Leftovers

• Vintage Everyday ☛ The Backstuga: Survival in Sweden’s Forests

  Additionally, in architecture, a backstuga is a cottage built into the southern slope of a hill, alternatively with a low floor and its walls stretched halfway down into the ground. Such cottages are also referred to as jordstuga (earth cottage) or stenstuga (stone cottage). They were small, typically about 20 square metres (220 sq ft), and only exceptionally found further north than Gothenburg. In the 20th century, the general poverty was mitigated and this kind of homes became less and less used. They were very close in design to Anglo-Saxon Pit-houses.

• Buttondown LLC ☛ YouTube and the end of "[Internet] culture"

  I bring up all of this history because I think it marks the final nail in the coffin for "[Internet] culture" as a distinct concept. I highly recommend scrolling through the YouTube screenshots on Version Museum, because you can see the breakdown happen as you scroll. The early screenshots work as museum pieces, showing you how the site looked for everyone in 2005. By the 2010s the screenshots reveal the individual viewing habits of the people who took them, which in turn reveals how there really isn’t any one "[Internet]" to archive.

• James G ☛ What is the web equivalent?

  I encourage you to keep the question “what is the web equivalent?” in the back of your mind. Perhaps someone will say something and you’ll wonder if there is relation to the web. For example: what is the web equivalent of writing manual editor’s marks on a piece of paper? What is the web equivalent of a community centre? What is the web equivalent of a coffeehouse? Maybe the answer to the question already exists, or maybe you, like I have in the past, will feel that maybe there is something new to be made.

• James G ☛ Collaborative web weaving

  This has me thinking about collaborative web weaving. What would it look like if multiple people edited a HTML document at the same time? To extend the idea even further: how does our perception of personal websites change if we consider that they may be a place not only for our selves but for friends, too? Could we have sections of our website that friends could add to?

• James G ☛ Digital, physical

  I don’t have a conclusion so much as I do a feeling that it is significant to reach for a physical thing on a digital call. It’s a reminder that we live in the physical world and that the digital and the physical are intertwined. It’s a reminder of how dynamic video calls can be, and of how wonderful it is that we can do a mini show and tell while everyone is in different places.

• Raspberry Pi ☛ Happy Maker Monday — show us your Raspberry Pi builds!

  Every Monday, our friends at Raspberry Pi Official Magazine ask the question: have you made something with a Raspberry Pi over the weekend? Every Monday, their followers send amazing photos and videos of the things they’ve made.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Newsletters I read

  Marc Thiele, Eric Bailey and Thomas Rigby all blogged about the newsletters they subscribe to and I found a few interesting ones there so I decided to join the fun and share the main ones that I subscribe and enjoy.

• Herman Õunapuu ☛ The 'politsei' problem, or how filtering unwanted content is still an issue in 2025 :: ./techtipsy

  What it also had was a basic filtering system. As a good chunk of the audience was children (myself included), there was a need to filter out all the naughty Estonian words, such as “kurat”, “türa”, “lits” and many more colorful ones. The filtering was very basic, however, and some took it to themselves to demonstrate how flawed the system was by intentionally using phrases like “politsei”, which is Estonian for “police”. It would end up being filtered to “po****ei” as it also contained the word “lits”, which translates to “slut”2. Of course, you could easily overcome the filter by using a healthy dose of period characters, leading to many cases of “po.l.i.t.sei” being used.

• Science

  • Wired ☛ The Black Market for Fake Science Is Growing Faster Than Legitimate Research, Study Warns

    However, recent research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) reveals that, in recent years, this system—composed of researchers, academic institutions, government agencies, private companies, and dissemination platforms—shows signs of breaking down.

    The authors argue that due to the large scale and specialization of contemporary science, the contribution of each actor is no longer evaluated by the intrinsic merit of their work, but by quantitative indicators, such as the number of research papers published, how often articles are cited by other research, university rankings, or by awards and other recognitions obtained.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ This quantum radar could image buried objects

    When incoming radio waves hit Rydberg atoms, they disturb the distribution of electrons around their nuclei. Researchers can detect the disturbance by shining lasers on the atoms, causing them to emit light; when the atoms are interacting with a radio wave, the color of their emitted light changes. Monitoring the color of this light thus makes it possible to use the atoms as a radio receiver. Rydberg atoms are sensitive to a wide range of radio frequencies without needing to change the physical setup, says Michał Parniak, a physicist at the University of Warsaw in Poland, who was not involved in the work. This means a single compact radar device could potentially work at the multiple frequency bands required for different applications.

• Career/Education

  • Rich Trouton ☛ Session videos now available from Penn State MacAdmins Conference 2025

    The good folks at Penn State have posted the session videos from Penn State MacAdmins Conference 2025. The sessions slides are all accessible from the Penn State MacAdmins’ Resources page at the link below: [...]

  • [Old] Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: RA Basics: Promote the Books Patrons Will Not Find on Their Own

    Our job is to promote the books patrons would NOT find on their own.

    That's RA 101. We do not need to add blockbuster books to our displays and lists. They do not need your help. And even more so, you are not helping your patrons find a book by putting, for example, Stephen King on a Horror list. Everyone knows Stephen King writes Horror. Let's help people find more.

  • Ben Congdon ☛ Fifty Bits of Career Advice

    As my team’s summer interns finished up their rotations this week, I had my usual end-of-internship “AMA” 1:1s. It’s something I enjoy doing, but I realized I was covering a lot of the same topics I’ve discussed with other previous interns and early-career engineers over the years.

    So I thought it’d be useful to collect these recurring bits of advice into a single place, both for my own reference and for anyone else who might find them helpful.

  • YLE ☛ Education expert blames Finland's neglect of gifted students for PISA rankings decline

    "Equality does not mean levelling everyone down. It means responding individually to the needs of every students, whether weak or gifted," she said.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ My PC won't shut off this ugly red RGB light — my motherboard has become my biggest aesthetic annoyance

    Perhaps if I ever get around to starting a new build from scratch, I'll look into a whole bunch of components that use something like OpenRGB. Perhaps when I'm picking parts, having this in the back of my mind will lead me to a stealth build, or at least a case without a side panel.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Servers will apparently run for a while even when quite hot

    It's one thing to be fairly confident that server thermal limits are set unrealistically high. It's another thing to see servers (probably) keep operating at 54C, rather than fall over with various sorts of failures. For example, I wouldn't have been surprised if power supplies overheated and shut down (or died entirely).

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Revelator ☛ Meet the Activist Fighting PFAS Pollution — and Winning

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ On Being Haunted By My Corporate Software Past

    Nurses carry three (!!) different scanners, and patients have a QR and a bar code bracelet. Sometimes the former needs to be scanned, sometimes the latter, sometimes a combination and sometimes up to nine (!!) times because the system refuses to cooperate. Then the nurse has to run back and forth their laptop to scan the medication to register it with the patient but if that happens too late—say because of an additional inquiry—the thing times out and the whole process has to be repeated. Blood pressure systems aren’t well-integrated. The system’s UI looks like a beefed up giant spreadsheet. Because the system doesn’t run locally—of course it doesn’t—inevitable hiccups also mean repeating the whole thing.

    I was baffled, and yes, ashamed. When I asked the staff about what they thought of the technology and digitisation, nobody smiled and everybody complained. The thing that struck me the most is that one staff member said that they object to “scanning the patient”: they said you use scanners to scan and buy products in supermarkets. You don’t scan patients! I wonder if there was an ethical committee who evaluated the system. I can think of two simple other solutions so it’s not like this was a choice by technical limitation.

  • Nathaniel Snelgrove ☛ Nathan Snelgrove | Doing the hard thing, even if it's working out in…

    I’ve been playing with a new routine for the month of August. Nearly a year and a half ago, I bought a good rowing machine. I use it a lot. I’ve tried rowing during the morning, which is hard; rowing over lunch, which is difficult to consistently schedule; and rowing after work, which requires a level of fastidiousness towards a shut-down routine that I do not possess.

• Proprietary

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Nearly 30,000 Microsoft Exchange servers remain unpatched against critical hybrid flaw

    According to the Shadowserver Foundation, the exact number of Exchange servers exposed to the vulnerability as of Aug. 10 was 29,098. The highest concentrations were found to be in the U.S. (more than 7,200) followed by Germany (6,700) and Russia (2,500), with thousands more in France, and the U.K., Austria and Canada were also exposed.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Conversation ☛ GPT-5: has AI just plateaued?

      It also cannot learn from its own experience, or achieve more than 42% accuracy on a challenging benchmark like “Humanity’s Last Exam”, which contains hard questions on all kinds of scientific (and other) subject matter. This is slightly below the 44% that Grok 4, the model recently released by Elon Musk’s xAI, is said to have achieved.

    • Sean Monahan ☛ a glossary for artificial intelligence - by Sean Monahan

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Goodhart’s Law (of AI)

      This insight, called "PageRank," was behind Google's stunning entry into the search market, which was easily one of the most exciting technological developments of the decade, as the entire web just snapped into place as a useful system for retrieving information that had been created by a vast, uncoordinated army of web-writers, hosted in a distributed system without any central controls.

      Then came the revenge of Goodhart's Law. Before Google became the dominant mechanism for locating webpages, the only reason for anyone to link to a given page or site was because there was something there they thought you should see. Google aggregated all those "I think you should see this" signals and turned them into a map of the web's relevance and authority.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Cybersecurity ‘red teams’ to UK government: AI is rubbish

      The main relevance of AI to security is scammers using chatbot-generated text to do social engineering attacks and deepfake video and audio for phishing attacks.

      Otherwise, the AI guys just aren’t on-message with DSIT on the vast and unspeakable benefits of AI. Because they’re trying to get real work done.

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ HMRC uses AI to spy on social media posts

      “You’ve got to have a check and balance. The risk is that AI gets it wrong and someone is pilloried – it seems a bit strange if they start doing that with AI. Without a human check, you can see there’s going to be a problem.”

      The tools used to examine social media in criminal cases exist alongside Connect, a separate IT system used by HMRC to examine financial data for routine tax investigation.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ AI Photos of Classic Rock Legends Crying, Hugging Are Everywhere

      From fake photos of a sobbing Bob Dylan and a hospitalized Phil Collins to rock legends supposedly singing at Ozzy Osbourne's memorial, absurd and unreal images are flooding the [Internet]

    • Thomasorus ☛ I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid

      So, I tried using AI. First at my day job, because that's where I write the most code. But besides fixing TypeScript types errors, generating inaccessible template code, or reviewing my code for errors, I couldn't find a life changing use out of it that all AI influencers talk about. I asked my colleagues about their own experiments, and many of them came to the same conclusion: It doesn't seem to help me help our clients achieve their goals.

      [...]

      I was shocked by how easily I had slipped into this slacker way of programming. The LLM had produced shitty code, made me ignorant about my own code base, but also too lazy to try to fix it myself. And at the same time, the whole experience felt smooth, frictionless, empowering. In the moment, I felt smarter, more productive, in control. But it was all an illusion.

    • New Yorker ☛ Is the A.I. Boom Turning Into an A.I. Bubble?

      Welcome to the A.I. boom, or should I say the A.I. bubble? It has been more than a quarter of a century since the bursting of the great dot-com bubble, during which hundreds of unprofitable [Internet] startups issued stock on the Nasdaq, and the share prices of many tech companies rose into the stratosphere. In March and April of 2000, tech stocks plummeted; subsequently many, but by no means all, of the [Internet] startups went out of business. There has been some discussion on Wall Street in the past few months about whether the current surge in tech is following a similar trajectory. In a research paper entitled “25 Years On; Lessons from the Bursting of the Technology Bubble,” which was published in March, a team of investment analysts from Goldman Sachs argued that it wasn’t: “While enthusiasm for technology stocks has risen sharply in recent years, this has not represented a bubble because the price appreciation has been justified by strong profit fundamentals.” The analysts pointed to the earnings power of the so-called Magnificent Seven companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. Between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of this year, Nvidia’s revenues quintupled, and its after-tax profits rose more than tenfold.

  • Social Control Media

    • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ In Egypt, Social Media Offers the Last Public Stage — and the State Is Cracking Down

      It is no longer surprising for Egyptians to film and share every detail of their daily lives on social media, from casual conversations and meals to gaming challenges, street pranks and other behind-the-scenes moments. These practices have become a repetitive routine—sometimes a ritual—driven by intertwined psychological, social and political motives.

    • Kev Quirk ☛ Finding a Home on the Fediverse

      Ipso facto, I didn't miss anything from Fosstodon. The irony is, there are things I miss from Micro.blog, so today I flipped back.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Ransomware gang claims attack on St. Paul city government

      The Interlock ransomware gang added the Minnesota city to its leak site on Monday, claiming to have stolen 43 gigabytes of data. No payment deadline or ransom demand was listed. City and state officials did not respond to requests for comment.

      It is unclear what data was stolen in the attack but Mayor Melvin Carter said during a press conference on July 29 that the city is most concerned about data related to government employees. Resident data is held in a cloud-based application and was not impacted by the ransomware attack, city officials have said.

    • KSTP TV ☛ 3500 St. Paul city employees begin password reset process; city confirms cyberattack was ransomware - KSTP.com 5 Eyewitness News

      On Sunday, Jennifer Lo, the city of St. Paul’s press secretary, confirmed with 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS reporters that the attack experienced by the city of St. Paul on July 25 was ransomware.

    • IT Wire ☛ iTWire - Semperis 2025 Ransomware Study Reveals Relentless Cyberattacks on Australian and New Zealand Organisations

      Study shows many companies paid multiple ransoms in the past 12 months. Victims also report that hackers have threatened to physically harm executives and file regulatory complaints against their companies.

• Security

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Monday

    Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (jackson-annotations, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jackson-jaxrs-providers, and jackson-modules-base and libxml2), Debian (distro-info-data, gnutls28, modsecurity-crs, and node-tmp), Fedora (chromium, incus, perl, perl-Devel-Cover, perl-PAR-Packer, polymake, varnish, and xen), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and rhc), and SUSE (chromedriver, ffmpeg-4, go1.23, go1.24, go1.25, govulncheck-vulndb, himmelblau, iperf, keylime-ima-policy, net-tools, sqlite3, texmaker, tomcat, and zabbix).

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • RIPE ☛ OAuth 2.0 Available for the RIPE Database

      Earlier this year, we introduced API keys as an easy-to-use replacement for MD5 hashed passwords, which we plan to deprecate in a few months’ time. Following up on discussions with the community, we worked on an OAuth 2.0 solution that can be used as an alternative to API keys. By enabling both methods, we want to let users choose the best fit for their technical setup. While OAuth 2.0 introduces an additional layer of protection, API keys may still be suitable for simpler use cases or legacy systems.

    • The Register UK ☛ Torvalds blasts kernel dev for late 'garbage' RISC-V patches

      Torvalds came to a very different conclusion – though he agreed fully with Dabbelt that the patch set was submitted far too late into the merge window, just one day before it closes, to be included.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Papers Please ☛ Flock expands pre-crime policing from air travel to road travel

      New tools deployed and offered to law enforcement agencies by Flock Safety, the largest US aggregator of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from both government and private cameras, are moving Flock from data mining into profiling and pre-crime predictive policing. This marks the expansion to road travel of the profiling and predictive policing that was developed and has until now been applied primarily to air travel.

      Flock’s data warehouse  includes billions of monthly records, each of which links a unique vehicle identifier (license plate number) to a precise date, time, and location. Flock boasts that it is now using artificial intelligence (i.e., more complex algorithms) to identify patterns and “surface” evidence of suspicious activity.

      This moves Flock from a surveillance company and provider of investigative tools to a provider of suspicion-generating and predictive tools for “pre-crime” policing. This makes  a quantitative difference in degree of intrusiveness and danger, of course, but there’s also a qualitative difference between an investigation based on a lawful pre-existing basis for suspicion, and dragnet surveillance intended to generate a basis for new suspicion (that can in turn be used as the basis for further surveillance, search, seizure, detention, etc.).

    • The Register UK ☛ Wikipedia host loses challenge to Online Safety Act regs

      Wikipedia today lost a legal battle against the UK's tech secretary to tighten the criteria around the Online Safety Act 2023 (OSA), as it seeks to exclude itself from the strictest regulations.

      The Wikimedia Foundation argued that the criteria for Category 1 services, as defined by the OSA, were too broad and would see its online encyclopedia unfairly grouped together with social media and porn giants.

    • The Record ☛ Wikipedia’s operator loses challenge to UK Online Safety Act rules | The Record from Recorded Future News

      User verification — just one of several requirements for category 1 platforms — ”could expose contributors to data breaches, stalking, lawsuits, or even imprisonment by authoritarian regimes,” Wikimedia Foundation said in a statement.

      Although the U.K.’s High Court of Justice dismissed the foundation’s challenge, it said it would revisit the case if the organization was classified as category 1 by Ofcom — the country’s communications regulator — later this year.

    • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Delete your account

      Who are the worst offenders? Well, all the household names for starters. Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google — Apple too. So, if you're in a position to. Delete your account.

    • Wired ☛ What Does Palantir Actually Do?

      Xia was one of 13 former Palantir staffers who signed an open letter published in May arguing that the company risks being complicit in authoritarianism by continuing to cooperate with the Trump administration. She and other former Palantir staffers who spoke to WIRED for this story argue that, in order to grapple with Palantir and its role in the world, let alone hold the company accountable, you need to first understand what it really is.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ 35 Historic Postcard Photos From the Mexican Revolution

    Many of the photos were printed on postcard stock and marketed by commercial photographers to soldiers and civilians on either side of the international border between Mexico and the United States. Other photographic postcards in this collection created by amateur photographers document their personal experience in the conflict.

  • Mike Brock ☛ A Note on "Trump Derangement Syndrome"

    “Hysterical.” “Alarmist.” “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” “He’ll be constrained by institutions.” “There are adults in the room.” “You’re overreacting.” “The generals won’t let him.” “Stop being so dramatic.”

    Every single person who said we were being hysterical about Trump being an existential threat should be forced to explain how the President seizing control of the capital’s police force and deploying military units to forcibly relocate citizens represents normal democratic governance.

    They called us hysterical when we said he’d use the military against civilians. He’s literally doing it right now.

  • The Record ☛ Finland charges captain of suspected Russian ‘shadow fleet’ tanker for subsea cable damage | The Record from Recorded Future News

    The ship is believed to be part of Russia’s “shadow fleet,” which exports sanctioned goods — particularly oil — and hides its ties to Russia through flags of convenience and opaque ownership structures.

    Finnish authorities boarded the ship in December 2024, suspecting it was responsible for damage to the Estlink-2 power cable and to communications infrastructure between Finland and Estonia. On Monday, authorities said the ship is suspected of damaging five subsea cables by dragging its anchor seabed for about 90 kilometers.

  • YLE ☛ Eagle S captain, two officers to face trial over suspected sabotage of undersea cables

    The oil tanker is suspected of damaging five undersea cables in the Gulf of Finland last December by dragging its anchor along the seabed for about 90km.

  • Latvia ☛ Nordics and Baltics: 'Path to peace cannot be charted without Ukraine’s voice' / Article

    The eight Nordic and Baltic countries issued a joint statement on August 10th in the context of the latest U.S.-brokered talks about resolving Russia's illegal war on Ukraine and a possible upcoming meeting between Presidents Trump of America and Putin of Russia. The statement is reproduced in full below.

    The 'NB8' (Nordic–Baltic Eight) format includes Latvia, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Lithuania, Norway, Finland and Sweden and the statement is signed by the Prime Ministers of those countries including Prime Minister Evika Siliņa on behalf of Latvia.

• Environment

  • El País ☛ Seashells are not a souvenir: Scientists explain why it’s better to leave them on the beach

    “Let’s assume the following,” says Michal Kowalewski, a researcher at the University of Florida specializing in the study of invertebrates: “There are, annually and almost certainly worldwide, around 10 billion visits to beaches. And let’s say one shell is collected for every 100 visits, which sounds small, but we’d still be talking about 10,000 tons of shells disappearing from beaches every year.” This is equivalent to three Olympic-sized swimming pools filled to the brim. It seems like a small and innocent gesture, but the rise of mass tourism on Mediterranean beaches is irreversibly altering their ecosystems, and now taking a summer souvenir home is leaving an ever-deeper mark.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Pro Publica ☛ North Dakota Program Falls Short of Promised Oversight of Oil Companies

      One morning in February 2023, a small group of mineral owners arrived at the North Dakota Capitol on a mission. They had traveled from across the state and other parts of the country to explain to lawmakers how the powerful oil and gas companies had been chipping away at their income.

      It’s not easy to recruit people to testify during the winter months of the legislative session. Ranchers are busy with the calving season. Snowbirds have relocated to warmer climates. It’s a more than three-hour drive for those living in the Bakken oil field.

• Finance

  • Rlang ☛ A Personal Message from an Open Source Contributor

    Dear fellow developers and data scientists,

    If everyone reading this gave just the price of a coffee, I could focus fully on the open source work that serves our community. But not everyone can or will contribute, and that’s okay.

  • The Hill ☛ H-1Bs are wreaking havoc on American workers

    When it comes to immigration, there’s a refrain that periodically arises with respect to new immigrants: “They’re even more American than us,” or something to that effect. And if immigration causes any ill effects on Americans already here — such as disruptions in the economy or employment environment — they are reminded that they should just grit their teeth and “learn to code.”

    Unfortunately, that advice may no longer be helpful. Layoffs in the tech industry for 2025 had already exceeded 80,000 as of July, according to estimates. Although the public may know the tech climate has been bleak, they haven’t heard much about the causes.

    Corporate executives have been eager to insinuate that AI is driving the employment environment. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in June that there would “be fewer people doing some of the jobs that the technology actually starts to automate.”

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ GitHub folds into Microsoft following CEO resignation — once independent programming site now part of 'CoreAI' team

    GitHub is one of the largest code repositories in the world, having become an essential tool for spreading and collaborating on code projects. It was built based on Git, a distributed version control system for developers created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 to support the development of the Linux kernel. GitHub recently saw its one billionth repo hit the site, which was simply the word "sh*t".

  • The Register UK ☛ GitHub head ankles as Microsoft takes biz by the hand

    GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke plans to leave the company and corporate parent Microsoft will not appoint a successor.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Microsoft to integrate GitHub more closely with its CoreAI unit after key executive’s departure

    Thomas Dohmke, chief executive of Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub unit, today announced plans to step down.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ FCC tightens rules on foreign firms building undersea cables, citing security

    The Federal Communications Commission has adopted new rules to make it more difficult for foreign firms to apply for licensing to build out submarine cables, citing the need to protect the continued construction of critical undersea cables that underpin the internet and transcontinental communications.

  • Jono Alderson ☛ Standing still is falling behind

    But the [Internet] isn’t a museum. It’s a coral reef – a living ecosystem in constant flux. Currents shift. New species arrive. Old ones die. Storms tear chunks away. You can sit perfectly still and still be swept miles off course.

    In this environment, “nothing changed” isn’t a defence. It’s an admission of neglect.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ I guess that makes me…Horace Slughorn?

    Neoliberals, like The Economist, tend to put the economic freedom bits first and assume that the other dimensions will take care of themselves. Populists are opposed to pretty much everything in that list other than those economic dimensions. As the latter rise in power, the former seem more and more willing to let their social and political commitments fade into the background.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • CPJ ☛ Pakistani authorities block journalist Asad Ali Toor from traveling overseas

    Toor, who had been arrested and beaten prior years, said he was on his way to participate in a 12-day International Visitor Leadership Program arranged by the U.S. State Department when immigration authorities prevented him from boarding his flight, stating that his name had been added to a Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) list that imposes temporary travel restrictions on Pakistan citizens.

  • CPJ ☛ Bangladeshi journalist hacked to death for filming assault

    “We condemn the killing of Bangladeshi journalist Asaduzzaman Tuhin, who was attacked while carrying out his work,” said CPJ Regional Director Beh Lih Yi. “Authorities must identify and prosecute everyone responsible for this brutal attack and take urgent, concrete measures to ensure journalists in Bangladesh can work freely and without fear.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ Future expands paid online content offering with Tom's Hardware launch

    Future plc is testing a membership model on tech brand Tom’s Hardware in a significant expansion of its online paid content efforts.

    Tom’s Hardware, which launched in 1996 and publishes news and reviews around the around the PC hardware and semiconductor industry, has introduced a premium membership described as being in beta testing.

    The launch makes Tom’s Hardware one of only a handful of Future brands with a digital subscription product.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Why do we agree to take off our shoes at the airport?

    What strikes us first in these airport scenes is the gradual, systematic dispossession of personal belongings, clothing, and status symbols deposited into plastic bins before they disappear from view. Then, there is the arbitrary character of the underlying logic: Why shoes and not underwear? Why 100 ml and not 110 ml? This apparent lack of coherence actually serves a symbolic purpose: It's there to create a sense of dispossession that touches on the individual's social status attributes.

  • BBC ☛ Dame Stephanie 'Steve' Shirley, technology pioneer, dies aged 91

    She founded the software company Freelance Programmers in 1962, which shook up the tech industry by almost exclusively hiring women, and in later life donated almost £70m to help those with autism and to IT projects.

  • The Independent UK ☛ UK’s biggest toy chain to hand ownership to its employees

    The UK’s biggest toy retail chain, the Entertainer, will soon be in the hands of its workers after its founder opted to put the organisation into an employee ownership trust.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• The Verge ☛ Reddit will block the Internet Archive

  The Internet Archive’s mission is to keep a digital archive of websites on the [Internet] and “other cultural artifacts,” and the Wayback Machine is a tool you can use to look at pages as they appeared on certain dates, but Reddit believes not all of its content should be archived that way.“Until they’re able to defend their site and comply with platform policies (e.g., respecting user privacy, re: deleting removed content) we’re limiting some of their access to Reddit data to protect redditors,” Rathschmidt says.

  The limits will start “ramping up” today, and Reddit says it reached out to the Internet Archive “in advance” to “inform them of the limits before they go into effect,” according to Rathschmidt. He says Reddit has also “raised concerns” about the ability of people to scrape content from the Internet Archive in the past.

• Silicon Angle ☛ Reddit says its blocking the Internet Archive to stop sneaky AI scrapers accessing its content

  The company seems to think that the Internet Archive should be taking steps to prevent this scraping, so there’s hope that the decision won’t be a permanent one. However, the report also highlights a concern by Reddit that Wayback Machine has a tendency to archive user’s posts and comments that are later deleted, saying that this is problematic for user privacy.

• New York Times ☛ AOL Will End Its Dial-Up Internet Service (Yes, It’s Still Operating)

  The company said the service, synonymous with the early days of the [Internet], will be discontinued on Sept. 30.

• Inside Towers ☛ FCC Votes to Speed Submarine Cable Buildout and Security - Inside Towers

  FCC officials say submarine cable systems carry roughly 99 percent of global [Internet] traffic. There are 90 FCC-licensed cable systems and, as of December 2022, cable landing licensees reported more than 5.3 million Gbps of available capacity and 6.8 million Gbps in planned capacity for 2025.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • 404 Media ☛ Voiceover Artists Weigh the 'Faustian Bargain' of Lending Their Talents to AI

      She sees accepting AI training voiceover roles as something of a Faustian bargain: They might seem like a lot of money, but they reduce the amount of work available in the future. “You're still taking away tomorrow's meal because they're offering you a little bit more,” she said. “Those 19 hours… will scale to hundreds and thousands of hours of AI output. They would otherwise have to pay for it.”

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Netflix, Amazon & Hollywood Win $15M Judgment Against U.S. Pirate IPTV Operator

    A California man has been ordered to pay $15 million in damages for operating the pirate IPTV service 'Outer Limits'. After the defendant failed to respond to a lawsuit brought by a coalition of Hollywood studios, Netflix, and Amazon, a district court judge in California awarded the maximum statutory damages for willful copyright infringement.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Fines For Greek Pirate IPTV Users €750-€5,000, Double For Repeat Infringers

    The details of a new procedure for imposing and collecting administrative fines for intellectual [sic] property [sic] offenses has been published in Greece. At the bottom end of the scale, fines for accessing pirated content such as pirate IPTV streams, start at €750 per violation, increasing to €5,000 if use is commercial. For repeat offenses, fines double to €1,500 and €5,000 respectively.

  • IT Wire ☛ Scott Farquhar's AI copyright conundrum - is there a third solution?

    In essence, he presented a binary choice: either forgo your copyright claim, or risk undermining the future of Australia’s AI industry. The alternative—preventing AI companies from crawling your site for content—was framed as equally problematic.

    But there is a third path: requiring AI developers to pay a reasonable fee for using intellectual [sic] property [sic]. Big tech will still access the Australian content it needs. The sky won’t fall in, and the local AI sector won’t collapse.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ From Oasis gigs to Monaco hotels, photographers' rights are under siege

    Following the opening dates in Cardiff, the band's management told photo agencies they will only own the rights to concert images for one year. After that? The band swoops in and claims ownership of pictures they didn't take, with equipment they didn't buy, by photographers they didn't hire.

    Unsurprisingly, Getty Images, Reuters and the AP have boycotted the remaining dates. But to my mind, this isn't just a one-off. It's part of a creeping assault on photographers' rights that's making our visual culture poorer by the day.