Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • Perl / Raku

    • Perl ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] A NetAddr::IP Trial Release

    • Perl ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] This week in PSC (236) | 2026-09-22

Leftovers

• Vintage Everyday ☛ Photos of Meat Loaf on the Set of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975)

  Meat Loaf had played Eddie (and Dr. Scott) in the 1974 Los Angeles stage production at Lou Adler’s Roxy Theatre. When 20th Century Fox greenlit the film adaptation, executive producer Lou Adler insisted on bringing Meat Loaf to the UK shoot alongside Tim Curry (Frank-N-Furter).

• Robert Lützner ☛ Schafe sind bessere Rasenmäher | Something from Nothing

  It’s true that this is most likely the ultimate resting place of all my Origami creatures and probably also my drawings. I’m neither a well-known artist, nor are the things I create particularly good.

  But that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth doing!

• University of Toronto ☛ An unexpected difference between terminal programs: backward line wrapping

  A very simple way to present the progress of a parallel operation is to print one '.' for every operation started and then backspace and erase these as each operation finishes. The venerable ping program uses a similar output if you're flood pinging; it prints a '.' for every ping packet sent and then backspaces and erases the '.' when it gets a reply, letting you visually see any packet loss as '.'s build up. However, today I discovered an unexpected difference in how (Unix) terminal programs handle part of this,

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] A new venomous British snake? Why there’s no need to panic

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-23 [Older] Can you lend me a hand? Researchers are developing wearable robotic limbs

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-23 [Older] Five intimidating houseplants that are surprisingly easy to care for

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] In the race to roll out 6G, the UK and Europe are caught between technology’s superpowers

• Career/Education

  • University of Michigan ☛ UMich is embracing AI tools. Not everyone is convinced.

    “AI is generally a problem for education, especially in the early stages of learning a subject,” Miller wrote. “Not because it’s impossible to use it productively but because we only ever really learn something by struggling with it, and the temptation to press a button to do the work for us short-circuits that process.”

  • Tracy Durnell ☛ Adopting new words

    Although I’m looking up more words than ever, I don’t find myself adopting many of those new words for my own use.

  • Jim Grey ☛ First day

    I start a new full-time job today as Director of Software Engineering for one of the largest providers of insurance, lending, risk management, and marketing products for financial institutions in North America. What this company needs from its engineering leadership lines up startlingly well with the experience I’ve gained over the last ten years or so of my career. Partnering with my peers and the leaders above me, I think we can make a substantial difference here.

  • Devon Dundee ☛ Internal Processing

    For whatever reason, I have a tendency to keep my processing internal. I absorb information, I let my brain do its thing with it, and then I output whatever needs to be done: work, writing, decisions. The entirety of the middle part happens in my head.

    Lately, though, I’ve been trying to externalize more. It started when I switched to Bear for writing and note-taking, forcing myself to let it become a bit of a messy space without any expectations. If I’m thinking about a problem or planning an event, I create a note for it and just jot things down: ideas, issues, questions, things that need to be done. Tiny sub-tasks that would never make their way into Reminders suddenly appear and disappear in my notes as needed. Links, reference images, quotes, half-baked thoughts – they’re all there.

  • Giles Dickenson-Jones ☛ X Reasons for policy professionals to get into programming in 202X

    In 2019 I wrote a post with seven reasons policy professionals should learn to code. Now that AI can write reasonable code, I’ve had a number of people ask me if it’s still worth learning to program. Based on the evidence I’ve seen, AI appears to be a an amplifier, rather than a substitute for human intelligence in the policy space: meaning the people that get the most out of AI are likely to be those that know how to instruct AI to tackle a problem and tell good output from bad. So my answer is yes, learning to code still makes sense. Not necessarily so you can write the code yourself, but so you can make AI a force multiplier for your work.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Army leaders wary of ‘data fatigue’ as fitness management system rolls out

    Holistic Health and Fitness, or H2F, launched as a pilot in 2018, aiming to equip combat brigades with specialized equipment and staff, including dietitians, occupational therapists and athletic trainers, to boost troops’ fitness, increase injury prevention, and promote overall warfighter health. The program proved so successful that in 2024 the Army announced it planned to eventually roll H2F out to all soldiers.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Google confirms ChromeOS phase out in 2034 — 10-year support lifetime cut short for some devices, company says it will support transition to Googlebook OS

    The announcement of Google's new Googlebook laptops raised questions: what happens to the Chromebooks that many, especially students, know well? Google says it will be phasing out ChromeOS updates in mid-2034. That date matches plans previously described in court records, but it is now official.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft tells nonprofits their deleted M365 data isn't coming back

    The problem arose after the subscriptions were deactivated. In an email to one affected customer seen by The Register, Microsoft admitted that, "due to an error," it had deleted remaining data before the retention and export window closed. Attempts to recover it had failed.

  • Android Police ☛ Some Pixel users are stuck because Tap to Pay refuses to work

    If you're a Pixel phone user, you'll know that the experience is pretty good, but it's never perfect. One day, you might get the latest software updates and features, and the next day something stops working completely. One recent example is Google Photos, where you can't share edited photos.

  • Six Colors ☛ Why Stolen Device Protection makes Passwords safer – Six Colors

    When enabled, it restricts a number of activities and requires Touch ID or Face ID for many authentication steps—passwords can’t be used instead. For the purposes of protecting your secrets, Stolen Device Protection has two key attributes: [...]

  • Neowin ☛ Users find a default, mandatory Windows feature freezes your PC when you use internet

    Using the available resources and native Windows tools like Task Manager and Event Viewer, some of the enthusiasts and affected users managed to pinpoint the root cause. Turns out, it was a Secure Boot process that was causing this as it runs automatically after a system boots.

    Although I did not face the issue myself, there are many accounts of it online to know that this has been a fairly widespread problem. It is note-worthy here that a former editor in our team did face a related problem that had to do with Secure Boot.

    If you are wondering what exactly is causing the freezes and hangs, the culprit is the "Secure-Boot-Update scheduled task". As the name suggests, this runs a scheduled Secure Boot update whenever you are online or connected to the internet. That is why many affected users initially thought the issue was related to the internet as they noticed the bug won't show up when they were offline.

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

    • The Atlantic ☛ OpenAI Has Gone Rogue

      When AI companies have reported their models going rogue, it has been with great delay and, frequently, under duress. Earlier this month, OpenAI published a blog post boasting about the firm’s commitment to the “value of transparency” and shared six new incidents of troubling actions taken by its AI models—most of which the company had known about since May or even April, but was telling us about only now. Google, confronted with a report that Gemini had hacked three other websites in May, confirmed the events but told The Wall Street Journal that the incidents hadn’t been serious enough to warrant public disclosure. For its part, Anthropic has said it was not reviewing for such misbehaviors until OpenAI started doing so.

    • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ AI Bros Are Having a Meltdown Because the Associated Press Stylebook Clarifies That AIs Don't Have Feelings

      In the midst of heated discussions on AI safety and consciousness, the Associated Press Stylebook has reminded everyone of where it stands on the whole “anthropomorphism” debate.

      “Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics,” it wrote Wednesday in a post on X. “This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.”

    • The Conversation ☛ AI companies could learn safety lessons from the history of nuclear weapons

      J. Robert Oppenheimer oversaw development of the first nuclear weapons through the US government’s Manhattan Project. But Oppenheimer also lobbied for international control of these weapons. The Acheson-Lilienthal Report, published in March 1946, aimed to prevent a destructive arms race between the US and Soviet Union. It was largely written by Oppenheimer.

    • Truthdig ☛ Scam Altman Is Driving Drunk. Let Him Face the Consequences

      We do already have laws to deal with harms caused by AI; we just need to be prepared to use them. Again, no one would expect President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and Attorney General Todd Blanche to take criminal or civil actions against AI in the public interest. If there was a major incident, he would most likely look to initiate a prosecution in pursuit of a payoff for dropping the case. But the law does not begin and end with Trump’s Justice Department.

      If we can forget about the extinction events that keep our pundits busy and focus instead on the millions of far more likely disasters that AI could cause, there will almost certainly be plenty of room for state-level prosecutions, as well as civil suits.

    • No One's Happy ☛ Anthropic’s Claude Max Plans Are Misleading at Best

      There are also at least three class action lawsuits against Anthropic over these plans. Kahn v. Anthropic, filed in June, alleges that “the actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage.” [1] Pascual v. Anthropic alleges Anthropic reduced the value of Pro and Max through backend changes between March and May 2026. [2] A third suit, filed September 8, alleges the 5x and 20x figures only apply to the five-hour session window, not the weekly limit subscribers actually run into. [3]

    • Mike Brock ☛ The Gorilla Is Not an Argument

      The strongest risk argument does not need a frightened machine. Bostrom’s instrumental-convergence argument is that many different goals can make the same intermediate outcomes useful: remaining operational, for example, or obtaining resources. A system pursuing a goal might therefore resist shutdown because shutdown prevents the goal from being achieved.

    • Marc Brooker ☛ Small Decisions: Engineering a Leading Model

      My day job has been primarily in AI for three years now, but I’d be the first to admit that’s been almost entirely in one corner of AI: infrastructure, safety, and tools for AI agents. That work has brought me in contact with a lot of the AI science (and I’d dabbled there over the previous decade), but I’m super far from the day-to-day of work like model building. I wanted to catch up a little (after all you have to know what you’re talking about), and the last couple weeks provided a perfect opportunity.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ "AI" once again revealed to be three perverts in a trenchcoat

      "These contractors are not being hired to flag or vet offensive or inappropriate content. They are being paid to review the quality of Copilot's output, including in these cases of sexual imagery."

    • Farid Zakaria ☛ Hiding my AI slop from my Nix friends

      We seem to be all worried about how many em dashes are in our text. Goodhart’s law teaches us that at that point, that is no longer a good measure of AI slop.

    • Brett Chalupa ☛ Join the Humancrafted community

      When I shared that I was stopping using AI for coding (and everything) else, a lot of people reached out to me asking if there was any online space to talk with other people who are doubtful of AI, experiencing the harms it causes, or have rejected it entirely. I wasn't aware of any, and I very much want one to exist! So I started the Humancrafted forum over at https://humancrafted.dev/forum.

    • The New Stack ☛ OpenAI exposes “new variety of prompt injection” that can spread like computer worms

      First, it details what it describes as “one of the clearest examples,” where the prompt injection arrives by email. Then, when the agent reads the email, the injection instructs it to copy the injection into any emails it sends.

      That example may sound relatively simple, but OpenAI adds that it discovered other, more complex prompt injections, too. For instance, it found that some prompt injections can use the filesystem to replicate themselves or commit themselves through code comments.

    • Manuel Bustillo ☛ One month without AI

      Several months ago, I decided that AI contributions were no longer welcome in a FOSS project I am building and maintaining - LibreWeddingPlanner. It’s not that it got a lot of contributions with AI — actually all contributions I’ve had are translations and feature requests — but I wanted to avoid future drama and have a position against AI.

      However, although I was not using AI for my FOSS contributions, I kept using it at work. In my workplace, as well as in many of my developer friends’, using AI to work is very, very common. Not without a degree of shame, let me tell you about this experience, and how it was turning me dumber, lazy, and a worse developer.

    • NPR ☛ Schools are experimenting with AI with little evidence or policy to guide them

      Meanwhile, the research around how schools can use AI to help students — and avoid potential harms — is extremely limited, according to a recent Stanford University review of more than 800 academic papers. According to that report, some of the existing studies suggest that carefully designed AI tools show more promise than general-purpose chatbots.

      There's also no consensus around how schools and educators should be measuring what works and what doesn't.

    • Global Nerdy ☛ Aaron Patterson’s closing keynote (and antidote to the DHH funeral) at Rails World 2026: “Get in loser, we’re going programming”

      Proponents of vibe coding argue that AI agents are “just another compiler”, and that since you don’t inspect the assembly generated by LLVM or GCC, you shouldn’t care about inspecting the Rust or TypeScript spit out by Claude or GPT.

      Aaron obliterated that comparison in two sentences: [...]

    • Sancho Panza ☛ When did Google get so f-ing weird?

      Google, a search engine which does not have human emotions, assumed that I had been spurned by a man in my life named Dario and decided what I wanted was an empathetic digital friend. What I wanted was some links, but that's not what Google does in 2026. Expanding the AI overview to see the full answer gave me this: [...]

    • David Bushell ☛ Leaving them behind – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)

      I’ve waited long enough! I’ve entertained one “wait six months” too many!

      The TL;DR for my updated AI policy has changed:

      - I do not currently use AI for professional work.
      + I do not and will not use AI.

      The absolute vileness of the AI industrial complex knows no bounds.

      Beyond morality — because let’s be honest few care — it’s very simple: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Parasocial media: why influencers really aren't your friend

      The “parasocial” illusion that’s created by social media platforms helps deceive and misguide you, the audience.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ The Public Ledger of Credentials directory is taking flight

      One criticism of Bluesky has historically been that it’s not been fully decentralized. Originally, it provided the only application and datastore that sat on the network, and it was the only organization doing identity management — so, while there was an open protocol underneath it, in practice users couldn’t pick anyone else’s services or really migrate.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Cyberattack on Polish medical software provider exposes patient data

      Qbusoft, which develops the Medyc medical records and practice management platform, was breached after an attacker exploited an SQL injection vulnerability in August, according to a notification issued last week by one of the healthcare providers affected by the incident.

    • Yle ☛ Threat of Russian sabotage in Europe has grown, says Finnish intelligence official

      Isokangas does not, however, believe Russia wants to challenge Nato through military action.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Five More Cops Charged for Abusing Flock Cameras Amid So Many Similar Scandals That We Can't Even Keep Track

      Those are just the latest incidents involving police abuse of ALPRs, and are almost certain to be superseded by new scandals in the coming days and weeks.

      As Flock’s surveillance network swells to well over 140,000 ALPRs across the US, incidents of police abuse have followed, with at least 244 separate cases of police abuse recorded by the Institute for Justice — and those are just the ones who’ve gotten caught.

    • ABC ☛ 5 Indianapolis police officers charged with misusing license plate readers

      In one case, Jonathan Schultz, an 18-year veteran of IMPD, allegedly utilized the agency's 300 Flock cameras to track down multiple women, including his ex-wife, and then allegedly proceeded to interact with them, based on their movements tracked by the cameras.

    • EFF ☛ EFF to San Francisco Police: Drones are Powerful Surveillance Tools That Require a Robust Policy

      The department has a new proposed policy, which continues to be grossly inadequate in protecting privacy and civil liberties. At best, the draft policy continues the SFPD’s pattern of putting vague guardrails on a powerful surveillance tool, but at worst, if implemented, the policy could effectively usher in sweeping, non-targeted, and unspecified general surveillance over the city with few guardrails.

    • Sinclair Inc ☛ With Flock cameras removed, law enforcement lean on voluntary home surveillance registries

      At the county level, there is an option for a live feed.

      Residents can register an address or plug their cameras into the Real Time Crime Center.

      "It's a way to take advantage of the the popularity of the Ring cameras and different cameras that are on that individuals have on their own personal property," Sheriff Chip Simmons says.

      There are now 1,272 cameras integrated with the sheriff's office and 1,439 on its registry.

    • Chicago Sun Times ☛ 5 Illinois public universities use Flock cameras to surveil campus, records show - Chicago Sun-Times

      That includes the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the largest campus in the state, and the University of Illinois Chicago, which is in the process of renewing its contract. Southern Illinois University Carbondale even employs a Flock surveillance drone that costs more than $40,000 a year.

      These schools, in addition to Western Illinois University and the University of Illinois Springfield, have spent more than $450,000 on Flock’s services since 2021, records show.

    • 404 Media ☛ The End of Privacy Is Here (with Kashmir Hill)

      Facial recognition is everywhere now. It’s in surveillance cameras; it’s soon going to be in Meta’s RayBan pervert glasses, and some students already did that. You now have massively viral accounts that take clips of people, run them through facial recognition software, and then post their name and other personal info for everyone to see. We haven’t fully come to terms with what it means to live in a world where anyone can basically dox anyone else now.

    • Matt Birchler ☛ My phone is clearly listening to me*

      Of course, I don't think I fooled anyone with this post. No one actually thinks that my phone was listening to me, and therefore a marketing newsletter went out or a podcast episode that was recorded months ago was released just because me and my friends were talking about these things.

      However, these are exactly the sort of coincidences that people bring up all the time when talking about proof that everyone is listening to you through your phone. Genuinely, if these had been in any form of advertisement or promoted content in a social feed, there are millions of people who would immediately clock it as undeniable proof that their phone is listening and you'd be a rube if you denied their experience. How could you look at this clear cause and effect and come to any other conclusion?

  • Confidentiality

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ New Attack Against RSA

      First, this attack isn’t new. The original research is from 2007. What is new is the implementation.

      Second, it is a forgery attack. It allows an attacker to forge digital signatures. It does not recover the private key from the public key.

      Third, the attack only works against pure signatures. That is, signatures without any formatting or padding. This is not generally how we use RSA in practice. [...]

    • Iain Cambridge ☛ Introducing the Triple Cipher encryption concept

      GCHQ say they don’t mind me telling people about this because they don’t have the capacity to create it so would love for someone to create an open source version to use.. And I don’t work for them, so I’m free to share my knowledge. And the name came from them since the idea came from me trying to come up with a way to have 3 ciphers in an encryption method.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Brattleboro Reformer, Vermont ☛ YouTube banned for under-16s in Australia: WhitelistVideo briefing for parents

    Nine months after Australia's social media minimum age took effect, WhitelistVideo, the YouTube parental control made by StayBoba, today published a briefing for families asking "YouTube banned for under 16s in Australia: how parents can still control what kids watch". The briefing sets out the controls that still work when a child watches YouTube signed out, including channel approval on the device that does not depend on a YouTube sign-in.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Parking policy masks anti-Muslim discrimination for communities building new mosques

    Published in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the research shows that newly proposed mosques are 16% to 18% more likely to face opposition than newly proposed churches nearby—significantly more than would be expected by chance.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The MAGA Factor

    So when Trump states that the economy is now far better than it was when he took over in January 2025 — a lie he tells repeatedly — they believe him, even though they’re struggling more now than they did then.

    Trump’s continuous lies trump certain people’s lived experiences — people who have surrendered to him their critical judgment.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ The Pentagon’s Million Drone March

    This spending spree is premised on the Pentagon’s frankly dumbass belief that the next war will look like the one Ukraine is fighting (a trench-warfare style slog), rather than the kind the U.S. has spent decades and billions preparing to fight with airpower and long-range precision weapons.

    Before I explain why that’s (very) wrong, here’s how the military came to that view. As drones shrink in size and AI promises to make them autonomous, the Pentagon is convinced they won't just shape the future of war but usher in a completely new way of waging it.

  • The Next Move ☛ Trump and Xi Have a Laugh

    Who is Xi Jinping? He is the boss of the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP imprisons, tortures, and kills some of the best people in China—democrats striving for basic freedoms. The CCP is committing genocide against the Uyghur people. (This was the determination of the US State Department in 2021.) The CCP has crushed Tibet and threatens to do the same to Taiwan.

    This government, the Chinese government, is a mortal enemy of the United States and all free countries.

    If you think that what Trump did with Xi in the White House is wrong, you do not suffer from “TDS”—“Trump Derangement Syndrome”—as many will tell you (as they do me regularly). You are just a decent American.

  • NPR ☛ 'End Times Fascism' looks at supremacist groups uniting around end-of-the-world ideas

    Thanks to Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's brilliant new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, I now have an answer. Klein and Taylor reveal in disturbing detail why some believe it is in their self-interest to fan the flames. They identify three groups of supremacists — religious extremists, technofascists, and ethnonationalists — who have converged around what the authors call "end times fascism." Despite their ideological differences, these factions have come together around their shared conviction that they are part of an elite destined to survive the coming apocalypse.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia Hits Ukraine’s Largest Mobile Provider, Strikes Data Centers

    Russia's Defense Ministry also said on Sunday it hit a data center belonging to Vodafone Ukraine, the country's second-largest cell network provider.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ $200 million-plus spent fighting and supporting billionaire tax

    Opponents of the billionaire tax on the November ballot have vastly outraised the proposal’s supporters, with the anti-Proposition 40 effort and the backers of two other ballot measures crafted to nullify it raising $187 million compared to the $32 million raised by boosters of the wealth tax, according to campaign finance documents filed with the state.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Trump offered to sell arms to China during Xi summit

    China recently got its hands on some fighter jet parts that were inadvertantly sent to Hong Kong, a screw-up that may reveal more of the F35's characteristics to a potential adversary. We at least got some more pandas out of the meeting. Art of the Deal!

• Environment

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Satellite Images Reveal Greenland and Antarctica Have Lost More Than 12 Trillion Tons of Ice Over the Past 50 Years

    Since the 1970s, more than 12 trillion U.S. tons of ice have disappeared from the two landmasses. It’s mostly because glaciers have been flowing faster into the ocean, rather than surface melting, researchers report in the journal Scientific Data on September 16. They also found that the ice loss has raised global sea levels by more than one inch in that timeframe and has accelerated in recent decades.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ UK government tells staff to stop thanking AI chatbots — draft guidance pushes lightweight models and shorter prompts to cut environmental impact

    The government is also keen to make sure that its employees don't rely on AI, reminding everyone that they are responsible for any content or decisions that are made using the input of AI. They won't be able to simply point the finger at an AI-powered tool if something goes awry. This is especially notable given a recent report suggested that using AI can actually increase burnout because it allows workers to take on too many tasks.

  • arXiv ☛ [2608.17055] Wasted large language models: A life cycle thinking approach

    We suggest that one possible way forward is to use life cycle thinking, and view LLMs as products that can become waste. With this perspective, we investigate the potential of the waste hierarchy from the EU's Waste Framework Directive, which suggests five different measures for how to manage waste: prevention, reuse, recycling, recovery, and disposal. We examine how these measures can inform and motivate new types of thinking and approaches to reducing LLM waste and their environmental impact in general.

  • Erik Johannes Husom ☛ Wasted large language models

    Earlier this year I was developing some guidelines for more environmentally-friendly use of generative AI for the Norwegian certification foundation Eco-Lighthouse. In this process I collaborated with Stine Vintervoll, senior advisor from Eco-Lighthouse, who one day asked me: "Could we somehow connect AI's climate footprint with the waste hierarchy?"

    The waste hierarchy is a framework for managing waste to reduce environmental imapct. In its most basic form, it consists of 1) prevention, 2) reuse, 3) recycling, 4) recovery, and 5) disposal. I instinctively thought that this was a very interesting idea, but we struggled with concretizing how it would look like in practice, and in what sense it would make sense to talk about "waste management" in the context of AI.

  • Futurism ☛ Data Center Operator Slapped With $1 Million Fine for Belching Noxious Gas Into Surrounding Community

    But even after a data center goes online, the battle is far from over. Take the DataOne facility in southern New Jersey, for example, which was recently slapped with a $1 million fine by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection after inspectors uncovered illegally installed gas-powered generators belching smog into the surrounding neighborhood.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Backlash as Indian oil heir made professor of sustainability by Newcastle University

    The university announced that Anant Ambani had been given a professorship of practice for “his work in conservation, biodiversity protection, animal welfare and environmental stewardship” and “significant contributions to advancing a more sustainable future”.

    Ambani is the son of India’s richest person, Mukesh Ambani, who made his fortune primarily in oil and gas, owns the world’s largest oil refinery and has close ties with the ruling Bharatiya Janata party (BJP). Mukesh Ambani has enthusiastically praised BJP policies, and firms linked to his Reliance conglomerate have recently made significant donations to the party. The prime minister, Narendra Modi, attended Anant Ambani’s lavish 2024 wedding in Mumbai.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Irish Examiner ☛ 'Horrific' experience as musician stopped from boarding flights at Cork Airport

      “The treatment I received was extremely unpleasant, as if I were committing some kind of offence or trying to take advantage of the system. Nobody is asking to carry instruments free of charge, of course, but one extra seat should be more than sufficient for instruments that genuinely require it.”

• Finance

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] The Rising Left Can’t Ignore Labor’s Ongoing Crisis

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Techdirt ☛ More Xbox Layoffs They Promised Wouldn’t Happen After Acquisition Blitz

    While battling the government to acquire Activision Blizzard, Microsoft stated to the FTC and to the courts that this acquisition would result in more consumer options and would not result in consolidation-based layoffs. Shortly after the purchase was allowed to go through, Microsoft laid off 2,000 staff. Then it laid off more staff. Then it warned it would lay off even more staff, which was a promise it actually followed through on. Then, over this past summer, Xbox cut 20% of its staff.

    Most recently Microsoft — you guessed it — cut even more staff and sold or shuttered a bunch of its studios.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Unified U.S. Site Blocking Bill Targets ISPs and DNS Resolvers But Spares VPNs

    Senator Thom Tillis and Rep. Zoe Lofgren have introduced their joint site blocking bill, the DEFEND IP Act. The proposal comes less than two weeks after Rep. Darrell Issa's competing proposal, and both bills allow rightsholders to obtain court orders requiring ISPs and large DNS resolvers to block foreign pirate sites. A crucial difference is that the unified bill explicitly leaves VPN providers out.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Data center developer offers $10,000 checks to 4,500 households if the 1,300-acre facility is approved — locals push back over noise and 'bribe' concerns

    NorthPoint Development wants to build a data center on 1,300 acres in the Pocono foothills, near Hazle Township, Pennsylvania. As well as seeking to charm the local government with various funding packages, it has proposed paying checks of $10,000 per household. Despite the Pennsylvania town’s median income of $60,000, the offer isn’t being warmly welcomed by locals, reports the Wall Street Journal. Those interviewed were widely against the data center development plans and cited several reasons for being averse to accepting the payout. The major concerns regarded potential impacts on property values, the specter of noise pollution, and a distrust of both the AI moguls and local government representatives.

  • Mike Brock ☛ It is Always Darkest Before the Dawn

    From the far side of a victory, we can mistake the people who achieved it for people who knew they would win. They had to decide whether to keep going before they could know how the story ended.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Neither Side of the Stage

    In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells his listeners to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. That teaching gives me a Christian reason to reject the defense of slaughter. An apologist who invokes Jesus as the measure of moral progress has supplied a standard against which his own defense can be judged.

    O’Connor has spoken of taking inspiration from Jesus, specifically the teaching to love one’s enemies. He need not believe in God to hold a Christian apologist to the standard of the Gospels.

  • Herman Groenbroek ☛ Who should be held accountable when an AI Agent (accidentally) acts maliciously? · Greenpants Blog

    It looks like public perception of how 'intelligent' current AI models are varies widely. Back in 2022, a Google employee already thought their AI model was sentient. Today in 2026, it seems like every other week there's a new article released about how AI companies "can't hold back their AI agents anymore"[2, 3, 4].

    It makes perfect sense for the general public to start fearing AI. In the past, people feared companies would use AI to replace all kinds of jobs, and now they are even [breaking into] government organisations.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Sid Miller, Texas Republican, Sounds Alarm on Data Centers

    Backlash to the data center bonanza has become an electoral fissure in the run up to November’s midterm elections. A survey published by Gallup earlier this month found that 7 in 10 Americans would oppose the construction of a data center in their communities. State-level polling conducted in August by the Texas Politics Project found that roughly 57 percent of respondents opposed or strongly opposed the construction of data centers in their communities, with the proportion of opposition being much higher in rural areas. They suck u p water and energy resources, take up land, disrupt the peace and quiet of the intentional distance you take from the city slickers, and they’re popping up like weeds.

  • Thorsten Ball ☛ Thorsten Ball - What I believe about the future of software development

    This was originally posted on X and blew up. To plant my flag, to say that these are things I believed in September 2026, here it is on the blog, non-ephemeral. Some of these predictions are just observations, they’ve long been true at companies like Amp. Others will take some time to play out.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Strategist ☛ Australia's next class war may be fought over reality

      Research has long shown that people systematically overestimate how widely others share their beliefs, a cognitive bias known as the false-consensus effect. More recent experimental and observational research indicates that social media can amplify this bias by exposing users to disproportionately like-minded content and visible signals of agreement, although the effects are generally modest and vary across platforms and users. Personalised algorithms intensify that tendency by exposing users disproportionately to people who think as they do. An audience can gradually become an imagined constituency, that constituency an assumed majority, and that assumed majority an expectation that governments ought to implement its preferred policies. When democratic institutions produce different outcomes, political disappointment can be reinterpreted as evidence that those institutions no longer represent the people.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ YouTube And Meta Reverse Course On Musk Documentary Ads. X, Unsurprisingly, Does Not.

    The real question is how much of this is just crappy systems and how much is billionaire oligarchs having each others’ backs. In the case of Meta, there have been complaints in the past that its automated ad review tools are notoriously quick to reject any documentary film, so this might just be run-of-the-mill “we’re bad at this” rather than Zuck protecting Musk (Zuck’s got his own Aaron Sorkin movie to worry about this week).

  • Insitut Politechnique de Paris ☛ Academic freedom in decline in Europe and around the world

    Aca­dem­ic free­dom has been stead­ily declin­ing world­wide for the past 15 years, accord­ing to the Aca­dem­ic Free­dom Index (AFI). In recent years, many demo­cra­cies have con­trib­uted to this decline, includ­ing the United States and the United Kingdom.

    The find­ings of the 2026 AFI report are damning: between 2015 and 2025, as many as 50 coun­tries recor­ded a sub­stan­tial and stat­ist­ic­ally sig­ni­fic­ant decline in their aca­dem­ic free­dom index, com­pared with only 9 that saw an increase. The AFI report, pro­duced by research­ers at Friedrich-Alex­an­der Uni­ver­sity and the V‑Dem pro­ject, provides an annu­al assess­ment of the effect­ive pro­tec­tion of aca­dem­ic free­dom in 179 coun­tries. It is based on five indic­at­ors: three relat­ing to indi­vidu­al dimen­sions (free­dom of research and teach­ing, free­dom of aca­dem­ic exchange and dis­sem­in­a­tion, and free­dom of aca­dem­ic and cul­tur­al expres­sion), and two con­cern­ing insti­tu­tion­al dimen­sions (insti­tu­tion­al autonomy and cam­pus integrity).

  • New York Times ☛ How Trump Has Cracked Down on Dissent Since the Killing of Charlie Kirk

    Officials have taken a governmentwide approach to scrutinizing citizens and organizations opposed to Trump policies. Tax agents have examined nonprofit groups. Investigators have looked into the books of labor unions. Prosecutors have brought charges against anti-ICE protesters, asserting that a leftist conspiracy is provoking political violence on the streets.

  • American Public Media ☛ Summit County Library declines to remove book after parent complaint

    As of Sept. 18, 37 titles have been banned from public school shelves in Utah because three or more school districts voted to remove them. Authors are suing to overturn the law.

  • The Current GA ☛ Georgia school system abruptly bans Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye’

    Library and free speech advocates reject the removal.

    Georgia Library Media Association advocate and retired school librarian Nan Brown said the district appears not to have followed the proper procedure under a 2022 law which created pathways for removing books that start with guardian complaints and must follow a review process.

  • Site36 ☛ German Police break up Kurdish commemoration in Hannover during ongoing peace process

    The state capital had previously banned the event throughout the city. According to the Kurdish news agency Ajansa Nûçeyan a Firatê (ANF), the police had therefore prevented an initial attempt to hold the commemoration. The participants subsequently moved to the centre.

  • The Next Move ☛ We’re Being Targeted by a Russian Spy Ring.

    Recently, we were advised to increase our security. Then, just the other week, federal authorities released the reason why: the Russian regime is hunting opponents on American soil.

    The Bureau busted a spy ring in the US. Intelligence officers from the FSB—that’s Putin’s version of the KGB—hired a Brooklyn man to surveil prominent Russian pro-democracy activists. Then the Russians offered their contractor tens of thousands of dollars to “eliminate” the target. We are grateful to the brave law enforcement officers who thwarted this scheme.

  • Futurism ☛ All Major Social Networks Refusing to Promote Documentary That Made Elon Musk Mad

    The stonewalling has reportedly taken distributor Bleecker Street by surprise, with the company scrambling to figure out why its ads have been so widely rejected.

    YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook and Instagram owner Meta have all provided a reason related to “political content” to the distributor for why they turned down the ad, per the reporting.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Nashville Public Radio ☛ Preschoolers at the Goddard School of Gallatin act as "kid journalists" for World News Day

    September 28 was dubbed “World News Day” by a global network of journalists and editors nearly a decade ago to highlight the role that reporters play in keeping citizens informed and strengthening democracy.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Orders The FCC To Punish A Reporter. Where Did All The ‘Ministry Of Truth’ Screamers Go?

    And speculate they did. Almost immediately the media was awash in people screaming about how Biden was creating a “Ministry of Truth” who would “police your speech.”

  • New Republic ☛ Transcript: Trump Rage over Failing Press Ban Erupts in Epic Self-Own

    Unfortunately, this lesson has been learned kind of late, after a whole lot of elite capitulation has already happened. But still, it’s good to see, and we’re wondering now if this will steel the media to go after Trump harder on things that it’s mostly avoided, like his deteriorating mental state.

    Paul Waldman’s been writing well on Trump’s waning power on his Substack, The Cross Section. So we’re talking to him about all of it. Paul, thanks for coming on.

  • CPJ ☛ Iran sentences two journalists as media crackdown widens

    “The latest convictions and prosecutions show how Iranian authorities continue to weaponise the judicial system to silence critical reporting and commentary, while journalists like Majid Saeedi remain detained without any information about their fate,” said Sara Qudah, CPJ’s regional director. “Authorities must overturn these convictions, drop cases targeting journalists for their work, disclose the whereabouts of those detained and immediately release them.”

  • Middle Tennessee State University ☛ CNN left off Air Force One for Trump's trip, White House signals in new media restriction | The Free Speech Center

    The news organization was replaced by Real America’s Voice, a conservative network, for the president’s trip to Knoxville, Tenn., according to White House guidance. Trump was scheduled to attend a college football game between the University of Tennessee and the University of Texas at midday Saturday.

    The news came just after journalists from CNN, along with MS NOW and Politico, which Trump banned last week from the White House grounds, returned to the executive complex with TV cameras in hand after a judge handed the organizations a reprieve.

  • New Yorker ☛ The President vs. the Press

    The ban followed the now familiar path of Trump’s potentially illegal or unconstitutional acts. As with his attempts to slap his name on the Kennedy Center and his effort to overrule the language of the Fourteenth Amendment, by curtailing birthright citizenship, that path typically travels from absurd idea to absurd (but nonetheless concerning) act, to a legal response that becomes another case study in which we evaluate the extent to which the judicial system is capable of reining in the arbitrary impulses of an aspiring autocrat.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ The Free and Unfree Press

    Axel Springer, the German media company whose corporate constitution includes support for Israel and “the principles of a free market economy” as its founding values, gives an award each year that can be thought of as the Press Ruiner Award. In past years, it’s gone to Jeff Bezos of Amazon, who ruined the Washington Post; Elon Musk, who ruined Twitter; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, who ruined the entire advertising-funded journalism market; and Sam Altman of OpenAI, who is working on ruining the existence of any remaining news outlets, by building a bot to replace them. Last week, the 2026 Axel Springer award was presented to billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, who ruined my own former employer Gawker, by suing us into bankruptcy ten years ago.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Graham Helton ☛ Security Conference Websites Are Bad

    A security conference website should be the authoritative source of truth for anyone looking to attend. This is not always the case. Allow me to illustrate this by showing two examples I stumbled upon this morning.

  • Yle ☛ Purchasing power splits in two: down for the poor, up for the rich

    Purchasing power is still falling for the bottom tenth on the income scale this year, while it is rising for the top decile.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ The Metric Is Not The Mission: When The Maps Became The Territory

    There is a curious tendency among successful technologies to disappear. Not physically, of course, but cognitively. Once they become sufficiently embedded in everyday life, they cease to be experienced as technologies at all. Electricity is no longer a marvel of engineering but an expectation. We do not admire the plumbing each time we turn on a tap, nor do we reflect on the extraordinary complexity of global logistics every time fresh fruit appears on supermarket shelves in the middle of winter. The greatest infrastructures become invisible because they succeed so completely that we mistake them for part of the natural order.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Techdirt ☛ Free Speech, Consumer Groups Make Last Ditch Effort To Block Paramount Merger

    A cornerstone of the settlement is the requirement that the new, bigger Paramount produce 30 traditional big films a year. Though the groups note this is less films in total than the two individual companies had already planned to produce in 2027. Another major condition involves a “CBS and CNN oversight board” staffed by people hand-picked by Paramount executives.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Muse Is What Meta Means by ‘Personal Superintelligence’

    The business model is also bananas to me. Apparently, Meta will eventually charge a commission for transactions conducted through Muse. That just means another layer of rent-seeking. Imagine the result of ordering a meal with Doordash through Muse: the saddest sandwich you have ever seen that, somehow, also cost like $50. I feel like there is a type of person who will get a lot out of Muse, and that someone has substantial disposable income.

  • Matt Stoller ☛ Monopoly Round-Up: Paramount-WB Isn't Just a Loss, It's a Prelude

    It’s easy to see this merger fight as a catastrophic loss, which it is. It will combine two of the five major movie studios, CNN and CBS, and major streaming platforms under the control of a highly politically connected owner of Oracle and TikTok. Iconic TV writer Mike Schur basically said it’s game over for Hollywood, and the American news media will likely become more corrupt, feckless, and aligned with capital.

    But the merger challenge is also more than that, and it has implications beyond the castle walls of media, as important as those are. This fight was a battle between coalitions, and in some ways, it is a prelude to more of that fight in this election cycle and beyond.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Priceful (28 Sep 2026)

    Digital rights activists have long railed at the use of the term "IP," criticizing it for being deceptively imprecise and also rhetorically dishonest. I get where these objections are coming from, but I think they're misguided.

    Start with "deceptively imprecise." "IP" covers a lot of legal ground, from the "big three" of copyright, trademark and patent, to a whole arcane bestiary: anticircumvention, noncompete, trade secrecy, nondisparagement, database and publicity rights, and more. Each of these has a radically different policy basis and radically different contours.

    Take copyright and trademark. Copyright is designed to allow companies (and the creators they hire or contract with) to commercially exploit creative works. In the US, copyright is a creature of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8: [...]

  • Trademarks

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Some assembly required: The CJEU on balancing trade mark rights and freedom of expression in Inter IKEA Systems