Leftovers

• New York Times ☛ Stephanie Shirley, Who Created a Tech World for Women, Dies at 91

  Still, work orders picked up, and she began hiring more programmers. Of her first 300 employees, 297 were women. The company designed software for the black box flight recorder on the Concorde supersonic jet, and for scheduling buses and freight trains. It also developed software protocols that were eventually adopted by NATO.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Notes require regular gardening

  While I don’t follow Zettelkasten method myself, one thing I do like about it is that it encourages you to go through your notes whenever you’re adding new ones. This helps you discover connections between ideas and refreshes your memory of what’s in your notes.

• Joel Chrono ☛ Maybe the thrill went away

  Something cool that I see from the people invested into these “old school” methods, is that they recognize it’s all about doing what works, seeing them as a tool and not as some revolutionary discovery, it’s just going back to basics and sharing how it works for them.

• FSF

  • FSF ☛ Forty years, forty links

    The Free Software Foundation (FSF)'s fortieth anniversary is approaching. Here are forty links from around the FSF and GNU sites that give a sense of what we've been doing all this time as we work for your freedom. Hint: some of these pages may include answers for the FSF40 Trivia we'll hold during the FSF40 celebration on October 4.

• Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Rock Used as Doorstop For Decades Found to Be Worth Over $1 Million

    Classified as a national treasure of Romania, the nugget has had a home at the Provincial Museum of Buzau – the county in which the relic was found – since 2022.

  • The Conversation ☛ Vikings were captivated by silver – our new analysis of their precious loot reveals how far they travelled to get it

    Tens of thousands of silver objects and coins are known from hoards and settlements across the Scandinavian homelands of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, as well as far overseas – from England to Russia and beyond. The study of this silver’s origins opens a window on the vast web of connections these warrior-traders established – a study invigorated in recent years by scientific techniques drawn from geochemistry.

    Now, our analysis of the Bedale hoard and other Viking valuables promises to change the story of when their fellow-Scandinavians began travelling thousands of miles to the east to secure the silver that so captivated them.

  • Rlang ☛ Another interesting decision, now for ‘Beyond Nelson-Siegel and splines: A model-agnostic Machine Learning framework for discount curve calibration, interpolation and extrapolation’

    The paper introduces a general machine learning framework for yield curve modeling, in which classical parametric models such as Nelson-Siegel and Svensson serve as special cases within a broader class of functional regression approaches. By linearizing the bond pricing/swap valuation equation, I reformulate the estimation of spot rates as a supervised regression problem, where the response variable is derived from observed bond prices and cash flows, and the regressors are constructed as flexible functions of time-to-maturities. I show that this formulation supports a wide range of modeling strategies — including polynomial expansions, Laguerre polynomials, kernel methods, and regularized linearmodels — all within a unified framework that could preserve economic interpretability. This enables not only curve calibration but also static interpolation and extrapolation. By abstracting away from any fixed parametric structure, my framework bridges the gap between traditional yield curve modeling and modern supervised learning, offering a robust, extensible, and data-driven tool for financial applications ranging from asset pricing to regulatory (?) reporting.

• Hardware

  • Russell Coker ☛ Russell Coker: Colmi P80 SmartWatch First Look

    I just bought a Colmi P80 SmartWatch from Aliexpress for $26.11 based on this blog post reviewing it [1]. The main things I was after in this was a larger higher resolution screen because my vision has apparently deteriorated during the time I’ve been wearing a Pinetime [2] and I now can’t read messages on it when not wearing my reading glasses.

    The watch hardware is quite OK. It has a larger and higher resolution screen and looks good. The review said that GadgetBridge (the FOSS SmartWatch software in the F-Droid repository) connected when told that the watch was a P79 and in a recent release got support for sending notifications. In my tests with GadgetBridge it doesn’t set the time, can’t seem to send notifications, can’t read the battery level, and seems not to do anything other than just say “connected”. So I installed the proprietary app, as an aside it’s a neat feature to have the watch display a QR code for installing the app, maybe InfiniTime should have a similar QR code for getting GadgetBridge from the F-Droid repository.

  • [Old] The Trace ☛ Federal Agencies Reject SIG Sauer P320 Amid Safety Concerns

    In October 2020, ICE issued a report linking the gun to an increase in unintentional discharges.

    Between 2017 and 2018, before ICE approved the P320 for service, the agency experienced seven unintentional discharges, resulting in one injury, according to the report. ICE added the P320 to its arsenal in 2019. After 18 months, a dozen officers had reported unintentional discharges with the weapon, resulting in seven injuries. Most of the incidents took place at shooting ranges, but at least one happened in the field, the report said.

  • [Old] New Hampshire Public Radio ☛ Documents detail U.S. soldiers shot by their own Sig Sauer guns; military says no reason for concern

    The shooting at Fort Eustis is one of nine separate incidents involving the U.S. military detailed in documents obtained by New Hampshire Public Radio that echo the claims made in many of the lawsuits against Sig Sauer from individual gun owners and police officers who say their pistols fired without a trigger pull.

    The Army, Air Force, and Marine Corps incident reports, which were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, detail unintentional shootings between September 2020 and June 2023. This is believed to be the first time these unintentional firings have been publicly reported since Sig Sauer won a lucrative contract to supply the Army with new pistols for service members in 2017.

  • [Old] New Hampshire Public Radio ☛ Facing a wave of P320 lawsuits, Sig Sauer asked for immunity. NH lawmakers granted it.

    Over the past few years, Newington-based Sig Sauer has been sued dozens of times by gun owners who were shot by their own P320s, including police officers and federal agents, and who claim the gun’s design — and its lack of an external safety — make the company liable for injuries.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Latvia ☛ Poland won't buy Latvia's unused Covid vaccines

    Poland has refused to buy unused Covid-19 vaccines from Latvia, according to information provided by the Ministry of Health to the government, LETA reports on 19 August.

  • Pro Publica ☛ RFK Jr. Cut Grants for Autism Research While Vowing to Find a Cause

    Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.

    Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Plastics: All around us and inside us

    If microplastics can be as small as 1 micrometer (about the size of a bacterium)—or even 0.1 micrometers (roughly the size of the SARS-CoV-2 virus)—a single toothbrush could theoretically break into 8.5-19 trillion microplastics. And these particles are small enough to be inhaled or ingested.

• Proprietary

  • Pro Publica ☛ Microsoft Didn’t Disclose Key Details to U.S. Officials of China-Based Engineers, Record Shows

  • RTL ☛ No back doors: UK drops demand for access to Apple user data

    Britain has dropped its request for access to Apple users' encrypted data, which had created friction between London and Washington, US intelligence chief Tulsi Gabbard said Tuesday.

    The UK government wanted the tech giant to create a "back door" to let authorities snoop on data uploaded by Apple users if required, for example by law enforcement agencies.

  • Rich Trouton ☛ Reading DDM logging on macOS Sequoia

    Figuring out what declarative device management (DDM) is sending to or requesting from a Mac can be a challenge. Fortunately, this is possible to figure out via the unified system logging using the right predicates when searching. For more details, please see below the jump: [...]

  • Update: Microsoft shuts down questions about layoffs and Israel ties at Gamescom 2025

    Microsoft has responded to Game Developer's request for comment by restating plans to undertake a formal review into a report published by The Guardian that asserts Azure technology is currently being used by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to surveil civilians in Gaza and the West Bank en masse.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Privacy International ☛ Privacy International's submission on Artificial Intelligence in counter-terrorism

      PI believes that the use of AI technologies in counter-terrorism poses significant risks to human rights, risks that in certain cases cannot be adequately mitigated. As a result, governments should not design or deploy AI technologies for counter-terrorism without having first demonstrated their capacity to comply with existing human rights law.

    • EPIC ☛ EPIC Joins Coalition to Urge the FTC to Investigate Grok “Spicy” Image Generator

      The letter notes that while Grok doesn’t offer “Spicy” mode for user-uploaded photos, the tool can still generate nude imagery that looks like specific people, especially harmful for celebrities and underage users. The letter goes on to explain that if the limitation of the “Spicy” mode for user-uploaded photos is ever removed, it “would unleash a torrent of nonconsensual deepfakes and notes that the platform and its chief executive have a penchant for removing moderation safeguards under the guise of free speech.’”

    • The Register UK ☛ AWS patches Q Developer after prompt injection, RCE demo

      At the time this story went to press, AWS had not published any security bulletins about the potential for prompt injection and RCE, or the Amazon Q Developer updates.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Privacy International ☛ Privacy International's submission on discrimination and the right to privacy

      Our submission covers the following topics: [...]

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Become unoptimizable

      Forget surveillance capitalism – let's talk about surveillance infantilism: the drive by the wealthy to spy on you in order to pursue the toddler's goals of getting everything they want from the people around them, without any reciprocal obligations.

      After the Snowden revelations, I started to wonder about something fundamental: why spy at all?

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Login.gov will start accepting passports for identity verification 

      The GSA is leveraging the State Department's “privacy-preserving” API for passport records to compare passport photos submitted to Login.gov.

    • Columbia University ☛ Privacy-Preserving Age Verification—and Its Limitations [PDF]

      The basic concept is to use a privacy-preserving credential scheme, and in particular one that can carry other attributes such as age assertions. One such scheme was proposed by Camenisch and Lysyanskaya [10]; an implementation in a different context, deterring intimate image abuse, was done by Gorman et al. [16] and a comprehensive U.S. legal analysis of the use of the scheme (including a more accessible description of the protocol) was done by Zhang and Bellovin [41].

      There are, however, several difficult problems, including availability of Camenisch-Lysyanskaya (CL) credentials for all users, and economics: who should pay the cost of the necessary infrastructure? From a technical perspective, a key security assumption behind the CL protocol only holds if these credentials are used for multiple purposes. Furthermore, the international nature of the Web presents its own set of governance difficulties.

      In the remainder of this note, I describe the CL protocol, how to use it for the web, and the challenges to its use. I note that many of the obstacles will apply to any age verification scheme.

• Defence/Aggression

  • [Repeat] TechCrunch ☛ Citizen Lab director warns cyber industry about US authoritarian descent

    Ron Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, one of the most prominent organizations investigating government spyware abuses, is sounding the alarm to the cybersecurity community and asking them to step up and join the fight against authoritarianism.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Trump Launches White House Fentanylware (TikTok) Despite Congressional Ban

    The ban on Fentanylware (TikTok) was enacted during former President Biden’s administration, citing national security concerns over the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. The law mandated that Fentanylware (TikTok) either be sold to a U.S.-approved entity or face removal from app stores and hosting services in the country. The Biden White House argued that the platform could be used by China to harvest U.S. user data and spread propaganda.

  • The Strategist ☛ Northern Australia: from developing economy to national powerhouse—if we choose to act

    From the deserts of the Pilbara to the coastlines of Cape York, the future of Australia’s security and prosperity is already being written in the north.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Australia probes Nauru-China business deal

    Officials were looking into whether that deal complied with a security pact between Canberra and Nauru.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Australia probes Nauru-China business deal

    Australia was Tuesday investigating whether Pacific microstate Nauru breached a security treaty by inking a lucrative business deal with a Chinese company. Nauru last week announced it had signed a US$650 million economic development agreement with the China Rural Revitilisation and Development Corporation.

  • Hong Kong activists granted asylum in U.K., Australia

    Activist Tony Chung and ex-lawmaker Ted Hui were both prosecuted under Hong Kong’s national security law.

  • France24 ☛ Aid workers in the crosshairs

    The world is becoming more dangerous for humanitarian workers. New data from the Aid Worker Security Report shows that a record 383 were killed in the line of duty last year. On World Humanitarian Day, we ask the author of the report why we're seeing a spike in attacks against NGO personnel - and what can be done to protect them.

  • France24 ☛ Syria, Israel hold US-mediated talks in Paris on regional de-escalation

    Syria’s foreign minister met with an Israeli delegation in Paris on Tuesday to discuss de-escalation and non-interference in Syrian affairs, state news agency SANA reported. The US-mediated talks yielded agreements aimed at regional stability. Washington has been working to address security concerns in Syria and Lebanon, which Israel says justify its military actions.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Taiwan, responding to Convicted Felon’s invasion comments, says it must rely on itself for security

    US President The Insurrectionist said Chinese President Pooh-tin Jinping told him China would not invade Taiwan while he is in office.

  • New York Times ☛ Dihydroxyacetone Man Revokes Security Clearances of 37 Former and Current Officials

    The move is the latest effort by the Convicted Felon administration to shift the public’s attention to the 2016 election.

  • New York Times ☛ A ‘Dexter’ Obsessed Man Highlights a Gap in British Law

    Inspired by the TV serial killer, Jacob Power wrote out detailed murder plans and dug graves. Still, prosecutors could not charge him with attempted murder.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • ABC ☛ Judge rejects Trump administration's bid to unseal Jeffery Epstein's grand jury transcripts

    The Congress documents are to be turned over to the committee on Friday, but it is unclear exactly which or how many documents might be produced.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Flying Spaghetti Monster = Trump's Effort to Evade Epstein Files Scandal

    The one thing Trump has been consistently successful at in his lifetime: leading the media away from his failures.

    Australia’s 60 Minutes did what CBS’ 60 Minutes in the US wouldn’t do. It stayed on course and covered the Epstein files scandal with this video aired August 17.

• Environment

  • Overpopulation

    • Harvard University ☛ How to reverse nation’s declining birth rate?

      Financial-incentive programs for prospective parents don’t work as a way to reverse falling birth rates, Harvard health experts said on Tuesday about a policy option that has been in the news in recent months.

      Instead, they said, a more effective approach would be to target issues that make parenting difficult: the high cost of living, a lack of affordable childcare, and better options for older parents who still want to see their families grow.

    • The Vietnamese Magazine ☛ When the Cost of Living Becomes Birth Control in Việt Nam - Part Two

      According to Matt Jackson, the UNFPA’s representative in Việt Nam, the real barriers to parenthood are the immense economic and social pressures young people face. He cites a long list of obstacles, including high housing costs, lack of childcare services, job instability, and growing fears over conflict and climate change.

• Finance

  • Mitchell Hashimoto ☛ Advice for Tech Non-Profits

    It is surprisingly difficult to simply figure out: how am I supposed to give you money?

    Tech projects usually nail the metaphorical swipe-a-credit-card donations to provide small one-time amounts and specific smaller tiers ($X/month). But a lot of donors don't work this way. I don't work this way.

    I donate through a donor-advised fund (DAF). To donate, I need -- at a minimum -- the verifiable EIN of a tax-exempt organization (DAFs can only contribute to registered non-profits). On top of that, I usually need a physical address and the contact information for a real human that can work with the fund managers to process the donation. DAFs are just one of many vehicles for donation, though.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Don Marti ☛ Don Marti: habit power, technical power, political power

    Three ways to increase privacy: habits, technology, politics. The options available have changed, but in general it’s more effective to put some time into all three than to max out on one.

    habit power: spend less time doing activities that can be surveilled. See you at the public library. This overlaps with the next one because one of the habits you can form is the habit of using a better-protected device like a properly set up laptop instead of a high-surveillance device like a mobile phone or smart TV. This one can only scale with the time put into it, and gets a multiplier effect when better technology and political options are available.

    technical power: Choose tools and options to limit surveillance.

  • New York Times ☛ California Republicans File Suit Seeking to Block Newsom Redistricting Plan

    Republican state lawmakers argue that Democratic lawmakers violated 30-day disclosure rules in the California Constitution.

  • New Yorker ☛ The Revised Laws of Robotics

    A robot must not hurt another robot, outside of some sort of cool sporting event you can place bets on.

  • FAIR ☛ ‘It’s Really a Full-On Attack on the Voting Rights Act’: CounterSpin interview with Ari Berman on voting rights erasure

    Janine Jackson interviewed Mother Jones‘ Ari Berman about the erasure of the Voting Rights Act for the August 15, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Texas’ Tarrant County Cuts Over 100 Polling Sites, Reduces Early Voting Locations

    ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

    Officials in a large North Texas county decided this week to cut more than 100 Election Day polling sites and reduce the number of early voting locations, amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

  • EDRI ☛ CSA Regulation Document Pool

    Privacy and safety are mutually enforcing rights. People’s ability to communicate without unjustified intrusion - whether online or offline - is vital for their rights and freedoms, as well as for the development of vibrant and secure communities and society

  • Wired ☛ AI Isn’t Coming for Hollywood. It's Already Arrived

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ New FOIAs Show Barr’s DOJ Coordinated With Congress On Destroying Section 230

    During the last year of the Trump administration, there was this weird period where the Bill Barr DOJ decided that it could destroy the internet. It came out of Donald Trump declaring that Section 230 was bad for whatever reason Donald Trump thinks anything is bad, and telling his Attorney General to do something about it. This kicked off a weird time where Bill Barr was suddenly criticizing 230 (even though 230 has nothing to do with the DOJ) and ran a silly process to come up with “ideas” for how to change 230 (again, totally outside of the DOJ’s authority).

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Get Up to Date on the State of Censorship and Then DO SOMETHING

    The school year is getting back into gear which unfortunately means that the book banners will get back at it in force at local school board meetings.

    I am here with links to help you get up to speed on the book banning conversation in America right now: [...]

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Prince Andrew book edited to remove Epstein claims about Melania Trump

    The letter, sent on Aug 6, is said to have demanded that Mr Biden retract his comments and issue an apology or face a $1bn (£726m) legal action.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • JURIST ☛ Kurdistan authorities urged to release journalist following prison sentence extension

    His lawyer, Mohammed Abdullah, called the sentence “oppressive” and “predetermined,” noting that it repeats prior rulings. The charge stems from allegations that Sherwani threatened a counter-terrorism officer and his family while in detention, under Article 229 of the Iraqi Penal Code, which addresses assaults against state employees. Sherwani denies the accusations, and his legal team has indicated plans to appeal.

  • CPJ ☛ Over 4 years added to sentence of imprisoned Kurdish journalist Sherwan Sherwani

    “Sentencing Sherwani for a third time on dubious charges and imposing the maximum penalty shows the authorities’ determination to silence his critical voice and keep him behind bars,” said Doja Daoud, CPJ’s Levant program coordinator. “Kurdish authorities should recognize the harm these actions inflict on the region’s reputation and immediately release Sherwani.”

  • CPJ ☛ Madagascar threatens criminal sanctions against 2 journalists

    “The Malagasy government is exposing a worrisome intolerance of reporting that challenges official narratives,” said CPJ Africa Program Coordinator Muthoki Mumo. “Authorities should withdraw their threats against journalists Gaëlle Borgia and Pauline Le Troquier, and refrain from further attempts to intimidate independent journalists.”

  • Common Dreams ☛ Rights Groups File Complaint Against U.S. Attorney who Retaliated Against the Press

    Any serious journalist would tell you that it’d be journalistic malpractice for a local journalist not to report that a prominent public official listed a boarded-up house as his official residence in order to claim eligibility for his position. But that’s not how John Sarcone III, acting U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, sees it.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Three Crises of Labor - by Hamilton Nolan - How Things Work

    In the middle of the 20th century, one in three American workers was a union member. Last year, that portion fell to less than one in ten. The most fundamental thing holding back union power in this country is: There are just not enough union members.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Unicorn Media ☛ Groklaw Domain Hijacked? Site Now Serving Crypto Content

    Groklaw’s storied domain has fallen into unexpected hands. What’s behind the sudden flood of crypto content—and is the site lost for good?

    [...]

    For another six years or so, Groklaw continued to report on the intersection of law and open source, but without the daily audience it enjoyed and pretty much without PJ, who quickly returned to private life. For years after the site quit updating, it remained online with all of its SCO coverage intact.

    What’s happening to the site now isn’t clear: it could have been hacked or it could be that the domain name expired and some crypto folks have picked it up. Most of the information about the domain name is kept private, protected by the Greenland-based company Withheld for Privacy, and there’s nothing unusual about that these days. According to GoDaddy, the WHOIS database isn’t showing any activity around the domain: it was registered on October 3, 2003 and is set to expire on October 3, 2027.

    However, it looks as if Groklaw as we knew it is gone, and that’s a loss to the community.

  • Techdirt ☛ Musk’s Starlink Gets Mad At The State Of Virginia For Refusing To Shower It With Broadband Subsidies It Doesn’t Deserve

    There are $42.5 billion in broadband grants that are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents).

    But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program’s guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is affordable to poor people, and to ensure that Elon Musk gets billions in new broadband subsidies for his expensive and increasingly congested satellite broadband company, Starlink.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Techdirt ☛ Fired Antitrust Official Reveals How Trump’s Friends Turned Justice Into A Pay-To-Play Business

  Roger Alford, who served as principal deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s antitrust division before being fired, has now delivered a blistering public account of what he witnessed inside the Trump administration’s Justice Department. Speaking at the TPI Aspen Forum and writing in UnHerd, Alford has essentially confirmed a pay-to-play system that many people expected to arise under Trump, while also destroying any pretense of principled antitrust enforcement (which people like Matt Stoller naively insisted would continue under Trump).

  For the few hipster antitrust folks among you, who still harbored credulous hopes that the Trump administration’s “populist” approach to antitrust would continue the more aggressive merger enforcement we saw under Lina Khan, Alford’s account should put that fantasy to rest permanently. What emerges instead is a picture of an administration where hiring the right Trump-connected lobbyists can get you out of even the most solid antitrust case.

• Inside Towers ☛ Google Fined $36M in Australia Over Anticompetitive Search Deals With Telecoms

  From December 2019 to March 2021, the agreements required Google Search to be exclusively pre-installed on Android devices sold by the carriers, blocking other search engines. In return, Telstra and Optus received a share of Google’s ad revenue. Google admitted the deals likely reduced competition and is cooperating with the ACCC, which will ask a court to approve the fine.

• Nick Heer ☛ How Invested Are You in the Apple Ecosystem?

  It is a good question; you should take this quick poll if you have a couple of minutes.

• The Register UK ☛ AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is ‘Dumbest thing I’ve ever heard’

  Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has suggested firing junior workers because AI can do their jobs is “the dumbest thing I've ever heard.”

  Garman made that remark in conversation with AI investor Matthew Berman, during which he talked up AWS’s Kiro AI-assisted coding tool and said he’s encountered business leaders who think AI tools “can replace all of our junior people in our company.”

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Vidit Bhargava ☛ The problem with AI filmmaking

      Why is it a problem? The problem is first, Generative AI is largely derivative. It is trained on hours of video content made by others and re-urgitates whatever it's trained on. Second, when AI is used to replace human artistic impression it's not only unethical but also artistically sloppy and lacks taste.

• Copyrights

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Spreadshirt to artists: We’re taking your designs for AI

    Spreadshirt will let random users mess with your designs via AI by default — unless you specifically opt out. By leaving Spreadshirt.