Leftovers

• Robert Birming ☛ Blog identity crisis — again

  It’s not about whether I should write in English or Swedish, and it’s not about doubts on blogging as a whole. A little bit of progress there, I suppose.

  This one’s about the mix of micro posts and long-form content. I’ve already covered this whole blogging honeymoon ending and reader responsibility thing before, and it’s still the same doubts that haunt me.

• Nico Cartron ☛ MWL's wise advice on opinions

  Michael is talking about using TLS in the context of mail servers (which is different than client-facing systems), and explains that there are 3 groups: [...]

• Science

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump cuts hit California National Weather Service offices hard

    “It’s unheard of,” said Tardy, who owns Weather Echo, a weather and climate information consulting business. “I worked for 32 years [with the National Weather Service], I worked a solo midnight shift a few times, and even that was frowned upon ... for safety reasons. So for an office to come out and say, ‘We’re not staffing the night shift from midnight to 6 a.m.,’ that’s a big deal.”

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Scientists find the first ice core from the European Alps that dates back to the last Ice Age

    The new study, published in PNAS Nexus, examines a 40-meter-long ice core from Mont Blanc's Dôme du Goûter. Using radiocarbon dating techniques, the research team found that the glacier provides an intact record of aerosols and climate dating back at least 12,000 years.

• Career/Education

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Registration Open – Designing Libraries for the 21st Century Conference

    On September 28-30, the River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester hosts Designing Libraries XII, an annual conference that gathers librarians, architects, planners, designers, and information technologists to discuss the challenges and achievements of designing libraries and learning centers for the 21st century.

  • Namanyay Goel ☛ Uncomfortably simple secrets to building anything great

    That’s when I realized: I wasn’t doing the whole thing. If you want to be a great writer, you can’t just write—you need readers. If you want to found a startup, you can’t just code—you need customers.

    The pattern I started noticing everywhere: greatness comes from doing the complete cycle, not perfecting one part.

    Get that set up as soon as you can, however you can, and remember that it’s only you who has to make sure that you’re doing it correctly.

  • Cynthia Dunlop ☛ Tanel Poder on Technical Blogging - Write that blog!

    Tanel just celebrated 18 years of blogging, and his answers reflect that deep experience.

  • The Nation ☛ The Supreme Court Just Crowned Trump King—Again

    The case, which was resolved on the Supreme Court’s “shadow docket”—which should really be viewed as Trump’s personal docket—is called McMahon v. New York. It involves Ignorance Secretary Linda McMahon’s plan to lay off over half of the people who work for the Department of Education. The firings were challenged in federal court by a teachers union, education groups, school districts, and a number of states, all of which will argue that they will be harmed if half the workforce is taken out. The Department of Education is primarily responsible for distributing money to college students, mostly in the form of grants and loans, enforcing antidiscrimination laws, and overseeing programs for low-income students and students with disabilities.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Education Department in the middle of a growing tug-of-war between Trump, Democrats

    Democrats in Congress are pushing back hard on the Trump administration’s freeze of $6.8 billion in funds for after-school programs and more at public schools, some of which open their doors a few weeks from now. California alone lost access to $939 million and every state is seeing millions of dollars frozen.

    At the same time, the Supreme Court on Monday slammed the door on judicial orders that blocked the dismantling of the 45-year-old agency that Congress created and funds.

• Hardware

  • Lee Peterson ☛ My camera gear

    I’m slowly getting back into using my camera again and I wanted to log what I’m using to help both myself and I thought some might be interested in what I’m using. This is the gear that goes with me on day trips or when I’m just out and about.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • “Voices of the Vaccine-injured”: Old school antivax nonsense on steroids

    On Monday, I wrote a post about a US Senate hearing called by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), Chair of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which is under the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. The purpose of the hearing is evident in what Sen. Johnson decided to call it, Voices of the Vaccine-Injured. Part of the reason that I decided to write about the hearing before it even happened was because all but one of the antivaxxers asked to testify were what I would call “old school” antivaxxers; in other words, they were antivax before the COVID-19 pandemic—in most cases, long before the pandemic—and would be expected to spew really old antivax claims. For example, two of the witnesses, Brian Hooker and Polly Tommey, included old schoolers whose antivax activism stemmed from their mistaken belief that vaccines caused their child’s autism and, in fact, were tightly associated with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s antivax organization Children’s Health Defense, with Hooker being the “Chief Scientific Officer” (if you can call it that” and Tommey being the director of programming for CHD-TV, the arm of CHD that produces antivax propaganda video content for CHD. Capping the “old school” nature of these two is the observation that Tommey has long been best buds and worked with the godfather of the 21st century antivax movement, Andrew Wakefield, and Hooker was intimately involved in the genesis of the “CDC whistleblower” conspiracy theory in 2014 that ultimately resulted in Andrew Wakefield and Del Bigtree’s 2016 antivax conspiracy-fest of a “documentary,” VAXXED.

  • Futurism ☛ Your Teen Says Her Best Friend Is AI. What Next?

    That's striking on its own, as an illustration of how embedded AI companions have become in mainstream teenage life. But even more startling were the 31 percent of surveyed teens who said their interactions with AI companions were either as satisfying or more satisfying than conversations with real-life friends — a finding that shows how profoundly AI is already changing the formative and tumultuous years of adolescence.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Musk launches AI Grok girlfriend available to 12-year-olds

    Research this week found that children are regularly using AI bots as friends. One in eight children said they use the bots because they have nobody else to speak to.

    This week, the independent reviewer of terror legislation warned that sex chatbots could put lonely [Internet] users on the path to radicalisation.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Cloudflare: Config change borked net access for all

    There was a disturbance in the force on July 14 after Cloudflare borked a configuration change that resulted in an outage, impacting [Internet] services across the planet.

  • Fortra LLC ☛ Police dismantle DiskStation ransomware gang targeting NAS devices

    Synology has been advising users on how to protect their NAS devices from ransomware attacks for several years. Much of the advice revolves around minimising the exposure of NAS devices to the [Internet], hardening password security, and ensuring that regular backups are made of critical data.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Said Grok 4 Was the "Smartest AI in the World," But Its Leaderboard Scores Just Came Out and They Tell a Different Story

      Soon after the paper's release, it was revealed that the version of Meta's LLaMA 4 that had been used by the leaderboard wasn't the same one that had been released publicly — a bait-and-switch ploy on Meta's part to charm the human voters behind the arena.

    • Futurism ☛ Top AI Researchers Concerned They’re Losing the Ability to Understand What They’ve Created

      As those researchers acknowledge, CoTs add a certain transparency into the inner workings of AI, allowing users to see "intent to misbehave" or get stuff wrong as it happens. Still, there is "no guarantee that the current degree of visibility will persist," especially as models continue to advance.

      Depending on how they're trained, advanced models may no longer, the paper suggests, "need to verbalize any of their thoughts, and would thus lose the safety advantages." There's also the non-zero chance that models could intentionally "obfuscate" their CoTs after realizing that they're being watched, the researchers noted — and as we've already seen, AI has indeed rapidly become very good at lying and deception.

    • TruthOut ☛ Pentagon Signs Contract With Musk’s AI After It Called Itself “MechaHitler”

      The AI bot praised Adolf Hitler as the best figure to combat “vile anti-white hate.”

    • Dan McQuillan ☛ Decomputing as Resistance

      This talk is titled 'Decomputing as Resistance'. In it, I will argue that contemporary AI reveals the seams our current system in ways that can't be ignored but have to be countered. Anyone who's used a large language model for any amount of time will be familiar with how glitch-prone they are. I'm proposing that AI is itself a glitch; a stuttering misstep of the neoliberal order that hints at nothing less than internal disarray.

      What I'll be proposing as a countermeasure is decomputing; an approach that takes direct aim at AI, but is concerned with unstitching more than just the digital. Decomputing is a way of reconfiguring our broader social and economic relations.

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK leader tells universities to tackle student misconduct after AI porn scandal

      Chief Executive John Lee has urged Hong Kong universities to handle student misconduct “seriously,” after a male student allegedly created AI-generated indecent images of more than 20 women.

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK privacy watchdog launches criminal probe into AI porn scandal at HKU

      The student allegedly used photos he found on the women’s social media accounts to generate pornographic “deepfake” images using free online artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

    • Futurism ☛ Users Immediately Find Grok's Anime Waifu Persona Has Hidden "Full Gooner Mode"

      We wish we were kidding. The mercurial CEO's xAI startup announced that its Nazi-loving assistant will now be able to take on several personas, including a lingerie- and corset-wearing anime girl, dubbed Ani.

    • Futurism ☛ Bernie Sanders Issues Warning About How AI Is Really Being Used

      As the two-time presidential contender noted, AI seems already to be accelerating the longstanding disparity between increasing worker productivity and those same workers failing to see the fruits of their labor. As the independent senator puts it, all that money instead goes "to the corporations and to the companies that developed that technology" — and the current existential struggle should be about AI helping rather than hindering labor rights and security.

      "Workers today... are earning less, and I fear very much that almost all the new benefits of worker productivity will go to the people on top at the expense of working people," Sanders told the site. "That is something that concerns me very much."

    • The Atlantic ☛ The AI Mirage

      The cursing was, in my view, warranted. I was in my car, running errands, and had found myself in an unfamiliar part of town. I requested “directions to Lowe’s,” hoping to get routed to the big-box hardware store without taking my eyes off the road. But apparently Siri didn’t understand. “Which Lowe?” it asked, before displaying a list of people with the surname Lowe in my address book.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Nvidia CEO says China's open-source AI a 'catalyst for progress'

      Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called China’s open-source artificial intelligence a “catalyst for global progress” and hailed the country’s innovation in the sector as he addressed an expo in Beijing on Wednesday.

• Security

  • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Critical UEFI vulnerabilities found in Gigabyte motherboards — allow attackers to bypass Secure Boot and install firmware backdoors

      Firmware security research company Binarly has discovered four new vulnerabilities affecting the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) on multiple Gigabyte motherboards. The vulnerabilities with CVE identifiers CVE-2025-7029, CVE-2025-7028, CVE-2025-7027, and CVE-2025-7026 were shared with Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) for further analysis.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Malware found embedded in DNS, the system that makes the internet usable, except when it doesn't

      DomainTools reported that someone found a way to embed malware in Domain Name System (DNS) records, which means we have something new to blame on the system responsible for pretty much every networking problem most people may have.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • India Times ☛ Porn sites must check age of French users, says top court

      After the government appealed, the Council of State, the country's top administrative court, on Tuesday said it had annulled that suspension.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ After CBS and ABC's Trump settlements, Democrats want to curb presidential library gifts

    “This new bill will close the loopholes that allow presidential libraries to be used as a tool for corruption and bribery,” Warren told reporters on a Zoom call. “Slamming the door shut on apparent corruption at the highest levels of government is an important step forward and something everyone should get behind.”

  • Meduza ☛ Latvian court overturns decision to revoke TV Rainʼs broadcasting license

    Latviaʼs public broadcaster LSM noted that a lower court had previously upheld the NEPLPʼs decision to revoke the license.

  • Court House News ☛ Would-be TikTok buyers accuse Chinese owners of maintaining control through racketeering scheme | Courthouse News Service

    This new evidence included a public statement from U.S. Representative Brad Sherman last month that ByteDance, Beijing Telecom and their controlled affiliate GD Culture Group bought $300 million worth of President Donald Trump's cryptocurrency "meme coin." TikTok Global argues that this shows the companies were paying bribes.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Marines to field new smart scope to help shoot down small drones

    In Ukraine, small drones have a “ubiquitous” presence on the front lines, he said. The Ukrainians are using these drones as artillery rounds, and they are burning through between 10,000 to 20,000 of such drones a week.

  • CBC ☛ Remember Cambridge Analytica? What to know about the $8B US lawsuit against Meta's board

    The plaintiffs, led by Amalgamated Bank Inc., will argue in court in Wilmington, Del., that the harvesting of data of Facebook users in the Cambridge case was in violation of a 2012 agreement with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

    It's an investors' lawsuit that Meta battled all the way to the Supreme Court. The nine justices even heard arguments last November, before doing an about-turn just a couple weeks later, unanimously allowing the case to go forward.

    Here's a look at how the case proceeded, and what to expect: [...]

  • India Times ☛ Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg expected to testify in $8 billion Facebook privacy lawsuit

    Investors allege in their lawsuit that Meta did not fully disclose the risks that Facebook users' personal information would be misused by Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump's successful Republican presidential campaign in 2016. Shareholders say Facebook officials repeatedly and continually violated a 2012 consent order with the Federal Trade Commission under which Facebook agreed to stop collecting and sharing personal data on platform users and friends without their consent.

  • Michael Geist ☛ What Is the Canadian Government Doing With Its Incoherent Approach to TikTok?

    TikTok raises real issues and risks with the service that require a serious policy response. But removing the corporate offices and leaving the app untouched always seemed to guarantee the worst possible outcome by doing little to address the potential risks faced by Canadians and bringing to halt some of the cultural benefits of having the service operate in Canada. New reports indicate that the government has thus far refused to engage, but it’s time for a new approach that better positions Canada to benefit from TikTok’s presence in Canada, while more effectively addressing the privacy and security risks.

  • Graham Cluley ☛ Quelle surprise! Twitter faces criminal probe in France • Graham Cluley

    A criminal investigation into Twitter has been initiated by French prosecutors, over allegations that its algorithm is manipulated for the purposes of “foreign interference.”

  • ADF ☛ DRC Unrest Provides Opportunities for Islamic State

    As M23 rapidly expanded its territory to the north and south of the regional capital, Goma, it drew more attention from the Congolese military (FARDC) and allied militias, which may have given the region’s Islamic State affiliate more space to launch attacks.

  • The Register UK ☛ LLMs are changing how we speak, say German researchers

    The paper doesn't go beyond statistically analyzing a few words to track their increased usage, and it doesn't pass judgment over whether the shift is good or bad, but it's enough to make the researchers ask an important question: Do LLMs have a culture that's shaping ours?

  • International Business Times ☛ First the US, Now Canada? TikTok Faces Shutdown — Will Canadians Lose Access to the App?

    In the month of July, TikTok, a platform owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, began halting its expenditures on cultural initiatives and sponsorships. This action comes after a November order to shut down its Canadian division, a directive issued due to national security concerns.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ The Press Keeps Coddling Trump's Tariff Lawlessness

    Courts have not “called into question” Trump’s legal authority to impose arbitrary sanctions. Two ruled that Trump’s tariffs were unlawful.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Nobody (Not Even Trump) Can Control the Epstein Story

    At the center is a genuine secret, the main thing that keeps the story from fading away: the specter of Epstein’s so-called client list, a document that supposedly contains the names of powerful people whom Epstein provided girls to. This list is the basis for the most sordid and compelling parts of the conspiracy theory: that Epstein not only facilitated the trafficking of these girls to elites, but that he then entrapped and extorted those elites. The Trump administration had teased the release of this list as though it were a blockbuster movie, even though its very existence remains an open question: Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that it was “sitting on my desk right now to review.” But in an abrupt reversal last week, the Department of Justice and the FBI released a memo saying that the list would not be coming after all and that the list did not even exist, an announcement that has enraged many prominent members of the MAGA base and captured the interest of, well, everyone else.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Attacks MAGA Supporters for Caring About Esptein Files

    The president's meltdown following the MAGA revolt over his administration's handling of the convicted sex offender's case keeps getting worse

  • El País ☛ Trump’s attempt to quell the Epstein list rebellion further ignites the MAGA movement

    House Speaker Mike Johnson joins conservative voices demanding the government share all information about the millionaire pedophile

  • Futurism ☛ Metadata Shows That Critical Minutes Were Deleted From the Epstein Video

    But as Wired reported at the time, the allegedly unaltered video showed signs of tampering. Metadata analyzed by the publication found that it was edited using the professional editing tool Adobe Premiere Pro.

    And the plot continues to thicken. In followup reporting today, Wired revealed that the video appears to have had nearly three minutes cut out — further stoking the flames of a major political crisis.

  • Vox ☛ Trump and Jeffrey Epstein docs: why Trump betrayed the MAGA base

    Part of it is anger at hypocrisy. The MAGA base is deeply invested in the idea that Epstein ran a sex trafficking ring — that he did not merely abuse young girls on his own, but rather pimped them out to other rich and powerful people. Pretty much everyone in the administration, from Trump down, promised to get to the bottom of this story — and now, they’re doing nothing.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Jordan Klepper Charts Trump's Long History With Jeffrey Epstein

    Klepper detailed many past interactions between Trump, Epstein, and Maxwell, which he noted suggest that there is more to the story than Trump is letting on. “You’ve probably heard that Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Epstein’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, used to be friends,” Klepper said. ”But it’s worth understanding how close this friendship was.”

• Environment

  • DeSmog ☛ Oil Advocate Behind Anti-Suzuki Complaint a Nameless 'BC Resident' in National Post Story

    A well-connected lobbyist and advocate for fossil fuel resource development is one of eight applicants alleging the David Suzuki Foundation used misleading photographs in their promotional materials.

  • Wired ☛ Trump and the Energy Industry Are Eager to Power AI With Fossil Fuels

    Natural [sic] gas from Pennsylvania and the Appalachian region, in particular, has faced market challenges both from ultra-cheap natural [sic] gas from the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico as well as a lack of infrastructure to carry supply out of the region. These economic headwinds are “why the industry is doing their best to sort of create this drumbeat or this narrative around the need for AI data centers,” says Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It appears to be working. Pipeline companies are already pitching new projects to truck gas from the northeast—responding, they say, to data center demand.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Kerr County, Texas, Oral Histories Reveal Local Knowledge of Floods

    In late September 2000, longtime Kerr County, Texas, resident W. Thornton Secor Jr. sat down with an oral historian to tell his story. Like many of the residents recorded as part of a decadeslong effort by the Kerr County Historical Commission to document the community’s history, Secor had a lot to say about the area’s floods.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Bridge Michigan ☛ [Cryptocurrency] mines a noisy nuisance to some. Should Michigan regulate them?

      [Cryptocurrency] mines require a lot of energy. Mining a single Bitcoin takes as much electricity as it takes to power an average US household for 41 days, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index run by Digiconomist. Around the world, Bitcoin mines use as much energy as the entire nation of Poland, and as much water as the entire nation of Switzerland.

    • India Times ☛ Microsoft, US national lab tap AI to speed up nuclear power permitting process

      Microsoft and the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) said they will tap Microsoft's AI technology for generating engineering and safety analysis reports that are a standard part of the application process for construction permits and operating licenses for nuclear facilities in the United States. The AI systems, which have been trained on a huge trove of successful historical applications, will pull data from studies and compile it into complex applications that span hundreds of pages.

    • The Register UK ☛ Google, Westinghouse team up to use AI to build nuclear

      The two companies aim to pair Westinghouse's "nuclear-specific" HiVE GenAI system and its "nuclear-aware" large language model (LLM), bertha, with Google Cloud's technology and expertise to streamline construction of new nuclear plants and improve the performance of current reactors through "data-driven AI insights." The electric gear maker claims its nuclear AI technology is trained on "75 years of proprietary data, knowledge, and expertise," according to the deal announcement.

    • The Hill ☛ Hardline conservatives tank procedural vote over [cryptocurrrency[ bills in House floor revolt

      Johnson told reporters after the vote that the hardline critics want to link the cryptocurrency bills into one product, which is why they torpedoed the procedural vote. The House this week is scheduled to vote on the GENIUS Act; negotiated by the Senate, which would create a regulatory framework for stablecoins; the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, which would lay out regulations for the broader cryptocurrency market; and the Anti-CBDC Surveillance State Act, which would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a Central Bank digital currency.

    • CNBC ☛ [Cryptocurrency] bills stall in Congress for second day

      The three bills in question include one, the GENIUS Act, which passed the Senate in June, and two others that are moving through the House first: The CLARITY Act and a bill that would bar the Federal Reserve from establishing a central bank digital currency.

    • Gizmodo ☛ [Crackers] Can Tamper With Train Brakes Using Just a Radio, Feds Warn

      These devices were first installed in the 1980s as a replacement for caboose cars, and unfortunately, they lack encryption and authentication protocols. Instead, the current system uses data packets sent between the front and back of a train that include a simple BCH checksum to detect errors or interference. But now, the CISA is warning that someone using a software-defined radio could potentially send fake data packets and interfere with train operations.

    • RFA ☛ Vietnam to ban gas-powered motorbikes in central Hanoi next year – Radio Free Asia

      Vietnam will ban fossil-fuel-powered motorcycles and mopeds in the heart of Hanoi starting in July 2026 in an effort to reduce air pollution, state media reported on Monday, curbing the main mode of transport for many of the city’s 8 million residents.

    • Futurism ☛ Zuckerberg's Building AI Data Centers In Outdoor Tents, But the Hack Could Backfire on Hot Days

      Could Zuckerberg be in the middle of a similar crunch time, desperately trying to convince investors — and users — of a future filled with so-called "superintelligent" AIs that justifiably eat up a monstrous amount of resources?

    • Science Alert ☛ AI Is Heading For an Energy Crisis That Has Tech Giants Scrambling

      Companies can either build more energy supply – which takes time and the AI giants are already scouring the globe to do – or figure out how to consume less energy for the same computing power.

    • Business Insider ☛ Meta Building Data Centers in Tents, Part of Bid to Catch up in AI - Business Insider

      Zuck confirmed some of the details of SemiAnalysis's report via a Facebook post on Monday. The CEO said Meta will build several new AI data centers that use more than 1 gigawatt of power each. This is how data center capacity is measured, and anything in the 1 gigawatt range is absolutely massive (or at least it was until now).

    • Vintage Everyday ☛ Amazing Photos of the 1929 Bugatti Type 37 Grand Prix

      Designed primarily for Grand Prix and Formula racing, the Type 37 quickly became a force on European racing circuits, including events like the Targa Florio and Grand Prix de Monaco. With its powerful yet efficient engine, the Type 37 proved successful in a variety of racing conditions and built a reputation for reliability and performance.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Can a Powerful International Wildlife Conservation Meeting Help Save Sharks?

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Kruger Park's white rhinos get a hi-tech lifeline

      The project aims to monitor rhino herds daily using drones, GPS collars and digital reporting systems to provide real-time data to enforcement teams.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Records: Michigan offered more than $6B in failed bid to land chip factories

    Still, Michigan Democrats joined Whitmer in expressing concern over the company withdrawing its planned development, though none addressed whether additional subsidies could have passed the Republican-controlled House.

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan loses massive semiconductor plant. Whitmer blames ‘national economic turmoil’

    Sandisk’s decision was prompted by ‘national economic turmoil’ Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said About $260 million in taxpayer funding has been spent on preparing a 1,300-acre megasite for the factory

  • Greece ☛ The digitizing of bureaucracy

    Unfortunately, the reality turned out to be more complex. Indeed, dozens of platforms were introduced to make our lives easier, and to a point they succeeded, since accessing them is easy. However, navigating them and entering data is a much more complicated matter, especially for anyone who is not fully acquainted with technology. For citizens to do their job, they are once again forced to seek the help of other experts.

  • India Times ☛ Scale AI to cut 14% of staff following Meta investment: Report

    Scale AI, founded in 2016, has been a key player in training data pipelines for companies like OpenAI, Meta, and the US Department of Defense. The company cut 200 full-time employees, about 14% of its global workforce, and will provide severance, Scale spokesperson Joe Osborne said Wednesday. Scale will also stop working with 500 of its thousands of global contractors, he said.

  • Wired ☛ Another High-Profile OpenAI Researcher Departs for Meta

    Wei worked on OpenAI’s o3 and deep research models, according to his personal website. He joined OpenAI in 2023 after a stint at Google, where he worked on chain-of-thought research, which involves training an AI model to process complex queries step-by-step. At OpenAI, Wei became a self-described “diehard” for reinforcement learning, a method of training or refining an AI model with positive or negative feedback. It’s become a promising area of AI research—one that several of the researchers Meta has hired for its superintelligence team specialize in.

  • University of Toronto ☛ People want someone to be responsible for software that fails

    There are a lot of ways that this could happen, with the EU CRA being only one of them; as various drafts of the EU CRA has shown, there are a lot of ways that things could go badly in the process. And it could also be that the forces of unbridled pure-profit capitalism will manage to fight this off no matter how much people want it, as they're busy doing with other things in the world (see, for example, the LLM crawler plague). But if companies do fight this off I don't think we're going to enjoy that world very much for multiple reasons, and people's desire for this is still going to very much be there. The days of people's indifference are over and one way or another we're going to have to deal with that. Both our software and our profession will be shaped by how we do.

  • Baptist News Global ☛ America’s moral emergency

    In The Atlantic article he writes: “If there is an underlying philosophy driving Trump, it is this: Morality is for suckers.” So in lockstep, the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, who helped Donald Trump win the election with his almost $300 million, chimes in with his moral philosophy that the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” As director of DOGE he supervised the end of U.S. aid to the poorest of nations and peoples and is causing multiple thousands to die.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Digital occupation: Pro-Russian bot networks target Ukraine's occupied territories on Telegram

      Our investigation found that automated Telegram comments targeting local audiences in Ukraine fell into three overarching categories: pro-Russian propaganda, anti-Ukrainian propaganda, and abstract anti-war messaging and calls for peaceful coexistence. Individual narratives were often tailored to respond to current events and changes in local conditions, such as power or water outages, but there was also evidence of proactive narratives initiated by the network unrelated to external events.

      The bot network used similar messaging when targeting channels based in Russia; however, a significantly larger share of comments targeting the occupied territory channels emphasized positive portrayals of Russian culture and government. Across the sixty-nine narrative themes identified (see appendix), the bot network pushed essentially the same menu of talking points in both Russia-wide and occupied territory channels. What differentiates the content aimed at the occupied territories from that aimed at a wider Russian audience is the proportion of talking points: themes that praised Russian culture, social services, and governance dominated in occupied territory-based channels, accounting for a markedly higher share of content than in Russia-based channels. The pattern points to an effort to cultivate the appearance of local consensus in favor of occupation and Russian administrative control, but not necessarily to create genuine agreement.

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ EU slaps new sanctions on Russia over hybrid threats, disinformation

      The new restrictive measures target actors involved in what the EU described as "Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference" (FIMI), a term encompassing activities such as cyberattacks, disinformation, and manipulation of infrastructure and public opinion.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • StokeonTrentLive ☛ Girl, 12, put in isolation for wearing Union flag dress on school's culture day

    'Straight A' student Courtney Wright, 12, from the Midlands, wore the Spice Girls-esque dress and wrote a speech about history and traditions as part of the celebrations last week. But the Year 7 pupil was left shocked after being told the dress was "unacceptable" and she was hauled out of lessons and made to sit in reception until her father collected her.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia Moves to Streamline Process for Labeling Groups as ‘Extremist’

    The bill, passed in the lower-house State Duma in its third and final reading, allows authorities to classify an organization as extremist based solely on a single criminal conviction under Article 282.1 of the Criminal Code, which pertains to the organization of extremist activities, for any of its members.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia Expands Free Public Wi-Fi as Mobile Internet Blackouts Spread

    July marked a peak in [Internet] shutdowns, with the independent communications watchdog Na Svyazi documenting disruptions in 77 regions, including areas far from the front line such as the Primorye region, the Sakhalin region and the Kamchatka region.

    Wired [Internet] has also been affected. In June alone, 655 incidents of [Internet] blocking were recorded across Russia, a tenfold jump from the previous month.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘A new Gulag’ After 20 years without them, the FSB is getting its own jails. That’s bad news for Russians.

    Some experts are even more pessimistic about the reform. Russian intelligence researchers Andrey Soldatov and Irina Borogan, in their analysis of the FSB detention center bills, have described the legislation as “a foundation for a new Gulag” and predicted a major expansion of repressions in the country: [...]

  • 404 Media ☛ Steam Bends to Payment Processors on Porn Games

    Steam, the dominant digital storefront for PC games operated by Valve, updated its guidelines to forbid “certain kinds of adult content” and blamed restrictions from payment processors and financial institutions. The update was initially spotted by SteamDB.info , a platform that tracks and publishes data about Steam, and reported by the Japanese gaming site Gamespark.

  • Seth Michael Larson ☛ Email has algorithmic curation, too

    Email for most people has algorithmic curation applied by their email provider. Email providers like Gmail automatically filter the email and decide which "category" the email ends up in, regardless of how much you trust the sender or if you have opted-in to their emails. Some of these categories are harmless, like "Social", where social media updates will be filtered into its own category but not hidden in any meaningful way.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ ICE Is A Press Freedom Issue: Interview With Status Coup Reporter Tina-Desiree Berg

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Native American radio stations part of funding deal as US Senate takes up cuts to NPR, PBS

    At the center of the dispute is how cutting foreign aid for dozens of programs, including those addressing global health and democracy, would affect American influence around the globe.

  • Nebraska Examiner ☛ US Senate Republicans advance bill stripping funds from NPR, PBS, foreign aid

    The 51-50 vote marked a significant moment for President Donald Trump’s rescissions request, which faced more headwinds in the Senate than in the House. Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote.

    Trump proposed doing away with $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that lawmakers had approved for the next two fiscal years as well as $8.3 billion from several foreign aid accounts.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Afghan data breach super injunction 'deeply disturbing' for press freedom, says Lewis Goodall

    News Agents podcast co-host Lewis Goodall has warned that the wide-ranging super injunction used to silence UK media for two years sets a “profoundly dangerous” precedent.

  • Nick Heer ☛ G/O Media Has Sold Off Just About All Its Sites Eighteen Months After Denying It Was Selling Off All Its Sites

    In January 2024, Mark Stenberg reported for Adweek that G/O Media was “shopping around its portfolio of editorial assets” — which normal people call “publications” or “websites” — “in hopes of securing buyers for individual titles”. Stenberg included a statement from G/O Media in which a representative said “[y]our reporting is largely incorrect”.

  • JURIST ☛ Journalist group urges Senegal to release news commentator, protect press freedom

    CPJ urged Senegal’s government to drop charges against all journalists currently penalized for reporting, and to reaffirm protections under the Press Code, ensuring that legal provisions are not weaponized against legitimate journalists’ work.

  • CPJ ☛ Kyrgyzstan tightens control over media with new false news laws

    “The new law on so-called fake news is just one element of a broader legislative campaign under President Japarov aimed at restricting media, civil society, and public discourse in Kyrgyzstan,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Kyrgyz authorities should repeal the law and reverse their escalating legal assault on the independent press.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Atlantic Council ☛ To stand up for religious freedom, the US should support the Dalai Lama’s succession plan

    When that time comes, the United States and its partners and allies should continue to speak out, fund counter-disinformation efforts, and stand unequivocally behind the Dalai Lama’s succession plan. In doing so, the West will continue to defend not just one people’s faith, but also the principle that spiritual authority cannot be dictated by political power. It’s also in the United States’ geopolitical interest to defend the Dalai Lama’s succession from Chinese manipulation, as this can help prevent the spread of Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) influence throughout the region’s large Buddhist populations.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Pentagon ends deployment of 2,000 National Guard troops in Los Angeles

    Roughly 4,000 National Guard soldiers and 700 Marines have been in the city since early June. It wasn’t immediately clear what prompted the 60-day deployment to end suddenly, nor was it immediately clear how long the rest of the troops would stay in the region.

  • Gizmodo ☛ Bernie Sanders Reveals the AI 'Doomsday Scenario' That Worries Top Experts

    Artificial intelligence promises a future of unprecedented productivity and wealth, but for Senator Bernie Sanders, the crucial question isn’t if the technology will change the world, but who will benefit from that change. As a lifelong champion for workers’ rights, Sanders sees the rapid advancement of AI not just as a technological revolution, but as the next major battleground in the fight against corporate greed and inequality.

    In a conversation with Gizmodo, the Vermont senator, who revealed he had just spoken with one of the world’s leading AI experts, laid out his fears that the technology will be used to suppress wages, break unions, and further enrich the billionaire class. He also shared his concerns about AI’s impact on our collective mental health and discussed the “doomsday scenario” that has some top minds in the industry worried that humanity could lose control of its own creation.

    The conversation has been edited for clarity and formatted as a Q&A. All quotes are verbatim and unaltered.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Native American Radio Stations at Risk as Congress Looks to Cut $1B in Public Broadcasting Funding

    Native American radio stations could face shutdowns if Congress cuts over $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

  • The Washington Post ☛ Here are your rights on subscriptions even without ‘click to cancel’

    Although a court last week blocked a proposed rule to let you easily quit an unwanted subscription, existing laws protect you from deceptive subscription charges or those that feel impossible to cancel.

    Here’s what you need to know about misleading or hard-to-cancel subscriptions and where to turn for help.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Starlink Now 83% of Zimbabwe's International Internet Capacity Usage

    In just under a year since being licensed in Zimbabwe Starlink now accounts for a staggering 83% of the country’s international [Internet] capacity usage, according to POTRAZ’s latest Q1 2025 report.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ FBI's Video Game Piracy Crackdown Leads to Domain Confusion

    Late last week, the FBI seized the domain names of several gaming piracy websites, including NSW2U.com. The sites in question were used to download more than a million games per month, according to a press release, which inadvertently identified a nonexistent domain. The FBI eventually seized the correct domain, and the investigation continues. Meanwhile, opportunists are moving in to lure displaced pirates to new "NSW2U" domains.

  • The Atlantic ☛ What Two Judicial Rulings Mean for the Future of Generative AI

    At first glance, this seems like a substantial blow against authors and publishers, who worry that chatbots threaten their business, both because of the technology’s ability to summarize their work and its ability to produce competing work that might eat into their market. (When reached for comment, Anthropic and Meta told me they were happy with the rulings.) A number of news outlets portrayed the rulings as a victory for the tech companies. Wired described the two outcomes as “landmark” and “blockbuster.”

    But in fact, the judgments are not straightforward. Each is specific to the particular details of each case, and they do not resolve the question of whether AI training is fair use in general. On certain key points, the two judges disagreed with each other—so thoroughly, in fact, that one legal scholar observed that the judges had “totally different conceptual frames for the problem.” It’s worth understanding these rulings, because AI training remains a monumental and unresolved issue—one that could define how the most powerful tech companies are able to operate in the future, and whether writing and publishing remain viable professions.

  • Nick Heer ☛ On A.I. Video Watermarks

    But the watermark needs to be small because otherwise people would be less likely to use these services. Even if it was not very obnoxious, it would feel like an advertisement to post videos generated by these tools if they contained a more honest disclaimer of their origins. Hence, the truly incredible feat of generating video and synced audio from a text prompt is buried and, therefore, only comes up when it is being used to further scams, fraud, hatred, or advertisement campaigns.

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Technology and Free Software

    • Internet/Gemini

      • small world small web

        he strolls in off the alley and greets the regulars. ~bartender, he says, i'll just have an iced coffee. he settles in next to the bookshelves as usual, pulling out a notebook and scrawling a few notes.

        so i keep reading that July is Small Web Month, which is billed as a way to reduce the time we spend on the corporate web. neat idea.

        [...]

        gemini and the smolnet in general definitely got a boost during the quarantine lockdowns that followed the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020. so many people stuck at home, hunkering down, bored and at a loss of what to do. at least if you had a computer, you could use it to escape and connect with others - and perhaps in a different way than you usually do. after all, boredom is the mother of creativity. people looked for new ways to connect with others and find comfort as they suffered together through the same shared ordeal, and they built beautiful spaces around those connections.