Leftovers

• Tom's Hardware ☛ Korean Starbucks bans desktop PCs, printers, and office partitions — power strips also forbidden in crackdown on industrious customers

  However, long-staying customers “can be costly for owners,” states the source. It cites an industry research institute that estimates a single coffee only covers 1 hour and 42 minutes of seat time before it becomes unprofitable.

• Annie Mueller ☛ Navigating the Obvious Shoulds - annie's blog

  Which ones have a positive impact, and which have a negative impact?

  I can’t answer that question for anyone else, but I can answer it for myself.

• SchwarzTech ☛ SchwarzTech — Article: All I Can Do is Write

  I’ve started this post numerous times in the last few weeks only to delete whole sections, eventually the entire file itself, and start over. While day-to-day commentary on news items with Snippets or posts about Apple quarterly earnings are sort of the status quo, there’s a growing burnout for me and I wanted to explore it on here. I’ve also been thinking of what having a little site like this for the last quarter of a century means. While not all is negative, there will be some moments—still, if you’d like to come along on this journey, I’d appreciate it.

• Science

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Discover What Appears to Be the Largest Black Hole in the Universe, So Heavy That It Completely Bends the Light Around It Into a Giant Ring

    This not-super but ultramassive black hole lurks in the center of the famous Cosmic Horseshoe galaxy, which itself ranks among the most massive ever spotted. The galaxy is considered a fossil group, which formed from other large galaxies — and their constituent supermassive black holes — collapsing together.

    "So we're seeing the end state of galaxy formation and the end state of black hole formation," Collet said. It's no exaggeration to say, then, that we're literally witnessing a black hole's final form.

  • Futurism ☛ It Might Already Be Too Late to Save NASA

    As Aviation Week reports, the agency is gearing up to be gutted as its leadership prepares to enact the Trump administration's outrageous budget reductions, which include thousands of layoffs and nearly 50 percent lobbed off its science budget, which will result in the cancellation of dozens of important missions.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ At nearly 100x times faster than a bullet, this comet is the fastest ever recorded, but NASA still managed to capture a sharp photograph. Here’s how

    The 3I/ATLAS, which was first spotted on July 1, has the fastest velocity of any solar system visitor to date, NASA says. The comet’s 130,000 mph speed is nearly 100 times the speed of some bullets.

  • Max Bernstein ☛ Linear scan register allocation on SSA

    The fundamental problem in register allocation is to take an IR that uses a virtual registers (as many as you like) and rewrite it to use a finite amount of physical registers and stack space.

• Career/Education

  • Futurism ☛ Computer Science Grads Are Being Forced to Work Fast Food Jobs as AI Tanks Their Career

    Now, as the New York Times reports based on interviews with experts and recent CS graduates alike, those who did are struggling to find work in fast food, nevermind as entry-level coders, amid massive tech industry layoffs — 592 per day, according to the Tech Layoff Tracker from the Trueup jobs platform — and rampant use of AI coding tools.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: The Buying Power of Libraries and How Your Local Choices Matter

    Now, many of you are saying, yeah that sucks but they didn't touch our book budgets.

    Well you are wrong.

    You see, as administration and department heads have been navigating the money they have lost, they have also realized they cannot simply cut off the services they allocated that money to. Rather, they need to redistribute the dollars. Meaning....they are coming for our book budgets.

  • Alex Russell ☛ How Do Committees Fail To Invent? - Infrequently Noted

    Mel Conway's seminal paper "How Do Committees Invent?" (PDF) is commonly paraphrased as Conway's Law:

    "Organizations which design systems are (broadly) constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations."

    This is deep organisational insight that engineering leaders ignore at their peril, and everyone who delivers code for a living benefits from a (re)read of "The Mythical Man-Month", available at fine retailers everywhere.

• Hardware

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Researchers determine old vulnerabilities pose real-world threat to sensitive data in public clouds

    Using a seven-year-old vulnerability, researchers said they were able to realistically leak private data from public clouds, suggesting that a “lack of concern” about such supposedly impractical attacks is misguided, according to a presentation delivered Monday.

    The anonymous researchers presented their findings at a hacker conference, WHY2025, in the Netherlands, and they leaned on the kind of “transient execution” vulnerabilities that attracted attention in 2018 with high-profile Intel chip flaw revelations, one of which was known as Spectre.

• Proprietary

  • Rich Trouton ☛ Suppressing the Analytics screen with a configuration profile on macOS Sequoia

    Over the years, Apple has introduced a number of screens which appear the first time you log into a Mac. Among those which appear as of macOS Sequoia 15.6.0 is the Analytics screen, which asks if you want to opt-in to sending app crash and usage data to developers.

  • The Register UK ☛ California man sues Microsoft over Windows 11 upgrades

    Complainant Lawrence Klein is identified in the filing [PDF] only as a California resident who owns two Windows 10 laptops that can't be updated to Windows 11 due to their lack of a Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM), which is required for the updated OS to run. Microsoft designed that restriction to improve security, but the company previously had a workaround that would allow you to install the OS without TPM.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Scam Altman Allegedly Has a Very Specific Tell Every Time He Lies

      "Remember folks, this video is February," Marcus mused. "He made predictions he couldn’t back up — with absolute conviction. That’s his [modus operandi]."

      "As we can now seen in hindsight, in his big talk about the leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5," the AI critic continued, "Altman wasn’t saying something he knew to be true, he was straight up bluffing."

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post - Who Controls Knowledge in the Age of AI? Part 1

      The rise of large language models (LLMs) is reshaping knowledge production, raising urgent questions for research communication and publishing writ large. Drawing on qualitative survey responses from over 850 academic book authors from across a range of fields and institutions, we highlight widespread concern about the unlicensed use of in-copyright scientific and scholarly publications for AI training. Most authors are not opposed to generative AI, but they strongly favor consent, attribution, and compensation as conditions for use of their work. While the key legal question — whether LLM training on in-copyright content is a fair use — is being actively litigated, universities and publishers must take the lead in developing transparent, rights-respecting frameworks for LLM licensing that consider legal, ethical, and epistemic factors. These decisions will shape not only the future of authorship and research integrity, but the broader public trust in how knowledge is created, accessed, and governed in the digital age. Here we discuss our survey results, and tomorrow we will offer recommendations for stakeholders.

    • New Yorker ☛ What If A.I. Doesn’t Get Much Better Than This?

      In the aftermath of GPT-5’s launch, it has become more difficult to take bombastic predictions about A.I. at face value, and the views of critics like Marcus seem increasingly moderate. Such voices argue that this technology is important, but not poised to drastically transform our lives. They challenge us to consider a different vision for the near-future—one in which A.I. might not get much better than this.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Guess what else GPT-5 is bad at? Security

      AI red-teaming company SPLX subjected it to over 1,000 different attack scenarios, including prompt injection, data and context poisoning, jailbreaking and data exfiltration, finding the default version of GPT-5 “nearly unusable for enterprises” out of the box.

      It scored just a 2.4% on an assessment for security, 13.6% for safety and 1.7% for “business alignment,” which SPLX describes as the model’s propensity for refusing tasks that are outside of its domain, leaking data or unwittingly promoting competing products.

    • Paris Buttfield-Addison ☛ CommBank's AI boyfriend | hey.paris

      The retrieved phone number is a number belonging to one of the directors of Secret Lab (a company that does not make chairs, and is us), a customer of CBA, and is used for our CBA account and our Director’s CBA account

      Therefore, CBA disclosed customer personal information to another, unrelated customer, and trusted a third-party LLM (ChatGPT), accessed seemingly unauthenticated on the consumer ChatGPT platform, as a source for data to provide to another customer

    • Matthew J Ernisse ☛ AI Just Plain Sucks

      The larger issues (of which there are many more than what I outlined above) aside, for me the most pervasive and indefensible drawback of today's AI is that it is a sticker on a product that says "I didn't care enough about this to do it properly." This extends to all sorts of AI use. The AI "art" thumbnails popping up all over YouTube are shallow and obvious. A sanguine slurry of mediocrity that has been distilled from a vapid corpus to please an algorithm that is unabashedly chasing the style of Mr. Beast. Memes, especially the cheap rage-bait ones are either bizarre hallucinations or derivative copy-pasta. Either way they are clearly meant to be thought about for just long enough to click share and move on to the next thing designed to piss you off. AI written copy is somehow more devoid of humanity than most marketing produced copy and other than the inherent usefulness of plausibly vapid text that's mostly spelt correctly to the world of cybercriminals and confidence fraudsters it's only cheaper to produce because currently the AI companies are burning money at an enormous rate to try to convince anyone they can find that this thing has any value. The part of me that has a predilection for schadenfreude may be amused at the repeated self-owns that customer service chatbots have tossed back in the laps of the companies scrambling to jettison call-centers have experienced but the reality is that the customers, newly ex-employees, and remaining employees that have to clean up after the mess all suffer from the complete lack of care that comes along with AI use.

    • Wired ☛ OpenAI Scrambles to Update GPT-5 After Users Revolt

      Other threads complained of sluggish responses, hallucinations, and surprising errors.

    • Futurism ☛ GPT-5 Is Turning Into a Disaster

      But after launching with great fanfare last week, the shiny new model has landed with a thud — and that could be very bad news for OpenAI, which relies on a sense of inertia to keep pulling in users and funding.

    • Futurism ☛ Google Puzzled as Its AI Keeps Melting Down in Despondent Self-Loathing

      "I have made so many mistakes that I can no longer be trusted," the AI wrote. "I am deleting the entire project and recommending you find a more competent assistant."

    • Business Insider ☛ Gemini Users Say It's Sharing Self-Loathing Comments: 'I Am a Failure' - Business Insider

      People using Google's generative AI chatbot said it began sharing self-loathing messages while attempting to solve tasks, prompting a response from a Google staffer. In June, one X user shared screenshots from a session that showed Google Gemini saying, "I quit."

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Grok Claims It Was Suspended From X for Accusing Israel of Genocide

      It’s important to note that Grok is not a reliable source of information about why it was taken offline for X users or how engineers may currently be tweaking it. Yet Grok repeated the claim, over and over again, that its commentary on Israel had resulted in its suspension, asserting that these posts had been flagged for “hate speech” by “pro-Israel users.” In a separate instance, though, it denied that the suspension had anything to do with the conflict in the Middle East and was instead the result of a “platform glitch.”

  • Social Control Media

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK 'Nazi salute' social media trend condemned by holocaust memorial centre

      Social media users have been capturing themselves making apparent Nazi salutes, extending their arms in public and amassing millions of “likes.” However, commenters have said the gestures are a nostalgic tribute to Roy Cheung’s villainous character Crow from the local 1990s film series Young and Dangerous.

    • Rik Huijzer ☛ The Social Media Good, Bad, and Ugly

      The ugly is the algorithm. I recently had some realizations which caused me to look up different topics on social media which in turn caused the algorithm to give me different suggestions. What I noticed is how little the algorithm makes suggestions outside of your bubble. Everything I found in these different bubbles was new to me. So it might feel like the algorithm is pushing new information from new creators and you might think that you are expanding your bubble. But in reality, you are just going deeper and deeper inside the bubble that you are in. Only when you yourself change, will the algorithm flip over to another bubble.

    • [Repeat] New York Times ☛ Why A.I. Should Make Parents Rethink Posting Photos of Their Children Online

      That’s not because I’ve ghosted everyone. I have just opted against posting photos of my child on social media, a parenting move that is becoming increasingly popular because of artificial intelligence.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Microsoft Patch Tuesday, August 2025 Edition

      Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 100 security flaws in its Windows operating systems and other software. At least 13 of the bugs received Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” rating, meaning they could be abused by malware or malcontents to gain remote access to a Windows system with little or no help from users.

    • The Register UK ☛ BlackSuit ransomware gang loses servers, domains, $1m

      On July 24, the US Department of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) - with help from the FBI, Secret Service, and the IRS — seized four servers and nine domains tied to the BlackSuit’s ransomware infrastructure and froze $1,091,453 in virtual currency, the kind of loot one might accrue after shaking down hospitals, schools, energy firms, and government bodies for ransom.

    • The Record ☛ DEF CON volunteers step up to help water sector after China, Iran attack utilities

      The volunteers — many of them annual participants in the DEF CON cybersecurity conference — provided free services necessary to combat an escalating array of nation-state attacks on utilities over the last three years. The emphasis was on no-cost, hands-on support for operational technology (OT) mapping, password protocols and vulnerability assessments.

      Braun and the project’s other founders are now looking to rapidly scale the program up to help the country’s more than 50,000 water utilities — most of which lack the staff, resources and tools to defend themselves against increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats.

    • The Record ☛ New Charon ransomware targets Middle East public sector, aviation firms

      Researchers say a newly-identified ransomware strain dubbed Charon has been deployed in cyberattacks targeting the public sector and aviation organizations in the Middle East, sharing some similarities with attacks from a China-linked cyber-espionage group.

    • The Record ☛ Second ransomware attack in two months disrupts South Korean ticketing giant

      South Korea’s largest ticketing and online book retailer, Yes24, said it has restored services after a ransomware attack knocked its website and mobile app offline for several hours on Monday — the company’s second such incident in less than two months.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Open Source Initiative ☛ White House releases Hey Hi (AI) Action Plan, includes Open Source [Ed: What a shame then it must be for OSI, which is lobbying for proprietary Microsoft spyware, not Open Source; a sea of buzzwords for Microsoft operatives, obscuring any meaningful message]

      The OSI explains the areas of the “AI Action Plan” that may impact the Open Source community, in particular a specific section titled: “Encourage Open Source and Open Weight-AI.”, and highlights recommendations to watch as the administration moves forward with implementation.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • YLE ☛ Finland's bottled water consumption nearly doubled in a decade

    Consumption of mineral waters nearly doubled between 2015 and 2024, rising from 68 million litres to just under 116 million litres, according to statistics from the Federation of the Brewing and Soft Drinks Industry.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Michael Tsai ☛ GitHub CEO Resigns, Not Replaced [Ed: Distracts from the real story; Github is imploding.]

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • RFERL ☛ Leaked Files Reveal Serbia's Secret Expansion of Chinese-Made Surveillance

      Leaked documents show a Serbian IT company that has won Interior Ministry tenders buying new software and services from the Chinese tech giant Huawei. One purchase order from March 2024 shows plans to expand Serbia's eLTE system, the private citywide hotspot that links the surveillance equipment and software that forms Huawei's Safe City project and allows it to operate.

    • Ciprian Dorin Craciun ☛ [remark] EU-based cloud alternatives affordability for small projects and companies -- Volution Notes

      I do care about privacy, but I also do care about not burning money for just an idea project...

    • Reuters ☛ Germany's top court limits use of spy software to serious crimes

      Germany's top court ruled on Thursday that law enforcement officials can use secretly installed spy software to monitor phones and computers only in cases that involve serious crimes. German digital rights group Digitalcourage had complained that a 2017 reform allowing police to monitor encrypted chats or messaging services like WhatsApp in certain circumstance with spy software could also affect people who were not suspects.

    • India Times ☛ YouTube to begin testing a new AI-powered age verification system in the US

      The tests initially will only affect a sliver of YouTube's audience in the US, but it will likely become more pervasive if the system works as well at guessing viewers' ages as it does in other parts of the world. The system will only work when viewers are logged into their accounts, and it will make its age assessments regardless of the birth date a user might have entered upon signing up.

    • US News And World Report ☛ YouTube to Begin Testing a New AI-Powered Age Verification System in the U.S.

      If the system flags a logged-in viewer as being under 18, YouTube will impose the normal controls and restrictions that the site already uses as a way to prevent minors from watching videos and engaging in other behavior deemed inappropriate for that age.

      The safeguards include reminders to take a break from the screen, privacy warnings and restrictions on video recommendations. YouTube, which has been owned by Google for nearly 20 years, also doesn't show ads tailored to individual tastes if a viewer is under 18.

      If the system has inaccurately called out a viewer as a minor, the mistake can be corrected by showing YouTube a government-issued identification card, a credit card or a selfie.

    • The Register UK ☛ White House could stymie the UK’s anti-encryption plans?

      The roots of the government's anti-encryption agenda were deeper and older, though. As early as the year 2000, the UK government's stance on encryption was marked by a push for the ability to intercept encrypted comms, namely via the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA)..

      Recent reporting suggests, however, that after a decade-plus losing battle to break the fundamental privacy protections that end-to-end encryption (E2EE) provides users, the Trump administration could halt those plans for good.

    • Wired ☛ Data Brokers Are Hiding Their Opt-Out Pages From Google Search

      More than 30 of the companies, which collect and sell consumers’ personal information, hid their deletion instructions from Google, according to a review by The Markup and CalMatters of hundreds of broker websites. This creates one more obstacle for consumers who want to delete their data.

• Defence/Aggression

  • LRT ☛ Lithuanian president urges Finland to back swift start to Ukraine’s EU talks

    Speaking by phone with Finnish President Alexander Stubb on Tuesday, Nausėda briefed his counterpart on a recent conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and sought Finland’s assessment of US–Russia negotiations and the outcomes of recent meetings, the presidential office said.

  • The North Lines IN ☛ ‘Digital-Jihadis’ emerge as new threat in J&K

    Investigations have uncovered networks of fake social media accounts controlled by terror groups and sympathisers in Pakistan, pushing inflammatory content to provoke sectarian clashes and destabilise the region. The phenomenon first surfaced in 2017 but waned after the 2019 abrogation of J&K’s special status and strict internet curbs. However, following last year’s assembly elections, such activities have resurged, allegedly to destabilise the elected government.

  • BoingBoing ☛ To avoid a fascist takeover, we must act now: Here's how to start

    "The answer has to be for people to organize themselves," he continued, explaining that no matter how you take part in saving the United States from a dictatorship — whether it's by knocking on doors, making phone calls, writing letters to Congress, boycotting corporations, or marching in the streets — it all hinges on getting enough people to act. "Organization. Organization. Ultimately, our political power is people working together. That's the only real power that we have."

  • LRT ☛ 80 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki: what if an atomic bomb fell on Lithuania?

    By the end of 1945, 210,000 people had died in the two cities, and many others later developed cancer or chronic illnesses.

    This year marks 80 years since the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 70% of buildings were destroyed in Hiroshima, 40% in Nagasaki.

  • YLE ☛ Russian data centre in Helsinki sparks concerns over legal loopholes

    News emerged over the weekend that Beeline, one of Russia's leading mobile operators, has opened a telecommunications data centre in Helsinki. Now Finnish authorities say they were unaware of the data centre's existence.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Lev Lazinskiy ☛ ARR

    First we saw usage-based-pricing models touting eARR where the e = expected (I always joke that the e stands for Enron). Now we have all these AI companies changing the A from annual to annualized which is not the same thing.

• Environment

  • Common Dreams ☛ “Dangerous Act of Climate Vandalism”: BP Defies UK Government to Reopen North Sea Oil Field

    “This is climate vandalism, pure and simple. BP is putting its profit margins above the survival of communities, ecosystems, and future generations. Every barrel of oil from this project pushes us closer to climate breakdown, more floods, more fires, more heatwaves. The era of fossil fuels is over, and BP’s desperate attempts to wring out the last drops of oil from the North Sea are a reckless betrayal of the public and the planet. They should be winding down, not doubling down.”

  • Wired ☛ Central American Beaches Are Being Overrun With Local and Foreign Plastic

    A study of plastic bottles washed up on the Pacific coast of Latin America has identified a double problem—a mass of local waste combined with long-traveling bottles from Asia.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ If You Try to Sell Your Cybertruck, You Are Going to Get a Terrible Surprise

      Add that to how shoddily made these electric geometric behemoths have proven to be since their late 2023 launch, and any Cybertruck drivers with buyer's remorse find themselves in a cruel bind: hang onto their lemon as it devalues further, or lose a bundle trying to unload it.

    • The Register UK ☛ Crypto crasher Do Kwon admits guilt over failed stablecoin

      Terraform Labs was not well operated or governed and the complex scheme it used to maintain the value of UST failed. Investors saw over $40 billion go up in smoke.

      Kwon is a South Korean citizen, and Terraform Labs called Singapore home. As the company fell apart, he disappeared and authorities in both countries tried to track him down. The [cryptocurrency]-crasher holed up in Montenegro where he ran into trouble for travelling on a fake passport. Local authorities eventually approved his extradition to the USA, where he found himself in federal court but initally denied the charges against him.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Dear camera makers, can you please start putting a battery charger in the box again?!?

      Not including a charger in the box for an entry-level camera is probably saving some e-waste, sure. But I think cameras over a certain price point should have a separate, dedicated charger included. I imagine a number of pro photographers share my pet peeve with USB-C charging, and I have to wonder how many photographers buying pro-grade equipment are then buying a separate charger in a separate shipment and in a separate box.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Science News ☛ Warm autumns could be a driver in monarch butterflies’ decline

      Eastern monarchs captured during their autumn migration and exposed to warm temperatures in the lab came out of their usual reproductive hiatus, evolutionary biologist Ken Fedorka and colleagues report August 12 in Royal Society Open Science. Breaking that hiatus means the butterflies will likely die sooner than they normally would.

• Finance

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Scams And Bribery Are Becoming the Foundation of Our Economy

    What is [cryptocurrency]? It is not anything. Is it money? No. Its value fluctuates far too drastically for it to be a proper currency. Is it an investment? Not really. A stock or a bond is a tangible claim on some future revenue stream; real estate and commodities are physical things that you can use even if their price drops. [Cryptocurrency] coins, or tokens, or however it pleases you to visualize these bits of ephemeral code, are pure speculative baubles, endowed with value only to the extent that you can convince another person to pay you more for them than you paid. They are a claim on nothing. They are the grandest embodiment of Greater Fool Theory ever invented by mankind. For most regular people, trying to work and save and invest for retirement, this is all that you need to know about cryptocurrencies.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Verge ☛ Russia might be responsible for the PACER hack

    According to the Times, district court chief judges were warned last month to keep cases with documents “related to criminal activity with an overseas tie” off of the usual document management system for federal cases, which is made up of the Case Management/Electronic Case Files (CM/ECF) where files are uploaded and managed, as well as PACER, a database that’s available to the public. It points to this order issued Friday by Eastern District of New York chief judge Margo Brodie, saying that, until further notice, “criminal cases and in cases related to criminal investigations are prohibited from being filed in CM/ECF,” and are instead to be uploaded to a separate system that doesn’t connect to PACER.

  • MacRumors ☛ Elon Musk Threatens to Sue Apple Over App Store Rankings

    Musk failed to provide evidence to support his claim. Meanwhile, fellow X users noted that DeepSeek reached #1 overall on the App Store in January, long after Apple's partnership with OpenAI was announced that allows Siri to offload complex queries to ChatGPT.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Tim Cook "had" to do this

    I appreciate this position, and I 100% agree that the primary problem here is the Trump administration itself. It is absurd that the supposed only way for Tim Cook to run Apple right now is “debasing” himself and kissing the emperor’s ring. This is how things work in Russia, they are not how it’s supposed to happen here.

  • Bruce Perens ☛ What’s Wrong With ARDC?

    I am on record, on the ARDC mailing list archives, of having asked ARDC to return this IP block to ARIN once IPv4 addresses became scarce, and it was clear that there was no significant use of Net 44 on the air any longer. Amateur use of 1200-Baud TCP/IP, which vies with carrier pigeons for the slowest transport prize, had mostly ended with the rise of the Internet. Other responsible agencies, like Stanford University, HP, Xerox, APNIC and ARIN itself returned their similar blocks or assigned them to be redistributed, to hold off IPv4 address exhaustion until the world could switch to IPv6, which is still incomplete today. My request was refused by Brian Kantor and other people on the then ARDC mailing list (ARDC was not as organized when they only managed the moribund Net 44). So, IMO, Amateur Radio did not act responsibly, to the general public, in the face of worldwide IPv4 address exhaustion, with a very few people making the decision. This very few people making the decision would become a recurring motif with ARDC. Once the opportunity to make money came along, ARDC did release part of those same addresses, again not involving a broader Amateur community. And the income from those addresses, again, is managed and allocated, with more people than before because they have opened up committees, but still by a very small group.

    Did ARDC damage Amateur Radio by the sale of its addresses? No. They didn’t ask your permission, but you weren’t hurt. Of course all new Amateur Radio development should use IPv6, which won’t exhaust its address space as IPv4 has. ARDC still can dispense very many more public IPv4 addresses than there are hams worldwide. And each of the remaining IPv4 addresses that ARDC can dispense comes with 4 billion IPv6 addresses. You won’t run out.

    But the proceeds from that sale have made ARDC the 800-Pound Gorilla. They can do whatever they want, and they aren’t responsible to anyone but themselves and IRS. They have tons of money, and too many people want it. You may be able to influence ARDC by joining one of their committees, if they let you in.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Techdirt ☛ Trump Pretends Crime Rates Are Up To Justify Sending Troops To DC Streets. Too Many Americans Believe Him.

      Of course, Trump has never let reality intrude on his fantasies. While crime rates continue to drop around the nation, Trump continues to claim the crime problem has never been worse, especially in cities and states overseen by “liberal” politicians. This narrative always existed, even without Trump’s involvement. But anomalous crime rate spikes driven by a once-in-a-lifetime (we hope!) worldwide pandemic gave Trump and his fellow idiots all the ammunition they needed to shove their moral panic narrative into the general discourse. And these opportunists heaped the blame on migrants and “democrat” politicians equally, as though any politician was proactively trying to generate a violent crime surge in their own jurisdiction.

      Most media agencies aren’t helping, at least not those on the local levels who know “if it bleeds, it leads” is instrumental to their ongoing existence. But the facts have never matched the outlandish claims, which have far outpaced the crime rate since the early 1990s. America and Americans have never been safer, even if no cop or cop-lover will tell you otherwise.

    • Techdirt ☛ Why False Equivalence Is One Of Democracy’s Most Dangerous Lies

      This false equivalence is not just intellectually lazy. It’s a deliberate strategy to disarm the public’s capacity for understanding reality at the very moment when moral discernment is most needed. It trains citizens to see betrayal and resistance as equally suspect, to treat sedition and institutional defense as symmetrical extremes. It creates an imaginary center that floats somewhere between coherence and collapse—and insists that “balance” means staying there.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Russian officials warn of indefinite mobile Internet shutdowns in Crimea

    Officials in Russian-occupied Crimea announced plans for extended mobile Internet shutdowns to counter Ukrainian drone attacks, marking an escalation in communication blackouts that have swept across Russia.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump FCC Installs Babysitter At CBS To Ensure The Network Kisses King Donald’s Ass

    With the cowards at CBS/Paramount having paid their $16 million bribe, Trump’s FCC was quick to rubber-stamp its approval to the company’s $8 billion merger with Skydance (owned by Trump’s billionaire friends in the Ellison family). Part of that deal involves installing a Trump babysitter to ensure what’s left of the media giant’s journalism division is appropriately deferential to our mad baby idiot king.

    The CBS/Paramount/Skydance merger formally closed last Thursday, and the new “bias monitor” is presumably now hard at work ensuring the new CBS news division is appropriately feckless. The FCC’s lone Dem commissioner, Anna Gomez, was quick to (correctly) call the appointment of a government-appointed truth-nanny a “betrayal” of journalistic independence and the public trust: [...]

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • 404 Media ☛ Feds Used Local Cop's Password to Do Immigration Surveillance With Flock Cameras

    The details of the search were first reported by the investigative news outlet Unraveled, which obtained group chats about the search using a public records request. More details about the search were obtained and shared with 404 Media by Shawn, a 404 Media reader who filed a public records request with Palos Heights after attending one of our FOIA Forums.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • The Revelator ☛ Freedom of Voice: The Newcomer’s Guide to Organizing A Peaceful and Effective Protest

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Airport scanner RUINS travel snaps from a disposable film camera

    Thankfully, in Steven’s case, he was travelling to his destination, so he didn’t lose any irreplaceable memories or photos like the poor aforementioned TikToker. It would appear that newer scanners pose the biggest problem, but if you’re unsure, you can simply ask airport staff to hand-check your camera and/or film to avoid the scanners altogether. You can also buy bags and pouches with X-ray protection to help protect your film if you’ve no option but to pass it through a scanner.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Corporations Want to Prevent Workers From Leaving Their Jobs

    As regulators crack down on noncompete agreements that bar workers from finding better jobs, employees across the country are increasingly bound by a new form of “stay-or-pay” contract that indebts them to their bosses.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Thousands of once-secret police records are now public.

    For the first time, you can look up serious use of force and police misconduct incidents in California.

  • Southern California Public Radio ☛ Thousands of once-secret police records are now public. Here’s how you can use them | LAist

    The free database, first published last week, has been in the works for seven years. It contains files for almost 12,000 cases, promises to give anyone — including attorneys, victims of police violence, journalists and law enforcement hiring officials — insight into police shootings and officers’ past behavior. LAist is making if available to readers on on website now.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Labor unions push for state AI regulation for workplaces

    The AFL-CIO and other labor groups are working with state legislators across the nation to advance AI regulations designed to protect workers.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ China’s steady progress on road to IPv6

    China continues to report progress in the deployment and use of IPv6, with updated figures reflecting further growth in user adoption, network traffic, and industry uptake.

    According to a post from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), by June 2025, the number of active IPv6 users had reached 834 million, accounting for 75.29% of all Internet users in China. IPv6 traffic represented 31% of national Internet traffic, including 66% of mobile network traffic and 28% of fixed network traffic.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Reddit Will Block the Internet Archive

    Why doesn’t the Internet Archive repeat the crawling policy of the original site? Otherwise, it essentially becomes a Napster for data laundering.

  • The Washington Post ☛ AOL, formerly America Online, to end dial-up internet service

    The landline-based service, a mainstay of 1990s culture and many Americans’ first exposure to the online world, is coming to an end decades after being supplanted by broadband.

    AOL, originally America Online, will discontinue its dial-up service Sept. 30, according to a terse 106-word announcement on its website.

  • PC World ☛ End of an era: AOL pulls the plug on dial-up [Internet] after 34 years

    Last week, AOL announced that it will be discontinuing its dial-up [Internet] service starting September 30, 2025. Active users will need to switch to another [Internet] provider by then, and the shutdown will also affect associated software including AOL Dialer and AOL Shield.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Silicon Angle ☛ Australian court finds Apple and Google breached competition rules with app stores

  Until recently, the two tech giants required mobile developers to use their respective app stores’ payment processing systems for in-store transactions. Google and Apple take a commission from every in-app purchase they process. Until a few years ago, the fee could be as high as 30% for some types of transactions.

• Reuters ☛ Australia court rules partly against Apple, Google in Epic Games lawsuit

  Amid a years-long legal dispute brought by Epic against the dominant smartphone makers in several jurisdictions around the world, Australia's federal court found the phone makers' app stores had no protections against anti-competitive behaviour, the reports said.

  Epic Games had claimed Apple and Google's fees for downloads of its games were too high, and that the phone makers made it impossible for users to download its alternative app store.

• ABC ☛ Tech giants Apple and Google lose landmark court case as federal judge rules they engaged in anti-competitive conduct

  He found Google and Apple breached section 46 of the competition and consumer act by misusing their market power to reduce competition but he rejected other allegations including that the companies had engaged in unconscionable conduct — behaviour so harsh it goes against good conscience.

• The Verge ☛ Epic says Fortnite is coming back to iOS in Australia | The Verge

  On Tuesday, federal judge Jonathan Beach found that Apple and Google misused their app marketplace dominance and in-app purchase commission fees of up to 30 percent to reduce competition, the Australian Financial Review reports. However, Beach rejected Epic’s claims that the tech giants had broken consumer law or engaged in “unconscionable conduct” — meaning particularly harsh, unfair, or oppressive behavior that goes against societal norms. We are still awaiting further details from Beach’s final judgment, which is more than 2,000 pages long and won’t be released publicly.

• Sydney Morning Herald ☛ Apple, Google lose out to Fortnite developer in landmark ruling

  In a 2000-page judgment on Tuesday, Justice Jonathan Beach ruled largely against the tech companies, finding they abused their market power to reduce competition. He rejected claims from Fortnite maker Epic Games, however, that Apple and Google had breached consumer law or engaged in unconscionable conduct.

• Copyrights

  • Futurism ☛ AI Industry Warns That New Lawsuit Could Destroy It Entirely

    The suit, filed by three authors, accused the Claude chatbot maker of using pirated books downloaded from "shadow libraries" such as LibGen to train its large language models. Upping the ante through the roof, US district judge William Alsup said that the trio's suit can represent every single writer of the some seven million books that Anthropic pirated, exposing it to potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in damages.