Leftovers

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ JWST Delivers Bad News About Life on TRAPPIST-1 Planet

    There's hope for its neighbors, though.

  • Science Alert ☛ Earliest Black Hole Ever Confirmed Could Explain Mysterious Red Dots

    It's surprisingly monstrous.

  • Science Alert ☛ Record US$5.3M Sale of Largest Mars Rock Sparks Global Dispute

    "All the characteristics of illicit international trafficking."

  • Science Alert ☛ A Signal of Future Alzheimer's Could Hide in The Way You Speak

    Early warnings could make all the difference.

  • Science Alert ☛ This Diet Helps Lower Dementia Risk, And We May Finally Know Why

    The hippocampus could be key.

• Career/Education

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ 2 Hong Kong schools suspended as Education Bureau vows to crack down on ‘shell’ institutions

    Two private schools in Hong Kong have been suspended as education authorities vow to crack down on “shell schools” – institutions in the city partnering with mainland Chinese agencies to help non-local students obtain local status.

  • Chronicle Of Higher Education ☛ White House Uses Back Door to Axe Approved Funds for Exchange Programs

    The “irregular” process cancels spending for global-education programs already greenlit by Congress.

• Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 Z-Wave USB adapter launched for $69

    Home Assistant Connect ZWA-2 is a new Z-Wave USB adapter with Long Range support, which follows the launch of the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-1 (SkyConnect) Zigbee 3.0, Thread, and Matter USB dongle in 2022. Home Assistant explains that Z-Wave operates in the sub-GHz (865-926 MHz) frequency band, where waves can more easily go through thick walls and reach across large households, and do not need to compete in the crowded 2.4 GHz airspace used by wireless protocols such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and Thread.

  • Hackaday ☛ DIY Wind Turbine Gets A 3-Phase Rectifier

    [Electronoobs] is using some brushless motors to make a DIY wind turbine. His recent video isn’t about the turbine itself, but a crucial electronic part: the three-phase rectifier. The reason it is so important is due to the use of brushless motors. Normal motors are not ideal for generating power for several reasons, as explained in the video below.

  • Hackaday ☛ Bench-Top Wireless Power Transmission

    [mircemk] has been working on wireless power transmission. Using a Class-E Tesla coil with 12 turns on the primary and 8 turns on the secondary and a 12 volt input he can send a few milliwatts to power an LED over a distance of more than 40 centimeters or power a 10 watt bulb over a distance of about 10 centimeters. With the DC input set at 24 volts the apparatus can deliver 5 watts over a distance of a few centimeters and a light is still visible after separating the primary and secondary coils by more than 30 centimeters.

  • Hackaday ☛ Calibration, Good Old Calibration

    Do you calibrate your digital meters? Most of us don’t have the gear to do a proper calibration, but [Mike Wyatt] shares his simple way to calibrate his DMMs using a precision resistor coupled with a thermistor. The idea is to use a standard dual banana plug along with a 3D-printed housing to hold the simple electronics.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ DeepSeek reportedly urged by Chinese authorities to train new model on Huawei hardware — after multiple failures, R2 training to switch back to Nvidia hardware while Ascend GPUs handle inference

    DeepSeek’s bid to train R2 on Huawei’s Ascend chips failed due to technical limits, forcing a return to Nvidia GPUs and delaying the launch.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Intel spinoff Altera faces lay offs — 82 staff let go after defective chip maker Intel sold majority stake for $4.46 billion earlier this year

    FPGA developer Altera will cut 82 San Jose jobs in October 2025 as part of a strategic shift following its sale by defective chip maker Intel and a strategic realignment under new leadership.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • New York Times ☛ Supreme Court Allows Mississippi Law on Children’s Use of Social Media, for Now

    A trade group representing sites like Facebook (Farcebook) and X said the law ran afoul of the First Amendment.

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Identify How Young Blood Reverses Aging in Human Skin Cells

    With the help of a secret ingredient.

  • Science Alert ☛ New Vaccine For Two Deadly Cancers Shows Promise in Clinical Trial

    "This is an exciting advance."

  • Science Alert ☛ Something Inside Your Gut Could Be Like a Natural Ozempic

    A natural alternative?

  • New York Times ☛ For Some Patients, the ‘Inner Voice’ May Soon Be Audible

    In a recent study, scientists successfully decoded not only the words people tried to say but the words they merely imagined saying.

• Proprietary

  • Qt ☛ Elevating Quality: Qt Group’s Commitment to Excellence

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Ex-Intel engineer sentenced for sharing secrets with Abusive Monopolist Microsoft — gets two years of probation and $34k fine for stealing 'thousands of files' that may have landed them a new job with the company

    An ex-Intel employee has been sentenced to two years' probation and fined $34,472 for pilfering "thousands of files" which were reportedly instrumental to him landing a new position at Microsoft.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ ChatGPT 5 power consumption could be as much as eight times higher than GPT 4 — research institute estimates medium-sized GPT-5 response can consume up to 40 watt-hours of electricity

      Estimates from the University of Rhode Island's Hey Hi (AI) lab suggest OpenAI's more capable GPT 5 could consume up to 45 GWh per day. But researchers may be wrong.

    • New York Times ☛ Big Tech’s Hey Hi (AI) Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone

      Electricity rates for individuals and small businesses could rise sharply as Amazon, Google, Abusive Monopolist Microsoft and other technology companies build data centers and expand into the energy business.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ LLM Coding Integrity Breach

      Here’s an interesting story about a failure being introduced by LLM-written code. Specifically, the LLM was doing some code refactoring, and when it moved a chunk of code from one file to another it changed a “break” to a “continue.” That turned an error logging statement into an infinite loop, which crashed the system.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • New York Times ☛ Blood Oxygen Measurements to Return to Some Fashion Company Apple Watches

      The company said it would issue a software update to restart the technology, which was caught up in a patent monopoly dispute.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Nvidia: 'We don't install secret tracking devices in our products' — GPU giant responds after Washington accused of secretly tracking Hey Hi (AI) server shipments at risk of diversion to China

      Several anonymous sources claim that U.S. authorities sometimes implant trackers on Hey Hi (AI) servers that are bound for export to see where they end up.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ What WeChat Knows: Pervasive First-Party Tracking in a Billion-User Super-App Ecosystem

      Researchers take a look at the analytics and first-party tracking ecosystem of WeChat Mini Programs.

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Hidden Links: Analyzing Secret Families of VPN Apps

      In this paper co-authored by the Citizen Lab’s Jeffrey Knockel, researchers investigate the secret relationships between VPN operators and the vulnerabilities these VPNs share. The authors warn that the obfuscation of these relationships prohibits consumers from making informed decisions about their digital security and misleads them about the security properties of the VPNs.

• Defence/Aggression

  • LRT ☛ US human rights report highlights Lithuanian politician’s hate speech case

    The US State Department’s annual human rights report on Lithuania has drawn attention to the ongoing case against Remigijus Žemaitaitis, chairman of the Nemunas Dawn party, over allegations of inciting hatred toward Jews and denying the Holocaust.

  • France24 ☛ Mali junta accuses 'foreign states' of attempted destabilisation plot

    Mali's ruling military junta said Thursday it had arrested a French national suspected of working for French intelligence services and at least 55 soldiers for allegedly attempting to "destabilise the institutions of the republic" with the help of "foreign states."

  • New York Times ☛ A Year After the Revolution, Bangladesh Grapples With Frustration

    There are concerns about the slow pace of change in the country, with a promised election still months away, a struggling economy and familiar problems persisting.

  • CS Monitor ☛ US-Pakistan relations are the best they’ve been in decades. Pakistanis aren’t thrilled.

    The budding U.S.-Pakistan friendship marks a seismic diplomatic shift in South Asia. But lingering distrust toward the American security establishment will color their cooperation.

  • Defence Web ☛ Nigeria requests $346 million worth of guided and unguided weapons from US

    Nigeria is looking to buy $346 million worth of munitions from the United States, including guided bombs and rockets, with the State Department approving the possible sale. The US Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) on 13 August said it had notified Congress of the potential sale on Wednesday.

  • The Strategist ☛ Friends to all: Agreement with Australia to shape Vanuatu security landscape

    Vanuatu and Australia are poised to sign a reshaped and reformed broader strategic agreement in September that will supersede the stalled 2022 bilateral security agreement.

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ Baja California Sur tourism industry demands action on insecurity

    A spike in crime in central Baja California Sur threatens to scare visitors away from the state's tourism destinations, La Paz hoteliers say.

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ US drone that flew over cartel stronghold came at Mexico’s request, security minister says

    The unmanned aircraft circled over southwestern México state before its transponder signal disappeared.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • American Oversight ☛ American Oversight Files Administrative Appeal for Records on ICE’s New York City Detention Facilities

    We’re challenging DHS’s refusal to process our public records request seeking information about ICE detainees and detention center conditions relevant to ongoing federal lawsuits and public interest.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Straits Times ☛ AirAsia flight from KL to Incheon lands at wrong airport in South Korea

      Passengers were reportedly told they had arrived at Incheon after the plane landed at Gimpo Airport.

    • JURIST ☛ Truck manufacturers sue California, “caught in crossfire” in emissions battle

      Four major truck manufacturers, including Daimler and Volvo, filed a lawsuit against the state of California Monday, aiming to block the state from enforcing emissions standards voided by the Convicted Felon Administration.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Public Knowledge ☛ Is Colbert Really Losing $40 Million?

    Whether or not Colbert’s cancellation was a “Dihydroxyacetone Man Tax,” what matters is that people with money think so.

  • Citizen Lab ☛ An Analysis of Chinese Censorship Bias in LLM

    In this paper, the Citizen Lab’s Mohamed Amed and Jeffrey Knockel examine Chinese censorship bias in LLMs with a censorship detector they designed as part of the research. They warn that when LLMs are trained on state-censored texts, their output is more likely to align with the state.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • France24 ☛ Hong Kong court to hear closing arguments in mogul Jimmy Lai's trial

    Jailed Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai's national security trial, which began in late 2023, will enter its final stages on August 14 as lawyers present closing arguments.

    The 77-year-old founder of the Fashion Company Apple Daily newspaper is charged with foreign collusion under Hong Kong's national security law, which Beijing imposed following huge and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests in 2019. France 24's Camille Nedelec tells us more.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Hong Kong tycoon Jimmy Lai's collusion trial resumes after delay

    The 77-year-old founder of the Fashion Company Apple Daily newspaper is charged with foreign collusion under the national security law.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Press freedom groups flag China links of new prospective Telegraph owners

  • Press Gazette ☛ Smartnews launches new app to counter rage-bait and polarisation

    Smartnews tries something new in tough market for aggregators.

  • JURIST ☛ Press group urges Ghana to act following assault against journalists

    The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on Tuesday called on Ghanaian authorities to swiftly and comprehensively conclude inquiries into the July 30 assault on JoyNews reporter Carlos Lorlornyo Atsu Calony and threats against camera operator Jonas Zodzi Voergborlo. The CPJ urged transparent investigations into the attacks against these journalists.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • JURIST ☛ UN experts urge rejection of Taliban rule and call for accountability

    UN human rights experts issued a forceful appeal to the international community on Thursday to reject the Taliban’s four-year rule in Afghanistan, denouncing it as violent, illegitimate, and fundamentally oppressive.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • MWL ☛ Web Site Reorg

    Not really a reorg. More of a shredding. July’s StSBM talked about how my web site is unmaintainable and unauditable. I have most of the titles up there, I think, but the descriptions are sketchy and the buy links are chaos. I had to hire help just to get the Amazon links straightened out.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Battlefield 6 open beta says it won't run if you have Valorant installed, thanks to Riot's anti-cheat — uninstall or disable Vanguard if you plan to join the second open beta this weekend

    Battlefield 6 will refuse to load if you have Valorant installed on your computer because its anti-cheat software, Riot Vanguard, conflicts with Battlefield's own. The issue boils down to kernel-level anti-cheat software looking for control over the computer to prevent exploits on the deepest possible level, maybe a little too deep.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Epic Games adds Easy Anti-Cheat for ARM devices — Feature unlocks support for Windows, Linux, and Switch 2

    Epic Games has introduced Easy Anti-Cheat support for ARM-based backdoored Windows and GNU/Linux devices, unlocking a massive library of games for ARM gamers that explicitly rely on EAC to protect gamers against cheating.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Steam games no longer purchasable with PayPal in most countries — Valve offers no timeline for a potential fix

    Millions of Steam users worldwide can no longer use PayPal for purchases in most currencies, leaving affected regions to rely on alternative methods or Steam Wallet codes. Valve cites a bank decision behind the disruption but gives no clear timeline for restoring support, impacting global gamers.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Latvia ☛ Latvian hotels join claim against Booking.com

  Several Latvian companies have joined a European hotel lawsuit against Amsterdam-based accommodation and services platform Booking.com, seeking compensation for losses caused by the platform's so-called ‘best price clause’ over the past 20 years, Latvian Television reports on 14 August.

• Patents

  • Hoverboard Design Patent Owner Falls Flat at CAFC

    The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Thursday affirmed a district court’s finding on remand from an earlier CAFC decision that several hoverboard design patents were not infringed by hoverboard products sold online.

  • Kangaroo Courts

    • JUVE ☛ Orbisk and Hoyng ROKH successfully fend off Winnow’s UPC suit [Ed: UPC is illegal and must not exist, but JUVE is paid to pretend otherwise]

      Yesterday, the judges of the local division The Hague under presiding judge Edger Brinkman revoked Winnow’s EP 3 198 245 as granted in the UPC member states.

    • JUVE ☛ Court of Appeal grants final victory to Boehringer in PI case against Zentiva [Ed: Mentions UPC again. It is illegal.]

      The Court of Appeal has overturned a first-instance decision from the local division Lisbon and granted Boehringer Ingelheim a PI against Zentiva. The dispute concerns Boehringer’s EP 1 830 843 B1, which protects the use of nintedanib or nintedanib esylate.

• Trademarks

  • TTAB Blog ☛ BOSTON STRONG Fails to Function as a Service Mark for Volley Ball Entertainment, Says TTAB

    The Board upheld a failure-to-function refusal of the proposed mark BOSTON STRONG, deeming it to be a commonplace term rather than a source indicator for, inter alia, "Entertainment services in the nature of professional athletes competing in volleyball." The Board found that BOSTON STRONG "conveys a common message of support for the city of Boston and ... is incapable of functioning as a mark." In re Franklin Sports, Inc., Serial No. 98326109 (August 12, 2025) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Elizabeth A. Dunn).

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Universal Music-Backed Chord Music Partners Scores Searchlight Capital Investment As Catalog Boom Continues

    The catalog space isn’t cooling off just yet: Chord Music Partners has scored a “strategic investment” from Searchlight Capital Partners and doubled down on plans to scoop up additional music IP. The self-described “leading management and acquisition platform for music intellectual property” Chord unveiled the backing in a formal release today.

  • Digital Music News ☛ It’s Not Just His Contract: Drake’s Attorneys Also Want Access to Kendrick Domestic Violence Claims

    Drake wants UMG to hand over the label’s contract with Kendrick Lamar—but he also wants info about claims of domestic abuse committed by the rapper. Drake continues seeking dirt on Kendrick Lamar in his defamation lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG) over the Compton rapper’s mega-hit “Not Like Us.”