvious for Bluesky users. Clicking the fancy “View publication” button opens the homepage and not the actual article. This subverts the UI design pattern for ‘card’ components which is long established, evident by unhappy feedback.

      I keep clicking the button myself despite knowing better.

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Mitsubishi Electric CC-Link IE TSN Communication Protocol (Update A)

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Bransys ELD

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Mitsubishi Electric GX Works3 and Motion Control Settings

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Hitachi Energy FACTS Control Platform (FCP)

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Schneider Electric Modicon M340 Controller and Communication Modules

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Schneider Electric NetBotz 5 750/755

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] ABB Ability Edgenius

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Schneider Electric PowerChute Serial Shutdown

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-16 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-16 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] Digital Watchdog VMAX DVR and NVR Product Lineups

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] Wärtsilä FOS-Onboard

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] mySCADA myPRO Manager

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] Schneider Electric SCADAPack x70 Products

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] Siemens Reyrolle 7SR5

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] Siemens Mendix SAML

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] Siemens Teamcenter

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] CareCam CM2507

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-14 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-11 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-11 [Older] CISA Adds Three Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-10 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Common Dreams ☛ SCOTUS Greenlights the Misuse of Social Security Data

      The personal data that Americans provide to the Social Security Administration is intended for one purpose only: To get people the benefits they’ve earned. Only those who are lawfully present in this country are eligible for benefits.

      Because Social Security data was never intended for verifying voter eligibility, SSA has no reason to keep people’s immigration status up to date in cases where it isn’t relevant for their benefits. Indeed, it would be a misuse of trust fund monies for SSA to spend resources updating that information.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Wired ☛ The Trump Administration Is Trying to Get Musk and X Out of a $137 Million EU Fine

    The US government is arguing that it should be involved in the case to protect American companies. The fine is precedent-setting as the bloc’s first sanction under the Digital Services Act, which requires online platforms to do more to tackle illegal and harmful content, especially the largest sites. Many of those, which include Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, Google’s YouTube, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn, are headquartered in the US and contribute significantly to the US economy, it pointed out.

  • The Next Move ☛ The Alphabet of Democracy's Destruction

    America did not lose itself suddenly—it voluntarily surrendered its shame. When impunity became the norm and cynicism became a license for power, the internal prohibition disappeared. This psychological shift became the catalyst for systemic transformation. Behind the rhetoric of liberation (”now we can do anything”—straight from Fyodor Dostoyevsky) followed deliberate engineering: a set of specific legal, budgetary, and administrative instruments that allow constitutional traditions to be circumvented without formally breaking the law.

    This inventory contains no moral judgments—only mechanisms documented in public sources, court decisions, executive orders, and administration reports. Each entry is a neutral category of actions Trump employed across his first and second terms. Some entries describe mechanisms already implemented; others document potential risks and announced initiatives of the second term. The goal is not moral condemnation but systematic mapping—to show how individual measures, from personnel purges to district redraws, combine into an architecture of democratic subversion. This is not a “conspiracy theory.” It is a description of institutional dynamics in which legality is formally observed while the spirit of procedures—independence, accountability, adversarial competition—is systematically destroyed. And these deliberate actions are only the opening chapter of the era of America’s dismantling: its transformation into a pure and unadulterated form of Trumpocracy—or, in other terms, electoral totalitarianism.

    Democracies do not die from a single blow. They die from a political alphabet. This one, for example. [...]

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] EU to condemn war in Ukraine at G20 even if Putin attends

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] ‘My friend’: Emotional Albanese hugs Zelensky as historic Ukraine deal sealed

    • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-09-23 [Older] Germany De-Industrialised Itself For Ukraine, And Cheeto Mussolini’s Oil Donors Profited

    • Spiegel ☛ 2026-09-23 [Older] Putin's War of Aggression: A Journey Along the Dnipro in Wartime Ukraine

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] Expert insights: Many Ukrainians are probably here to stay

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] Why this new Ukraine pact is a war-game changer for Australia

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-19 [Older] Ukraine steps up measures to protect railways

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] Russia has not decided whether Putin will attend G20 summit in US

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] Danish intelligence service warns Russia may intensify hybrid attacks against West and NATO

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] PET warns of increased Russian espionage and sabotage in Denmark

    • HRW ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] Russia Crackdown on Bypassing Online Censorship

    • The Local DK ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] Danish spy agency: Russian invasion of Nato country 'highly unlikely' but cannot be ruled out

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-23 [Older] Zelenskyy addresses UN as Rubio of U.S. says Ukraine, Russia have interest in limited ceasefire

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-23 [Older] Famine threatens the Ukrainian town of Oleshky in the southern Kherson region as Russia delays creating a humanitarian evacuation corridor

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] United Russia wins parliamentary election with two-thirds majority after 95 percent counted

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] As Cheeto Mussolini and Zelenskyy talk about potential energy truce, Russia and Ukraine unleash new wave of strikes

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] Republican senator calls for investigation after Cheeto Mussolini son's wedding party bankrolled by Russian oligarch

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] Russia, Ukraine trade deadly strikes as Zelenskyy attends UNGA

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-21 [Older] Canada and the U.K. consider merging financial initiatives to rearm against Russia

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-21 [Older] Russia: Putin party retains majority in controlled parliamentary vote

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-09-21 [Older] 'Months, Not Years': European Spy Chiefs Warn Putin Preparing Imminent Strike On NATO Soil

    • The Local DK ☛ 2026-09-21 [Older] Nordic broadcasters pull documentary on Russian spying amid fears [slop] could unmask sources

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-20 [Older] Ukraine fires more than 1,000 drones at Russia, including hundreds launched at Moscow

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-20 [Older] Russia: Ukrainian drone strike on Moscow kills 2

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-09-20 [Older] Putin will win Russia’s sham election. What happens next terrifies Europe

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-19 [Older] Russian drones are stalking Ukrainian trains and trying to hobble the country's rail system

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-19 [Older] German-Russian relations at freezing point

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-19 [Older] Russia votes for new parliament in controlled elections

    • Pro Publica ☛ 2026-09-19 [Older] “Our Dear Friend Umar”: How We Uncovered That a Russian Oligarch Bankrolled Donald Cheeto Mussolini Jr.’s Wedding

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-09-18 [Older] Russia begins three-day parliamentary election with anti-war party removed from party ballot

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-09-18 [Older] Denmark brings forward DKK 1.8 billion Ukraine aid package after Russian frigate fires flares at Danish helicopter

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-18 [Older] France: Macron orders defense against Russian hybrid attacks

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Russian birth tourism to Brazil increases

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • American Oversight ☛ A Bill to Abolish Watchdog Group Is Making Its Way Through Congress - American Oversight

    Shortly before Congress left for its August recess, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform approved a bill that would abolish the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE). CIGIE is the independent agency responsible for coordinating, training, and setting quality standards for federal inspectors general. The bill, the Restoring Integrity and Efficiency to Inspector General Oversight Act, would transfer CIGIE’s responsibilities to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), an agency housed within the White House. It has not yet been scheduled for consideration by the full House of Representatives.

    CIGIE supports the work of more than 70 Offices of Inspectors General (OIG), the nonpartisan watchdogs responsible for rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and misconduct in the executive branch. CIGIE provides OIGs with training, coordinates their work across agencies, establishes quality standards, and manages peer reviews and websites like oversight.gov, the online public archive of OIG reports. By abolishing CIGIE and transferring OIG oversight to the White House, the bill would make it easier for the Trump administration to shield itself from scrutiny and would put the government’s central accountability mechanisms at further risk of political interference.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Media silence deafening as Reform UK on brink of administration

    Twenty four hours later and the mainstream British media dare not mention it. Are they in shock or did the lawyers from Reform obtain a super-injunction?

• Environment

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Data centers have an insurance problem

    Climate change impacts are one problem: Data centers consume huge volumes of water, leaving them exposed to drought, and many are being planned in places that are prone to floods, fires, tornadoes, or other disasters. Up to 80% of data center projects globally are exposed to such hazards, a recent study from the risk analytics firm First Street found. Investors and insurers are starting to ask developers more pointed questions about the buildings’ physical integrity and siting, Peiser said, and asking for better forecasts about future climate exposure. Data centers are also expensive, reaching into the tens of billions of dollars; insurers are starting to get sufficient capital in place to cover that volume of risk, but are struggling to keep up with the requirements of the biggest hyperscalers. The tightness of the power equipment supply chain is another major risk. If a gas turbine breaks, and the queue for replacement parts takes weeks or months, “that loss to insurers or their policyholder or both is going to be dramatically higher than anyone is currently thinking about,” Peiser said.

  • CNBC ☛ Study: Nearly 80% of data center capacity at elevated climate risk

    A huge portion, 79%, of all data centers globally are exposed to acute risk from severe, climate-induced weather events.

  • TruthOut ☛ Pesticide Linked to Cancer Pollutes 25 Percent of US River and Stream Miles

    Atrazine is the second most widely used herbicide in the US after glyphosate. US farmers apply roughly 70 million pounds of the pesticide to their fields every year, according to US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates. Exposure has been linked to birth defects, low birth weights, hormone disruption, some cancers and immune system problems. It is also considered an endocrine disruptor, meaning it can interfere with the human hormone system.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Google's orbital AI data center test packs four TPUs and 1,000W of solar power — overheating limits runs to just 15 minutes, but orbital server will handle tasks for one year

    While clearly limited, the orbiting server is set to handle AI requests for up to a year, although it will remain in orbit for up to six years. After that, gravity will take hold, and the satellite will burn up during re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Low-Level Waste Dumps In The Atlantic Have Become Ecosystems

    Although a lot of fuss is made of the spent uranium fuel and high-level waste produced by light water reactors and fuel reprocessing facilities, the overwhelming majority of nuclear waste is low- and intermediate-level waste (LLW and ILW) churned out by hospitals, laboratories and various industries.

  • John D Cook ☛ Servers in dawn-dusk orbit

    Despite the predictions that no one would ever put build data centers in space, Google is starting on Thursday. Google’s prototype satellite will be one of 130 payloads on SpaceX’s Transporter 18 mission on October 1.

    The server will follow a dawn-dusk orbit, a special case of a sun-synchronous orbit (SSO), following the terminator line between daylight on dark on the earth below. A dawn-dusk orbit allows the satellite’s solar panels to stay in nearly continuous daylight, while also being in a relatively inexpensive low earth orbit (LEO). Geostationary orbit (GEO) would allow solar panels to always receive sunlight, but launching a satellite into GEO requires more fuel and so is more expensive.

  • CBC ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Millions of fish tested Canada's largest nuclear plant. The incident points to a growing climate risk

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-16 [Older] How climate change worsened Nepal's deadly mountain collapse

  • CBC ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] Chocolate faces more climate shocks as study highlights risk of extreme rainfall

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-09-12 [Older] Mexican Activists Are Fighting Climate Crises by Stopping Extractive Violence

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-12 [Older] Corals as climate archive: Are El Nino events intensifying?

  • NL Times ☛ 2026-09-11 [Older] German climate activist planned 160 attacks on electricity grids in Germany, Netherlands [Ed: So-called 'hey hi' companies are attacking the grid every hour of the day (and night)]

  • CBC ☛ 2026-09-10 [Older] Why this student offers tours of climate solutions hidden throughout Vancouver

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-16 [Older] Is 'drill, baby, drill' Cheeto Mussolini helping the world transition away from oil?

    • The Age AU ☛ 2026-09-16 [Older] High seas and low fuel: Energy-efficient ship launches in Fremantle [Ed: But still allowing chatbot companies run amok]

    • 2026-09-14 [Older] The Gulf Offshore Research Institute has been awarded $20 million to turn idle Gulf oil platforms into hubs for energy, minerals and aquaculture

    • Hackaday ☛ Reviving The PoE++ Feature On A Ubiquiti Switch

      With power applied the switch starts up as normal, including its 1.3″ touch screen that provides direct port information as well as a fancy screensaver cum QR code for the AR feature.

    • Dedoimedo ☛ Laptop and battery pending charge issue

      Just recently, I encountered a weird issue, for the first time in my computing life. I plugged a charged into a laptop, one Slimbook Executive to be more precise. The machine pinged, indicating it was now under socket power. The system tray icon changed accordingly. But when I expanded the power applet, it read: "Not Charging". This status stayed for a while, and then, the device began charging. A few minutes later, the problem happened again. Rinse and repeat.

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-09-12 [Older] Why are European banks moving gold out of United States?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Silicon Angle ☛ AI data center builder Nscale raises $3.36B ahead of IPO

    The capital will arrive in two tranches. Nscale expects to receive $2.26 billion in the near future from a consortium that includes Third Point, Apollo, Citadel and more than a dozen other institutional investors. Nvidia Corp. will provide the remaining $1 billion in mid-November.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Advice to a beginning software engineer

    Don’t start fights. Being pleasant to work with (particularly when you don’t get your way) covers many sins. Once you’re further along in your career, you will be expected to start some fights, but this is not a tactic beginners should adopt: there are a lot of factors2 that determine when and how to start fights, and getting it wrong can be costly. Just don’t risk it.

  • Michael Geist ☛ A Definition That Meets the Moment: Federal Government Recognizes Antisemitism Includes Anti-Zionism

    There is little doubt that the report’s references to anti-Zionism are deliberate. Both fall within Pillar One of the report that focuses on understanding antisemitism. The inclusion is how many in the Jewish community understand and experience antisemitism, facing threats that go to their longstanding beliefs and identity as Jews. For identifying antisemitism, it is that experience that matters, not the intent of the speaker. The report first states that the intended outcome of the pillar is that “Institutions across Canada have increased access to tools, guidance, and training to support the recognition, understanding and response to contemporary manifestations of antisemitism, including anti-Zionism, as outlined in the Canadian Handbook on the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism.” The report says the definition and Handbook “will continue to serve as the foundation of the federal government’s engagement with Jewish communities and its work to fight antisemitism.” Second, in explaining why understanding antisemitism is important, it states: [...]

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Disruption! AI!

    Techbros literally out here trying to disrupt the fraternity rape-house: [...]

  • Derek Thompson ☛ How China Thinks About AI

    By this logic, the future of AI development—and, according to some, the future of the economy and the entire human race—depends on America’s understanding of China’s approach to artificial intelligence. But I cannot tell you how many times I have spoken to blazingly intelligent people around the AI industry who have told me “Now, I’m not a China expert, but…” and then gone on to defend America’s AI strategy in the context of a subject that they just told me they don’t fully understand.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Winding-up petition leaked before service on Reform UK Party Limited / Nigel Farage

    I had fully intended to respect the seven day grace period without mentioning the petition on my blog or anywhere else. My respect for the process has been usurped by the leak obtained by MouseInTheCourt.

    In a normal insolvency procedure, creditors are typically looking to maximise their own return. In many situations, a creditor would be happy to receive their payment within the seven day grace period. Sometimes the creditor will continue trading with the same debtor after the affair is put behind them.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Boston Globe Praised Harvard for Suppressing Free Speech to Save It

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-09-12 [Older] Fearless Speech: Examining Myths Around The First Amendment

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-09-16 [Older] Exceptional Hatred: Free Speech, Fear, and the Fight Over Jewish Identity in America

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-09-16 [Older] Ed Sheeran Tour Faces Opener Exodus After Macklemore Is Dropped Following Controversial Speech

  • TruthOut ☛ Over 100 Protesters Arrested at Peaceful Sit-In Ahead of Netanyahu’s UN Speech

    Over 100 protesters were arrested near the United Nations in New York on Thursday ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the General Assembly. The sit-in, organized by Jewish Voice for Peace, denounced Netanyahu for perpetrating a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, building more illegal settlements in the West Bank, occupying parts of Lebanon and bombing Iran alongside the United States. Democracy Now! spoke with participants, including some congressional candidates and other prominent figures.

  • Truthdig ☛ The Israeli Filmmakers Behind ‘NAZA’ Might Lose Their Citizenship

    Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to pass a law to revoke the citizenship of anyone who defames Israel’s soldiers, his latest threat against the Israeli directors of “NAZA,” a documentary about soldiers’ killing of Gaza civilians.

    “NAZA” is a British documentary film written and directed by the Israeli Jewish journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. It follows the ongoing Gaza genocide committed by Israeli forces.

    The film won a major prize at the Venice Film Festival.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Reflection on Five Years of Relentless Attacks on the Freedom to Read by Those at the Center of the Fight via Book Riot

    As I have mentioned before on this blog, Kelly Jensen has been the only journalist in America covering the assault on our intellectual freedom that has been happening in our libraries (of all types). Full stop. She is not the only person engaged in this fight, but she is the only one chronicling it as a journalist.

  • Book Riot ☛ "Weed On Purpose, Not Only After a Fight": Florida Official Demands More School Book Bans

    Where the argument over books available in public schools and public libraries has been around “local control“–that is, each community gets to decide whether or not material violates state law regarding “depictions or descriptions” of sexual content that could be “harmful to minors”–Mack’s letter is a reminder that that line is a lie. “Local control” is state control at the local level. If assessing collections were about local control, then schools wouldn’t be urged by a state politician to review their collections and preemptively review books that appear on the state’s annual reports of books removed from schools.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Salon ☛ Years before his CNN and Politico ban, Trump yanked my press pass

    By noon he had backed down.

    So by my count that leaves First Amendment attorney Ted Boutrous, who represented the news organizations, 5–0 when pitching against Donald Trump. That’s one hell of a legacy.

    If I leave a legacy, I hope it’s for something as well done.

  • Vox ☛ Even Trump knew he’d lose this fight with the press

    By all accounts, the president’s case was a feeble one. While the Justice Department attempted to argue on Wednesday that the three outlets’ reporting jeopardized national security, Trump himself kind of gave the game away last week when he said he’s gotten “sick” of the stories the three organizations published.

    But the case is by no means closed. Even before the hearing, Trump promised that he would appeal any decision against him “almost without question.” And on Thursday morning, despite Judge Kelly’s orders, reporters from CNN, MS NOW, and Politico were blocked from entering the White House yet again.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ urges US senators to seek accountability for Israel’s killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh

    Abu Akleh, a veteran journalist known to millions across the world, was shot while covering an Israel Defense Forces operation in the West Bank town of Jenin on May 11, 2022, despite wearing a clearly marked press vest. Although the FBI reportedly opened an investigation into her killing in November 2022, it has made no progress nearly four years later.

  • Richard J Tofel ☛ McClatchy, Cutting Newsrooms, Says the Quiet Part Out Loud

    The confirmation came from McClatchy, publishers of 29 papers in 14 states, including a number of the old Knight-Ridder offerings. McClatchy holdings currently include the Miami Herald, Charlotte Observer, Kansas City Star, Lexington Herald-Leader, Sacramento, Modesto and Fresno Bees and Idaho Statesman. Since emerging from bankruptcy as an independent public company in 2020, McClatchy has been controlled by a New Jersey hedge fund which has since separately entered into a consent decree on charges of improper securities trading.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Pete Brown ☛ Just get one of your people to do it for you

    That’s in response to Ezra Klein’s sit-down with Jensen Huang, head of Nvidia, in which Huang happily admits he doesn’t know his zipcode or phone number.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • The Local SE ☛ 2026-09-11 [Older] Big tech to banking: Which companies spend the most on EU [bribery]?

  • Patents

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Patent Litigation Europe returns to Amsterdam with IPKat readers’ discount

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-09-15 [Older] [Book Review] Patent Claims: Interpretation, validity and infringement

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-09-11 [Older] [Guest post] Standard Essential Patent Litigation in Brazil: A Short Story of Sharp Practices

    • 2026-09-11 [Older] Biofer S.P.A. v. Vifor (International) AG (Fed Cir. 2026)

    • Software Patents

      • Mailing list ARChives ☛ 'Re: Hi everyone!' - MARC

        However terms in some bring in patent law, others export restrictions, etc. which aren't wanted as part of the main OS distribution.

  • Copyrights

    • The Verge ☛ Sony and UMG are suing Suno again

      In its complaint shared with The Verge, Sony and UMG accuse Suno of “model laundering,” saying:

      “Training a ‘new’ model on the outputs of an infringing model does not eliminate the infringement; it launders it, passing the value of Plaintiffs’ expression from the copied recordings into the tainted models, from those models into their outputs, and from those outputs into v6 … V6 is not a fresh start; it is the fruit of the same poisoned tree.”