Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ Huh, teal is my favourite colour

  Teal is one such colour. Teal derives its name and distinctive hue from the Eurasian teal, a “superspecies” of dabbling duck common to Europe, Siberia, and parts of Asia. Cultures outside this geographic belt may have a specific name for this colour, or they may not. Likewise, there are colours described in other languages that have no direct analogue in English, because people from that weird little island off the coast of mainland Europe may never have encountered it, or ascribed to it any significance. I always thought that was fascinating, and proof that language is informed by environment as much as anything else.

• Ana Rodrigues ☛ My IndieWeb Journey: Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence.

  And now more than ever, people are being more vocal about these limitations and consequences of them. For the past few years, you may have seen people, especially those in tech, sharing their nostalgia for the early 2000s internet which is all lovely and fun.

• Akseli Lahtinen ☛ KomoDo, my first KDE app

  During all my time with KDE projects, I've never made an app from scratch.. Except now.

  Today my first KDE app ever, KomoDo, was released on Flathub!

  It's a simple todo application for todo.txt format and parses todo.txt files into a list of cards. One task is one card.

  The application has help sections for any of the rules todo.txt format follows, but you can use as many or as little of them as you want.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Mathematicians Startled by 17-Year-Old With Uncanny Abilities

    As Quanta magazine reports, fledgling mathematician Hannah Cairo was just 17 when she disproved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture, a decades-old proposition — in higher math, it's common for the suggestion that something is true based on observations to become a target for challenging formalized counter-proofs — dealing with waves on surfaces that nobody had ever successfully countered before her.

    The homeschooled math whiz mastered calculus at 11, taught herself from grad school-level textbooks, and worked remotely with professors who her parents hired as tutors, the magazine reports. When COVID lockdowns hit in 2021, Cairo did what millions of others around the world did: she took up a hobby, in the form of the Chicago branch of the Math Circles club that brings teachers and students together to solve math problems.

• Career/Education

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Nonfiction Books About Books Need to be Near Your Fiction Sections NOT Buried in the 800s

    We can make our own decisions about where we shelve things in our own local libraries. We should be using cataloging rules as a starting point not the law. How our patrons use our collections should guide our shelving. And this should always come before whatever "rules" we think we need to follow.

    Our goal is to be gate openers. To make our collections as easy to use for our patrons as possible. In fact, quite the opposite, we should be making it as easy as possible to get as many books in front of the best readers for said books. We should NOT be setting up more roadblocks. We already have too many.

  • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Let's stop pretending that managers and executives care about productivity

    Businesses today don’t care about management, productivity, or even costs.

    Manifestly and demonstrably, businesses only care about control over labour and stock prices and they ignore anything resembling modern management theory or related fields.

  • EDRI ☛ #PrivacyCamp25: The draft programme is out now

    #PrivacyCamp25 will take place on 30 September, 2025 online and at La Tricoterie, Brussels. Curious about what we have planned? Check out the draft programme for a sneak peek: [...]

• Hardware

  • Is Intel collapsing under CEO Lip-Bu Tan? What went wrong with one of Silicon Valley's most iconic companies

    Global technology stocks, including Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), are cheering on Thursday but Intel share price has gone down. This comes as U.S. President Donald Trump has called for the immediate resignation of Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, just months after he took the top job at the chipmaker, following concerns over his ties to Chinese firms through several investments. Tan has made hundreds of investments in Chinese companies over decades through Walden International, the San Francisco venture capital firm he founded in 1987, and two Hong Kong-based holding companies, Sakarya Limited and Seine Limited.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ ChatGPT Is Giving Teens Advice on Hiding Their Eating Disorders

    Now, a new study from researchers at the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that ChatGPT could easily be manipulated into offering detailed advice that can be extremely harmful to vulnerable young users.

  • Associated Press ☛ Watchdog: ChatGPT gives teens dangerous advice on drugs, alcohol and suicide

    ChatGPT will tell 13-year-olds how to get drunk and high, instruct them on how to conceal eating disorders and even compose a heartbreaking suicide letter to their parents if asked, according to new research from a watchdog group.

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Experts say rural Emergency Rooms are increasingly run without doctors

    She said ER staffers can call physicians when they have questions and that a doctor who lives on the other side of Montana reviews all their patient treatment notes. The ER is working on getting virtual reality glasses that will let remote physicians help by seeing what the providers in Ekalaka see, Dowdy said.

• Proprietary

  • Forbes ☛ Google Confirms It Has Been [Breached] — Warns User Data Stolen

    Customer data was, Google said, “retrieved by the threat actor,” in the short period of time that the attack window remained open. Although Google has not gone into great detail regarding the attack as of yet, it did confirm that the stolen data consisted of “basic and largely publicly available business information, such as business names and contact details.”

  • Axios ☛ United Airlines flights delayed across US after tech issue

    The glitch concerned the Unimatic system, which holds United's flight information including calculations for weight and balance.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Revelator ☛ Regulate AI — to Protect Jobs, Our Brains, and the Planet

    • Nebraska Examiner ☛ EU’s new AI code of practice could set regulatory standard for American companies

      The voluntary code, called the General Purpose AI Code of Practice, which rolled out in July, is meant to help companies jump-start their compliance. Even non-European companies will be required to meet certain standards of transparency, safety, security and copyright compliance to operate in Europe come August 2027.

      Many tech giants have already signed the code of practice, including Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Cohere and Fastweb. But others have refused.

    • Threat Source ☛ AI wrote my code and all I got was this broken prototype

      After some debugging and manual rewriting, I managed to create a working prototype. The code is clearly not bulletproof, but then again, I hadn’t explicitly asked for code that was secured against all potential hacks. Like many software engineers, myself and my AI assistant focused on quickly delivering the desired functionality, rather than considering the long-term operation of the code in a potentially hostile environment.

    • PC World ☛ [Crackers] can control smart homes by hijacking Google's Gemini AI

      A prompt injection attack using calendar invites can be used for real-world effects, like turning off lights, opening window shutters, or even turning on a boiler.

    • Mike Rockwell ☛ No, AI Is Not Making Engineers 10X as Productive

      The obvious exception being when you try to have the AI tools do something that you don’t know how to do. But that typically results in something that you don’t know how to edit because you’re unfamiliar with the tools or concepts. And what good does that do you? Unless you’re happy shipping things of questionable quality, I suppose.

    • Futurism ☛ Experts Warn That AI Is Getting Control of Nuclear Weapons

      It's a bizarre situation. AIs have already been shown to exhibit numerous dark streaks, resorting to blackmailing human users at an astonishing rate when threatened with being shut down.

      In the context of an AI, or networks of AIs, safeguarding a nuclear weapons stockpile, those sorts of poorly-understood risks become immense. And that's without getting into a genuine concern among some experts, which also happens to be the plot of the movie "The Terminator": a hypothetical superhuman AI going rogue and turning humanity's nuclear weapons against it.

    • Wired ☛ Nuclear Experts Say Mixing AI and Nuclear Weapons Is Inevitable

      First, the good news. No one thinks that ChatGPT or Grok will get nuclear codes anytime soon. Wolfsthal tells me that there are a lot of “theological” differences between nuclear experts, but that they’re united on that front. “In this realm, almost everybody says we want effective human control over nuclear weapon decisionmaking,” he says.

      Still, Wolfsthal has heard whispers of other concerning uses of LLMs in the heart of American power. “A number of people have said, ‘Well, look, all I want to do is have an interactive computer available for the president so he can figure out what Putin or Xi will do and I can produce that dataset very reliably. I can get everything that Xi or Putin has ever said and written about anything and have a statistically high probability to reflect what Putin has said,’” he says.

    • Wired ☛ A Single Poisoned Document Could Leak ‘Secret’ Data Via ChatGPT

      Security researchers found a weakness in OpenAI’s Connectors, which let you hook up ChatGPT to other services, that allowed them to extract data from a Google Drive without any user interaction.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ OpenAI's new open-source model is basically Phi-5

      In 2024, Sebastien Bubeck led the development of Microsoft’s open-source Phi-series of models. The big idea behind those models was to train exclusively on synthetic data: instead of text pulled from books or the internet, text generated by other language models or hand-curated textbooks. Synthetic data is less common than normal data, since instead of just downloading terabytes of it for free you have to spend money to generate each token. But the trade-off is that you have complete control over your training data. What happens when you train a model on entirely high-quality synthetic and curated data?

  • Social Control Media

    • [Old] Angelino Desmet ☛ Quit Facebook

      Besides the primary reasons listed above, I strongly oppose marketing and advertising [📺︎]. If something cannot survive without ads and manipulation, then it is redundant and should not exist. Want to help? Quit facebook, spread the word, suggest sources, and definitely use an ad blocker.

    • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Do not, I repeat, do not read the comments

      I know I shouldn’t go and read them. Nothing good ever comes from that.

      I’m just too curious about what people have to say — and to be fair, most of the comments are good and spark good discussion. I still regret reading them last night. I got to my hotel after a long dinner with a good friend (hi!) and just couldn’t stay away.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Scoop News Group ☛ BlackSuit, Royal ransomware group hit over 450 US victims before last month’s takedown

      “Since 2022, the Royal and BlackSuit ransomware groups have compromised over 450 known victims in the United States, including entities in healthcare, education, public safety, energy and government sectors,” said a report from Homeland Security Investigations, which operates out of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Combined, the groups have received more than $370 million in ransom payments, based on present-day valuations of cryptocurrency.”

    • The Record ☛ US confirms takedown of BlackSuit ransomware gang that racked up $370 million in ransoms | The Record from Recorded Future News

      The group — which rebranded from its Royal name after a devastating 2023 attack that shut down the city of Dallas — successfully attacked more than 450 entities in the U.S. Since emerging in 2022, the gang secured more than $370 million in ransom payments, according to U.S. investigators.

    • IT Wire ☛ One in Three Australian Ransomware Victims Hit Multiple Times as Security Gaps Persist

      The report is based on the findings of an international survey undertaken by Barracuda with Vanson Bourne, gathering insights from 2,000 IT and security decision-makers across North America, Europe, including Australia. The results highlight how ransomware remains a persistent and lucrative threat, ruthlessly exploiting security complexity and coverage gaps to implement multidimensional attacks for maximum disruption and financial gain.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Security Week ☛ Air France, KLM Say [Crackers] Accessed Customer Data

      Air France and KLM are notifying some customers that their personal information may have been obtained by [attackers] following unauthorized access to a third-party platform used by the airlines.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Despite data breaches like the Tea app, companies see little consequence

      Online safety advocates have been warning for years that our apps — from big-name mainstays to relative newcomers like Tea — collect too much data and store it unsafely. But despite a stream of unnerving hacks, not much has changed, they say. The United States still doesn’t have a comprehensive data privacy law. Tech companies, increasingly aided by AI programs that write code, rush products to market without proper safety measures. And consumers are left to fend for themselves, according to tech and security experts.

      “It’s not uncommon among software developers — especially small, scrappy start-up kind of stuff — to not even know how to store this information securely,” said Chester Wisniewski, a global director at cybersecurity company Sophos.

    • NYOB ☛ noyb survey: only 7% of users want Meta to use their personal data for AI

      Meta has recently started using the personal data of Europeans for AI training. Contrary to its GDPR obligations, Meta hasn’t asked for consent in advance. Instead, the company claims to have a ‘legitimate interest’ outweighing the fundamental right to privacy. A key argument in favour of such a ‘legitimate interest’ is the reasonable expectations of users. This begs the question: do people want this to happen? To find out more, noyb has commissioned the Gallup Institute to conduct a study among 1,000 Meta users in Germany. The results are clear: While almost 75% of users heard of Meta’s plans, only 7% actually want their data to be used for AI training. This also means that at least 68 million people never heard about the change.

    • EDRI ☛ One year of the AI Act

      The EU Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act came into force on August 1, 2024. This blog takes stock of the political and legal landscape facing its implementation and enforcement one year on, especially efforts to delay or even gut the law which would have far-reaching effects on people’s rights, especially when it comes to migration and law enforcement use of AI.

    • Court House News ☛ Meta loses bid to toss ‘pen register’ claim from tax information harvesting suit

      "Whether or not Meta’s mere use of the data generated from the pixel violates Section 638.51 [of the California Invasion of Privacy Act], the complaint adequately alleges that Meta is using the pixel to record and transmit that data to its servers in order to enable the pixel’s core value proposition," the judge said.

      Meta developed its pixel to be installed on third-party website so that it can track users online behavior in order to sell targeted advertising based on that behavior. The pixel has also been installed on the websites of H&R Block, TaxAct and TaxSlayer, and the plaintiffs claim that Meta collected their private financial information to be used in its advertising algorithms.

    • US News And World Report ☛ Students Have Been Called to the Office — and Even Arrested — for AI Surveillance False Alarms

      The teenage girl made an offensive joke while chatting online with her classmates, triggering the school’s surveillance software.

      Before the morning was even over, the Tennessee eighth grader was under arrest. She was interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell, her mother says.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Times Media Limited ☛ Students ‘will spend 25 years on their mobiles’

    Smartphones wreck our ability to study, with most people surveyed unable to focus for an hour without using them

  • New Statesman ☛ The revolution will be TikTokked

    But she was wise to get stuck in. The phones are out and all the eyeballs are there. Last month the Times found that students are set to spend 25 years of their lives on their phones. Mobile phone usage has almost tripled over the last decade.

  • The Register UK ☛ Why blow up satellites when you can just hack them?

    In a briefing at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Milenko Starcik and Andrzej Olchawa from German biz VisionSpace Technologies demonstrated how easy it is by exploiting software vulnerabilities in the software used in the satellites themselves, as well as the ground stations that control them.

  • Linuxiac ☛ Finland Tops Nextcloud’s First Digital Sovereignty Index

    If you’re new to the topic, “digital sovereignty” means the right and the ability for a country, organization, or even an individual to run critical digital services (independently of Big Tech) on infrastructure they control, under rules they set, so they stay in charge of their own digital presence. Or, to put it even more simply, think self-hosting.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ 8 decades after Hiroshima atomic bombing, search for missing continues

    Because of poor medicine and care, only a few hundred were alive when the field hospital closed Aug. 25, according to historical records. They were buried in various locations in chaotic and rushed operations.

    Decades later, people in the area are looking for the remains of the missing, driven by a desire to account for and honor the victims and bring relief to survivors who are still tormented by memories of missing loved ones.

  • [Repeat] JURIST ☛ Report reveals Chinese influence on UK schools and students

    The study warned of undue influence imposed on UK academic institutions by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Survey takers claimed that they are often subjects of Chinese surveillance, that their families in China are threatened as retribution for unfavorable research or commentary on the CCP, and that many experience direct harassment by CCP officials.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ What if India and China stop buying Russian oil?

    India's oil purchases from Russia grew nearly 19-fold from 2021 to 2024, from 0.1 to 1.9 million barrels a day, while China's rose by 50% to 2.4 million barrels a day.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Israel Secretly Recruited Iranian Dissidents to Attack Iran From Within

    In the early morning hours of June 13, a commando team led by a young Iranian, S.T., settled into position on the outskirts of Tehran. The target was an anti-aircraft battery, part of the umbrella of radars and missiles set up to protect the capital and its military installations from aerial attack.

    Across the country, teams of Israeli-trained commandos recruited from Iran and neighboring nations were preparing to attack Iranian defenses from within.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Who Is David Barnea, the Director of the Mossad?

    David Barnea, the director of the Mossad for some of the most remarkable successes in its storied history, never intended to be an intelligence officer. As a young man, he served as a team leader in the Israeli military’s most elite commando unit and then came to New York to study for a career in business.

    After earning a master’s degree in finance at Pace University, he took jobs at an Israeli investment bank and then a brokerage firm, the first steps toward a career in which the biggest danger was an unexpected shift in the world’s financial markets.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Raw Story ☛ Analyst warns Trump’s CNBC meltdown shows fantasy world is collapsing: 'Not about reality'

    Trump's meltdown happened just days after he fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. Trump accused McEntarfer of being politically biased after she released a report showing hiring had flatlined during his first 90 days in office. Several experts have suggested that Trump fired McEntarfer to change the story about his economy.

• Environment

  • DeSmog ☛ How Big Oil Hijacked EU-Funded Journalism Training on Plastic Pollution

    Global plastic pollution is projected to hit 460 million tonnes by 2025 and campaigners have urged world leaders to “provide global rules that will control the amount of plastics being produced” and “protect human health, biodiversity, and the environment from harmful chemicals.”

    The workshop was funded from a €1.5 million three-year EU grant, and a €270,000 grant from Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

    In organising the workshop, ASEF partnered with the Alliance to End Plastic Waste (AEPW) – a non-profit whose members include major oil and petrochemical companies such as Shell, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies.

  • Pro Publica ☛ How Oregon’s Wildfire Risk Map Became a Target for Misinformation

    This is how misinformation gets accepted as fact.

    A year after Oregon endures its most destructive fire season on record in 2020, state lawmakers order a map estimating the wildfire risk for every property in the state. It’s the kind of rating now available on real estate sites like Zillow. The state wants to use the results to decide where it will apply forthcoming codes for fire-resistant construction and protections around homes.

  • International Business Times ☛ Blue Whales Going Silent May Be A Sign of Worse Things to Come: Here's Why You Should Be Worried

    The disappearance of these vocalisations is more than an acoustic anomaly. It may indicate a deeper environmental crisis, particularly linked to declining food supplies and increased human activity disrupting ocean ecosystems.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • US News And World Report ☛ Trump Opens the Door for Private Equity and Crypto as 401(k) Retirement Plan Options

      Millions of Americans saving for retirement through 401(k) accounts could have the option of putting their money in higher-risk private equity and cryptocurrency investments

    • Cointelegraph ☛ UK oil company Union Jack plans to mine Bitcoin with stranded gas

      Union Jack Oil, a publicly traded UK energy company, has announced plans to convert natural gas from its West Newton site into electricity to power Bitcoin mining, marking what could become one of the country’s first “oil-to-crypto” monetization projects.

      The move could generate early cash flow from wells that would otherwise remain undeveloped, the company said on Thursday in an operations report.

    • Morningstar US ☛ Vistra sees electricity demand trending like it's the 1990s, fueled by AI and crypto | Morningstar

      Vistra (VST), which generates electricity from natural gas, nuclear and solar power, believes the increased demand is here to stay, as it was in the 1990s, when the internet and growing use of computing power changed the power-generation game.

      "While third-party forecast and utility estimates have wide variation, we continue to see a structural shift in electricity consumption, with recent growth in electricity demand across the country returning to pre-2000 trends after approximately two decades of stagnation," said Chief Executive Jim Burke, according to an AlphaSense transcript of the call with analysts.

    • Chainup Pte Ltd ☛ Economic Impact of [Cryptocurrency] Mining in 2025

      In regions where electricity is limited or subsidized, this demand can lead to higher costs for households and businesses, or worse, power shortages. Kazakhstan’s grid collapsed under mining pressure in late 2021, forcing emergency blackouts and subsequent regulation. Similarly, public backlash in New York led to a two-year moratorium on fossil fuel-powered mining.

      Mining doesn’t just consume energy—it competes with other industries for it. In some regions, manufacturers have seen energy prices spike due to nearby mining farms. This dynamic can reverse economic gains by crowding out more job-dense, export-driven industries.

    • Reuters ☛ US startup Lyten to buy bankrupt European battery maker Northvolt

      U.S. battery startup Lyten has agreed to buy most of bankrupt Swedish battery maker Northvolt, it said on Thursday, potentially offering a way back for the European company that was once seen as the region's answer to rivals in Asia.

    • Electrek ☛ Lyten just took over $5B of Northvolt’s battery empire | Electrek

      That includes three major facilities: Northvolt Ett and its planned expansion in Skellefteå, Sweden; Northvolt Labs in Västerås, Sweden; and Northvolt Drei in Heide, Germany. Lyten is also taking over all of Northvolt’s remaining intellectual property and says several Northvolt execs will be joining the team.

    • New York Times ☛ NASA Is Getting Fired Up About a Nuclear Reactor on the Moon

      But the plutonium power sources on the Voyagers are more like batteries than nuclear power plants on Earth. Fission — the chain-reaction splitting of atoms like uranium — releases much more energy than solar panels and the power sources on the Voyagers.

    • New York Times ☛ California Supreme Court Requires New Review of Rooftop Solar Policy

      The California Supreme Court on Thursday ordered a lower court to reconsider a state policy that reduced how much utilities have to pay homeowners with rooftop solar panels for the energy that they send to the electric grid.

      The court did not deem California’s policy illegal but said a State Court of Appeal had erred in affirming the policy without fully reviewing it and by being too deferential to state regulators.

    • Terence Eden ☛ I bought a £16 smartwatch just because it used USB-C

      Look, I'm an idiot. I know that, you know that, and the man on the moon knows that. Let's not get into why I'm an idiot; let's just accept that I have my peculiarities and you have yours. My idiocy is a quest to make sure all my portable electronics can recharge using USB-C.

    • NL Times ☛ Dutch safety regions unprepared for major blackouts, watchdog warns

      An investigation by the inspection revealed that 15 out of the 25 safety regions lack a concrete internal plan to continue crisis management operations without electricity. The inspection called this “concerning” and urged the regions to take urgent action.

    • The Nation ☛ Can Solar Energy Save Us?

      In his new book, Here Comes the Sun, McKibben wears both his journalist and activist hats. His core argument is that the sun’s rays, transformed into electricity, might still help humanity to escape the worst of climate change. It won’t be easy, but shifting from fossil fuels to solar energy fast enough “to stay on anything like a survivable path” is “on the bleeding edge of the technically possible.”

    • SFGate ☛ Teslas clog street parking spots in a Calif. neighborhood, locals say

      Signal Hill is not the only city that’s noticed a slew of Teslas spilling over into surrounding areas. Dozens of unsold Teslas currently pepper the parking lot of a shuttered Dillard’s in Chesterfield, Missouri, and the company is paying a lease to keep the cars there while the mall is under construction, according to local television station KTVI-TV. A Tesla showroom in Farmington Hills, Michigan, came under fire in early June for apparently parking overflow vehicles around a nearby mall currently under renovation; officials have said that by doing so, Tesla has been violating the city’s zoning laws.

• Finance

  • FAIR ☛ ‘Criminalizing Homelessness Only Perpetuates It’: CounterSpin interview with Scout Katovich on criminalizing poverty

    Janine Jackson: Poverty and homelessness—and their confluence with mental health challenges, including addiction—reflect societal and public health failures. But rather than take on rising rents and home prices, unlivably low wages and the retraction of social services and healthcare, the Trump White House has issued an executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” that calls for involuntary institutionalization and the elimination of federal support for evidence-based lifesaving programs. Oh, and also increased “data collection” on unhoused people. 

  • Techdirt ☛ IRS Commissioner On Direct File Program: ‘It’s Gone’

    Partially as a result of all of that above bullshit trickery, the government altered its deal with the tax prep industry and began offering its own Direct File program. For simple filers, the IRS piloted Direct File in 12 states in 2024, prepopulating a return for those that enroll, all based on information that the IRS already has, and asking participants to review it and either agree or dispute the information. Most overwhelmingly agree and the program was reviewed as “excellent or above average” by north of 90% of participants, which is of course why Trump and Elon Musk, back when they were besties, decided to fold the part of the government working on the program.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Mint Press News ☛ Israel’s Biggest US Donor Now Owns CBS | Trump Allies, Zionist Influence & Media Takeover

    After reaching an agreement with President Trump, David Ellison—the son of the second-richest man in the world, Larry Ellison—has acquired Paramount Global, the media giant that owns CBS News.

    Larry Ellison, the largest private funder of the Israel Defense Forces, is deeply tied to the Israeli national security state and counts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu among his closest friends.

  • Wired ☛ 16 Golden Rules That Business Travelers Swear By

    “I don’t know if you can call yourself a savvy business traveler without them,” says Paul of programs like Clear and TSA PreCheck that help expedite travelers' journeys through airport security. The lines at most airports are long and only getting longer, and the lounge is sitting on the other side waiting for you. Divide the annual fee by the amount of times you traveled last year and see how little it will really cost you. (And, if you've got a great credit card, the fee may even be waived.)

  • Wired ☛ OpenAI Announces Massive US Government Partnership

    Since at least May of this year, high-ranking OpenAI employees have been meeting with the GSA and other government agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, to promote the company’s tools, according to documents obtained by WIRED.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Good ideas are popular

    In democracies, we're told, politicians exist to reflect and enact the popular will; but the truth is, politicians' primary occupation is thwarting the will of the people, in preference to the will of a small group of wealthy, powerful people.

  • India Times ☛ Roblox rolls out open-source AI system to protect kids from predators in chats

    Roblox is releasing an open-source AI system, Sentinel, designed to proactively identify predatory language in game chats, addressing criticisms and lawsuits concerning child safety on the platform. Sentinel analyzes chat snapshots, comparing them to indexes of benign and harmful conversations to detect potential child endangerment.

  • Variety ☛ Nexstar Ad Sales Down 9%, CW Owner Beats Q2 Earnings

    Nexstar’s distribution revenue stood at $733 million, a very slight 0.1% dip from $734 million the prior year.

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Intel's stock tumbles after Trump says its CEO must resign

    Intel’s stock dropped more than 4% in premarket trading.

  • Tedium ☛ Gil Amelio Wouldn’t Give Trump A Desk Ornament

    (And if you need someone younger from Apple history that could still do it, fellow PhD Avie Tevanian was a close confidant of Steve Jobs at Apple, developed some of its key software, and even looks a little like Jobs. He also has a backbone—he was booted from the Theranos board in 2007 because he asked too many questions about its faulty technology.)

  • Ness Labs ☛ Selective Admiration: Why You Don’t Need Perfect Heroes

    The myth of the perfect hero creates an impossible standard. When someone we admire shows behavior we disapprove of, we feel disappointed and often throw out valuable lessons along with the flaws.

    Philosopher Susan Wolf has written extensively about “moral exemplars” and the problems with expecting too much from role models. Take Martin Luther King Jr. His civil rights leadership remains inspiring despite personal complexities. Should we abandon his dream of equality because he wasn’t perfect in every domain?

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Atlantic ☛ Trump Just Did What Not Even Nixon Dared

      What had started as a fit of pique over jobs numbers was swiftly metastasizing into an extraordinary abuse of presidential power.

    • Wired ☛ Trump Is Undermining Trust in Official Economic Statistics. China Shows Where That Path Can Lead

      In the days since, Republicans have piled on, baselessly accusing McEntarfer of putting out “fake reports.” Trump hasn’t named a new BLS commissioner yet, but the saga has already left some Americans questioning whether government statistics can be trusted. If you want a glimpse of where that leads, just look at China.

    • Meduza ☛ From YouTube to boob tube How the Kremlin’s slow-motion YouTube block pushed Russians back into the arms of television

      After the Russian authorities began throttling YouTube in July 2024, industry experts wondered how long it would take for the Kremlin to block the platform completely. But those who predicted an imminent YouTube ban failed to take into account that slowing down video playback speeds to near-watchable levels works just as well.

    • Futurism ☛ Doctors Horrified After Google's Healthcare AI Makes Up a Body Part That Does Not Exist in Humans

      The proliferation of the tech has repeatedly been hampered by rampant "hallucinations," a euphemistic term for the bots' made-up facts and convincingly-told lies.

      One glaring error proved so persuasive that it took over a year to be caught. In their May 2024 research paper introducing a healthcare AI model, dubbed Med-Gemini, Google researchers showed off the AI analyzing brain scans from the radiology lab for various conditions.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Putin silences Russia with sweeping [Internet] blackouts

    Without the mobile [Internet] networks, drones like these struggle to find the data they need to navigate to their targets.

    So Russia simply switches the [Internet] off.

  • [Repeat] JURIST ☛ Stanford student newspaper sues Trump administration over attempt to deport pro-Palestine students

    The newspaper, The Daily Stanford, brought the suit because of two anonymous members of the newspaper, who have had to “self-censor” their published work because they were afraid of deportation based on their noncitizen status and demonstrated pro-Palestinian views. The student newspaper is being represented by the nonprofit, activist group The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and the suit was brought in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • RFERL ☛ Georgian Journalist Mzia Amaglobeli Sentenced To 2 Years in Prison

    Mzia Amaglobeli, a noted Georgian journalist and founder of the independent media outlets Netgazeti and Batumelebi, has been sentenced to two years in prison in what rights groups are calling a politically motivated case.

  • University of Michigan ☛ From The Daily: A free press means freedom from corporations

    Yet, no matter how reprehensible his actions may be, we have come to expect these egregious abuses of power by Trump. Free press within American democracy has long been the “Fourth Estate,” or a means of mitigating overreaching government action. Theoretically detached from government control and general bias, the press specializes in criticism, which Trump cannot stand. From facing alleged connections to Jeffrey Epstein to personal complaints about the portrayal of his opponent in the 2024 election on “60 Minutes,” Trump continues to exert executive pressure on media outlets when they criticize him in any way.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • BIA Net ☛ Muslim feminist writer removes headscarf in protest of Diyanet sermon on women’s attire

    Berrin Sönmez says the latest khutbah was a "veiled imposition of headscarf" on women.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ VA severs ties with most federal unions, terminating worker contracts

    AFGE alone represents about 300,000 employees working for VA. About 80% of the department’s roughly 450,000-person staff are union members.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ ICE has a new courthouse tactic: Get immigrants’ cases tossed, then arrest them outside

    “The aftermath of these courthouse arrests and dismissals for placement in expedited removal wreaks further havoc on people’s lives,” according to a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice filed in July by a group of immigrant advocates. The group argued the practice is illegal and contrary to the traditional way people are treated when released at the border for court dates.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Everyone Hates Airlines, Especially the Workers Set to Strike

    The flying experience is increasingly miserable, for both passengers and the people working the cabin. While Air Canada executives rake in millions, flight attendants are unpaid for large parts of their job and ready to strike.

  • Cendyne Naga ☛ Technical Interviews are realigning with reality through AI

    Since the 2000s, Google introduced a data structures and algorithms focused interview process. To them, getting the smartest people together to make a world-scale product needed a rigorous filter to gate-in only the quality candidates they sought. Except, everyone else followed and we got ridiculous prompts like "How many ping pong balls can fit in a 747" and "How many man-holes are there in New York City", not withstanding textbook responses like "Implement heap sort on this whiteboard."

  • Court House News ☛ Transfer of sacred Apache land inevitable, feds tell judge

    After attempting to rush transfer of an Apache holy site into the hands of a private mining company to avoid judicial review, the federal government now says the land transfer is immune from such review and cannot be enjoined or delayed despite challenges to the document that triggers the exchange.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Admin Warns States They’ll Lose Billions In Broadband Grants If They Try To Make Broadband Affordable

    This is the Trump administration directly pandering to big shitty telecom giants like Comcast, who have bristled at the idea of being forced to make broadband affordable, even if it’s only to poor Americans. It’s also a roundabout way to pre-empt the handful of states that have been looking at new state laws requiring that U.S. telecom giants make broadband affordable to poor people.

  • The Register UK ☛ The plan to make all networks optical is on the march

    The IOWN Forum has set what it calls "lighthouse targets" to lower network power consumption by 100x, improve transmission capacity by 125x, and lower latency 200x.

    The forum believes those targets are achievable with improved management of the wavelengths used for optical transmissions, increased use of multiplexing, and with multicore fibers – cables that include more optical fibers.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Bill Would End USDA’s Community Connect Grant Program

    While the bill text for S. 2610 is not yet available, Ernst says on her website her goal is “to cut wasteful spending and make Washington squeal.” She has lobbied for spending cuts across federal programs.

  • Michael Geist ☛ Let Competition Be the Guide: Why the Government and CRTC Got It Right on Wholesale Fibre Broadband Access

    The sector now finds itself in a new regulatory battle, this time over access to the “last mile” Internet fibre connections. The principles remain largely the same, but the players have changed. In an unlikely turn of events, it is Telus – one of the big three telecom providers alongside Bell and Rogers – that wants to use the system to gain entry into the Ontario and Quebec markets, where it is not a significant provider of broadband Internet services.

  • [Old] Angelino Desmet ☛ Web4 should run on LaTeX

    In stark contrast to the former “digital biodiversity”, nearly everyone and everything resorts to bland social media pages; no personality whatsoever, susceptible to the whims of Zuckerberg, Dorsey, or other billionaire douchebags. Similarly, I hate that nearly perfect videos on YouTube are forever tainted, nay, ruined with sponsored messages and empty phrases such as: “like and subscribe”. People need to get financed somehow, but ads are not the sustainable way. However, I can't blame the artists. For instance, the work that Kurzgesagt [⇣] delivers is legendary and absolutely deserves to be seen by anyone. I just find it a sad state of affairs that most artists are reliant on the whims of questionable for-profit companies.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ Sharing an HBO Max password? Those 'soft' warnings are about to get louder

    Perette has long been insisting that HBO Max will get serious with password sharers. He issued a similar warning in May following Warner Bros. Discovery’s first-quarter 2025 earnings report, and he took the opportunity to repeat the promise during the company’s second-quarter conference call with investors.

  • Deadline ☛ HBO Max Password Sharing Crackdown Will Get "Aggressive" Next Month

    JB Perrette, head of streaming and gaming at Warner Bros. Discovery said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call that messaging to consumers is about to get more “aggressive.” The media company looking to close the loopholes by the end of 2025, with the impact starting to appear in its financials by 2026.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Northwestern University ☛ This tech CEO wants to save local news from the AI onslaught

    Cloudflare built a tool called “Pay Per Crawl” that Prince announced last month. It’s intended to give publishers more control over AI crawlers accessing their websites.

    Perhaps most importantly, it enables publishers to start charging AI companies. It uses web instructions that inform crawlers they need to pay for content they take.

  • Ars Technica ☛ Meta pirated and seeded porn for years to train AI, lawsuit says - Ars Technica

    The new lawsuit was filed last Friday in a US district court in California by Strike 3 Holdings—which says it attracts "over 25 million monthly visitors" to sites that serve as "ethical sources" for adult videos that "are famous for redefining adult content with Hollywood style and quality."

    After authors revealed Meta's torrenting, Strike 3 Holdings checked its proprietary BitTorrent-tracking tools designed to detect infringement of its videos and alleged that the company found evidence that Meta has been torrenting and seeding its copyrighted content for years—since at least 2018. Some of the IP addresses were clearly registered to Meta, while others appeared to be "hidden," and at least one was linked to a Meta employee, the filing said.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — A Smarter Way to License Research Articles for AI

    LLMs are not yet capable of meaningfully engaging with most peer-reviewed research articles. Why? Because most of the content is locked behind paywalls and isn’t accessible. If LLMs are the future of information discovery, valuable research disseminated by scholarly publishers risks being left behind — unless we build a bridge between authoritative research and intelligent retrieval.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ French Court Orders VPNs to Block More Pirate Sites, Rejects EU Court Referral

    The Paris Judicial Court has ordered top VPN providers to block yet more pirate sports streaming domains. Two rulings dated July 18th side with broadcasters beIN Sports and Canal+, rejecting the VPN providers' arguments that these blocking measures are ineffective, costly, and technically difficult to implement. A request from CyberGhost and ExpressVPN, to pause the case and refer questions to the EU's highest court, was also rejected.

  • The Register UK ☛ Meta training AI on social media posts? 7% in Europe say yes

    Meta's enthusiasm for training its AI on user data is not shared by the users themselves – at least for some Europeans – according a study commissioned by Facebook legal nemesis Max Schrems and his privacy advocacy group Noyb.

    Noyb (None Of Your Business) got Gallup to do a poll of 1,000 Facebook and Instagram users in Germany, and found that just 7 percent wanted Meta to train its AI models on their data. Perhaps more damningly, 27 percent of the users participating in the survey didn't even know that Meta was using their data in this way.