Leftovers

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: How twiddling enshittifies your brain

  "If your customers are too happy, you're leaving money on the table": it's the rallying cry of the enshittifier, and it's also what a friend of mine was told by a respected professor in a top-tier MBA program.

• Manton Reece ☛ Linode outage recap

  I didn’t get a warning about data loss. This outage did wreck a sizable part of my Sunday, which was already stressful for unrelated reasons. And worse, it affected my customers’ weekends. I try to be patient with hosting providers because I’m one too, and I know how frustrating and unproductive it can be to feel piled on with complaints. But this outage was likely the most significant I’ve seen in the 10+ years I’ve been using Linode.

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ A Rare Portrait of Maryland’s Medical Hero Was Rediscovered in a Mussels Joint

  So when Meg Fielding, director of the History of Maryland Medicine at the Maryland State Medical Society, recently got a text from a friend saying she’d found a portrait of Davidge while cleaning out the local shuttered Bertha’s Mussels restaurant, Fielding says, per a statement by the university, that her heart stopped.

• Inside Towers ☛ FCC Requires Georouting for Texts to 988

  The new rules will require wireless providers to develop the technical capability to transmit georouting data in a manner that enables the 988 Lifeline to route 988 text messages to the appropriate crisis center based on where the handset is located when the text is initiated. Providers will also be required to provide georouting data for 988 text messages to the Lifeline Administrator when available.

  The action will require wireless providers to aggregate location data generated from cell-based technology to a level that will not identify the texter’s precise location, to protect the privacy of 988 Lifeline users. Nationwide and non-nationwide providers will have 18 months and 36 months, respectively, to comply with the rules after the effective date.

• Science

  • The Register UK ☛ Nearly one in five NASA staff opt for voluntary exit

    Figures on NASA's website put the workforce at just under 18,000. The number given in the FY2026 budget request is 17,391. A drop of almost 4,000 is therefore substantial. It also calls into question how NASA would manage to continue all its missions should the cuts in the White House's original budget proposal be unpicked by lawmakers.

• Career/Education

  • Robert Birming ☛ Turning resistance into reward

    It’s what we do — and it’s a great feeling of accomplishment.

  • University of Michigan ☛ From The Daily: Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ is an attack on students

    As usual, the Trump administration seems to operate outside the bounds of reality. In fact, the president’s bill does the opposite of what he claims — the Congressional Budget Office estimates it will add $3.4 trillion to the national debt, in addition to further damaging the already fragile social and political landscape of the United States.

    While this Editorial Board is appalled by the destructive policies passed, the attacks on education are particularly disconcerting.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Our kids' recess at school is essential to well-being and learning, and shouldn't be scaled back

    Cognitive science tells us that young children need regular breaks from focused academic work. These breaks reduce mental fatigue, improve concentration and help children return to class refreshed and ready to learn.

    Simply switching from mathematics to reading isn't enough. What's needed are genuine pauses from cognitive effort, ideally involving unstructured play.

• Hardware

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ Hello Sprout

    Sprout is the name of my new machine that just arrived. The crowd-funded laptop. Since this beauty is graciously sponsored by a large crowd of people a felt I should share a little bit of its journey and entry into my life.

    First I needed a name for it, and since it is small and is meant to grow with me a bit, I think Sprout feels apt.

  • Linux Kernel Space

    • GamingOnLinux ☛ OpenLinkHub is an open source interface to manage iCUE LINK Hub and various Corsair devices on Linux

      For people who have Corsair hardware, the OpenLinkHub project might be one you need to take a look at to help you manage it all including iCUE LINK Hub.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • America’s Quack (now CMS Administrator) Dr. Oz goes authoritarian quack…again

    Long ago in another time that, as quack-happy and unreasonable as it seemed then, appears almost quaint today given the level of bonkers that now runs the federal health bureaucracy, thanks to President Donald Trump‘s having appointed antivax conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services, I sarcastically dubbed Dr. Mehmet Oz “America’s Quack.” Now, amazingly, America’s Quack is now the Administrator for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the massive federal bureaucracy under the even more massive HHS bureaucracy that is responsible for running Medicare, Medicaid, and programs that fall under the Affordable Care Act. We thus have a former daytime medical talkshow host with a long history of promoting quackery (and even antivax nonsense) and no relevant experience running a large organization in charge of your mom and grandma’s Medicare. A recent interview given by Dr. Oz reminded me that I haven’t written as much about him now that he has real power and responsibility as I perhaps should have. That interview amplifies even more my view that Dr. Oz is fully down with the “soft eugenics” of RFK Jr.’s “make America healthy again” (MAHA) movement. In fact, the eugenics is not-so-soft, nor is his echoing of fascist authoritarian themes, as you will see.

  • 404 Media ☛ Former Moderator Sues Chaturbate for 'Psychological Trauma'

    “Without these safeguards, Mr. Barber eventually developed full-blown PTSD, which he is currently still being treated for,” the former mod's lawyer said.

    [...] Neal Barber, who was hired by Bayside Support Services and Multi Media LLC—the parent company of Chaturbate—in 2020, filed a lawsuit on July 22 claiming that those companies “knowingly and intentionally failed to provide their content moderators with industry-standard mental health protections, such as content filters, wellness breaks, trauma-informed counseling, or peer support systems.” The lawsuit is a proposed class action for moderators hired in the last four years to moderate Chaturbate streams.

  • Futurism ☛ Man Wakes Up Partway Through His Organs Getting Harvested

    The incident suggests, advocates say, that medical organizations could be jumping the gun to harvest organs from people who — with all apologies to Monty Python — aren't quite dead yet.

  • Science Alert ☛ Study Reveals Turning Point When Your Body's Aging Accelerates

    Now, a new study has identified a turning point at which that acceleration typically takes place: at around age 50.

  • Futurism ☛ OpenAI Is Giving Exactly the Same Copy-Pasted Response Every Time Time ChatGPT Is Linked to a Mental Health Crisis

    It's baffling because, on a certain level, OpenAI is acting like it's serious about the issue. Or at least, it wants us to think it's serious. In response to some of our subsequent reporting on ChatGPT-induced psychosis, it said it hired a full-time clinical psychiatrist with a background in forensic psychiatry to help research the effects of its chatbot on users' mental health. In April, it rolled back an update that caused ChatGPT to be egregiously sycophantic, even by its standards.

  • Futurism ☛ If Elon Musk Is So Concerned About Falling Birthrates, Why Is He Creating Perfect and Beautiful AI-Powered Girlfriends and Boyfriends That Seem Designed to Drive Down Romance Between Real Humans?

    They have eager customers: about 72 percent of American teenagers are already talking to AI buddies, with about half interfacing with these fictional characters every day. That's the next generation of consumers, almost entirely captured!

  • Rolling Stone ☛ More Guns Make Americans Feel Less Safe, Gun-Industry Study Confirms

    That market-research report, produced in 2018 and titled “Multi-Generational Research: Purchases, Perceptions, and Participation for the Firearms Industry,” was based on a survey of 1,800 people, spanning four generations, from baby boomers to Gen Z, and asked a wide range of questions covering a variety of gun-related topics. The researchers concluded that “more Americans feel less safe when it comes to people legally carrying concealed guns in public.” The finding applied to non-gun owners and gun owners alike, as well as to both ends of the political spectrum. “While millennials, liberals, and non-owners are more adamant about feeling less safe,” the study continued, “a majority of gun owners and conservatives also don’t feel safe when it comes to concealed carry.”

• Proprietary

  • Bitdefender ☛ French submarine secrets surface after cyber attack

    Although it has not been confirmed that the source of Naval Group's leak was due to exploitation of an on-premises SharePoint server, what is undeniable is that there has been a long history of countries breaching the defence infrastructure of other nations to gather intelligence and cause disruption.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Installing Windows 3.1 on DR DOS 6.0

    Now with a functional DR DOS 6.0 environment, I wondered what the next step would be. Obviously my beloved Brown Bag Software PowerMenu and Digital Research GEM would be great, but Windows 3.1 (specifically the later Workgroups flavour) seemed like the Final Boss. Microsoft’s infamous AARD code would generate an obtuse error on early 3.1 beta installers when run on DR DOS, so it seemed fitting to name this VM AARDvark. Thank you.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Microsoft SharePoint Zero-Day

    Chinese [crackers] are exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint to steal data worldwide: [...]

  • Security Week ☛ Scattered Spider Targeting VMware vSphere Environments

    Active since early 2022 and also known as Muddled Libra, Scatter Swine, Starfraud, and UNC3944, the hacking group has been blamed for multiple high-profile attacks, including such as MGM Resorts’ infection with BlackCat (Alphv) ransomware, and the 0ktapus campaign that hit over 130 organizations.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Microsoft Copilot AI’s official avatar looks like a blob of semen

      I had to euphemise furiously on the YouTube version of this post — but for the blog, the AP Style Guide lets us call a spade a bloody shovel. It might just be me, and it might just be every other person I showed the above official Microsoft promotional image to — but the official Microsoft Copilot avatar looks like a blob of semen. With a face. Animated. Bouncing around.

      Did nobody tell Suleyman what this thing looks like? Does nobody at Microsoft AI dare speak up about the pearly blob and say out loud what this thing looks like?

    • Alex Martsinovich ☛ It's rude to show AI output to people

      Whoa, let me stop you right here buddy, what you're doing here is extremely, horribly rude.

    • Futurism ☛ If You've Asked ChatGPT a Legal Question, You May Have Accidentally Doomed Yourself in Court

      In response to that massive acknowledgement, Jessee Bundy of the Creative Counsel Law firm pointed out that lawyers like her had been warning "for over a year" that using ChatGPT for legal purposes could backfire spectacularly.

      "If you’re pasting in contracts, asking legal questions, or asking [the chatbot] for strategy, you're not getting legal advice," the lawyer tweeted. "You’re generating discoverable evidence. No attorney-client privilege. No confidentiality. No ethical duty. No one to protect you."

    • The New Stack ☛ AI Is Testing AI-Generated Code: Should You Trust It?

      According to Harness’ State of Software Delivery 2025 report, two-thirds of developers say they spend excessive time debugging and resolving security vulnerabilities in AI-generated code. As AI becomes the engine behind modern software delivery, ensuring the reliability and safety of AI-driven workflows is mission-critical.

    • Dominik Schwind ☛ July 28, 2025

      And I don’t understand the psychology behind this invocation. Are people trying to defer to a higher power and shift responsibility away from themselves?

    • CBC ☛ Will we have thinking robots by 2030? Or is this just hype from big tech?

      "None of these companies are really making any money with generative AI … so they need a new magic trick to make people get off their backs," he said.

    • Futurism ☛ Detroit's Using Robots to Pick Up Garbage, Mow Grass, Clear Snow, and Much More

      At a city-owned beach in Detroit, a pilotless vehicle can be seen roaming over the sands as it picks up flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shore.

    • Fedora Family / IBM

      • Red Hat Official ☛ Hope, crash, iterate: One PM’s journey to make enterprise library content searchable, findable, and more useful - Part 1

        While exploring AI [sic], chatbots, and learning what our systems, teams, and content were ready for, the cast of characters changed along the way. People rolled on, rolled off, and the project weathered more than one handoff, but this wasn’t a project that failed, it was one that stretched. When it stalled, we didn’t give up. We mapped the damage, understood the limits, and rebuilt with intent. We were early. We were optimistic. And we kept going, even when it got messy. This is our field journal: three phases of an AI assistant story that’s still evolving.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Security Week ☛ NASCAR Confirms Personal Information Stolen in Ransomware Attack

      The investigation determined that hackers had access to NASCAR’s network between March 31 and April 3, 2025, and that they exfiltrated files containing personal information, including names and Social Security numbers.

    • Security Week ☛ BlackSuit Ransomware Group Transitioning to 'Chaos' Amid Leak Site Seizure

      Now displaying a splash screen informing visitors that it has been seized by law enforcement as part of Operation Checkmate, BlackSuit’s extortion site had roughly 200 victims listed as of July 2025. Royal had hit over 350 organizations by November 2023.

      The BlackSuit ransomware gang targeted organizations across numerous industries, including education, government, healthcare, IT, manufacturing, and retail, stealing their data before encryption, to leverage it for extortion.

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ Chinese [crackers] have seized control. How did we let this happen?

      So when we discovered in early July that Chinese [crackers] had gained control of Microsoft servers at hundreds of US government agencies – including the US nuclear weapons agency – it was just another [breach] story.

      What made this one noteworthy was that there wasn’t immediately a fix or a patch, Microsoft admitted last Tuesday.

      Incredibly, confirmation of the US military’s “assume breach” alert had to be dragged out of the Department of Defense via Freedom of Information Act requests by a campaigning non-profit called Property of the People.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • 404 Media ☛ A Second Tea Breach Reveals Users’ DMs About Abortions and Cheating

      It’s hard to overstate how sensitive this data is and how it could put Tea’s users at risk if it fell into the wrong hands. When signing up, Tea encourages users to choose an anonymous screenname, but it was trivial for 404 Media to find the real world identities of some users given the nature of their messages, which Tea has led them to believe were private. Users could be easily found via their social media handles, phone numbers, and real names that they shared in these chats. These conversations also frequently make damning accusations against people who are also named in the private messages and in some cases are easy to identify.

    • The Verge ☛ Women’s ‘red flag’ app Tea is a privacy nightmare

      On July 25th, 72,000 images — including 13,000 selfies and driver’s licenses, as well as another 59,000 images, that were published on the app — were breached, with many downloaded and posted publicly on 4chan. 4chan users initially posted images of four women’s driver’s licenses, redacting some personal information, but the firestorm of comments in the thread suggested that thousands of images were downloaded before the company was aware of the breach. Tea told 404 Media that it had launched “a full investigation with assistance from external cybersecurity firms,” and that it was working with law enforcement “to assist” in their investigation.

    • The Verge ☛ The UK is slogging through an online age-gate apocalypse

      Effectively, web platforms must either set up an age verification system that poses potential privacy risks, default to blocking huge swaths of potentially questionable content, or entirely pull out of the UK. Residents are finding themselves locked out of anything from period-related subreddits to hobbyist forums — it’s little wonder that they’re turning to VPNs.

    • New Design Congress ☛ The Mask-Off Moment for Digital Identity

      We begin here because it sets the tone for what’s to come. This quote — and the reality it concealed — foreshadowed the structural permissiveness we now document at every level of the global digital identity movement. From Laasik’s claim as our starting point, and over the course of our research, we have watched the optimism of digital identity’s proponents be erased by opportunists, vandals, and vulgar, second-rate power in real time. Now, as we prepare to publish, the polite façade of digital identity has shattered; every principal threat model we outlined in 2024 can now be observed in operation; some at pilot scale, others nationwide.

      In other words, all of the threats described in this report have materialised. Every single one.

      In my 12-year career, I have never, ever seen anything like it.

  • Confidentiality

    • The Register UK ☛ UK VPN demand soars after debut of Online Safety Act

      Searches and sign-ups for VPN providers have surged in the wake of online age checks that were introduced on July 25 as part of the UK's Online Safety Act.

      ProtonVPN reported a more than 1,400 percent increase in sign-ups in the UK after age verification requirements took effect.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Site36 ☛ German Air Force wants new combat drones: Three industrial consortia compete for contract

    The German Armed Forces want to procure combat drones with a range of over 1000 kilometres by 2029. Airbus, Rheinmetall and the start-up Helsing are vying for the billion-euro deal.

  • El País ☛ When did the Nazis lose? What was the most important battle? The unanswered questions about World War II

    Researchers continue to study every corner of the war that, between 1939 and 1945, caused between 60 and 70 million deaths, wiped entire cities off the map, and during which the Nazis carried out the crime of crimes, the Holocaust, the industrial extermination of six million Jews, often with the complicity of part of the population of the occupied countries. Historian Antony Beevor defined it as “the greatest man-made disaster.” Eighty years later, many debates remain open, and researchers continue to search for answers.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ EU: Temu violated laws with 'illegal products'

    "Evidence showed that there is a high risk for consumers in the EU to encounter illegal products on the platform," a press release

    on Monday stated.

    Temu is classified as a "very large online platform" under the DSA. It requires the world's largest tech firms to do more to protect European consumers online. Temu has nearly 94 million average monthly active users in the European Union.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft used China staff to support USG cloud - ProPublica

    The initial report, published by nonprofit investigative journalism outfit ProPublica on July 15, exposed Redmond's practice of using China-based engineers to staff contracts for the US Department of Defense, potentially exposing sensitive government data to hacking and espionage.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Truthdig ☛ Joe Rogan Is Still Hiding

    Nowhere is this dynamic more obvious than in the cult of Joe Rogan. His defenders often describe him as a kind of roving intellect — curious, flexible, ideologically unmoored. He’s just a guy asking questions, they say, a guy willing to talk to anyone, a guy who refuses to color inside the lines. And to be fair, that perception isn’t entirely false. Rogan has, on occasion, platformed voices from across the political spectrum, from Bernie Sanders to Alex Jones, from Cornel West to Ben Shapiro. That’s more range than you’ll find on most cable news networks. But there’s always a gap between what someone says they’re open to and the actual structure of the world they’ve built around themselves. And once you start looking closely at who gets invited onto The Joe Rogan Experience — and just as importantly, who doesn’t — the show’s reputation for open-mindedness starts to look a lot like brand management.

• Environment

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Is Furious That People Are Launching So Many Satellites, Even Though He's Personally Responsible for 60 Percent of All Satellites Currently in Space

    SpaceX has launched over 9,000 satellites into orbit, and the vast majority of them are still in operation today. As a result of that massive constellation, the Elon Musk-led firm controls over 60 percent of all active satellites currently in orbit.

    And the company's actively working to launch tens of thousands more, in an effort to bring Starlink broadband satellite internet to the world, efforts that critics say could severely impact the world of astronomy and potentially result in catastrophic orbital collisions.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Pattie Gonia: Nature’s Warrior Queen

  • Overpopulation

    • EcoWatch ☛ Earth Overshoot Day Reaches Record for Earliest Date

      Earth Overshoot Day is the point in the year when human demand for materials obtained from nature exceeds what the Earth can naturally regenerate in one year. For 2025, Earth Overshoot Day fell on July 24, the earliest it has been since the event was first calculated in 2006.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ The Limits of Sprawl

      Start with affordability. To be honest, the last time I even thought about housing prices in Atlanta was during the 2000s housing boom and bust. Back in 2005, when I warned that we were facing a major housing bubble that was beginning to deflate, I suggested that we think of Atlanta as part of Flatland — the central part of the country, where the relative absence of land-use restrictions made it easy to build more housing when demand increased: [...]

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Zimbabwe ☛ Google opens AI hub in Ghana, commits $37M to African research and training

    It’s part of Google’s attempt to make AI less foreign and more African. In Accra, this means a place for Ghanaians to not just learn AI but to shape it, from language models to climate solutions.

  • Bruce Lawson ☛ Bruce Lawson's personal site  : CMA Noir

    So the CMA is now all about ‘growth’ and reducing regulation (music to Big Tech’s ears, of course), and run by someone closely connected with Big Tech. Because the UK government has clamboured into bed with Google, while CMA is investigating both Google’s search business and mobile ecosystem, the meeting of its Growth and Investment Council would seem a way to get a sense of how the new regime is likely to function.

  • New Yorker ☛ How Tom Lehrer Escaped the Transience of Satire

    Lehrer’s gifts included an extraordinary and easily overlooked musicality, the secret sauce of his satire. One simple reason his songs endure is that, for all that they are written for their words, it’s hard to stop humming their tunes. His brilliance as a pianist kept him from becoming repetitive, particularly because he had such a remarkable talent for musical pastiche, flitting with ease from Broadway to marches, lieder, calypso, Christmas songs, folk ballads, flamenco, Viennese waltzes, Mozart, modern jazz, ragtime, and Gilbert and Sullivan. Meanwhile, the fact that he once adapted an actual Gilbert and Sullivan number for a song made up entirely of the names of the elements of the periodic table points to his other astonishing gift— he was not just a funny lyricist but an expert one, as flexible in his prosody and as virtuosic in finding unexpected rhymes as Stephen Sondheim, a onetime summer-camp companion of his: [...]

  • The Register UK ☛ Tom Lehrer: Satirist, mathematician, inventor of Jello shot

    Lehrer had a remarkable eye for rhyme and rhythm, and for its time, his material was highly subversive. His song Lobachevsky [PDF] was named for the great Russian mathematician, and intentionally uses cod-Russian syntax. Today, it could stand as an anthem for the users of generative "AI": [...]

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Tom Lehrer Passed Away at the Age of 97

    Tom Lehrer passed away on Saturday July 26 at the age of 97.

    He worked in both of my fields of interest: Parody Songs and Mathematics.

  • Seth Godin ☛ The order and the medium of feedback

    Who do you pay attention to?

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post - Six Things Your Marketing Colleagues Wish You Knew

    In many organizations, marketing has been hyper-compartmentalized into very specific areas (e.g. paid media or SEO), while elsewhere the marketing generalist wears about 100 hats as designer, writer, brand specialist, public relations, internal comms, and more. Still, there are some overall marketing principles that tend to ring true across responsibilities.

    I’ve consulted with some industry pros to compile a marketing manifesto of sorts, as a way to help our non-marketing colleagues see behind the curtain and understand how to best leverage these critical team members.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Why today’s toothless comedians can’t compare to Tom Lehrer. Plus, his five funniest songs

    Yet what makes his death all the sadder is that, without him, satirical music has lost its godfather, and those who claim to follow in his footsteps are toothless and sedate by comparison. Nobody would dream of tackling the hot-button issues that Lehrer dealt with head-on, and the tentative, unimaginative efforts of even today’s best comedians seem cowardly in comparison with what the grand vizier of satire came up with.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Court fines retired man for ‘liking’ antiwar content online, despite his civic work supporting Russian soldiers

    Komlev’s case stands out because he previously served as deputy head of a local pensioners’ organization that actively supports Russia’s military by making camouflage nets and collecting care packages for soldiers. Despite this affiliation, Komlev maintained an antiwar avatar on social media and liked antiwar posts, which are criminal offenses under Russian law. Local pro-invasion Telegram channels have denounced Komlev as a “two-faced Janus” and circulated footage released by the police that highlights his criticism of the war in Ukraine.

  • Techdirt ☛ Financial Censorship and the Love Affair Between Payment Processors and Anti-Porn Campaigners

    Despite this, Reist’s supposed tactics of signing “open letters” to the chief executive officers of the world’s credit card companies, payment processing platforms, and financial institutions are not new ones. Collective Shout learned it from another far-right anti-pornography group based here in the United States: the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). NCOSE is the same group that has published its so-called “Dirty Dozen” list each year, attempting to shame mainstream companies for engaging in “sexual exploitation.” But NCOSE and Collective Shout provide a glaringly broad definition of that term to describe anything that is even remotely out of line with their worldviews. Those organizations and other anti-pornography campaigners have used tactics like these in ways that led to rippling censorship across various platforms, verticals, and genres.

    The anti-pornography movement has proven effective in pressure campaigns targeting payment and banking partners for companies and individuals who produce controversial subject material.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ ‘Against Islamic values’: Muslim cleric defends remarks on SP MP Dimple Yadav

    He asked whether action would be taken against those who circulated the image, saying, “The question is, will Akhilesh Yadav file an FIR against the person who took this objectionable photo? The way Dimple Yadav is sitting, this would be considered immodest in our tradition.”

  • El País ☛ Roberto Saviano: ‘To be believed, you have to die, like Falcone, or risk dying. What kind of world do we live in?’

    That day changed Saviano’s life because since then he has had to live in hiding and with a bodyguard, which he had already had for two years previously. He left Italy and spent several periods in the United States. The writer’s story — he has sold millions of books and has been translated in more than 50 countries — is known worldwide, but the Italian justice system had not yet established this in a sentence. For Saviano, who responded to EL PAÍS in writing, it was a moral victory, and he broke down after hearing the verdict, unable to stop crying. Over the years, he has faced numerous criticisms, especially from politicians, who have accused him of almost living off the hype and enriching himself by doing so. Silvio Berlusconi reproached him in 2010 for tarnishing Italy’s image. He has clashed primarily with the far right in his criticism of its immigration policy, which has reacted by even threatening to remove his escort. Under the Giorgia Meloni government, he also had a program on RAI suspended. The ruling now supports his position.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ 3 DRC journalists beaten, detained for trying to question provincial minister

    “The Congolese officials and police who attacked and detained journalists Steve Paluku, Paul Beyokobana, and Sébastien Mulamba must be held accountable and the legal proceedings against the journalists should be dropped,” said CPJ Regional Director Angela Quintal. “Authorities in the DRC should focus on ensuring the safety of journalists working to report the news, not violently silencing them for asking questions.”

  • BIA Net ☛ My experience as a bianet intern

    I have always had a strong passion for writing and journalism, but this experience only deepened that commitment and gave it new direction. I hope to continue to be able to write all the way from Singapore.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFERL ☛ Taliban Restrictions Blamed For Surge in Suicides Among Afghans

    Suicide attempts and suicide rates have been rising in Afghanistan, especially among younger generations, since the return of the Taliban to power in August 2021, according to Afghan media, as well as local journalists, activists, and residents who spoke to RFE/RL.

    There is no official data on suicide rates in Afghanistan, and the authorities in Kabul did not respond to RFE/RL’s multiple requests for information on the matter.

  • teleSUR ☛ Diego Rivera: Art as a Mural Revolution

    Diego Rivera, one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, left an indelible mark on Latin American art history through his role as a pioneer of Mexican muralism. His work not only transformed public painting but also turned walls into spaces of social awareness and historical memory.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ Strengthening Internet governance through community collaboration

    Regional voices, technical collaboration, and inclusive dialogue are key to sustaining a global, open, and interoperable Internet.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Verge ☛ Your Whistle pet tracker will stop working next month

    The free replacement devices will only be available until September 30th, 2025 and will require Whistle users to register on Tractive’s platform through its website, select a new Tractive subscription, and provide the serial number of their current Whistle tracker.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ This is why we need Blu-ray

    DVDs have already disappeared from many households, but real film fanatics will never want to rely on streaming services

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Verge ☛ Warner Bros. Discovery is becoming Warner Bros. and Discovery again

  This time next year, the corporate entity known as Warner Bros. Discovery will be no more, and the two companies it’s splitting into have some very inspired names.

• The Register UK ☛ US clouds crush European competition on their home turf

  European cloud infrastructure companies make up just 15 percent of their own market, and the huge investment the US giants can wield makes their dominance "an impossible hill to climb" for any would-be challengers.

• India Times ☛ Google officials depose before ED in online betting linked PMLA case

  Google representatives appeared before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Monday for questioning in a money laundering investigation related to the promotion of illegal online betting and gambling platforms. While Meta executives did not attend, Google affirmed its commitment to platform safety and cooperation with investigating agencies.

• Copyrights

  • Techdirt ☛ Celebrate Tom Lehrer For His Music, But Also For Donating All His Works To The Public Domain

    In an era when artists’ estates routinely extend copyright protections as long as legally possible, Lehrer’s approach was not just generous—it was revolutionary. In an age where copyright terms are discussed in notation known as “life plus…” Lehrer agreed to free up everything while he was still around to see what people would do with it.

    We first wrote about his thinking on this way back when. It came out when someone had created a fan channel on YouTube posting all his music. Fearing that Lehrer would be upset, the guy (Erik Meyn) called up Lehrer to apologize, leading to this amazing conversation, in which Lehrer told him he was fine with it and didn’t care at all what people did with his music.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Facebook Rigorously Removes News Articles Mentioning Pirate Service "MagisTV"

    Facebook has several anti-piracy tools and technologies to keep problematic content off the platform. This apparently includes automated keyword filters that ban mentions of piracy-related terms, regardless of the context. This resulted in the removal of several MagisTV news articles, including a press release from anti-piracy coalition ACE. Trying to spot these errors is not without risk either, as Facebook bans repeat offenders.