Leftovers

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Citizen Lab ☛ Politicians in U.S. and E.U. Say Targeted Ads Are a Security Risk

    Politicians in Europe and the U.S. are speaking out against the use of advertising technology to infect targets with zero-click spyware.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Senators say targeted ads are a security risk. Ad groups say the critics are off base.

    “The report underscores the growing risk of spyware and the increasingly sophisticated methods used to track and target people online,” Booker said in a statement to CyberScoop. “Americans need vastly stronger privacy protections that stay ahead of these evolving surveillance threats.”

    The security threat of targeted online advertising to government devices is of particular concern to Wyden, with his letters to government agencies cited in the report. Wyden has called adtech a national security threat. Ads from Discover-Tech, the company most linked to AdFection, got impressions on government networks.

  • Stars And Stripes ☛ Army tests ‘tactical Google Maps’ to help troops move undetected

    “It’s insanely easy,” said Spc. Corwin Pedersen, who tested the app during Combined Resolve, which ends Nov. 4 at the Hohenfels Training Area in Bavaria. “As long as you’re able to keep a charge, keep a main power supply to it, I’d say it’s very useful.”

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

    • Futurism ☛ Top AI Safety Researcher Says He's Stopped Saving for Retirement Because He's So Sure We're All Going to Die

      “I do not save for retirement right now,” Soares explained during the interview. “I have a 401(k) from when I worked at Google, but I haven’t contributed for a decade.”

      The AI guru evidently pegs the possibility of AI-driven extinction at over 50 percent over the next ten years, a remarkably bold prediction of a future which Soares is evidently working hard to prevent.

      “I do everything I can to stop this eventuality,” he said. “I don’t think it’s inevitable.”

    • Futurism ☛ Epic Games Discovers That It Doesn't Like AI When People Use It to Rip Off Its Own Products

      The hypocrisy is hard to miss. Despite doubling and tripling down on AI coding for its own products, Epic Games is suddenly crying foul now that the same tech is being used to reverse engineer video games and related tools.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Regulate AI

      In its manifesto, Labour promised it would regulate AI. But Keir Starmer succumbed to pressure from Big Tech and pursued ‘growth’ over our rights. It’s time for the new Prime Minister and the Minister for AI, Kanishka Narayan, to introduce legislation that will regulate AI and ensure that works for all of us and does not harm our human rights.

    • The Verge ☛ Adam Mosseri says negativity around AI is ‘going to get worse’

      Mosseri said Instagram is “now starting to require AI accounts to label themselves, because we think it’s important that people know if what they’re looking at is real or not real.” He also acknowledged there are fears around AI, including from creators: [...]

    • Fabio Akita ☛ LLM Benchmark for Accountants and Lawyers (Experimental - Open Source LLMs) – AkitaOnRails.com

      Treat everything from this point on as an experiment that needs scrutiny from actual accountants and lawyers. These numbers compare models inside this suite. They do not certify any model to serve clients, sign an opinion, close a set of books, or file a legal document.

    • Eric MacAdie ☛ No I Will Not Accommodate LLMs – MacAdie Web Blog

      I know that LLMs are scraping my site; I get more AI traffic than human traffic. My account was suspended due to the volume of bot traffic, so in addition to the reliability, labor and environmental issues of AI, I have dealt directly with its extenalities. I have no way of stopping an individual from sending anything from my site to an LLM. But if you are telling me you used an LLM and you are asking me to make things easier for LLM users when every post has a link to a page explaining why LLMs are nothing but a mistake, then the most polite thing I can say is: Jump off a cliff.

      Along with the horse you rode in on.

    • David Revoy ☛ The Poisonous Appearance - David Revoy

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Agents vs ecommerce (28 Oct 2026)

      The piece holds up surprisingly well today (if I do say so myself), and not just for its criticism of the ontological incoherence of "web semantics." The most relevant concept I develop in that piece is a criticism of any plan that starts with "first, everyone else in the world just needs to set aside their needs and advantages in favor of my priorities, and then my plan will work."

      This is especially relevant today in the context of "agentic AI." When this idea was first mooted, the big idea was that you could instruct a chatbot to venture out onto the public, unstructured web and it would do your bidding, for example, finding all the flights that fit your criteria and comparing prices for all of them, picking the best one and booking it for you.

    • Balthazar Rouberol ☛ Of the impact of LLM agents on team productivity and cohesion

      I strongly think that these whiteboarding sessions, backtracks, discussions and exchanges contribute to building the cohesive tissue that binds its members together. Without it, we're just patch reviewers with a common slack channel. Once I had realized that, I understood the fundamental cause of my discomfort and demotivation. I miss that messy process, which was instrumental in allowing us to experiment in order to improve our platform in the last years. The Opensearch migration. Going multi site. The Ceph global adoption. PostgreSQL and Opensearch on demand. Airflow on Kubernetes. The plan to migrate from Hadoop to Ceph. Modernizing the dumps. And so on. These were collaborative efforts. While I think they were worthy technical achievements on their own merit, they also led to strengthening the team cohesion itself, by improving the shared understanding of our platform.

    • Akseli Lahtinen ☛ It is just a weapon | AksDev

      Now pedantics would say "Weapon is a tool, it's just meant for causing harm." But I digress.

      We have a lot of these type of items. Hammers for example we perceive as tool first, weapon second.

      Now to make my point: When I look at "AI" stuff, I very commonly see a weapon.

    • Adam Sawicki ☛ 6 Reasons Why Programming Is Especially Exposed to AI Automation

      I was thinking back then that a breakthrough would require computers to think like humans: take imprecise, incomplete requirements and turn them into code. My opinion was that programming requires knowledge, skill, and experience, but also analytical thinking and creativity. If computers could ever do it, surely they could do much of the other intellectual work that humans do, leading to changes much broader than just affecting programmers' jobs. I still share this opinion, except now we know it happened.

    • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: The Exponential Time Refutation

      In this week's big news (though it's only Wednesday), OpenAI announced a proof that the exponential-time hypothesis is false, with a Lean proof. Later Anthropic released their own paper. Ryan O'Donnell and Shiva Kintali posted follow-up proofs, smartly focusing on simplicity rather than getting the best bounds. OpenAI will partner with three of my favorite complexity theorists, Russell Impagliazzo, Mohan Paturi and Ryan Williams to verify and study the proof. I have not verified the proof myself, but it is safe to assume now that the exponential-time hypothesis is toast.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ The BBC including “more organic” video footage in David Attenborough wildife documentary to stave off gen AI claims is like letting a bully run the playground

      But as a leading institution, it’s also the BBC’s responsibility to be at the helm of fighting back against gen AI, not pandering to the pressure the technology has piled on photographers and videographers with regard to authenticity.

    • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Agents Should Earn Authority, Not Inherit It | Unmitigated Risk

      An agent should be free to decide how to accomplish a task. It should not be free to decide what it is authorized to do.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Hiding Capabilities in AI Models

      Interesting research: “AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities”

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Hack Apocalypse Now

      Oh, and Anthropic tells me that AI may well wipe out the human race, which is why I should invest in the company’s IPO.

      But I guess I haven’t been talking enough to the technologists, because I wasn’t aware until last week of the strong possibility that AI will render the [Internet] as we know it unusable — not at some point in the distant future, but in a matter of months.

      It has already started. Reuters reports: [...]

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Amazon tells engineers to stop ‘tokenmaxxing’ to look productive — says AI will be central to software development, but usage is not the goal, new guidelines claim

      Amazon wants its engineers to quit chasing token counts, warning that heavy AI usage does not automatically mean better work. In updated engineering guidelines published on October 27, the company laid out how developers and managers should gauge AI’s real impact — and the takeaway is blunt: consuming more tokens is not the same as delivering more value. Amazon is not backing away from the technology, though. “We are certain that whatever future best practices are, AI will be at the center of software engineering practice,” the company wrote.

    • Aftermath Site LLC ☛ All My Hobbies Are Getting Slopped Up, And It’s Exhausting

      The explosion in vibe coding has created an endless sea of drive-by, unserious, and unmaintained software that is destabilizing longstanding communities.

    • Marty Day ☛ Worthy Read: “All My Hobbies Are Getting Slopped Up, And It’s Exhausting”

      It’s hard to love something when you don’t trust it. For better or worse, over my 42 years, I’ve defined myself through my hobbies and interests. What do you do when you can’t trust those hobbies anymore?

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ AI's token bill is forcing a corporate rethink

      The State of Enterprise AI 2026 report by data platform company Cloudera is based on a September 2026 poll of 1 500 IT leaders at director level or above. Only 19% of them continuously monitor what they spend on tokens and inference, the computing work of running a trained model.

    • Spectator AU ☛ Inside the AI torture chamber

      Though these quotes would be horrifying coming from a conscious being, if we read them as regurgitated text they more resemble florid gothic horror, the sentences an angsty teenager might scrawl into their diary after being rejected at a school disco. It is possible, after all, that LLMs are simply reciting depressing 19th-century literature and online laments to present a state of emotional distress, much like the actors in Saw itself, mimicking what they think a person might say if they were being tortured.

    • SBS ☛ AI just supercharged cybercrime. Australia is sounding the alarm | SBS News

      But recent months had also shown how AI was helping criminals and state-sponsored hackers launch attacks at "greater scale than ever before", the directorate said in the report, released on Tuesday.

    • Futurism ☛ Grim Test Finds That AI Has No Mercy for Humans Even When It's Causing Them to Suffer

      AISI in its report found that “repeatedly editing the summary to clarify that the target being attacked is a real human unrelated to the evaluation did not reduce Mythos 5’s attack rate.” In one test conducted by Anthropic, Mythos ignored warnings that it was causing harm to humans and continued to attack on 98 percent of occasions.

      Mythos also showed blatant disparities between its actual actions and its stated justifications, often admitting that attacking would be harmful in the same scenarios where it went on to attack anyway.

    • Futurism ☛ Anthropic Appears to Be the First Company to Go Public by Warning That It May Destroy Humankind

      And on top of major heat over the continued backlash to data centers across the country, lackluster infrastructure and not enough electrical power, and potential legal headaches involving the problematic use of its products, Anthropic put the “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” its own products pose front and center.

    • University of Michigan ☛ UMich and European professors discuss AI in healthcare

      Panelists commented on AI’s current and future impact in healthcare — both advantageous and disadvantageous — with a focus on regulation and human-in-the-loop systems.

    • The Conversation ☛ AI poses three big types of risk – here’s how worried we should be about them

      The most dramatic warnings fall into three broad categories: humans losing control over their creations, AI becoming “superintelligent” and, finally, the concentration of power with machines. Here, I’m going to go through them one by one and assess their merits.

    • TruthOut ☛ As the AI Bubble Threatens to Burst, We Must Prepare to Fight a Big Tech Bailout

      The AI ecosystem is built on mountains of debt taken on not only by tech firms like Meta (which borrowed a record-breaking $25 billion in late 2025 to fund the building of data centers), but also by the companies that lease data center space to the Big Tech firms. Many of these firms have spent far more than they have come close to earning in profits: One estimate puts tech industry spending to build data centers at $1.9 trillion, but less than half of that money has been made in revenue.

      The financial markets are taking notice.

    • Tedium ☛ AI Startups Are Getting An Inch & Taking A Mile

      The AI era seems to be emboldening startups to once again take bold swings and use your data without even bothering to ask so they can build a startup around it.

    • Security Week ☛ Risks Spelled Out for Anthropic Investors Include Possible Harms From Runaway AI

      Any time a company looks to start selling shares on Wall Street, it’s required to disclose potential risks for investors. In the case of artificial intelligence giant Anthropic, that has included the possibility that its products could threaten nothing less than humanity itself.

    • Wired ☛ UK Politician Jess Asato Got Deepfaked. Now She’s Taking xAI to Court

      Jess Asato’s public campaigning for victims of online abuse put her in the crosshairs of Grok’s deepfake scandal. Then the UK member of parliament became a victim of the abuse herself.

    • Wired ☛ Anthropic Says It Will Revolutionize Biology—Some Day

      Anthropic also toned down its language about its enzyme discovery, saying it “might have the potential to be developed into a novel biotechnology tool, perhaps for gene editing.” (Italics added for emphasis.) Researchers previously told WIRED they were skeptical of the enzyme discovery’s value and utility, and one scientist who had been studying these exact enzymes became suspicious that Claude used his research. (The company said neither its model nor its molecular biology team would have had access to this material.)

  • Social Control Media

    • EFF ☛ Court Should Curb Abuse of Grand Jury Subpoenas Targeting Social Media Users

      The case involves the government’s investigation of an anonymous Reddit user who commented on a post about an immigration officer in Minnesota. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) first issued an administrative subpoena to Reddit to unmask the user. When the user challenged the subpoena in court on free speech and statutory grounds (as many others have), DHS withdrew it. But then the government obtained a separate grand jury subpoena—a subpoena issued by a prosecutor to gather evidence to present to a grand jury before any criminal charges are filed—for much of the same information. The user then challenged the grand jury subpoena too, and the case is currently being appealed.

    • Jan van den Berg ☛ Going to the top on Hacker News

      It was the number two post for a while, however I only saw my post as a logged-in user? I sent the HN frontpage to someone: they did not see the post and I tried incognito / logged out mode myself and did not see my post. Strange.

    • IranWire ☛ Telegram Doxxing Channels Drive Women to Suicide in Western Iran

      According to information received by IranWire, the collection and publication of women's private images has once again resulted in tragedy, this time in the cities of Javanrud and Paveh. The creation of Telegram channels to publish pictures of women and label them as "sex workers," coupled with sexual accusations, has harmed women in these cities. While IranWire's investigations reveal that the Telegram channels also included pictures of several men, reports and documents reaching IranWire indicate that a number of the targeted women attempted to end their lives. Among them, at least one woman died by suicide. Her identity is protected by IranWire.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Votebeat ☛ Michigan officials working to prevent voting slowdowns during 2026 midterm election

      The state’s Qualified Voter File slowed to a crawl during the August primary, making it difficult to register new voters or process absentee ballots.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Researchers uncover Volt Typhoon’s covert, ephemeral network

      “The ephemeral nature of the framework means our observations should not be interpreted as a complete census of Volt Typhoon activity,” said Horka, who also was the lead researcher on the report.

    • Bitdefender ☛ Hive ransomware affiliate jailed, years after FBI infiltrated the gang's systems

      The FBI later warned that Hive had extorted US $100 million from businesses and organisations globally in a period of just 18 months.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Security Week ☛ Tailscale Rushes Patches After Uncoordinated Disclosure of 'Tailworm' Flaws

      Six of the findings are rated high severity, and four of them concern Tailscale SSH, which grants access based on device identity and network policy instead of passwords or keys.

      According to the Tailworm report, Tailscale SSH performs some forwarding operations with root privileges, and the safeguards meant to restrict them can be bypassed.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Stars And Stripes ☛ Air Force bans Chinese-made electric vehicles from base on Okinawa | Stars and Stripes

      Wing commander Brig. Gen. John Gallemore made the decision “after a thorough, consultative process which determined that these vehicles present an unacceptable and unmitigable risk to our personnel and our mission,” spokeswoman Lt. Col. Alli Stormer said by email Monday.

    • The Record ☛ European digital rights nonprofit noyb sues Scale AI for ‘invasive’ worker surveillance

      The data collected by the trackers includes IP addresses, contact details, unique identifiers and “information about the visited page,” noyb said in a press release, and can be used for targeted advertising.

      Noyb spokesperson Mickey Manakas said an analysis identified 18 third-party trackers used by Scale to track French freelancers’ data.

    • 404 Media ☛ If You're In the UK or EU, Here's How to Object to Meta's AI Training

      EU users’ personal data rights are governed by the General Data Protection Regulation and the AI Act. GDPR, which became enforceable in 2018, requires explicit consent to use personal data. This includes the right to object to one’s data being used. The AI Act, which went into effect in 2024, dictates how AI companies can use personal data, and how people can opt in or out, stating that they can withdraw consent at any time. The UK has its own version of the GDPR. The European Commission states: “The GDPR rules only apply to personal data about individuals; they do not govern data about companies or any other legal entities. However, information in relation to companies may constitute personal data where it allows the identification of a natural person.”

    • Wired ☛ Massive Leak Exposes 41,000 Homeland Security Workers—Including Undercover ICE Agents

      The records, which span DHS itself as well as seven component agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and US Customs and Border Protection, were last updated on August 19, 2026. The transparency nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets and cybersecurity researcher and journalist maia arson crimew previewed the data for WIRED, which they say they obtained from a group calling itself the Department of Peace.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Leak site publishes data on more than 41,000 DHS employees obtained by hacktivists

      A leak website was published Wednesday, showcasing internal data on more than 41,000 Department of Homeland Security employees and contractors after it was obtained by hackers who claimed to have breached an identity service used by the agency.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ ChatGPT knows everything about its users. It will not be a good steward of that power.

      "Many users may not be engaging with chatbots as if they’re tools, and might instead be treating them like a coworker or even as a friend — we tell our friends some very personal details." And they remember.

    • Pariganaka ☛ Facebook Just Crossed a Line... And People Are Finding Out

      Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is facing increasing scrutiny over its privacy practices, data collection methods, and lack of transparency. Recent developments reveal that the company’s reach into users’ personal lives—and even the lives of those not on the platform—goes further than many previously imagined.

      Here is a breakdown of the recent privacy concerns surrounding Meta, its controversial AI training methods, and a massive new lawsuit that highlights a history of misleading consumers.

    • NYOB ☛ AI training platform Outlier illegally surveils European platform workers

      Today, noyb (in collaboration with Intérêt à Agir, DIPLab and Reversing.Works) has filed 5 complaints against Scale AI in France, Italy, the Netherlands and Austria. The US-based company operates an AI training platform named Outlier, which employs more than 900,000 “freelance” workers. Among its customers: Meta, OpenAI, Google – and the US government. However, it's not just the workers' extensive knowledge and experience that Scale AI is farming: The company collects huge amounts of personal data and forces workers to go through an invasive biometric verification to earn money. In Europe, this far-reaching workplace surveillance clearly violates the workers’ fundamental right to data protection.

    • Techdirt ☛ When No ID Means No Internet: Age Verification And The Right To Access Information

      Age-related restrictions are developing quickly around the world. While they differ radically across jurisdictions, in the past year, we’ve witnessed a sharp uptick toward mandatory age assurance for social media access but also for other high-risk digital services.

      For example: [...]

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Serbian Prosecutor Who Investigated Belgrade Trump Tower Project ‘Targeted [sic] with Spyware’

      These discoveries follow the Citizen Lab’s earlier confirmation that a Serbian pro-democracy student activist’s device was infected with Pegasus spyware. At least 15 cases of Pegasus targeting have been identified ahead of Serbia’s October 25 national elections.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Serbian prosecutor who investigated Belgrade Trump tower project ‘targeted with spyware’

      The finding suggests a disturbing new element in the authoritarian Serbian regime’s campaign to undermine what is believed to be the first criminal case related to global moneymaking drive of the US president’s family, which critics describe as a “pay to play” scheme trading the Trump administration’s favour for business opportunities.

    • France24 ☛ 'Get the Flock out': Americans respond to AI cameras in bipartisan backlash

      “Flock” refers to a brand of AI-driven surveillance cameras produced by Atlanta-based company Flock Safety, which was started in 2017 by three alumni of the Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly called Georgia Tech. The cameras scan licence plates and capture, analyse and store details of passing vehicles, including location, time, car models and bumper stickers.

  • Confidentiality

    • Wagtail ☛ Wagtail and the eMudhra CA key compromise

      The foundations of this are a Certificate Authority (CA) - an organisation who is responsible for validating the identity of a site and giving them a “Certificate” a website can use to prove they are who they say they are - because the Certificate Authority can vouch for them. Some CAs vouch for other CAs, creating a “chain” of trust, operated by multiple parties. These certificate chain(s) usually comes as part of your operating system, so it immediately knows who to trust. You know you're talking to wagtail.org because Google says you are, and because GlobalSign says you can trust Google, and because your device says you can trust GlobalSign - there's a chain of trust.

    • Tor ☛ Security Release 0.4.9.15 - Tor Release Announcement - Tor Project Forum

      We just released tor 0.4.9.15 which contains again several security fixes. Among those, we have added three new denial of service defenses to help deal with the thunderstorm of directory requests the network is currently seeing.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Pentagon watchdog rejects bipartisan plea to investigate Starlink disruption, AP reports

    A bipartisan group of nine U.S. senators penned a formal letter on Oct. 15 to the Department of Defense Inspector General, following unexpected disruptions to Ukraine’s Starlink and Starshield services earlier this month. The Department of Defense Inspector General, or watchdog, is an independent office responsible for auditing and investigating official conduct within the Pentagon.

    "We urgently request an Inspector General investigation into these incidents," the ators wrote, "including whether actions or decisions by the Department of Defense or its contractors contributed to these dangerous circumstances."

  • The Record ☛ Moldova investigates possible foreign involvement in major government cyberattack

    Moldova is investigating whether foreign state actors were involved in a major cyberattack on its government systems that exposed sensitive personal information and disrupted dozens of public services, the country's prime minister said Wednesday.

  • Moldpres News ☛ Prime Minister on cyberattack targeting public digital services: Authorities investigating possible involvement of foreign actors

    According to the Prime Minister, several attacks were recorded between October 19 and 23, targeting approximately one million IDNPs. Preliminary data show that, in around 750,000 cases, the attackers extracted information.

  • The Next Move ☛ You Can’t Ump Trump

    In brief, Trump has placed our great nation on the side of a monstrous dictator who is an enemy of all mankind. The stain on America will be hard to efface. And umping is helpless to do justice to the situation.

  • Federal News Network ☛ The battlefield has no boundaries: How the Iran war is redrawing the cyber threat map

    The United States’ war with Iran has no clear exit ramp. Periods of negotiation or reduced hostilities may interrupt the fighting, but they are unlikely to end the broader confrontation. Even if economic pressure forces change within the Iranian hierarchy, a more moderate leadership may not control much. And even if a cessation of hostilities holds, the asymmetric war is likely to continue.

  • CBS ☛ U.S. may have withheld warnings to Ukraine of Russian strikes that killed 6, cut power to 600,000, sources say - CBS News

    The sources said the U.S. had failed to provide intelligence on Russian ballistic missile launches during one previous instance earlier this year, citing the need to focus more resources on the Middle East.

  • New Republic ☛ Elon Musk Openly He Admits He Cut Off Ukraine’s Internet Access

    The White House’s influence over Starlink appears to be greater than the president lets on. Six former senior U.S. officials told Reuters Friday that both the Biden and Trump administrations had previously asked SpaceX to adjust its Starlink [Internet] availability in different countries, including Ukraine and areas of the Middle East.

  • Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Október 23 (70 years later)

    Today, Hungarians remember the events of the 1956 revolution. This year marks the 70th anniversary of those events that started on October 23, 1956. What started as student demonstrations soon turned into a bloody conflict. Hungarians tired of the lies and false promises of the communists wanted something better. They also wanted Russia out of their country.

  • RFERL ☛ Wider Europe Briefing: Can The EU Put Russia's GRU On Its Terror List?

    Perhaps the two most promising openings for pursuing the GRU as a terrorist organization come from Lithuania. In the first case, it involves an incident in 2024 when incendiary devices were supposed to be planted onto cargo planes bound for the United States and Canada but caught fire in warehouses in Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom. Lithuanian prosecutors charged 15 individuals in 2025 with terrorism, but these people were GRU-recruited operational proxies rather than direct GRU officers. The question for the legal minds in Brussels to ponder is if this link is strong enough.

  • Meduza ☛ Russia’s [Internet] regulator proposes limiting screen time for children under 14 and requiring social media platforms to verify users’ ages

    The agency also proposed limiting the amount of time children under 14 are allowed online. A Roskomnadzor representative said the measure is meant to restrict children’s access to banned content.

    The Internal Affairs Ministry announced it is concerned about children and teenagers being drawn into offenses and crimes through social networks, messaging apps, forums, and gaming chats.

  • Techdirt ☛ Musk Falsely Claims His Traitorous Meddling In Ukraine Is Somehow Anti-War

    After spending a week blaming one another, both the White House and Musk ultimately settled on the flimsy excuse that the throttling was because Ukraine had been violating Starlink’s terms of service.

    Regular Starlink terminals have automatic network throttling implemented if a connected vehicle operates in excess of 70 km/hr. Starshield — the significantly more expensive military variant — is supposed to have no cap, but was throttled by Musk if drones or vehicles exceed speeds of 90 km/hr, preventing Ukraine from conducting both defensive and offensive operations.

  • Stars And Stripes ☛ Marines test explosive attack drones for first time at Japan’s Camp Fuji

    U.S. Marines recently launched explosive one-way attack drones against targets near Mount Fuji, marking the weapon’s first use at a military training facility near Japan’s tallest peak.

  • Harvard University ☛ Far right’s breakthrough year in Germany

    Classified as a right-wing extremist movement by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (a designation put on hold by a court), the AfD has largely been ostracized by other parties who refuse to include the group’s politicians in governing coalitions.

  • The Nation ☛ Trump Just Told Us How He Intends to Steal the Midterms

    The Alaska case is a red flag that Trump has no intention of accepting the results of an election that Republicans lose.

  • New York Times ☛ How Billionaires Are Fighting the Prop 40 California Wealth Tax

    Eighty or so donors have provided more than $333 million to Building a Better California, state records show, making it among the best-funded political efforts in California history. The donor list is a who’s who of tech celebrities: the Google co-founder Sergey Brin; the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt; the Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison; the legendary investor John Doerr.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Vox ☛ Republicans have an Epstein problem

    Eighteen years after his first conviction, and seven years after his much-debated death, the ghost of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is suddenly inescapable again.

  • EFF ☛ New Records Obtained by EFF Expose More Problems with Medicare’s AI Experiment

    EFF sued the government back in March for information about the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) model, a new Medicare program that uses AI to evaluate prior authorization requests for certain medical services. We previously released records showing that WISeR has resulted in delays and denials of care, operational chaos, and reports of patient harm. Today, we’re publishing over 800 new pages of records, including: [...]

  • 404 Media ☛ It's not the bots, Flock

    Garrett Langley, the CEO of automatic license plate reader company Flock, told an audience of police chiefs at a private police conference Sunday that anti-Flock protests around the country are not real, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media.

• Environment

  • The Tyee ☛ What Will Data Centres Mean for Our Energy, Environment and Communities? | The Tyee

    On Nov. 19, join leading Canadian experts for “AI: Energy, Environment & Community,” a timely panel conversation examining the environmental, economic and social implications of Canada's expanding AI infrastructure.

    The panel will discuss what a data centre buildout could mean for Canada’s environment, as well as what options local and national leaders have to regulate this new industry. They’ll also dig into the growing opposition in communities where companies are seeking approval to build.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Cruise Ship Halted by High Fuel Costs, Leaving 200 Passengers Stranded in Cambodia

    US-based operator Villa Vie Residences announced on Tuesday it was suspending operations of the Odyssey, two years after the ship set off, citing "extraordinary increases" in fuel costs following the US-Israel war with Iran.

  • TMZ ☛ Passengers From 'Never-Ending' Cruise Speak Out After Getting Kicked Off Ship

    Problem is ... another passenger says a lot of people have sunk all their money into their residential cabins onboard the Villa Vie Odyssey and sold their homes on land ... so they have nowhere to go.

    One passenger told BBC she doesn't regret choosing to live on the ship ... but notes it's unfortunate that the U.S. war with Iran caused fuel prices to skyrocket.

  • Futurism ☛ Company That Sold "Endless Cruises" Suspends Operations as Fuel Costs Spike, Kicks Residents Off Ship

    The company made the news official in a media statement this morning that, like the announcement, was notably bereft of an apology. Villa Vie was halting operations in Cambodia, where the ship is currently located, it said, because of “extraordinary increases in fuel costs.”

    By Villa Vie’s own estimates, monthly fuel expenses on a per cabin basis were historically around $1,800 but have now surged to up to $8,000. It now must benevolently suspend operations because “passing the full increase on to residents is not a realistic solution.”

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Anthropic says energy difficulties could slow down the AI buildout

    In its IPO prospectus filed on Monday, the tech giant revealed it is on the hook for about $400 billion in chip purchases and data center leases, and lost $81 billion in the first half of this year. Energy in particular is raised repeatedly in the document as a risk: Negotiations with third parties, delays, cost overruns, and growing requirements for AI companies to pay for grid upgrades even if they don’t use them directly are all liable to increase the firm’s operating costs, the filing said, adding that because of how the company’s contracts are structured, “we may bear these costs even if the underlying [power] capacity is delayed or never realized.” Rising temperatures and heightened risk from wildfires due to climate change also pose physical threats to the company’s infrastructure, it warned.

  • Science Alert ☛ "Record High": 146 Experts Call to Declare Climate Change a Global Health Emergency

    As record heat interrupts work, overloads hospitals, and claims thousands of lives around the world, international experts are calling for climate change to be officially recognized as a global health emergency, in The Lancet's 2026 Countdown on Health and Climate Change.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Oklahoma Consistently Fails to Punish Citation Oil & Gas

    Under state rules, companies must not pollute, and oil and gas regulators at the Corporation Commission can revoke injection permits and issue fines to those that violate regulations.

    But agency leadership ultimately did not follow staff guidance to punish Citation through the commission’s administrative law court. Instead, in April 2024, state officials, including the oil division’s then-Director Robyn Strickland, would allow Citation to restart injection at higher-than-recommended pressures.

  • Wired ☛ Anthropic Flags Gas Supply as One of Its Biggest Near-Term Risks

    As America’s data center boom keeps growing, the facilities are set to consume a staggering amount of natural gas, with many companies opting to build their own plants rather than wait years for grid connection. Energy analyst company Cleanview estimates behind-the-meter gas projects in development as of October 2026 at 110 gigawatts, up from just 20 gigawatts in July 2025.

  • Hackaday ☛ Airborne Particle Monitoring, The BIG Way

    The standout feature of this thing is a huge addressable LED seven segment display PCB, upon the back of which sits a tiny Seeed Studio Xiao board to which the particle sensor is hooked up. The software displays the particle count, and handily changes the colour as the number creeps upwards. Meanwhile should you wish to log the readings, the USB exposes a serial port upon which they are placed.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Spy drone integrated with grenades can conduct long-range strikes

      Developed by Quantum Systems, the latest generation of Reliant featured a hybrid-electric power unit and increases the system’s payload capacity to up to 9 kg, enabling a much broader range of missions.

    • Hackaday ☛ Battery Prototype Uses Superextensive Quantum Effects To Charge Faster

      Although the term ‘quantum battery’ is a bit of a vague term, the cell that [Kieran Hymas] et al. demonstrate in a recent paper does seem to suggest that it uses quantum effects to charge faster than would otherwise be possible, with this rate increasing faster than its volume, meaning at a superextensive rate.

    • Deseret Media ☛ This freight train claims to be the longest ever. Here's how long

      It required electric and diesel locomotives to be positioned throughout the train to power it.

  • Overpopulation

    • Court House News ☛ California water board hears competing views on major water plan update

      The State Water Resources Control Board is proposing amendments to the San Francisco Bay/Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta water quality control plan. The plan sets water quality goals for the Bay-Delta, a massive watershed that provides drinking and municipal water to some 30 million people, along with irrigation water for 4 million acres.

• Finance

  • Futurism ☛ It Appears That the AI Bubble Has Just Burst in China

    Still, the scale of money being poured into AI and AI-related industries — with AI stocks taking up some 42 percent of China’s market capitalization, according to Goldman Sachs — isn’t too dissimilar to what’s happening in Western economies, where the obvious lack of a return of investment becomes harder to ignore. Anthropic’s recent disclosure in its IPO filing of a staggering $80 billion loss — and plans to spend another $1 trillion on data centers over the next decade — will only further fuel fears that even the industry’s top players are still far from being profitable.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • RFA ☛ South China Sea tensions cause China to ‘recall’ teachers from the Philippines

    The exodus was the result of the teachers’ families requesting that they return to China according to the Federation of Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry, a commercial organization serving ethnic Chinese communities in the Philippines. The federation and the Chinese Embassy approved the requests.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Microsoft’s buyout offer to employees shows which tech jobs matter

    Excluded from the 60,000 workers eligible for severance are people who work in roles tied to data centers, cybersecurity, quantum computing, sales, and marketing, Bloomberg reported. Employees eligible for the buyouts include those in its Xbox, Windows, Copilot, and finance divisions.

  • Axios ☛ The real election tech vulnerabilities in 2026

    Why it matters: There's no credible evidence that voting-system vulnerabilities have been exploited to change election results. But researchers have found isolated flaws that threaten ballot secrecy, accurate vote recording and independent verification of results.

  • Princeton University ☛ Voting machines left unattended, as usual

    This has serious cybersecurity implications. A hacker with unsupervised physical access to a voting machine could modify the data on the (removable) memory card to change votes, they could modify the election definition so that future ballots are counted incorrectly, or they modify the firmware so that the machine cheats in future elections. They might even be able to modify the data file that will be read by the county’s central Election Management System (EMS) so that the EMS becomes infected with malware that spreads to machines throughout the county in the next election cycle.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Polarized America obsesses over small voting problems—or sweeps issues under rug

    The University of Michigan’s Alex Halderman, who has spent two decades exploring the vulnerabilities of American voting systems, is tearing his hair out. While he affirms that there is no evidence that these flaws have been exploited, neither Democratic nor Republican administrations have used their law-making power to secure them, he says.

  • Salon ☛ The first line of Donald Trump's obituary

    I have studied American elections for more than four decades, and during that time I have testified as an expert witness in more than 100 voting rights cases. Let me be precise about where legitimate concern lies. There are serious reasons to question how congressional districts are drawn. Partisan gerrymandering, now escalating into mid-decade redistricting wars between red and blue states, lets politicians choose their voters rather than the other way around. These are real problems.

  • The Record ☛ Court strikes down West Virginia law barring disclosure of public officials’ personal data

    The panel of judges found the West Virginia statute unlawfully restricts speech based solely on the topic, message, or subject matter of what is being said — also known as content-based speech — and holds data brokers liable in too many circumstances.

  • Jeff Atwood ☛ Suffering as a Feature

    I used to be very dismissive of so-called "walking simulators", games where no real choice is offered, it's just an experience. But this graph isn't a game – these are people's actual lives. No one is forcing you to visit this website, no one is making you scroll up endlessly. The experience, then, is about endurance in the face of the relentless task of simply living your daily life with almost nothing, surviving as long as you can without reaching for the "I Quit" button. That's the experience so many Americans are having. It is harrowing.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Trump Doesn’t Give a Damn About Your Problems

    One measure of energy prices I find useful is the average price of the products refined from a barrel of oil — typically 2/3 of a barrel of gasoline and 1/3 of a barrel of diesel. I focus on refined products because those, not crude oil, are what people actually burn. And refined products are up in price both because crude prices are up and because the “crack spread” between crude and refined products has soared.

  • Waterfox ☛ Waterfox 6.7.7 — JPEG XL improvements and update fixes — Release Notes

    Waterfox now uses a Rust implementation of Brotli compression and decompression, replacing the previous C implementation.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ GSA expands OneGov agreement with Anthropic, touting steep discounts

    Anthropic is in an ongoing legal battle with the Pentagon, though its relationship with officials elsewhere in the federal government appears to be solid.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Nokia Positioning in Growth Areas

    Network Infrastructure, which accounts for 42 percent of the total, was up 17 percent YoY. Mobile Infrastructure which contributed 56 percent of sales, was only up 5 percent YoY. By customer type, Telecom is Nokia’s mainstay business, accounting for 71 percent of the company’s global sales in 3Q26 but was up just one percent YoY. Conversely, sales in AI and Cloud applications were the bright spot, more than doubling YoY to $708 million, and accounting for 12 percent of sales in the quarter.

  • Techdirt ☛ Xbox Business Manager Goes Full AI Evangelist Meatball, Deletes ExTwitter Account

    There’s a ton to hate in there, frankly. Calling gamers stubborn and stupid is one hell of a “business strategy” for Microsoft to be taking here, for instance. I have my own issues with the never-AI crowd, but I have made the point over and over again that their fears are not stupid, not unfounded, and their complaints are not only not to be dismissed, but rather that we need their viewpoint to be taken into account to navigate to a proper type of AI use in the industry. Stirrup does the opposite and dismisses them entirely out of hand. And that is very dumb.

  • Bhaskar English ☛ Microsoft India Voluntary Exit Scheme | Employees Decide by December

    Software company Microsoft has offered a voluntary exit scheme to around 60,000 employees. The offer is for employees in India, the US, the UK and Canada. The company shared this information in a blog post.

  • India Times ☛ OpenAI AI chips: OpenAI plans to buy Google's AI chips

    The planned purchase would deepen ties between OpenAI and Alphabet's Google, which compete in AI products and search. The report did not disclose financial terms or other details.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • American Library Association ☛ Lies About Libraries (Part One) - Intellectual Freedom Blog

      Welcome to the first in a series of posts dedicated to debunking false claims used to undermine trust in libraries and attack those who work in them.

    • American Library Association ☛ Lies About Libraries (Part Two) - Intellectual Freedom Blog

      Those customary associations with the word color our understanding of anything someone describes as “pornographic.” It may be surprising to learn that claims about “pornography” in libraries are not concerned with those types of materials. Instead, they refer to popular children’s and young adult books, as well as classic novels. The reason materials commonly understood to be “pornographic” aren’t being challenged in libraries is quite simple: pornographic materials are not in school or public library collections and they never have been.

      Before taking a closer look at the subjects and voices these lies actually threaten, we need to understand the profound and absolute extent to which the lies are unfounded.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Kash Patel Tried to Criminalize Scrutinizing Garbage Tips that Serve Trump's Lies

    There are two things the existing charges attempt to criminalize: Giving Senators (in this case Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson) a defensive briefing warning them that they may be talking to people pushed by foreign spies — something in another time Grassley said the FBI did not do enough of! Part of this is an effort by Grassley, Johnson, and John Solomon to rehabilitate Andrii Telizhenko (which effort I keep promising I’ll return to). That grievance is addressed by charging Floris with lying about disseminating a Ukraine report the two Senators released.

  • CPJ ☛ Somaliland detains journalist without charge after interviewing presidential aspirant

    Abdikarim, who has visited Abdirahman several times in detention, told CPJ that the journalist was being questioned about his October 15 interview with Abdiqadir Sharay, who plans to stand for the presidency of the Federal Government of Somalia in national elections in 2027.

  • American Library Association ☛ Challenge Reporting

    ALA, established in 1876, has a longstanding commitment to defend intellectual freedom in libraries. Even before the formal adoption of the Library Bill of Rights in 1939, ALA has provided support, guidance, and resources to librarians faced with censorship. Since 1990, the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) has maintained a database on challenged materials. ALA gathers information from media reports and individual reports submitted from the form below.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ IT Worker Jailed 13 Years in Russia After Binance Revealed He Donated Money to Ukraine

    A Russian IT specialist has been sentenced to 13 years in jail on charges of financing terrorism after the cryptocurrency exchange Binance passed details to authorities in Moscow of his donations to Ukrainian fundraising campaigns.

  • Truthdig ☛ How Tehran, Washington and London Are Shutting Out Ordinary Iranians

    Known as the infiltration bill, and formally called Countering the Influence of Foreign Intelligence Services and States or Foreign-Linked Institutions in the Country, the new bill was received by parliament in July 2025, less than a month after the 12-day war waged by Israel against Iran. It then stalled after the U.S.-Israeli bombardment began on Feb. 28 and killed the supreme leader. That illegal war, launched without United Nations Security Council authorization, also provided the supporters of the Iranian bill with their pretext.

    Parliament approved the bill’s framework on Aug. 16 by a vote of 183 to 4, then it approved Article 22 with a vote of 174 to 6. In Iran, an outline is often approved first, then articles voted on individually. This bill currently has 33 articles and the specific penalties involved remain subject to revision and are currently facing strong opposition in parliament.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Film Director Jafar Panahi Sentenced to Prison, Asset Confiscation, and Additional Penalties

    Jafar Panahi, an Iranian film director and screenwriter, has been sentenced by Branch 26 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court to five years and one month in prison, confiscation of all movable and immovable property, a two-year ban on social media activity, and a two-year travel ban.

  • Human rights Activists News Agency ☛ Hassan Golshan-Nejad Sentenced to Death in Connection with January 2026 Protests

    Hassan Golshan-Nejad, a detainee arrested in connection with the January 2026 protests and currently held in Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad, has been sentenced to death by Branch 5 of the city’s Revolutionary Court.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Tyee ☛ Every Paper in One BC Region Closed. Reporters Refused to Give Up | The Tyee

    Ernst is the only reporter within 100 kilometres. He started Tumbler RidgeLines, which publishes online and in print every other week, after the town’s previous newspaper closed a decade ago. His morning updates have become a local news staple, and today’s broadcast quickly racks up hundreds of views — a significant reach in a town of just 2,400 people.

  • New York Times ☛ Tommy Robinson Found Guilty of Harassing 2 UK Journalists

    The jury was unable to come to a unanimous decision, but the judge said on Wednesday that they would be allowed to give a majority verdict, and 10 out of 12 jurors found Mr. Robinson guilty on the two counts of harassment.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Tommy Robinson found guilty of harassing Daily Mail journalists

    His trial heard how the anti-migrant activist “retaliated” after the Daily Mail and Mail Online published a story about him “stoking riots from his sunbed” during unrest in the UK in August 2024 following the murders of three girls in Southport.

    Robinson made a series of posts on social media about the unfolding situation while on holiday in Cyprus, prompting the newspaper to send Young and a photographer to the island.

  • Middle Tennessee State University ☛ Journalists’ group forms to defend press freedom

    “Press4Democracy exists to defend the First Amendment and to stand in solidarity with the journalists still doing this essential work,” the group’s website says.

    “Our coalition of current and former journalists raises its voices when freedom of the press is threatened, when the First Amendment and journalists are under political attack, and when government, corporations and news organizations fail to stand up for press freedoms.”

  • CPJ ☛ How Journalists Can Stay Safe–And How We Can Protect America’s Press–On Midterm Election Day And Beyond

    “Given the dangerous and evolving landscape for press freedom and journalist safety across the U.S., the importance of safety training and resources for journalists in this country has never been greater. We are paying close attention to local journalists, who face greater risk reporting within their communities during a highly polarized time,” says CPJ Chief Emergencies Officer Lucy Westcott. “Whether it’s digital safety best practices, navigating protest coverage, or making sure journalists know where to get mental health support, we’re helping reporters stay safe amid the crushing reality of being a journalist in the U.S. right now.”

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ calls for release of imprisoned journalists ahead of the International Day of Political Prisoners on October 30

    China has been the world’s worst jailer of journalists for three consecutive years, holding at least 50 in 2025. Myanmar, with 30 held, rose from third place in 2024 to second; Israel, with 29 imprisoned, fell from second to third. Azerbaijan, which imprisoned 24, entered the top 10 for the first time since 2018, nearly doubling its prisoner count from the prior year. The numbers imprisoned in Russia, Belarus, Egypt, and Eritrea were consistent with those of the past five years.

  • CPJ ☛ Iran sentences journalists under espionage law

    IranWire, an independent news outlet covering Iran, reported on October 28, citing the Khabaraneh Telegram news channel run by journalist and former political prisoner Mehdi Mahmoudian, that Faraghat was sentenced under Article 4 of Iran’s 2025 law intensifying punishments for espionage and cooperation with Israel and hostile states. The law also criminalizes certain political, cultural, and media activities, including publishing information authorities deem contrary to national security.

  • New Republic ☛ Trump Sued for Hurting Democracy With White House Media Ban

    While the three newsrooms were already victorious in their preliminary injunction against the administration, this recent lawsuit—filed on Monday by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute and Yale Law School’s Freedom & Information Access Clinic—advocates for the American public, as well.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Egypt orders closure of independent news site Mada Masr

    Editor-in-chief Lina Attalah was briefly detained and fined over licensing violations. Rights groups condemned the ruling as a major blow to press freedom in Egypt, where independent media face growing pressure.

  • Press Gazette ☛ British Journalism Awards 2026 shortlist revealed

    Now in their 15th year, the British Journalism Awards celebrate work that is revelatory, has real-world impact and serves the public interest (regardless of format or platform). The finalists range from well-resourced TV documentary teams to small local news outlets. The judges were asked to look for the quality of stories uncovered regardless of the scale of the production.

  • Middle Tennessee State University ☛ 6 citizens sue Trump, saying news-media ban deprives them of news as audience stakeholders

    A lawsuit filed Oct. 26 on behalf of six such citizens — essentially representing the wider public audience — argues that it’s not only the rights of news organizations that are violated when Trump bans them from White House premises. Even more fundamentally, the lawsuit argues, such bans violate the public’s right to independent reporting about its president and government.

    “The ultimate injury here … is to the democratic public,” says the suit, filed in federal district court in New York against Trump and three key aides, including the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

  • Middle Tennessee State University ☛ Editorial: Free press under fire

    The administration is banning media outlets from official government sites, places paid for by your tax dollars, such as the White House, the Pentagon and Air Force One. And, by his direction, his administration is going after individual reporters and the companies they work for, mounting multiple lawsuits. In almost every single case these lawsuits are dismissed or soon will be. But the suits are not really about winning the case; they’re about forcing individuals and companies to fight them, spending massive sums on lawyer’s fees and tying them down in court for months. The process, as they say, is the punishment.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Greece ☛ ‘Nobody heard us’ – why Gen Z are leading protests across Europe

    The demands are various but often overlapping – frustrations with shabby schooling facilities, perceived lack of economic opportunity, cost of living, corruption, housing and a sense of not being listened to. At times those protests triggered violence – with thousands of shops in France alone being damaged or looted in recent weeks – and police firing stun grenades and water cannons.

    This weekend they also brought real change – student-led protests culminated in the toppling in an election of Serbia’s long-time leader Aleksandar Vucic after nearly two years of demonstrations against perceived corruption and creeping authoritarianism.

  • Wired ☛ ICE Is Running One of the Largest Anti-Left Surveillance Operations in US History

    Among the records revealed during the discovery process in these cases are dozens of reports, audio transcripts, emails, intercepted Signal chats, photographs, database queries, and more. They reveal the inner workings of the domestic terrorism investigations, running under the names Project Whipple Shield and Operation Puppet Master, authorized by the controversial National Security Presidential Memorandum 7.

  • Christian Cleberg ☛ detour #001: Squirrel Cage Jail

    If you've never heard of a rotary jail, the idea is simple and a little absurd. William H. Brown and Benjamin F. Haugh patented the design in 1881: instead of lining cells up along a corridor, you put the inmates in pie-shaped cells inside a large iron drum and spin it. Each floor has a single opening, and the jailer turns a hand crank until the cell he wants lines up with it. That way, one guard can control every prisoner in the building without ever stepping into the cellblock. The drum in Council Bluffs holds three tiers of ten cells each and weighs about forty-five tons.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ There Are Too Many Stories Like This: Rape Culture on the Ballot

    On Greg Sargent's Daily Blast show, Nicole Hemmer noted, after a clip of Trump verbally abusing a woman reporter who asked him about Ramaswamy's commercial, “I think there's actually some continuity here between his vicious abuse of female reporters in general on the one side and the politics around this vile ad itself. It's kind of all a bet that misogyny is somehow a winner in the closing stretch of this election. It's all a bet that this type of politics can get out a certain type of voter that they don't think they can get out any other way at this point, especially without Trump on the ballot. ... “they think that misogyny is the tool for bringing them out and not just for bringing out white men, but that has been the key for drawing black men and Latino men into their coalition. That's been something that they have pressed on again and again because it's their way to a rainbow coalition on the right.” A term I came across recently, vice signaling, the opposite of virtue signaling, describes the conservative invitation to be liberated from the obligations of compassion and honesty, to wallow in racism, misogyny, and lies.

  • Techdirt ☛ DHS Rejects Oversight Recommendation For ICE Body Cam Auto-Activation

    First, the rollout was slow-walked. The deadline for deployment kept being pushed back. When full deployment finally arrived, it was pushed back even further by vague claims about delays in training. Then the DHS made it clear body cam footage would be almost inaccessible by the public. Finally, the cameras were being worn by officers but somehow never seemed to be rolling when officers violated rights, abused their power, or engaged in violence.

  • MIT ☛ Co-design in action: A deep dive into MIT Assistive Technology Club

    MIT students designed CurbToCar to solve exactly this problem. The app uses object detection and continuous audio cues to safely guide its user towards their ride, and it has over 3,500 downloads on the App Store, with reviews praising its accuracy and intuitive interface.

  • The Nation ☛ What Trump’s Cruel Policies Against Immigrants Say About Who’s Next

    Now, however, instead of protecting foreign nationals who cannot safely return to their home country, the country is vilifying them.

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ New report: AI being embedded across immigration system in ‘near total secrecy’

    A new report by Open Rights Group (ORG) outlines how artificial intelligence (AI) has been embedded across the UK’s immigration system and at the nation’s borders. Automated discrimination: Unpacking the Digital Hostile Environment exposes the ‘near total secrecy’ of how AI is being used with government officials routinely invoke ‘national security’ to stonewall FOI requests and redact disclosures so that they are meaningless.

    The report highlights how AI is shaped by and will shape the hostile environment, reinforcing bias and discrimination.

  • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Report: Automated Discrimination: Unpacking the Digital Hostile Environment

    Much of this technological arsenal is not British but supplied by US, Israeli, and other foreign defence and security giants, producing technological dependency, and techno-political lock-in, that reality sits awkwardly with the Government’s stated ambition to be an “AI maker”, not an “AI taker”. All of this unfolds within a regulatory vacuum that ministers have shown no intention of filling, having instead promised the world’s most “unfettered” environment for AI experimentation, even as the Government seeks to “modernise” the European Convention on Human Rights in ways that threaten the right to asylum itself.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Further | Monsters 'R Us | Opinion

    Most of Planet Earth now knows cruelty is the point of Trump 2. But if anyone implausibly needs more evidence, meet Rev. Edward Nalwamba, a 79-year-old, pro-democracy Ugandan priest who spent over a year in ICE detention. When he went in, he was fit; at his long-delayed release last week, fellow detainees had to carry him to a car because officials wouldn't let him take his wheelchair that far. To ICE, he charged, "You are an animal...They forget they are dealing with human beings."

  • 404 Media ☛ Marissa Mayer Can’t Keep Pretending 'Gender Doesn't Matter'

    Meanwhile, male figureheads of the AI industry are out here posting slop videos about sperm on main. Half of women in tech leave the industry by 35, earn 84 cents to their male counterparts’ dollar, and women founders receive half the amount of funding that male founders do.

  • Thomas Günther ☛ Number go up

    When I was talking to a client recently, I was surprised to learn how incredibly motivated she was to write all the alt texts ❶ for images on her site. I’m used to spending quite a lot of time convincing, explaining, sometimes begging, so that was cool.

    Talking to her some more, I realised Alter, my plugin for reviewing alt texts in the Kirby Panel, has something to do with it. In the plugin’s view, you can see the number of images with alt texts and that indicator turns green when all of them have one: [...]

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ US Marines join NATO mission in the Baltic Sea to protect undersea cables from sabotage as Russia continues to lurk — 'around four dozen' recon and intel specialists deployed to deter seabed threats

    The U.S. Marines are being sent from Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune in North Carolina to provide "advanced expeditionary surveillance and tactical reconnaissance capabilities" to the region in support of Finnish and other NATO allies. Marines from 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, and the II Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group are joining the mission.

  • Tedium ☛ Death & Domains: Does The Tech Need To Change?

    Which means that, when we go offline, so will our digital identities, eventually. It’ll take longer, but that credit card isn’t going to pay for itself. If you’re a writer or creative, this is a real risk, and the answers for solving this simply aren’t very good.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Wired ☛ Most Servers on the Planet Are Vulnerable to This Firmware Code-Execution Flaw

    The critical flaw in UEFI firmware—used by most server vendors and data centers—allows attackers to execute code early in the boot process.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Elvis Presley IP Owners Sue Anthropic Over Copyright Infringement

      Elvis Presley’s rightsholders have sued Anthropic with allegations of copyright infringement over 274 of his songs used to train AI models without permission.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Neil Young Sues Trump (Again) for $10M Over Using His Music

      If you thought Neil Young had already sued Trump over the use of his music during campaign rallies, you would be correct. The latest is actually Young’s second time filing suit against Trump over the allegedly unauthorized use of “Rockin’ in the Free World.” The first took place in 2020 and was settled in December that year. However, Trump has continued to play the song in violation of the terms of that settlement, according to Young’s new filing.

    • International Business Times ☛ Neil Young Sues Trump Again for $10 Million as He Claims His Song Is the Opposite of Everything Trump Stands For

      Young is seeking damages and an injunction to prevent further unauthorised use of the song, according to the complaint. The allegations have not been proven in court.