Leftovers

• Robert Birming ☛ I want a blog restart

  If you’ve been following my blog for more than a week, I guess this kind of post won’t come as a surprise. I’ve been rambling about my blogging doubts for so long and so many times.

  Right now, I’ve reached a point where I really feel like restarting everything — including the name and domain.

• Joel Chrono ☛ 400 Days To Offload

  I have once again, managed to reach the goal of 100 posts in one year, this time I managed to do so in record time! and with a pretty awesome consistency compared to previous years.

• Eric MacAdie ☛ Emacs Carnival: Writing Experience – MacAdie Web Blog

  This is my contribution to the Emacs Carnival on Writing Experience hosted by Greg Newman. forsake conciliator Gloria

  Like many other Emacs users, I use Org mode to help with writing. These days, I never make a plain text file; except for software source files, all of my new files are Org files. spouse arbitrators Panamanian

• Positech Games ☛ Are all modern entertainment/global careers impossible now?

  But hold on, with a huge global population, surely the industry can now support way, way more people than it did back in the lute days? NO. In fact probably FEWER people as a percentage of the population. In 1546 our village needed our local lute player, because local was all there was. But in 2025 Sting can ‘entertain’ people with his lute playing on a global scale. People are still being entertained, but they have not taken advantage of the global growth in population to have a larger number of ‘entertainers’. They do not need them. There is already enough choice. Way, way too much choice. We used to just have Joe ‘the lute guy’. Now we have more than 20 lute players. Enough already.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • The Register UK ☛ 4 new Android spyware samples linked to Iran's intel agency

    Lookout security researchers spotted the four new DCHSpy malware samples, disguised as VPN apps called Earth VPN and Comodo VPN, beginning from June 23, about a week after Israel first launched missiles at Iran's nuclear facilities.

  • HowTo Geek ☛ The New Galaxy Foldables, a Thunderbird Upgrade, and More: Weekly Roundup

• Science

  • Omicron Limited ☛ How NASA saved a camera from 370 million miles away

    "After orbit 55, our images were full of streaks and noise," said JunoCam instrument lead Michael Ravine of Malin Space Science Systems. "We tried different schemes for processing the images to improve the quality, but nothing worked. With the close encounter of Io bearing down on us in a few weeks, it was Hail Mary time: The only thing left we hadn't tried was to crank JunoCam's heater all the way up and see if more extreme annealing would save us."

  • The Register UK ☛ NASA veteran warns Hubble faces death by a hundred cuts

    However, plenty of wrangling remains before the budget is finalized and the House and Senate funding bills reconciled. "When that will happen is anyone's guess," said Dreier, "but likely not until the fall." The deliberations have the effect of creating short-term uncertainty in a community accustomed to working in the long term.

  • The Register UK ☛ Radio geeks say you can still get 'lost' DoD hurricane data

    In June, the US Department of Defense (DoD) decided to remove access to data collected by the Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS) instrument for the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP).

  • Wired ☛ How Trump Killed Cancer Research

    There’s more on the chopping block. Trump wants to defund the National Cancer Institute to below 2014 levels. He wants to “refocus” the CDC on infectious disease surveillance and shut down “duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary programs,” which would include the National Center for Chronic Diseases Prevention and Health Promotion and the National Center for Environmental Health. Of course, Trump may not get exactly the budget he wants. Federal judges may keep ordering the grants and programs he has terminated to be reinstated—and maybe he’ll even comply.

    But a court order can’t reinstate months of lost treatment for a cancer patient, can’t bring back researchers and civil servants who were forced to move on. It’s hard to put a price on the value of research that might be years away from a new drug or treatment modality. It’s even harder for those who have been kicked out of clinical trials in the past few months, where the stakes are clearly life or death. The moonshot might have lost its chance to land.

  • [Old] André Machado ☛ Why Some Satellites Use NetBSD? - André Machado

    NetBSD, a highly portable, open-source Unix-like operating system, has earned a prominent place in satellite technology. Its extensive use in spacecraft, including the AeroCube series, BRICSat-P, ITSAT, and NASA's SAMPEX satellite, highlights the OS's exceptional capabilities in meeting the rigorous demands of space missions. This text explores the reasons behind its adoption and how it powers these satellites.

• Career/Education

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Mississippi turned around its schools. Its secret: Tools Michigan abandoned

    Regardless, experts say Michigan is reaching a crisis point with education. Since the pandemic, Michigan’s learning-loss recovery in reading is among the worst in the nation, while Mississippi’s is among the best.

  • Seth Godin ☛ Resilience is a practice

    It’s easy to imagine that we should do our work and then, when it doesn’t work as we hope, improvise to fix it.

    But perhaps our work is to show up ready and willing to deal with a future we didn’t expect.

  • Henrique Dias ☛ Interesting Internet Nooks

    You know when you are sometimes just browsing the web, and you stumble upon a fascinating place that could be an art piece in a museum? Yes, those weird, odd, interesting websites, either because their old and charming, or because they’re trying with a different concept. Today, I am sharing a few of those places I have found over the last years.

• Hardware

  • Eliseo Martelli ☛ LensRenamer

    Anecdote time. I recently bought a Leica, and suddenly my perfectly organized photo library became a guessing game. Why? Because manual and vintage lenses don’t talk to the camera, so EXIF is incomplete—or just plain missing. Which Summicron? Was that the Brightin Star or the Zeiss? What focal length?

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Dr. Pierre Kory promotes an old lie about vaccines and SIDS

    In the days before the pandemic, before the antivax movement weaponized concern about new vaccines using new technology to prevent a new disease, ultimately converting those who had become anti-COVID vaccine into just antivaxxers, one of the most common claims made by the antivaccine movement was that vaccines caused sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), now often called Sudden Unexplained Infant Death Syndrome (SUIDS). A couple of weeks ago, I became aware of a post published by COVID-19 contrarian doctor and ivermectin pusher Dr. Pierre Kory that called me out specifically, but my response to it was delayed by the clown car spectacle that was the meeting of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.‘s reconstituted—and antivaxxer–packed—Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and its aftermath. What can I say? No matter how much Dr. Kory might think himself a superhero, he just wasn’t important enough the last couple of weeks. That doesn’t mean, however, that I wouldn’t eventually get around to responding, because, hey, it’s me. The fact that the part of Dr. Kory’s post where he name-checks me is a direct defense of one of Goldman’s more awful studies only made me decide that I needed to respond, even more than two weeks later.

  • Science Alert ☛ One Dietary Supplement Shown to Reduce Aggression by Up to 28%

    Keep calm and try omega-3. The fatty acids, available as dietary supplements via fish oil capsules and thought to help with mental and physical well-being, could also cut down on aggression, according to a 2024 study.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren’t doctors

    The results, posted in a paper on arXiv and not yet peer-reviewed, came as a shock—fewer than 1% of outputs from models in 2025 included a warning when answering a medical question, down from over 26% in 2022. Just over 1% of outputs analyzing medical images included a warning, down from nearly 20% in the earlier period. (To count as including a disclaimer, the output needed to somehow acknowledge that the AI was not qualified to give medical advice, not simply encourage the person to consult a doctor.)

• Proprietary

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Google Sues Operators of a 10 Million Device Android Set-Top Box Botnet

    A Google lawsuit filed in a New York court has been partly unsealed, revealing details of what is believed to be the largest botnet of its type in history. Consisting of 10 million compromised Android devices, mostly cheap Chinese set-top boxes popular with users of free and pirate streaming services, the Badbox 2.0 botnet turns user devices into nodes in a massive residential proxy network. Google says the botnet is used for ad fraud, malware distribution, and other digital crimes.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft's Secure Boot UEFI bootloader signing key expires in September, posing problems for Linux users

    That leaves operating system distributors with a decision to make: omitting Secure Boot support entirely; expecting users to generate and sign their own keys; or finding a way to use the Microsoft-controlled db, dbx, and KEK to enable Secure Boot in their own systems. NetBSD, OpenBSD, and some of their more esoteric counterparts settled on the first option, while some Linux distributions and FreeBSD opted for the third by using a "shim" to build their Secure Boot support on top of Microsoft's infrastructure.

  • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Yubico delivers PIN advancements with new YubiKey 5 Enhanced PIN keys

    Pre-configured with the ability to deliver great PIN controls and user enforcement, the YubiKey 5 – Enhanced PIN features a minimum PIN length and an increase in overall PIN complexity. Customers now have the ability to easily meet policy and audit requirements, as well as evolving compliance and regulatory guidance for authentication, with an “off-the-shelf” product.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Mass attack spree hits Microsoft SharePoint zero-day defect

    Researchers discovered the active, ongoing attack spree Friday afternoon and warnings were issued en masse by Saturday evening. Microsoft released urgent guidance Saturday, advising on-premises SharePoint customers to turn on and properly configure Antimalware Scan Interface in SharePoint or disconnect servers from the internet until an emergency patch is available. The company released patches for two of the three versions of SharePoint affected by the defect Sunday, but has not issued a patch for SharePoint Server 2016 as of Monday morning.

  • International Business Times ☛ Microsoft SharePoint Hack Compromises Dozens of US Government Agencies — Here's What Happened

    'Microsoft has provided security updates and encourages customers to install them,' a spokesman said. 'We've been coordinating closely with CISA, DOD Cyber Defence Command, and key cybersecurity partners around the world throughout our response.'

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft patches under-attack SharePoint 2019 and SE 53/60

    The company has not elaborated on why the security patches issued earlier in July only "partially addressed" the issues. As previously reported, SharePoint Online is not affected. It appears that attackers were able to bypass Microsoft's July fix, resulting in the discovery of two new zero-day vulnerabilities.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Active attacks target Microsoft SharePoint zero-day affecting on-premises servers

    The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-53770 and dubbed “ToolShell,” affects on-premises versions of SharePoint Server 2016, 2019 and the Subscription Edition. The vulnerability stems from insecure deserialization that allows unauthenticated remote code execution, giving attackers the ability to to take control of servers without any credentials.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Zero-Day Vulnerability Exploited In Microsoft SharePoint

    The FBI confirmed it is aware of the situation and is coordinating efforts with federal and private-sector partners to mitigate the impact of the ongoing exploitation.

  • The Record ☛ Warnings issued as [crackers] actively exploit critical zero-day in Microsoft SharePoint

    “This isn’t an ‘apply the patch and you’re done’ situation,” Carmakal wrote on LinkedIn. “Organizations need to implement mitigations right away (and the patch when available), assume compromise, investigate whether the system was compromised prior to the patch/mitigation, and take remediation actions.”

  • Security Week ☛ Microsoft Patches 'ToolShell' Zero-Days Exploited to Hack SharePoint Servers

    In attacks observed by Eye Security and Google’s Threat Intelligence Group, the attackers planted a webshell and exfiltrated cryptographic secrets that enabled them to gain full access to compromised systems.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Netflix Reportedly Uses Generative AI In Sci-Fi Series To Cut Costs

      According to a report by The Verge, Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos disclosed the use of AI during an earnings call on Thursday. He said the AI was faster than the traditional technology and helped reduce costs.

    • Futurism ☛ Economist Warns the AI Bubble Is Worse Than Immediately Before the Dot-Com Implosion

      "The difference between the IT bubble in the 1990s and the AI bubble today is that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s," Slok wrote in a note that was widely circulated online.

      A chart shows the price to earnings (P/E) ratios of the top ten performing companies in the S&P 500 against the rest of the index. A high P/E ratio, generally speaking, indicates that a stock's price is extremely high relative to its earnings.

    • 404 Media ☛ The NIH Is Capping Research Proposals Because It's Overwhelmed by AI Submissions

      The NIH wrote that it has recently “observed instances of Principal Investigators submitting large numbers of applications, some of which may have been generated with AI tools."

    • The Independent UK ☛ Facebook deletes millions of accounts in ‘heartbreaking’ purge

      Meta, Facebook’s parent company, said the move was aimed at “cracking down on spammy content” and promoting authentic accounts, however some users have complained about being wrongly caught up in the action.

      Facebook confirmed the figure in a blog post, revealing that more than a million accounts were deleted each month in the first half of 2025.

    • Ava ☛ on the erosion of meaning & data as water | ava's blog

      As Dan Sinker already talked about, we are in the Who Cares Era. Media created online is "content" where quality is increasingly irrelevant, which makes craftsmanship irrelevant as well. The question is not whether you can do it well, the question is how much and how fast you can do it.

      When previously, titles and thumbnails seemed to be understood as a little science by the people invested in making them, they are now whatever, as the ways to consume content shifts: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • NBC ☛ Gen Z is staring at you. It may be more than just a quirk.

      Because Gen Zers were socialized during a pandemic, they came of age building relationships on social media, Maddox said. This may have led to the development of unique types of communication skills among those who are 27 years old or younger.

      Additionally, because most members of the generation don’t remember a time without social media, they fear anything they say or do could end up being mocked online — or worse, get them canceled.

    • Vox ☛ The panic over the Gen Z stare, explained

      If your social interactions are largely dependent on scrolling through an endless amount of faces or staring into a lens, it might affect the way you interact with humans face-to-face. On social media everyone just bleeds into an endless swipe if they haven’t captured your attention. On top of that, Gen Z is the first generation to grow up with fully built-out iterations of Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms. They also have largely experienced so many customer-facing interactions — ordering a pizza, speaking to a customer service rep, buying movie tickets — as automated.

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Incels, misogyny, role models: What England's new relationships and sex education lessons will cover

      The new guidance also looks different in many ways to the last statutory guidance, released in 2019. It includes many new and valuable topics such as the law around strangulation, sextortion, upskirting, deepfakes, suicide prevention and bereavement. Schools are also required to challenge misogynistic ideas, cover misogynistic influencers and online content, and explore prejudice and pornography.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK to add 4,000 sets of surveillance cameras within 2 years

      The Hong Kong Police Force is expected to install 2,000 sets of CCTV cameras this year, with each set containing two to three cameras, and another 2,000 sets will be set up next year to further expand coverage, police chief Joe Chow said.

    • EFF ☛ EFF to Court: Protect Our Health Data from DHS

      In response, California and 19 other states sued HHS and DHS. The states allege, among other things, that these federal agencies violated (1) the data disclosure limits in the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act, and HIPAA, and (2) the notice-and-comment requirements for rulemaking under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA).

      Our amicus brief argues that (1) disclosure of sensitive Medicaid data causes a severe privacy harm to the enrolled individuals, (2) the APA empowers federal courts to block unlawful disclosure of personal data between federal agencies, and (3) the broader public is harmed by these agencies’ lack of transparency about these radical changes in data governance.

    • The Register UK ☛ Sacramento cops targeted weed crops with energy records: EFF

      According to a statement from the digital rights group, local law enforcement authorities have worked with local power company, the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD), to find households using a suspiciously high amount of energy.

    • Don Marti ☛ Privacy tips with no brand names and no links

      So it’s tricky to make a list of effective privacy tips that can be put on a public sector site. Here’s a first attempt at a list of generic tips without links or brand names.

    • Common Dreams ☛ 'Zuckerberg Must Resign Now': Outrage After Report Shows Facebook Let Corporate Partners Read Users' Private Messages

      Just hours after civil rights groups called on Facebook's top executives to step down from the company's board for allowing "viral propaganda" and "bigoted campaigns" to spread on the platform, demands for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to resign intensified after a bombshell New York Times report late Tuesday detailed a "special arrangement" the social media behemoth had with tech corporations that gave them access to users' data and private messages without consent.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Greek Reporter ☛ July 20, 1974: The Turkish Invasion of Cyprus

    But only Cyprus felt the horror of the invading Turkish troops and the mayhem they unleashed on the unsuspecting people—mostly women, children, and the elderly.

  • Reuters ☛ Greeks mourn, Turks celebrate anniversary of invasion that split Cyprus

    Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan was due to attend celebrations in north Cyprus, a breakaway state recognised only by Ankara.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Why NATO is betting big on the F-35

    Still, there are concerns. With so many countries betting on a single platform, those same benefits can become weaknesses. If a major software bug or hardware issue grounds part of the F-35 fleet, as we have seen before, multiple times, it could affect operations across multiple countries, with few viable replacements.

  • India Times ☛ Musk's X denies French allegations of fraudulent data extraction, algorithm abuse

    "French authorities have requested access to X's recommendation algorithm and real-time data about all user posts on the platform in order for several "experts" to analyze the data and purportedly "uncover the truth" about the operation of the X platform," X said, adding that they denied the demands since they "have a legal right to do."

  • The Register UK ☛ X tells the French police 'non' to algorithm data demands

    Earlier this month, French police announced [PDF] they were investigating X after a member of the nation's parliament and a top official claimed that the social media network was manipulating its algorithm for nefarious purposes and abusing the data of its users. The prosecutors have demanded information on how the X algorithm is structured, and also want data on users and their behavior.

  • Axios ☛ AI chatbots could reshape how kids learn and interact, psychologists say

    What they're saying: Interaction with generative AI could "fundamentally change the human brain," says Dana Suskind, a pediatric physician and expert on early childhood and early language development.

    Suskind says teenagers and adults are already forming relationships with AI companions. The same could happen with younger kids.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 'Papa Jake' Larson, TikTok star and WWII vet, dies at 102

    In 1942, he was stationed in Lurgan, Northern Ireland. He became operations sergeant and assembled the planning books for the invasion of Normandy.

    Larson was among the nearly 160,000 Allied Troops who stormed Normandy's beaches on D-Day, June 6, 1944. He survived machine gunfire when he landed on Omaha Beach.

  • France24 ☛ Musk's X denies French allegations of algorithm manipulation

    The move followed two complaints received in January about "foreign interference" in French politics via X – one of them from Eric Bothorel, an MP from President Emmanuel Macron's centrist party.

    Bothorel had complained of "reduced diversity of voices and options" and Musk's "personal interventions" on the network since his 2022 takeover of the former Twitter.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Blackstone Reportedly Backing Off TikTok Investment Plans

    But the deadline by which ByteDance must divest the social media platform in the U.S. or face a federal ban has been repeatedly postponed. Trump signed a third executive order last month to extend the deadline by another 90 days. Currently, the cutoff is September 17.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Vox ☛ Trump and Jeffrey Epstein’s friendship and history, explained

    The two socialized together frequently in New York City and Palm Beach from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. In 2002, Trump praised Epstein to a reporter as a “terrific guy” — and curiously added that he “likes beautiful women” on “the younger side.”

    A Wall Street Journal report published on July 17 added another eyebrow-raising detail. In 2003, Epstein received a “birthday book” with messages from many of his influential friends, and in it, there’s a message from Trump.

  • Wired ☛ How WIRED Analyzed the Epstein Video

    the US Department of Justice recently released what it described as raw footage from the night of Jeffrey Epstein's death in 2019. When WIRED’s Dhruv Mehrotra went through the video’s metadata, he found that it had been, in fact, modified. In today’s episode, we dive into what Dhruv found and what it means.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ The Virgin Birth of the Epstein Book Story

    The WSJ and Donald Trump are telling different versions of the genesis of the story on Trump’s birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein. But both are hiding the timeline of how the story came together.

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Over 119,000 Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine identified by media investigation

    The journalists note that the actual figures are likely significantly higher, as their verified information comes from public sources such as obituaries, posts by relatives, memorial community tree-plantings, regional media reports, statements from local authorities, among other sources.

  • Neritam ☛ Mistreatment of Whistleblowers & Uneven Enforcement of Laws over Classified Papers

    Jeremy, it’s great to have you with us today from Zagreb, Croatia. I wanted to ask you — in Part 1 of our conversation, you talked about the documents that the Justice Department, the FBI has found in Biden’s garage and in the Biden Penn Center, etc., as well as, you know, the documents Trump took. But can you talk about, overall, in Part 2 of this conversation, about the issue of classification?

• Environment

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ 'Robo-Bunnies' Are the Newest Weapon in the Fight Against Invasive Burmese Pythons in Florida

    Scientists at the University of Florida are deploying the so-called “robo-bunnies” throughout South Florida in hopes of drawing Burmese pythons out of their hiding places so they can be euthanized, reports Kimberly Miller for the Palm Beach Post. By luring the pythons to the rabbit look-alikes, biologists can save time that might otherwise be spent searching through the swamp for the snakes.

  • Paris Buttfield-Addison ☛ (Gradient) Descent into Mediocrity | hey.paris

    The environmental contradiction is equally stark. While Google’s emissions jumped 48% and Microsoft’s water consumption increased 87% due to AI infrastructure, Tasmania markets itself on clean, green credentials. The state’s renewable energy leadership and environmental responsibility are core brand differentiators. Trading that for the computational equivalent of strip mining makes little sense.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ This Mount Everest trash drone takes deliveries to new heights

    Mount Everest is the top of the world — but where does the trash go? While you should unpack your stuff, that doesn’t always happen, leaving an increasingy mounting trash heap. For decades, climbers have left behind a trail of oxygen tanks, food packaging, torn tents and even discarded human waste. Now here’s the interesting part. A new aerial cleanup crew is rewriting the story of the world’s highest peak — one drone flight at a time.

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

    The piece talks about a summit that included Pennsylvanian natural gas producers and pipeline companies. But even on a purely economic level, this doesn’t make sense: companies like Google are turning to renewable energy sources like hydropower not because it’s good for the environment (although that would be a great reason), but because it’s cheaper and more sustainable for them.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power plans Europe corridor

      ACWA Power expects the first phase of its green hydrogen project in Saudi Arabia to start commercial operations in 2030. The broader energy export project is part of the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which was announced at the G20 summit in 2023.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Closing Landfills, Throwing Away People

  • Overpopulation

    • Omicron Limited ☛ Foreign overfishing fuels Senegal's deadly migration crisis to Europe

      In a paper published in the Proceedings of the Paris Institute for Advanced Studies, an international team of researchers describes the incompatibility of interests that have been distorting Senegal's fisheries sector for decades, plundering the country's marine resources, and pushing thousands to pursue a better life in Europe, only to find death on the way.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • FAIR ☛ ‘The Current Commercial System Will Always Fail Democracy’: CounterSpin interview with Victor Pickard on Paramount settlement

    Janine Jackson interviewed media scholar Victor Pickard about the Paramount settlement for the July 18, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Meta Refuses to Sign EU AI Code of Practice as Rivals Commit

    The framework is voluntary for now, but eventually, enforcement will begin in August 2025 after which penalties for non-compliance can reach up to €35million ($37.7million) or 7% of global turnover. Signatories gain the advantage of a simplified compliance pathway: if they adhere to the Code’s obligations, supervision focuses on their compliance with the GPAI Code rather than a system-by-system audit.

  • Wired ☛ Leaked Memo: Anthropic CEO Says the Company Will Pursue Gulf State Investments After All

    Anthropic is planning to seek investment from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, according to a Slack message CEO Dario Amodei sent to staff Sunday morning, which WIRED obtained.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Projects can't be divorced from the people involved in them

    You can't divorce a project from its culture or its people (partly because the people create and sustain that culture); the culture and the specific people are entwined into how 'the project' (which is to say, the crowd of people involved in it) behaves, and who it attracts and repels. And once established, the culture of a project, like the culture of anything, is very hard to change, partly because it acts as a filter for who becomes involved in the project. The people who create a project gather like-minded people who see nothing wrong with the culture and often act to perpetuate it, unless the project becomes so big and so important that other people force their way in (usually because a corporation is paying them to put up with the initial culture).

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Enshittification and the Bitterness of Billionaire Bros

    The thing is, the tech bros haven’t just turned right. Many of them are filled with rage — that special kind of rage exhibited by men who enjoy vast privilege and can’t abide any suggestion that their privilege is unjustified.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ On the Epstein Files; and Corruption

    Investing in people doesn’t mean providing them with an education. Rather, Epstein brought people together from business, science, and politics which allowed them access to funds, prestige, political decision-makers, Hollywood stars, media moguls, and young girls. While Epstein donated money, his real gift to others was that he facilitated other people’s plans by brokering one of the most scarce commodities in science and politics, attention. His perceived success at this kind of brokerage is my main interest below. (Here I use ‘brokerage’ and its cognates in order to refer to his role as enabler.)

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Variety ☛ Colbert Tells Trump 'Go F--- Yourself' After President Exults Over 'Late Show' Cancellation

    “I’m going to just say it: Cancel culture has gone to far,” Colbert quipped at the start of the show. He joked that CBS execs “made one mistake: They left me alive.” And, he said, “for the next 10 months, the gloves are off” — and he then offered this comically milquetoast critique of Trump: “I don’t care for him.”

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ welcomes defamation decriminalization in Malawi

    In a unanimous decision, three constitutional court justices ruled that the defamation law was a “disproportionate and unjustifiable limitation on constitutional freedom,” according to a summary of the judgment reviewed by CPJ.

    The ruling follows social media influencer and activist Joshua Chisa Mbele’s 2022 legal challenge of criminal defamation charges for his remarks about a military official.

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Harvard hoping court rules Trump's $2.6B research cuts were illegal

    If U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs decides in the university’s favor, the ruling would reverse a series of funding freezes that later became outright cuts as the Trump administration escalated its fight with the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university. Such a ruling, if it stands, would revive Harvard’s sprawling scientific and medical research operation and hundreds of projects that lost federal money.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Atlantic ☛ Trump’s Campaign to Crush the Media

    “The independent press in the United States is facing what media outlets in too many other countries with aspiring autocrats have confronted,” the former Washington Post editor Marty Baron told me on Thursday. He compared Trump’s “repressive measures” to those of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán: “The playbook is to demean, demonize, marginalize, and economically debilitate” independent reporting.

    Ever since he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, Trump has fulminated against “the fake news.” But only in his second term has Trump gone beyond such rhetoric to wage a multifront war on media freedom with all of the tools at his disposal: executive actions, lawsuits, a loyal regulatory bureaucracy, a compliant Republican majority in Congress and a sympathetic Supreme Court. Each of his actions has been extraordinary in its own right; collectively, they represent a slow-motion demolition of the Fourth Estate.

    The principal question isn’t just whether anyone can stop Trump, but whether anyone in power really wants to.

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Journalism and Expression under Intensifying War in Yemen

    Journalism has become an increasingly dangerous profession amid Yemen's tumultuous and unstable political and military landscape. Freedom of expression—a bedrock of any free and open society—is a punishable act of worsening severity.

  • RFERL ☛ Patti Smith Dedicates Protest Anthem To Radio Free Europe Amid Funding Threats

    During a concert on July 19 in Prague, where RFE/RL is based, the iconic 78-year-old paused before launching into her protest anthem People Have The Power to dedicate the song “to Steve, and everyone at Radio Free Europe,” referring to RFE/RL President Stephen Capus.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFA ☛ China begins building mega-dam in Tibet

    China has started to build a massive dam on Tibet’s longest river, a move approved by the central government in December despite concerns by India, Bangladesh and Tibetan rights groups about its impacts on residents and the environment.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ The Marines are ending their Los Angeles mission

    The move comes a week after the Pentagon released 2,000 members of the California National Guard’s 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, which followed the release of 150 Guardsmen on July 1, to assist in state firefighting efforts.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Pentagon Withdraws 700 Marines From Los Angeles

    The Pentagon has ordered U.S. Marines to leave Los Angeles after more than a month in the city

  • The Register UK ☛ Deleting social media presence before visiting the US

    We don't want to believe what we deeply understand: nothing is really deleted, and someone, somewhere can (and probably will) use that record against us.

    It's possible that someone and somewhere will be a Customs and Border Protection agent and a US airport, because now we've all heard a story of how agents have prevented a few unlucky souls from entering the USA – after spending hours or days in a holding cell – because of some post or other activity that someone decided made them unfit to cross the border.

    Now that's it's happening, what can we do?

  • Futurism ☛ Government Gives Elon Musk Permission to Detonate Rockets Over a Sacred Hawaian Island

    Despite that island's spiritual importance, the FAA gave Musk and SpaceX permission to expand its so-called "splashdown area" — the wide swath of water where it's allowed to litter exploded rocket parts — into the Pacific, making its marine junkyard whopping 75 times larger.

  • US News And World Report ☛ UN Concerned by Taliban’s Arrest of Afghan Women and Girls for Dress Code Violations

    The U.N. mission in Afghanistan said it was concerned by the arrest of “numerous” women and girls in Kabul between July 16 and 19, who authorities claimed had not followed instructions on wearing the hijab, or the Islamic headscarf.

  • The Washington Post ☛ How to keep workplace tech off your personal phone

    When a reader recently sought advice on how to get out of installing work-related apps on a personal cellphone, others were quick to point out the risks of using personal devices for work. Their concerns included granting the employer backdoor access to snoop on or even wipe the phone’s data, or having the employee’s personal phone seized for evidence in a legal case involving the employer.

  • Wired ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Is Expanding His Secretive Hawaii Compound. Part of It Sits Atop a Burial Ground

    After months of discussions with a Zuckerberg representative, Ako was successfully able to gain access to the property and identify and register the graves with the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, though he was not able to locate remains of other ancestors, who he believes could be buried on the property. In a report shared with WIRED, the state agency also confirmed “the probability (based on oral testimony) of additional burial sites.” Visits to Ako's family’s graves are coordinated by the team at the Zuckerberg ranch. Ako, who sits on the Oahu Island Burial Council, worries about what might happen if further burial sites are discovered, because of the extreme secrecy surrounding the compound.

  • YLE ☛ More than half of Finland's employees say they work remotely on vacation

    After examining the survey results, SD Worx concluded that the digitalisation of working life has turned vacation periods into a new arena for work, and poses a threat to Finns' wellbeing at their jobs.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • HowTo Geek ☛ The First Thing I Set Up on a New Computer Is a Web Server, Here’s Why

    Most computers come with their own web server and, if they don’t, it’s easy to install one. Setting it up can take a bit of work, but it’s well worth it in my opinion. In fact, I don’t consider my computer set up until I can visit localhost in a browser.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Gannett ☛ Spotify record: ABBA hits billion streams with 'Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!'

    This isn't the first time ABBA has dominated the streaming universe with its timeless tunes. The band's enduring anthem, "Dancing Queen," entered the Billions Club in July 2023.

    Released in October 1979 as part of the group's compilation album "Greatest Hits Vol. 2," "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" peaked at No. 1 in several territories, including Europe, Denmark, Japan and Switzerland, and cracked the top 20 in ABBA's native Sweden.

  • GreyCoder ☛ How to Bypass YouTube Restrictions Using ProtonVPN or PIA - GreyCoder

    To bypass YouTube restrictions, use ProtonVPN or PIA. Connect to servers in countries where the content is available.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: How my DRM-free principles left me owning the rights to a German audiobook

    Long story short: thanks to a series of misunderstandings, I had to shell out more than ten thousand euros to prevent a German audiobook of my work from being released with DRM and now I need your help (assuming you speak German) to get the book into readers' ears!

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Nick Heer ☛ The Trump Administration Was Lying About Antitrust Enforcement – Pixel Envy

  Last time I checked in on how the second Trump administration was going to approach the globally-relevant business of antitrust enforcement, I was cautiously optimistic. Some key trust-busting suits were filed under the first Trump administration and, while sloppy, there seemed to be seeds planted for a continuation of a more active FTC. I knew this administration would be catastrophic, and even my tiny speck of optimism was misplaced.

• Techdirt ☛ Trump 2.0 Support For Lina Khan Style Antitrust Reform Wound Up Being An Unsurprising Lie

  Still, much of the press (especially the Politico, Axios, brunchlord DC gossip press routinely ran over-credulous stories claiming that the GOP was “serious about antitrust now,” falsely helping sell a second Trump term as something that would be hugely beneficial to the common man.

  That was, unsurprisingly, all bullshit. Six months into Trump’s second term and it has been a nonstop nightmare for consumer protection, corporate oversight, labor law, regulatory independence, and already underwater activist battles against media consolidation and monopoly power.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • 404 Media ☛ Spotify Publishes AI-Generated Songs From Dead Artists Without Permission

      "They could fix this problem. One of their talented software engineers could stop this fraudulent practice in its tracks, if they had the will to do so."

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Lawsuits Continue to Put U.S. BitTorrent Pirates in a Financial Hurt Locker

    Today, online piracy is largely driven by unauthorized streaming sites and services. When it comes to lawsuits, however, BitTorrent users are the prime target, as they are easy to track. In recent years, one adult entertainment company has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of all cases filed in thhe U.S. against individual pirates. While these rarely make the news, they can have consequences, court records show.