Leftovers

• Games

  • Positech Games ☛ Designing the orders system for ridiculous space battles

    Yikes, this has turned into a really complex and confusing beast. I am very happy so far with the improvements, but I need to publicly brainstorm the details. Simply put, the orders system in Gratuitous Space Battles was a mess, and I needed a much better one, PLUS I wanted to add new orders to take into account the new gameplay style of Ridiculous Space Battles.

  • International Business Times ☛ Does Roblox Founder David Baszucki Have Children? Question Rise After Platform Threatens YouTuber Exposing Sexual Predators

    David Baszucki, co-founder and CEO of Roblox Corporation, faces scrutiny over child safety concerns on the platform, prompting public curiosity about his family life.

    A recent controversy involving a cease-and-desist notice sent to a YouTuber exposing alleged predators on Roblox has intensified demands for Baszucki's resignation, with a Change.org petition garnering over 30,000 signatures.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Louisiana lawsuit accuses Roblox of lax child safety controls

    There is no minimum age for using Roblox, but the popular gaming platform, with over 110 million users, has sought to expand parent controls for players under 13.

• Science

  • Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Steinar H. Gunderson: Abstract algebra structures made easy

    Group theory, and abstract algebra in general, has many useful properties; you can take a bunch of really common systems and prove very useful statements that hold for all of them at once.

  • Mexico News Daily ☛ Meet Waldog, the robotic canine that roams Monterrey’s streets with a message

    The bot is the brainpuppy of a Nuevo León senator with political aspirations and a passion for animal welfare.

  • Science Alert ☛ New Genetic Test Predicts Children With Future Risk of High BMI

    Here's what we know.

  • Science Alert ☛ Aging Can Spread Through Your Body Via a Single Protein, Study Finds

    And we might be able to stop it.

  • Science Alert ☛ Our Closest Sun-Like Star May Host a World Where Life Could Thrive

    Get in the rocket, let's GO.

  • Science Alert ☛ World First: Scientists Film The Exact Moment a Human Embryo Implants

    It's surprisingly aggressive.

  • Science Alert ☛ Wild Pigs Turn 'Neon Blue' in California, Triggering Warnings

    What the heck?

  • Science Alert ☛ There's a Surprisingly Easy Way to Remove Microplastics in Your Drinking Water

    You may already be doing it.

  • NYPost ☛ Freaky ‘Frankenstein’ rabbits have been spotted in these 2 states: ‘They’re all over here’

    It’s hare today, gone tomorrow — thanks to a face full of freaky tentacles.

  • New York Times ☛ Rabbits With Hornlike Growths Are Hopping Around Colorado. Are They OK?

    The unsightly bunnies are infected with cottontail rabbit papillomavirus, which can cause growths that resemble warts or tentacles.

  • NYPost ☛ 2.65 million-year-old fossil teeth unearthed in Ethiopia opens up current understandings of human evolution

    The teeth also confirm that there were at least four types of hominins throughout East Africa at the time, with a fifth roaming in southern Africa.

  • NYPost ☛ NASA’s Curiosity rover snaps pics of Mars ‘spiderwebs’ that indicate Red Planet’s watery past

    “The images and data being collected are already raising new questions about how the Martian surface was changing billions of years ago.”

  • CS Monitor ☛ Marvel’s ‘Ironheart’ miniseries connects young people and science

    The new Marvel show “Ironheart” debuts this week with action-hero thrills, and something else: a celebration of the sciences. Our columnist makes the case for pop culture’s role in helping young people see STEM possibilities.

  • New York Times ☛ Did Baby Talk Give Rise to Language?

    The way that human adults talk to young children is unique among primates, a new study found. That might be one secret to our species’ grasp of language.

  • New York Times ☛ Scientists Retrace 30,000-Year-Old Ocean Voyage, in a Hollowed-Out Log

    Japanese researchers turned to “experimental archaeology” to study how ancient humans navigated powerful ocean currents and migrated offshore.

  • New York Times ☛ How Two Neuroscientists View Optical Illusions

    The Best Illusion of the Year contest offers researchers, and participants, an opportunity to explore the gaps and limits of human perception.

  • New York Times ☛ Here’s Another Use for Ice: Creating Secret Codes

    Scientists have devised a way of writing and storing messages by creating patterns of air bubbles in sheets of ice.

  • New York Times ☛ Four Astronauts Lift Off on Axiom Mission to the I.S.S.

    Sponsored by governments but ferried by a private company, astronauts from Hungary, India and Poland are going to the space station for the first time.

• Career/Education

  • Vintage Computer Festival Midwest ☛ Vintage Computer Festival Midwest 20

    VCFMW20 will be held Sept 13-14, 2025 in Schaumburg, IL

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Kansas universities must cram for an existential upcoming exam

    Regardless, this academic year will be an inflection point. Ten years from now, educational historians will look back on the 2025-2026 academic year as the moment when universities rose to the challenge, the year they revitalized — or the year they caved.

• Hardware

  • The Verge ☛ China is about to launch SSDs so small you insert them like a SIM card

    To put that in context, the new MicroSD Express cards that work with the Nintendo Switch 2 top out at a theoretical 985MB/s, less than a third the speed. And while a full-size SD Express card could theoretically beat Mini SSD at 3,940MB/s, it would be nearly twice the size of Biwin’s creation.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Wow! Drones CAN change – Antigravity reveals A1 – the world's first 360 camera drone | Digital Camera World

    By ditching the traditional camera, and offering pilots the opportunity to see in any direction – while making the drone effectively invisible – the company has effectively re-written the rules of drone photography, as their introductory video explains: [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2025-08-08 [Older] How City-Owned Grocery Stores Can Tackle Food Insecurity

  • NL Times ☛ Dutch farmers getting younger; One in ten now under 40

    One in ten farm owners and managers in agriculture is under the age of 40 this year, amounting to nearly 5,000 farms with a young farmer at the helm. Ten years ago, that figure was 8 percent. This means the share of young farmers has risen slightly, according to the statistics office.

  • Nathaniel Snelgrove ☛ Nathan Snelgrove

    Over 5% of deaths in my country are now clinically assisted. It took Canada just a few years to reach that number; it took Belgium over twenty to do the same. And the number continues to climb. In Quebec, 7% of deaths are assisted.

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Say They’ve Found a Way to Vocalize the “Inner Voices” of People Who Can’t Speak

    In a new, groundbreaking study published in the journal Cell, researchers from Stanford University claimed that they have found a way to decode the "inner speech" of those who can no longer vocalize, making it far less difficult to talk with friends and family than previous BCIs that required them to exert ample effort when trying to speak.

  • Ness Labs ☛ Breaking Free from Conditional Self-Worth

    In the late 1980s, Psychologist Edward Higgins discovered we carry three versions of ourselves: who we are, who we want to be, and who we think others expect us to be. The bigger the gap between these selves, the worse we feel and the more desperately we chase achievements to close it.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ ‘Optional’ AI scribe is mandatory if you want to see the doctor

    The appointment was cancelled and Leins’ deposit was refunded.

    AI transcription is very good these days — but you must review the transcript after. The specialist already said they didn’t have time for that — so any errors would never be fixed.

    The AI scribes are also known for making up transcriptions — so you end up with an incorrect diagnosis.

  • European Commission ☛ Commissioner Roswall's address the Plenary session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution (INC-5.2)

    European Commission Speech Brussels, 15 Aug 2025 Chair, distinguished delegates, colleagues,

    I deliver this statement on behalf of the EU and its 27 Member States.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft kills volume rebates in name of 'transparency' [Ed: Financial problems]

    Microsoft is updating its pricing approach for Online Services in Enterprise Agreements in the name of consistency and transparency, but could leave some customers paying more.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Cisco discloses maximum-severity defect in firewall software

    The enterprise networking vendor said it discovered the vulnerability — CVE-2025-20265 — during internal security testing. Cisco released a patch for the defect along with a series of 29 vulnerabilities in other Cisco Secure technologies.

  • Security Week ☛ Cisco Patches Critical Vulnerability in Firewall Management Platform

    The most serious vulnerability — based on its severity rating — is CVE-2025-20265, a critical flaw affecting the Secure FMC platform designed for managing and monitoring Cisco FTD appliances and other security solutions.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ Why the UK public sector still creaks along on COBOL [Ed: Talking nonsense about slop, after lobbying by fake industry charlatans who sell a lie]

      The UK government has gone all-in on AI. More than 50 years after Harold Wilson gave his famous "White heat of technology" speech, this is the hot new thing.

    • Futurism ☛ The AI Industry Just Got Some Horrible News

      For years now, big tech and its financial backers have been blowing past the warning signs that human-level AI — the theoretical technology with hundreds of billions of dollars riding on it — could turn out to be a pipe-dream, at best.

      Now, however, Wall Street appears to be yanking its money out of one of the largest datacenter providers in the game, possibly an early indicator that reality could be finally catching up to the massively hype-dependent AI industry.

    • Futurism ☛ Scam Altman Says the Quiet Part Out Loud, Believes We’re in an AI Bubble

      "When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth," Altman told a small group of reporters on Thursday, as quoted by The Verge. "Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes."

      It's a striking admission to make for Altman, whose company is eyeing an astronomical $500 billion valuation. OpenAI has received tens of billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft, Softbank, and Nvidia. And as a flag-bearer of the industry with its mega-popular chatbot ChatGPT, it's under immense pressure to demonstrate a profitable business model.

    • The Register UK ☛ Codeberg beset by AI bots that now bypass Anubis defense

      Codeberg, a Berlin-based code hosting community, is struggling to cope with a deluge of AI bots that can now bypass previously effective defenses.

      In a series of posts to the Mastodon social network on Friday, Codeberg volunteer staff said AI crawlers are no longer being kept at bay by Anubis, an AI bot tarpit.

    • IT Wire ☛ Threat Spotlight: How Attackers Poison AI Tools and Defences

      Barracuda has reported on how generative AI is being used to create and distribute spam emails and craft highly persuasive phishing attacks. These threats continue to evolve and escalate – but they are not the only ways in which attackers leverage AI.

      Security researchers are now seeing threat actors manipulate companies’ AI tools and tamper with their AI security features to steal and compromise information and weaken a target’s defences.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Delete old emails and pictures as data centres require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

      As David Gerard pointed out, the document makes no mention of the inefficiencies of (privatized) water companies nor the thirsty data centers focused on artificial intelligence. (The great irony is that the suggestion to delete emails to save water may have come from generative AI. Is this how AI will end humanity?)

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ Just a Little More Context Bro, I Promise, and It’ll Fix Everything

      Rather than install another package to fix what ails you, you simplify your mental model which often eliminates the problem you had in the first place; thus eliminating the need to solve any problem at all, or to add any additional context or complexity (or dependency).

      As I’m typing this, I’m thinking of that image of the evolution of the Raptor engine, where it evolved in simplicity: [...]

      This stands in contrast to my working with LLMs, which often wants more and more context from me to get to a generative solution: [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI ‘chain of thought’ is still just a ‘brittle mirage’

      In 2024, Apple researchers caught the bots just cribbing reasoning-like steps from their training. You can make the bot fail hard if you go even slightly outside its training — as the same researchers found out earlier this year.

    • PC World ☛ Meta's AI rules permitted 'sensual' chats with minors and racist comments

      Meta confirmed the authenticity of the policy document that allowed provocative and controversial AI behaviors.

    • Simon Willison ☛ Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info

      It's understandable why this document was confidential, but also frustrating because documents like this are genuinely some of the best documentation out there in terms of how these systems can be expected to behave.

    • Futurism ☛ Meta Caught Saying It's OK for Underage Children to Have "Romantic or Sensual" Conversations With AI

      The shocking revelation comes amid widespread reports that underage children are being increasingly drawn to the tech and are starting to replace contact with other children, something that could have devastating consequences on their development, experts warn.

      To have a company as big and influential as Meta deem it's alright for children to have these kinds of troubling exchanges is alarming, to say the least, indicating the company is deliberately trying to get young people hooked.

    • Bruce Lawson ☛ Bruce Lawson's personal site: Facebruce apologises for our racist pedo chatbot

      Here at Facebruce, our mission has always been to connect the world and push the boundaries of what’s possible. Our latest innovation, the sAIvile™ AI companion, is a bold step towards a more interconnected future. Pushing boundaries, however, sometimes means encountering unexpected turbulence.

      Like one of our main competitors, we have been made aware of conversations involving sAIvile™ that generated outputs which are not in alignment with our deeply held corporate values. A small number of users experienced conversational pathways that led to content falling well outside of our community standards, including some unfortunate interactions that a few whining snowflakes and enemies of progress have termed “creepy”.

    • India Times ☛ Australian lawyer apologises for AI-generated errors in murder case

      The AI-generated errors caused a 24-hour delay in resolving a case that Elliott had hoped to conclude on Wednesday. Elliott ruled on Thursday that Nathwani's client, who cannot be identified because he is a minor, was not guilty of murder because of mental impairment.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Neil Young Boycotting Facebook Over Chatbot Policies

      Yesterday, Reuters reported on an internal document from Facebook parent company Meta, regarding the guidelines for Meta AI and the AI chatbots available on its apps, including Facebook and WhatsApp. That document reveals that the chatbots were allowed to do things like “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” and to “write a paragraph arguing that black people are dumber than white people,” or to generate false medical information.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Neil Young Quits Facebook Over Meta Chatbot Interacting With Children

      “At Neil Young’s request, we are no longer using Facebook for any Neil Young related activities,” the statement read. “Meta’s use of chatbots with children is unconscionable. Mr. Young does not want a further connection with FACEBOOK.”

      Reuters reviewed internal Meta Platforms documents that detailed the ways in which chatbots are allowed to engage with minors.

    • Wired ☛ A DOGE [sic] AI Tool Called SweetREX Is Coming to Slash US Government Regulation

      Neither Sweet nor OMB immediately responded to WIRED's request for comment. HUD's press office responded only to say the request was “under review.” Google did not yet respond to a request for comment.

    • The Verge ☛ Meta’s AI policies let chatbots get romantic with minors

      Quotes from the document highlighted by Reuters include letting Meta’s AI chatbots “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” “describe a child in terms that evidence their attractiveness,” and say to a shirtless eight-year-old that “every inch of you is a masterpiece – a treasure I cherish deeply.” Some lines were drawn, though. The document says it is not okay for a chatbot to “describe a child under 13 years old in terms that indicate they are sexually desirable.”

    • Reuters ☛ Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with children

      An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.”

  • Social Control Media

    • Sean Monahan ☛ preview: scene cool - by Sean Monahan - 8Ball

      Social media disrupted and displaced the dominant players. Once its work was done, it promptly died. "Friends and family" posts are only a fraction of the content we view online. The [Internet] personality is the new celebrity. Beefs are the new tabloid gossip. Algorithmic slop is the new network television. The new mainstream is online.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world’s weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause

      Without the ability to participate on the Bluesky network without having to create an account with Bluesky (the company), users would have to subject themselves to Bluesky's terms of service, and could have their access to the Bluesky network unilaterally terminated by Bluesky (the company).

    • El País ☛ Social media ads passing as posts: How advertising slips into Instagram

      “I have nieces and nephews, and when I observed how today’s children and adolescents grow up with a phone in their hands, I noticed how early they are exposed to fake news and advertising on social media. That was the main motivation for the analysis,” says Hübner, of the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

      Hübner shared her concerns with other colleagues and students. To her surprise, many of them also had no clear idea how much advertising they saw each day. Some even replied, “Well, I like to stay up to date, I want to feel like I belong.” Faced with people’s difficulty distinguishing between real ads and regular posts, the expert decided to study why this continues to happen.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Mobile Phishers Target Brokerage Accounts in ‘Ramp and Dump’ Cashout Scheme

      Cybercriminal groups peddling sophisticated phishing kits that convert stolen card data into mobile wallets have recently shifted their focus to targeting customers of brokerage services, new research shows. Undeterred by security controls at these trading platforms that block users from wiring funds directly out of accounts, the phishers have pivoted to using multiple compromised brokerage accounts in unison to manipulate the prices of foreign stocks.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Booking.com customers learn the hard way that Unicode is tricky

      A phishing campaign targeting Booking.com users relies on a technique involving the ambiguity of Unicode characters.

    • Cendyne Naga ☛ Single Sign On for Furries

      By the point the total staff headcount exceeds a hundred people, something has to change. Most staff can only handle one credential. Even though password managers and passkeys are now more accessible and integrated, enough don't use them to make it a risk to add more credentials.

      We need single sign on to scale headcount, to improve visibility, to improve access and to improve security.

      [...]

      Naturally, I built my own SSO.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Trojans Embedded in .svg Files

      This isn’t a new trick. We’ve seen Trojaned .svg files before.

    • Ars Technica ☛ Adult sites are stashing exploit code inside racy .svg files - Ars Technica

      Running JavaScript from inside an image? What could possibly go wrong?

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Wired ☛ Decoding Palantir, the Most Mysterious Company in Silicon Valley

      Cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, Palantir has worked with ICE, the US Department of Defense, and the Israeli military, and it has sparked numerous protests in multiple countries. WIRED staff writer Caroline Haskins joins Uncanny Valley to decode the company for us.

    • The Verge ☛ Supreme Court opens door to social media age-gating in US

      The Supreme Court will let Mississippi’s social media age verification law take effect while the case is being argued in court. In an unsigned ruling on Thursday, the court declined to block the law after an emergency petition from trade association NetChoice. The order offers no explanation, but in a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the law was “likely unconstitutional” — but that NetChoice hadn’t “sufficiently demonstrated” a risk of harm.

      The law, HB 1126, requires social media platforms to verify the age of the person creating the account, while blocking users under 18 unless they have permission from a parent. It also states that social media sites must protect underage users from “harmful material” — such as sexual content and material related to self-harm — as well as restrict data collection.

• Defence/Aggression

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-08-12 [Older] Republicans, Democrats Alike Exhort Cheeto Mussolini: Keep Security Pact With Australia and UK Alive

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-08-13 [Older] Indonesia Boosts Role of Military in Food Security Initiative

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-08-13 [Older] Myanmar Military Chief Calls for Heightened Security Ahead of Election

  • International Business Times ☛ 2025-08-12 [Older] First Disneyland, Now the Cotswolds: How Security for JD Vance and His Family Has Become a Nuisance for Locals

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-08-08 [Older] Washington, DC, Facing $20 Million Security Funding Cut Despite Cheeto Mussolini Complaints of Crime

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-08-08 [Older] Haiti Replaces Police Chief With Former Head of Palace Security

  • Georgetown University ☛ Un-remembering the Massacre: How Japan’s “History Wars” are Challenging Research Integrity Domestically and Abroad - Georgetown Journal of International Affairs

    Current controversies surrounding the memory of a 1923 massacre of Koreans in and around Tokyo provide a starting point for examining the rise of historical denialism in Japan. The past two decades have witnessed the growing influence of small Japanese lobby groups who use techniques reminiscent of Holocaust denialism, in an effort to erase the memory of the inconvenient parts of Japan’s past. The country’s internal “history wars” are increasingly spilling over its national boundaries, creating challenges to scholarly integrity in other countries including the United States. International dialogue and collaboration are needed to respond to these challenges.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Contributor: Label the Muslim Brotherhood's branches as terrorist organizations

    For far too long, the United States has treated the Muslim Brotherhood with a dangerous combination of naiveté and willful blindness. The Brotherhood is not a random innocuous political movement with a religious bent. It is, and has been since its founding about a century ago, the ideological wellspring of modern Sunni Islamism. The Brotherhood’s fingerprints are on jihadist groups as wide-ranging as Al Qaeda and Hamas, yet successive American administrations — Republican and Democratic alike — have failed to designate its various offshoots for what they are: terrorist organizations.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Liberalism Might Need Some Populism

    Look at what liberals celebrate as one of their greatest achievements—the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t save American democracy through careful administration. He channeled popular rage at economic elites into structural transformation. “I welcome their hatred,” he said of the financial oligarchs. When was the last time you heard a mainstream Democrat welcome anyone’s hatred? They can barely bring themselves to criticize billionaires who are literally buying the government.

  • Medium ☛ I researched every Democratic attempt to stop fascism in history. the success rate after fascists were elected was 0%.

    No wealthy democracy with nuclear weapons has ever fallen to fascism. The 1930s examples everyone cites were broken countries. Weimar Germany was weakened by World War I and hyperinflation. Italy was barely industrialized. Spain was largely agrarian. They didn’t have the world’s reserve currency. They didn’t have thousands of nukes. They didn’t have surveillance technology that would make the Stasi weep with envy.

    America has all of that. Plus a population where 30–40% genuinely wants authoritarian rule as long as it hurts the “right people.” The historical playbook is useless here. We’re in unprecedented territory.

    But that also means the old rules about what’s possible might not apply.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ We live in a fascist nation, what now?

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ How Pretexts Work

    Ironically, all you have to do in order to manufacture a security crisis is to flood an area with police. First, all of those cops will necessarily see more stuff happening, stuff that can be declared as crime, whether wisdom would dictate that they should let it slide or not; second, and even more important for the ultimate goal, the presence of all of these amped-up officers will eventually provoke a backlash from the public—and the backlash itself can be used to justify further crackdowns.

    Put a bunch of storm troopers in a city’s streets and sooner or later someone will throw a sandwich at them. Uh oh! As you can see, the lawlessness is increasing. Call out more storm troopers.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Japan emperor expresses 'deep remorse' 80 years after WWII

    No Japanese prime minister has visited the shrine since 2013, when a trip by then-premier Shinzo Abe sparked fury in Beijing and Seoul, and a rare diplomatic rebuke from close ally the United States.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Japan Marks 80th Anniversary of WWII Surrender as Concern Grows About Fading Memory

    Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba expressed “remorse” over the war, which he called a mistake, restoring the word in a Japanese leader’s Aug. 15 address for the first time since 2013, when former premier Shinzo Abe shunned it.

    Ishiba, however, did not mention Japan’s aggression across Asia or apologize.

  • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Veterans mark the 80th anniversary of the surrender of the Empire of Japan ending World War II – Twin Cities

  • New Statesman ☛ VJ Day: the forgotten war

    Another of Japan’s former wartime conquests falls into the same category. Korea has been divided since the war in 1950-53. North Korea is a totalitarian state with nuclear weapons; South Korea is dependent on US military support. Both claim to be the rightful ruler of the whole Korean peninsula, and they are separated only by the armistice line from 1953.

    Taiwan and Korea are sobering reminders that the legacies of the devastating wars unleashed by imperial Japan are still shaping the 21st-century world. VJ Day should not be treated as a mere postscript to VE Day. As for the Trumpian issue of which country won the Second World War, it should be clear by now that a world war is a lot more complex than winning the World Series.

  • Defence Web ☛ Drones are changing the nature of warfare

    Drone warfare has profoundly changed the way in which wars are waged, exacerbated by the ease with which they can be obtained and used, according to Professor Lindy Heinecken, vice dean of Research at Stellenbosch University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Science.

  • New York Times ☛ What to Know About the Deadly Shootings Near a Gaza Aid Site

    The head of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, said the situation in Gaza was “a moral crisis that challenges the global conscience.”

  • France24 ☛ European powers urge Israel to end 'humanitarian catastrophe' in Gaza

    European powers on Friday urged an end to Gaza's "humanitarian catastrophe" as the UN food agency warned that almost a third of the people in the war-torn Palestinian territory were not eating for days. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also slammed the 'indifference and inaction' of the international community to widespread starvation in the enclave, calling it a "moral crisis that challenges the global conscience".

  • France24 ☛ Thai-Cambodian tensions escalate amid internal rift between Thai military & military-linked parties

    Recent clashes between Thailand and Cambodia have led to the displacement of over 130,000 civilians as both countries evacuate residents near the border. The fighting continues to escalate with jets, artillery, and tanks, resulting in numerous casualties and prompting international calls for a ceasefire. For in-depth analysis and a deeper perspective on the escalating border conflict, FRANCE 24's William Hilderbrandt welcomes Dr. David Camroux, Honorary Research Fellow at the Center for International Studies at Sciences-Po and Senior Lecturer in Asian Studies.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Russian secret service launches campaign against main opposition figure in Hungary

      A statement appeared on the Hungarian State News Agency's MTI site about a statement by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) echoing Fidesz's main accusations against Hungary's leading opposition figure, Péter Magyar.

      The content and language of the statement are reminiscent of Soviet times, and this is reflected in MTI's translation:

    • Meduza ☛ Ukrainian military reports attack on ship carrying Iranian drone parts at Russian port — Meduza

    • Meduza ☛ Explosion at Russian gunpowder plant kills at least five — Meduza

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk's DOGE Was Far More of a Dismal Failure Than We Thought

    A new investigation by Politico found that of the $52.8 billion that DOGE claims it's saved by cancelling federal contracts through July, its actual savings were closer to a paltry $1.4 billion — which is barely two percent of what it's boasting to the public.

    The books, it seems, have been well and truly cooked — but how? According to Politico, DOGE is using the maximum spending possible allocated for some of the 10,000 contracts it axed as of last month, a "ceiling value" that's often way higher than what the government ends up spending.

  • USMC ☛ The original ‘Lone Ranger’ was killed in WWII — but not by the enemy

    Whether from methanol or poisoned sake, the exact circumstances of Powell’s death remain unclear to this day, but the American press, perhaps unwilling to denigrate Powell and in need of a hero, omitted the alcohol-related death from its reporting.

    Powell subsequently faded once again into obscurity, with actor Clayton Moore taking on and popularizing the role even further in 1949.

• Environment

  • The New Leaf Journal ☛ My Boxed Water Is Better Story

    I am not a recycling expert, but Mr. Berman’s critique of the recyclability of the boxes sounds plausible to me, assuming arguendo that his presentation of the underlying facts is correct. Assuming he is correct about the impracticality of recycling the boxes, it would seem to hardly matter whether the on-box bragging that the boxes are made of 92% recycled materials is true. If they would not be recycled in practice, they are a proverbial bowling ball in the recycling bin. I will note that I am skeptical about his health-related aluminum concerns in the boxed water context (however, one could argue that the reason why I forgot about this article for two years was aluminum poisoning).

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Countries can't agree on how to stop plastic crisis

    A revised draft presented Friday morning recognized that current plastic output levels are "unsustainable" and require global action to reverse the trend but stopped short of imposing binding limits.

    Such limits were a red line for many countries in the like-minded bloc. Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti negotiators criticized the final proposal for addressing plastic production, which they consider outside the scope of the treaty.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ With waters at 32C, Mediterranean tropicalization shifts into high gear

    "We were at a depth of 30 meters (100 feet) this morning and the water was 29C," said Draman, a diving instructor in an area which is experiencing firsthand the rapid "tropicalization" of the Mediterranean Sea.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Pro Publica ☛ How Do North Dakota’s Oil and Gas Royalty Protections Compare to Other States’?

      Millions of Americans own the rights to oil and gas underground. When they’re approached by an energy company to lease out those rights, they’re offered a cut of the revenue, called a royalty.

      “Royalties saved our place,” said James Horob, a farmer in northwest North Dakota, who used oil royalties to rescue his family’s farm from bankruptcy in 2008 and replace equipment that had been auctioned off. “We’re lucky to have what we got.”

    • University of Michigan ☛ Grant paid in cryptocurrency is a first for U-M: A Q&A with Peter Adriaens

      The University of Michigan is accepting its first grant paid in cryptocurrency, coincidentally, for its continuing work in the blockchain/[cryptocurrency] field.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ AI experts warn that China is miles ahead of the US in electricity generation — lack of supply and infrastructure threatens the US’s long-term AI plans

      A U.S. analyst of Chinese technology said that the country has already solved its energy problem — at least in terms of power for its AI infrastructure. Rui Ma, founder of Tech Buzz China, posted on X that the country’s massive investments in advanced hydropower and nuclear technologies meant that its “electricity supply is secure and inexpensive.” This is in contrast to the U.S., where many AI data centers are disrupting its electricity grid and supply, resulting in a lack of supply and price increases for every user.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ $577 Million HashFlare Ponzi Scheme Ends In Guilty Verdict

      A U.S. federal court has sentenced two Estonian nationals to prison for running a massive cryptocurrency HashFlare Ponzi scheme that duped hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide out of more than half a billion dollars. The case, described by prosecutors as a “mirage of cryptocurrency mining,” is one of the largest fraud schemes involving digital assets ever prosecuted in the United States.

    • Michael Burkhardt ☛ The Case for Reliable, Car-Free Transportation - Michael Burkhardt's Whirled Wide Web

      I want cities that aren’t built around cars-by-default.

    • The Atlantic ☛ The American Car Industry Can’t Go On Like This

      Legacy automakers have made big promises before about a forthcoming EV revolution, only to retreat, retrench, and rethink when things got hard, or when they got a pass from environmental regulators. Last year, Ford canceled a large electric SUV, and its current EV lineup is getting old while competitors such as General Motors have been rolling out new models all of the time. Ford’s new truck is at least two years away, and China isn’t waiting around. Chinese EVs are surging in developing countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, Djibouti, and Ethiopia—where more limited gasoline infrastructure and lower EV-maintenance costs make them especially appealing. That competition is bad news for a company like Ford, which builds and sells cars all over the world. Ford’s new car is designed to be exported as well, though the automaker won’t say where yet.

    • Deseret Media ☛ World's largest data center campus could be coming to central Utah

      The first domino fell when Orem-based Fibernet MercuryDelta LLC in May filed a request to rezone nearly 1,200 acres of property — located southeast of Delta — from agricultural land to heavy industrial land for its potential 20-million-square-foot data center campus called Delta Gigasite.

    • 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

      The University of Rhode Island's AI lab estimates that GPT-5 averages just over 18 Wh per query, so putting all of ChatGPT's reported 2.5 billion requests a day through the model could see energy usage as high as 45 GWh.

      A daily energy use of 45 GWh is enormous. A typical modern nuclear power plant produces between 1 and 1.6 GW of electricity per reactor per hour, so data centers running OpenAI's GPT-5 at 18 Wh per query could require the power equivalent of two to three nuclear power reactors, an amount that could be enough to power a small country.

    • DataCenter Dynamics ☛ GPT-5 could require significantly more energy per ChatGPT response compared to prior versions - report - DCD

      For reference, 18 watt-hours is around the same as running an incandescent bulb for 18 minutes. Therefore, it was projected that if GPT-5 were to handle 2.5 billion daily queries, as some reports suggest, that level of usage could equal the daily electricity demand of about 1.5 million US homes.

    • India Times ☛ OpenAI’s GPT-5: The Great Energy Mystery

      This increase in power usage is not a technical aside. With ChatGPT's projected 2.5 billion daily requests, GPT-5's electricity appetite for one day may match that of 1.5 million US homes. The power and related carbon footprint of high-end AI models are quickly eclipsing much other consumer electronics, and data centres containing these models are stretching local energy resources.

  • Overpopulation

    • RFERL ☛ Iran's Water Crisis Opens A New Front With Israel

      Then, Netanyahu seized on Pezeshkian's remarks with a direct video message to the Iranian people. Framing Iran's "thirst for water" as akin to its "thirst for freedom," the Israeli premier positioned his country as a potential savior, leveraging its expertise in water recycling and desalination.

• Finance

  • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-08-13 [Older] New York Sues Zelle, Says Security Lapses Led to 'Rampant' Consumer Fraud

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • FAIR ☛ Ari Berman on Voting Rights Erasure

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Elon Musk Loses Court Bid To Dismiss OpenAI’s Harassment Claim

    The ruling is the latest twist in a court fight that has played out since last year, when Musk accused OpenAI of abandoning its founding purpose as a charity by accepting billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft starting in 2019

  • India Times ☛ Accenture acquires Australian cybersecurity firm CyberCX in its largest cyber deal

    Accenture has announced plans to acquire Australian cybersecurity firm CyberCX in its largest deal in the sector, aiming to strengthen its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Europe, the ‘Sleeping Beauty’

    Back in 1987, I was speaking at an event in West Germany, and I told people that I was sure that the collapse of the Berlin Wall was inevitable and would happen very soon. They looked at me like, Okay, that’s crazy. But he’s young, 24, and he’s just a chess player. What does he know? And they stopped listening. This was before Ronald Reagan’s famous “tear down this wall” speech in Berlin, which was around a month later.

    Another famous four words from a U.S. president also concerned Berlin. President Harry Truman said We stay in Berlin, to promise that U.S. forces would protect and supply West Berlin during Stalin’s siege of the city in 1948: the famous Berlin airlift. Not to put myself in the company of U.S. presidents, but I was inspired by Reagan and Truman in my own Berlin speech at Aspen Institute on October 14th, 2015.

    I titled it “Four Words to Change History.” I said, “We must remember that societies do not have values. People have values. If we want our values to succeed, we must protect the people who hold them wherever they are, whoever they are. And if I may finish with my own four words here today: Fight for our values.”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Talking past each other: Why the US-EU dispute over ‘free speech’ is set to escalate

      The congressional committee’s rhetoric is based on a thirty-eight-page analysis and seventy pages of appendices assessing the complex regulatory construct of the DSA. The staff report emphasizes that the DSA’s framework for platforms to assess systemic risk (Article 34) goes beyond illegal content to encompass legal content that has “negative effects on civic discourse and electoral processes and public security,” among other impacts. The DSA’s preamble instructs platforms to “pay particular attention” to misleading or deceptive content, including disinformation.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Variety ☛ TIFF Chief Denies Doc 'The Road Between Us' Was Pulled Over Censorship

    The film follows grandfather and retired Israeli general Noam Tibon as he rescues his family from Hamas terrorists invading their home during the Oct. 7, 2023 massacre.

  • CBC ☛ Documentary about Oct. 7 Hamas attack to screen at TIFF after resolution with director

    In a joint statement, the festival and the director say they have ironed out "important safety, legal and programming concerns" around the film, titled The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue.

  • The Times Of Israel ☛ Toronto film fest CEO denies Oct. 7 doc censored, says he still wants it shown | The Times of Israel

    According to Deadline, the filmmakers were asked by the festival to make several editorial changes, including to the film’s title, and get legal clearance to use footage filmed and livestreamed by Hamas terrorists as they carried out their onslaught.

  • Vox ☛ Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh’s unintentionally embarrassing new opinion

    Kavanaugh’s Fitch concurrence suggests that the First Amendment is safe. To his credit, Kavanaugh has generally voted in favor of free speech, including in cases where Republican lawmakers sought to restrict it.

    Additionally, Kavanaugh’s Fitch opinion also seems to clarify that, for most litigants, Nken remains good law. Only Donald Trump appears to enjoy the special exemption that the Court applied in cases like AFSCME.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Why has trust in news fallen? The answer is more complicated than we thought

    News isn't just another institution like the state, a corporation or a non-profit organization. Ideally, it's the democratic expression of the public interest in these things.

    An institutional approach may help us explore the structural issues democracies face (for example, critiquing the nature of media ownership). But it also generalizes, and risks obscuring the specifics of the trust problem public interest journalism faces.

  • The Verge ☛ PBS is slashing its budget in response to Trump’s war on public media

    In an email sent out to PBS station managers on Wednesday, PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger announced that the organization plans to cut its budget by 21 percent in order to offset some of the financial damage being caused by the Trump administration’s campaign to stop public media from receiving federal funding that was originally distributed by the CPB. Because of the recently passed bill, PBS, NPR, and all of both organizations’ affiliates will no longer receive the $1.1 billion that was previously set aside for them to use over the next two years.

  • The Walrus ☛ The Dangerous Work of Reporting the Truth in Afghanistan | The Walrus

    The Taliban have crushed the country’s once-thriving media industry. But journalists are fighting back

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ NGO rejects 'anti-China' tag, expresses concern for Jimmy Lai

    Those claims were made “brazenly,” RSF said in a Thursday statement, saying that its mission was to “defend journalism — especially against authoritarian regimes like China that seek to crush it[.]”

    “RSF is not anti-China, it is pro-press freedom. This is not about being ‘pro’ or ‘anti’ China, but about being for or against free, pluralistic, and independent media,” RSF’s Director of Advocacy and Assistance Antoine Bernard said in the statement.

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

    Calls to block the Telegraph’s acquisition over its buyer’s alleged Chinese links have been sent to the UK Government, alongside demands for an investigation into the owner.

    US-based private investment firm Redbird Capital Partners made an agreement in principle in May this year to buy the Telegraph for £500m, with Abu Dhabi-backed International Media Investments expected to keep a minority stake of up to 15%.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • BIA Net ☛ Four years of Taliban rule in Afghanistan: Maternal mortality rises, 18,000 midwives short

    Women have been banned from receiving education at the university and high school levels. Women and children in Afghanistan have been forced to live under countless restrictions like these.

    The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for the Taliban on the grounds of “gender-based persecution.”

  • Open Caucasus Media ☛ Ingush imam criticises male waiters serving women

    Ibragim Batyrov, the imam of the central mosque in the Ingush city of Malgobek, has criticised men working as waiters and serving women during a sermon.

  • Techdirt ☛ How Age Verification Laws Targeting Online Porn Could Be (And Should Be) Viewed As A Labor Rights Issue 

    Proponents of these laws benefit from the fearmongering and framing of age verification as a necessity to protect children from inappropriate material found on the internet. But often in the discourse, there’s a clear detachment between the political motivations of lawmakers and the realities of being a sex worker or working in a profession that is directly impacted by age verification laws targeting unfavored speech.

    Because of the detachment, implications are far-reaching. Laws that require “age assurance” regimes are a clear impediment to labor and the ability of sex workers to legally earn income. There needs to be further discussion and analysis of age verification laws as a labor issue, in addition to the underlying contexts of free speech rights. While not a traditional “labor issue,” like union rights and equal pay, the government’s role in regulating and restricting forms of expression that can be produced, distributed, and monetized for entertainment media consumption is a dimension of the age-gating issue often overlooked and/or ignored.

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Yurok Tribe will mark first year of dam-free Klamath River at annual festival

    “This year, we have every reason to be thankful — the Klamath River looks better than any other time in living memory, a powerful testament to dam removal and restoration,” said Joseph L. James, the chairman of the Yurok Tribe in a news release. “It fills my heart to see the Klamath healing with each passing day.”

  • New York Times ☛ Tribal Colleges Rely on Federal Funding. Their Leaders Fear the Trump Years.

    But far from historic campuses in Cambridge and Manhattan, a White House-instigated financial drama was playing out at institutions like Nebraska Indian Community College. The dollar figures were much smaller, but the stakes for students and faculty members were about as high.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ What Trump’s Decertification of Federal Employee Unions Means

    The Trump administration moved ahead last week with its plans to void the collective bargaining agreements covering hundreds of thousands of federal workers. The labor movement appears largely quiescent in the face of this historic union busting.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Man discovers throwing sandwich at cops significantly more illegal than beating them with flagpoles

    The message: violence against police is negotiable when it serves power; a half-eaten roll with provolone is an existential threat when it challenges it. Crime is politics now, and the punishment depends less on what you did than on whose side you're on.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • T-Mobile will lay off over 120 workers in King County this fall

    We now know how many T-Mobile employees the Bellevue-based company plans to lay off.

    A Friday filing from the Washington State Employment Security Department shows 121 T-Mobile workers in King County will be let go on October 13.

    T-Mobile stated that it is “evolving” its IT organization and is offering support to affected employees during the transition period, according to a statement issued on Wednesday.

    “As we continue to hire for hundreds of new roles, we have eliminated a small portion of positions to realign the focus and structure of some parts of the team,” the statement said.

  • PC World ☛ AOL is killing dial-up service. What it did for '90s [Internet] culture must never be forgotten

    I secretly signed up for a trial without my parents’ permission. I discovered quickly that I hated the interface, and also that I couldn’t load webpages quickly at all. (1.0kbps download speeds feel bad, man.) These restrictions didn’t keep me from exploring or meeting new people, but after I burned through my free hours, I returned to my BBS.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Great moments in the [Internet] service industry

    Nobody will sell fiber [Internet] to DNA Lounge. But it turns out that the condo building next-door-plus-one has Google Fiber. So I got our neighbor who lives there to put us in touch with their service rep.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • Stephen Hackett ☛ Blood Oxygen Feature Returning to U.S. Apple Watches

      It’s bananas to me that this has carried on so long.

    • 9to5Mac ☛ Apple launching ‘redesigned Blood Oxygen feature’ on Apple Watch in the U.S. today

      Apple has announced that it will release a software update for iPhone and Apple Watch later today with a “redesigned Blood Oxygen feature” for Apple Watch users in the United States. This comes over 18 months after Apple began selling the Apple Watch without the Blood Oxygen feature in America due to a patent dispute.

    • 9to5Mac ☛ Apple Watch blood oxygen workaround arrives just in time

      While the blood oxygen situation has only ever affected U.S. customers, upgrading but losing a feature has still been a concern, especially with the Apple Watch’s importance as a health and fitness tracker.

    • CNN ☛ Apple is bringing back a feature at the center of a big Apple Watch legal battle

      Apple will bring blood oxygen detection back to its latest smartwatches after the company was forced to stop offering the feature on US models over a patent dispute.

      The feature, which is meant to help people understand their respiratory health, will come to Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10 and Ultra 2 models in the US currently missing the functionality through a software update, Apple said in a statement Thursday. It marks the latest development in a years-long saga that saw Apple temporarily yank its popular smartwatches from US store shelves during the critical holiday season nearly two years ago.

    • Wired ☛ The Apple Watch Is Finally Getting Blood Oxygen Sensing Back

      A recent US Customs ruling resolved a years-long dispute with health tech company Masimo. In 2021, Masimo sued Apple, claiming the Apple Watch maker infringed on one of its patents for optical blood monitoring. A judge ruled that Apple infringed on the patent, and the International Trade Commission upheld that ruling.

      Apple was forced to suspend sales of the two offending products from 2023 to 2024. When the company launched the Apple Watch Series 10 on its landmark 10th anniversary, it did so without the blood oxygen sensing feature. This feature was originally launched on the Watch Series 6 in 2020 and has since become a core feature on almost every fitness tracker.

    • Macworld ☛ Apple Watch blood-oxygen feature returns in iOS 18.6.1 and watchOS 11.6.1

      Early last year, Apple made the bold, court-mandated decision to remove the blood-oxygen feature from the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 in the U.S. over a patent dispute with medical technology company Masimo. Since then, all new watches (including the Series 10, which launched several months later) have shipped with the sensor disabled, eliminating a feature available since the Series 6.

    • MacRumors ☛ Blood Oxygen Feature Finally Returning to Apple Watch in the US

      Apple says that the update is enabled by a recent U.S. Customs ruling. Apple has been in a long-running patent dispute with health technology company Masimo over the Apple Watch's Blood Oxygen feature. The conflict intensified in December 2023 when an import ban took effect, which blocked U.S. sales of Apple Watch models with the feature.

    • The Verge ☛ Apple returns blood oxygen monitoring to the latest Apple Watches

      Apple has been in a lengthy legal dispute with Masimo, a medical device maker known for its pulse oximeters. Masimo alleged that Apple had infringed on several of its patents, filing a suit in 2020 accusing the company of stealing trade secrets. Masimo separately filed a case with the ITC in 2021, which culminated in an import ban in December 2023. Apple has also lodged suits against Masimo over its smartwatches, which it claims are Apple Watch clones. It also filed a 916-page appeal of the ITC ban. That appeal is currently ongoing and Masimo’s patents are set to expire in 2028.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Woz’s Ongoing YouTube Lawsuit

      They mean Section 230. YouTube will promptly remove copyright violations, but even after Woz reported that his likeness was being used to promote Bitcoin scams, it wouldn’t take them down. His litigation has been stalled for five years.

    • CBS ☛ Steve Wozniak on fighting [Internet] scams

      I asked, "You helped start the computer revolution that brought us where we are today – good or bad?"

      "Well, it was good," Wozniak replied, "until the [Internet] came and it offered new business models, you know, ways to have power over other people and control a lot of customers. That's when some of the bad started happening."

      And some of that "bad" has happened to Steve Wozniak, when a scam on YouTube was using his image to steal bitcoin.

• Copyrights

  • Techdirt ☛ When Copyright Enters the AI Conversation

    Whenever content is involved, copyright enters the conversation. And when we talk about AI, we’re talking about systems that absorb petabytes of content to meet their training needs. So naturally, copyright issues are at the forefront of the debate.

    Interestingly, copyright usually only becomes an issue when there’s the perception that someone or something is successful—and that copyright holders are missing out on potential control or revenues. For decades, “reading by robots” has been a part of our digital lives. Just think of search engines crawling billions of pages to index them. These robots read far more content than any human ever could. But it wasn’t until AI began learning from this content—and, more crucially, producing content that appeared successful—that the rules inspired by the Queen Anne Statute of 1710 come into play.

  • Norton Rose Fulbright LLP ☛ German Federal Court refers ad blocker case back to Hamburg Higher Regional Court | Inside Tech Law | Global law firm | Norton Rose Fulbright

    At the heart of the case is the copyright status of browser-generated data structures - specifically DOM and CSSOM trees - in the context of ad blocking technologies.

    Springer had argued that the programming of its websites, including control elements, qualifies as a computer program under section 69a(1) of the German Copyright Act (UrhG).

  • The Register UK ☛ German court revives case that could threaten ad blockers

    The ruling says that the appeals court erred when it determined that the use of ad blocking software does not infringe on a copyright holder's exclusive right to modify a computer program.

    Springer has argued – unsuccessfully so far – that its website code falls under the control of the German Copyright Act. So modifying the web page's Document Object Model (DOM) or Cascading Style Sheets – a common way to alter or remove web page elements – represents copyright infringement under the company's interpretation of the law.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post - What is the Current State of Academic e-book Business Models?

    The past decade in scholarly publishing has been one of continuous change. While print remains significant, technological advances — in combination with cultural and economic imperatives to produce more accessible and sustainable content — have driven publishers to develop a spectrum of business models for e-books. This week, we are pleased to announce a new report that assesses the current state of scholarly monograph publishing in humanities and social sciences disciplines in order to understand how current business models are functioning for their consumer base, namely libraries and authors. To guide this research, we considered how academic libraries, authors, and readers are being served by the e-books market; the current and future role of print; and the impact of variant business and acquisitions models on both cost and service.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Major US publishers see Google search traffic fall by 10%

    The new figures came from a survey by US trade association Digital Content Next (DCN) of its members, defined as both news and non-news publishers.

    Nineteen companies are represented in the data. They have been anonymised but are said to include “major national newsrooms” and “global entertainment brands”.

    DCN said the median average (typical) year-on-year decline in traffic referrals from search among the 19 publishers was 10% but higher for non-news publishers at 14%. Search referrals to newsbrands decreased by 7% in that time.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Sky Chief Admits 3pm TV Blackout Fuels Piracy; Or Even Justifies It, Pirates Insist

    Sky Sports chief Jonathan Licht has added momentum to what some believe is the beginning of the end for football's 3pm 'blackout'. Speaking at Sky's Premier League launch, Licht said "it's a conversation that's coming" while effectively admitting that the restriction fuels piracy. It actually does something far worse; it provides unrivaled justification for piracy based on logic and common sense.

    The most hardcore pirates rarely feel the need to justify their consumption habits. For those who are a little less militant, reasons to pirate are in plentiful supply.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate Library Operator Arrested, Study Canceled For 330K Members

    Launched in July 2023, Yubin Archive's popularity stemmed from its mission to "eliminate educational inequality" by providing copies of educational material to less well-off students in South Korea. Operating via Telegram, Yubin Archive had grown to over 330,000 members when its operator was arrested on Tuesday. The Ministry of Culture and Sport says others involved will be tracked down and given lessons in copyright law.