Leftovers

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ If you had absolutely no worries about money, and no fear, what are ten things you would do this week?

  I often find we define our opportunities through the restrictions (real or imaginary). I’ve met my fair share of people of different professions who’d always start with the “It would be nice but we don’t have the resources”. It’s understandable.

  I find that if we want to explore opportunities and possibilities outside the box of our daily grind, we need to think about things we might not be able to fully achieve.

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-08-13 [Older] Premier League: from red success to grey failure – how kit colours appear to impact performance

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-08-15 [Older] Some people just don’t like music – it may be down to their brain wiring

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-08-14 [Older] Quantum alternative to GPS navigation will be tested on US military spaceplane

  • Science Alert ☛ JWST Just Found a New Moon Hiding Around Uranus (And It's Tiny)

    "No other planet has as many small inner moons as Uranus, and their complex inter-relationships with the rings hint at a chaotic history that blurs the boundary between a ring system and a system of moons," says planetary scientist Matthew Tiscareno of the SETI Institute.

• Career/Education

  • Manuel Moreale ☛ P&B: Tom Critchlow

    This is the 104th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Tom Critchlow and his blog, tomcritchlow.com

  • Annie Mueller ☛ Quit being support staff

    That's an enormous difference, but that difference isn't taught, is it?

  • BBC ☛ Denmark scraps book tax to combat "reading crisis"

    The Danish government has announced it will abolish a 25% sales tax on books, in an effort to combat a "reading crisis".

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Denmark to abolish VAT on books in effort to get more people reading

    At 25%, the country’s tax rate on books is the highest in the world, a policy the government believes is contributing to a growing “reading crisis”.

  • Le Monde ☛ Denmark to end book tax to encourage people to read

    The latest education report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) raised alarm in Denmark when it found 24% of Danish 15-year-olds cannot understand a simple text, up four percentage points in a decade.

• Hardware

  • Alex Ellis ☛ I Bought An N100 Mini PC, Then Another

    Compared to the latest Ryzen processor, the N100 is no Usain Bolt - but it does come with native support for an NVMe boot drive, support for double the RAM, 4x 2.5Gbps Ethernet ports, and full-sized HDMI, and its power brick is included. You can buy it as a bare-bones kit, or pre-populated with OEM RAM and disk.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ If You've Breathed Wildfire Smoke, Scientists Just Found Something Horrifying

    As detailed in a new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health journal, health data analysis shows that wildfire-related deaths in Europe have been underestimated by a whopping 93 percent, partially because the average person doesn't know that the smoke from these conflagrations can travel hundreds or even thousands of miles from the initial fire.

  • Amos Wenger ☛ The science of loudness

    How do all these decibels fit together?

    Are the decibels from my watch and the decibels from my amp related? And if so, how? I’ve decided to spend twenty minutes of your time answering that question.

  • Heliomass ☛ There's Bees Up Top

    Well, it turns out, several rooftops have been turned over to the ares of beekeeping and growing vegetables. I had the opportunity to visit the rooftop of one of Montreal’s downtown office buildings. And in doing so, got up close and personal with quite a lot of bees.

  • Harvard University ☛ Physicians embrace AI note-taking technology

    The findings, published in JAMA Network Open, draw on surveys of more than 1,400 physicians and advanced practice providers at both Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham and Atlanta’s Emory Healthcare.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft puts the squeeze on onmicrosoft.com freeloaders [Ed: Microsoft running out of money?

    As of October 15, Microsoft has announced that it will begin throttling emails. The limit will be set to 100 external recipients per organization per 24-hour rolling window. From December 1, Microsoft will start rolling out the restrictions across tenants, starting with tenants with fewer than three seats and eventually reaching tenants with more than 10,001 seats by June 2026.

  • Tyler Thorsted ☛ Page Perfect

    But the one thing they all have in common is their file formats. Unfortunately they used the same extensions many word processing software used during this time and after. .DOC and also .STY which was used frequently by Microsoft Word as well. It makes sense, a Document is shortened to DOC and a Stylesheet is shortened to STY. So if you have any DOC files which don’t open in Word, you might look here. The other problem is the file format used is not plain text and is in a binary proprietary format.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ AI Experts No Longer Saving for Retirement Because They Assume AI Will Kill Us All by Then

      The meteoric rise of artificial intelligence has instilled an existential fear in "AI doomers," a subset of people who believe the tech will cause humans to lose their jobs, fall prey to a dominating species of rogue superintelligent AIs, and even eventually get wiped out altogether.

    • The Atlantic ☛ The AI Doomers Are Getting Doomier

      But at the same time, the underlying concerns that animate AI doomers have become harder to dismiss as chatbots seem to drive people into psychotic episodes and instruct users in self-mutilation. Even if generative-AI products are not closer to ending the world, they have already, in a sense, gone rogue.

    • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Fans Are Brutally Mocking Him for Incessantly "Gooning to AI Anime"

      A separate clip of Ani that Musk responded to with the same tweet has been taken down, suggesting even for Musk, it may have gone a little too far.

    • Gizmodo ☛ Even Elon Musk's Fans Are Making Fun of Him Now

      “It appears Elon has shifted focus from Mars to Uranus,” one Musk fan tweeted Thursday, ribbing him for his torrent of cartoon girls. “Please tell me that he got hacked,” another person tweeted, seemingly in disbelief at the rate of posting, with someone else insisting, “I think from all these posts you’re really into Hentai.”

      Still another account captured a sentiment that’s become much more common this week, “BRO STOP GOONING TO AI ANIME AND TAKE US TO MARS.”

    • Press Gazette ☛ Wired says 'AI-written' story did not have 'proper fact-check process'

      Press Gazette revealed on Thursday that Wired and Business Insider were among publications in the UK and US to have removed news features written by a journalist calling themselves Blanchard over concerns they appeared to be AI-generated works of fiction.

    • APNIC ☛ Why your AI factory's biggest bottleneck isn't the GPU — it's the network

      Welcome to the hidden bottleneck of the modern ‘AI factory’ — the sprawling, multi-billion-dollar clusters of servers that are the engines of modern AI. The dirty little secret of the AI industry is that for many of these supercomputers, the biggest constraint isn’t the GPU. It’s the network.

    • Tim Bradshaw ☛ The glorious AI future

      This, of course, is all hype and lies. The ‘AI’ systems we have almost certainly aren’t a path to intelligence of any kind. The most likely use they have is the use they’re being put to now: weaponized disinformation machines. Even without intelligence or any real possibility of reaching it they are busily destroying our ability to think.

      But let’s assume the glorious AI future happens. Let’s assume that it’s not just a vast speculative bubble to make some plutocrats even more pluto, and that we will have access to real, cheap, machine intelligence in a few years. Let’s ignore the possibility that these intelligent machines decide to eliminate or enslave us, which is inconvenient to the politicians.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Prompt-inject an AI chatbot with … an image!

      Prompt injection is easy because you can’t separate the data and the instructions — it’s all one pile of words.There is no way to fix this. The AI vendors are Daffy Duck running around frantically nailing a thousand little filters on the front, and then Bugs Bunny just casually strolls through.

    • Jorge Sanz ☛ Anti AI zip bomb with Caddy

      Found this nice post on how to publish a zip bomb on my website as a honeypot for AI crawlers that don’t respect the robots.txt directive. The idea is that I have a hidden link on all pages of my website that points to a URL that returns the bomb. You don’t see it. Legit crawlers won’t follow it. AI crawlers will do, and I hope they spend some CPU cycles trying to download it.

      I have no idea how fast AI crawlers detect and avoid these traps, but I change the name of the trap on every deployment to mess with them a bit more than the OP. I’m not following closely the logs of my web, and there’s not much here published anyway, but any small effort seems worthwhile these days of so much AI annoyance.

    • Dave DeGraw ☛ What the hell is going on right now?

      Engineers are burning out. Orgs expect their senior engineering staff to be able to review and contribute to “vibe-coded” features that don’t work. My personal observation is that the best engineers are highly enthusiastic about helping newer team members contribute and learn.

      Instead of their comments being taken to heart, reflected on, and used as learning opportunities, hapless young coders are instead using feedback as simply the next prompt in their “AI” masterpiece. I personally have witnessed and heard first-hand accounts where it was incredibly obvious a junior engineer was (ab)using LLM tools.

    • Futurism ☛ Wired and Business Insider Accidentally Published AI-Generated Slop Articles by Seemingly Fake Journalist

      Renowned publications including Wired and Business Insider have been caught publishing what appears to be AI slop.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Wired and Business Insider remove 'AI-written' freelance articles

      Wired and Business Insider have removed news features written by a freelance journalist after concerns they are likely AI-generated works of fiction.

      Freedom of expression non-profit Index on Censorship is also in the process of taking down a magazine article by the same author after concerns were raised by Press Gazette. The publisher has concluded that it “appears to have been written by AI”.

      Several other UK and US online publications have published questionable articles by the same person, going by the name of Margaux Blanchard, since April.

    • MLQ ☛ The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 [PDF]

      Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return. The outcomes are so starkly divided across both buyers (enterprises, mid-market, SMBs) and builders (startups, vendors, consultancies) that we call it the GenAI Divide. Just 5% of integrated AI pilots are extracting millions in value, while the vast majority remain stuck with no measurable P&L impact. This divide does not seem to be driven by model quality or regulation, but seems to be determined by approach.

    • Futurism ☛ Wall Street Appears to Be Having Serious Doubts About AI

      But for investors, that cash represents a dream: that AI will someday do more than generate video essays explaining that Nubian giants built the pyramids, and become a major financial driver.

      Whether that will ultimately come to pass is anyone's guess. But for the first time since US president Donald Trump's bizarre tariff scramble back in April, Wall Street is clearly getting the jitters.

    • Mozilla

      • The Register UK ☛ Saved you a click: Firefox 142 offers AI summaries of links [Ed: Mozilla jumping the shark because LLMs don't summarise text, only shorten it, and this is parasitic]

        Good news, everyone! The new version of Mozilla's browser now makes even more extensive use of AI, providing summaries of linked content and offering developers the ability to add LLM support to extensions.

  • Social Control Media

    • International Business Times ☛ Fury In Africa As Tourists Block Wildebeest Migration, Sending Some Back Into Crocodile-Infested Waters

      Footage circulating widely on social media shows tourists stepping out of safari vehicles and clustering along the riverbanks, leaving the animals barely a metre to pass.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Arch Linux takes a pounding as DDoS attack enters week two

      Some joyless ne'er-do-well has loosed a botnet on the community-driven Arch Linux distro, with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack now in its second week of sustained disruption.

    • Linuxiac ☛ Arch Linux Confirms Ongoing Denial‑of‑Service Attack

      Arch Linux confirms a denial-of-service attack disrupting the AUR, forums, and main site, with developers working alongside providers to restore stability.

    • Fortra LLC ☛ Warlock ransomware: What you need to know

      Warlock is a ransomware operation that emerged in 2025, combining the traditional "double extortion" tactics of encrypting victims' files so they cannot be accessed, and threatening to release data stolen from the company's network.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • AJ Bourg ☛ Emailed Auth Codes

      I was particularly peeved the other day when I was setting up an account to have my fingerprints taken for a background check I need to do. They had extremely bespoke password rules. They wanted a second factor. All to just simply schedule a time for me to go into a place and physically hand over my ID. They don’t need such security. It should just be a “one way” system where I enter my information and I have no way to retrieve it back, and then there would be no need for such security measures.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Verge ☛ Meta is going to stuff Midjourney AI images into your feed

      Meta is partnering with Midjourney to “license their aesthetic technology” for use in its own models and products, Meta’s new chief AI officer, Alexandr Wang, announced on Friday. The partnership involves a “technical collaboration between our research teams,” Wang said, suggesting the deal involves more than simply using Midjourney’s existing product across Meta services.

    • Don Marti ☛ building wealth the privacy way?

      Other news and academic literature suggests a much more plausible cause and effect relationship. It’s not that wealthier people choose privacy over personalization, but that people who choose privacy build more wealth. Although a typical personalized ad is likely to be somewhat better than a typical non-personalized ad—because an ad campaign with a creative budget is likely to also have a data budget—the benefits of personalization, of usually getting an ad that’s better matched to you, are swamped by the risks of being more accurately targeted for a win-lose deal.

    • [Old] India Times ☛ HC to bank: SC ruled Aadhaar not must to open a/c, pay 50k for delay

      Microfibers Pvt Ltd could not rent out its premises in Nariman Point without a bank account. In Jan 2018, it applied to the bank to open an account. In April 2018, the bank replied that providing an Aadhaar card was mandatory for opening an account. The petitioner pointed out that Supreme Court's interim orders suggested that insisting on an Aadhaar card was not legal or proper. Since the bank did not yield, the petition was filed in HC.

    • The Moscow Times ☛ Regions Calling: How Russians Are Adapting to WhatsApp and Telegram Throttling

      Though Russia has long flirted with the idea of a “sovereign internet,” when our editorial team named this newsletter “Regions Calling,” we did not expect events to take the turn that they did. Indeed, for over a week now, calling has become the one thing that people across Russia’s regions are struggling to do after authorities restricted voice and video calls on WhatsApp and Telegram.

    • EDRI ☛ 16 countries burned Poland’s bridges on the CSA Regulation: What now?

      The European Commission’s proposed CSA Regulation – nicknamed Chat Control – has now been at an impasse in the Council of EU Member States for three years. The proposal faced overwhelming concerns about its incompatibility with EU’s fundamental rights and criticism from a broad range of stakeholders.

    • Techdirt ☛ UK Backs Down On Apple Encryption Backdoor—But The Secret Deal Raises New Questions

      We had written about this—and how dangerous it was—the day the news leaked that the UK had issued such an order. In response, Apple turned off its iCloud encryption in the UK, making everyone way less safe.

      Of course, I say “leaked” because the demands to Apple were never officially discussed by the UK government, who hoped to keep this unconscionable attack on everyone’s privacy a total secret. Since then, Apple has been fighting it out (still in secret) in the UK to try to get this order blocked, though it was believed that they only had limited legal routes to stopping it.

    • The Telegraph UK ☛ Russia orders the Max state messaging app to be installed on all phones

      Max, a messaging app launched by state-owned technology company VK, will come pre-installed on phones and devices from September, the Kremlin announced on Thursday.

      Independent journalists and analysts in Russia have described Max as Moscow’s answer to China’s WeChat and warned that the app will allow the state to tighten its grip on the online activities of its citizens and crack down on dissent.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Digital Music News ☛ Trump to Extend TikTok Ban Deadline Indefinitely for a Buyer

    On Friday, President Trump said he intends to keep extending the deadline by which TikTok must divest from its Chinese parent company ByteDance, until there’s a suitable buyer. Congress approved a federal ban on TikTok last year unless its parent company sold its controlling stake to a U.S.-based buyer. But Trump has thus far extended the deadline three times since his second term began.

  • Air Force Times ☛ F-16s intercept Russian spy planes near Alaska two days in a row

    In separate incidents on Wednesday and Thursday, Russian IL-20 surveillance and reconnaissance planes flew into the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ, prompting NORAD’s response.

  • Pro Publica ☛ How DOGE [sic] Left Mohammad Halimi’s Life in Tatters

    Errors: DOGE [sic] staffers exposed a sensitive U.S.-funded Afghanistan program and falsely suggested a contractor was involved in an off-books mission.

    Consequences: DOGE [sic]’s public outing led to a Taliban intelligence service crackdown in Kabul.

  • RFERL ☛ Hungarian President Deletes Word 'Russian' From Statement On Ukraine Strikes

    The post was taken down shortly after it went up, only to be replaced by a nearly identical statement with the word "Russian" ("orosz" in Hungarian) removed from the first sentence.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Pentagon’s realistic electronic warfare system to move to Navy lab

    The Defense Advanced Research Agency has been developing its Digital Radio Frequency Battlespace Emulator, or DRBE, since 2019 with the goal of helping improve the Defense Department’s ability to test new electronic warfare capabilities or provide realistic EW effects like radar jamming and spoofing.

  • YLE ☛ Finnish Defence Minister: Russia does not genuinely want peace

    According to Häkkänen, all signs and intelligence indicate that Russia has no intention of phasing down its war effort.

    "Russia is stalling and seems to assume that it will ultimately outlast Western democracy," he suggested.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Hungary's President removes ‘Russian’ in statement on Russian missile strike in Mukachevo

      Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok removed the word "Russian" from "Russian missile attack" in a post about Mukachevo, a town in Zakarpattia, which was hit for the first time since the start of Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion in Ukraine. 

      An hour after the original post appeared, President Sulyok amended the text about the attack in Mukachevo, where many ethnic Hungarians reside. The original statement expressed deep solidarity for the survivors of the Russian missile attack on Mukachevo and wished them a speedy recovery. The word “Russian” was deleted from this statement.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • TMZ ☛ Ghislaine Maxwell Doesn't Believe Jeffrey Epstein Killed Himself

    Here's the deal ... on Friday, the Justice Department released a transcript of the interview Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche recently conducted with Maxwell ... and she's straight-up asked her opinion on his 2019 death.

• Environment

  • The Conversation ☛ Why Ireland’s mild temperatures won’t protect it from the climate crisis

    Ireland’s position on the edge of the Atlantic – the very reason for its mild climate – makes it especially vulnerable. Those recent severe storms remind us that climate change is a serious threat to wellbeing and, in the longer-term, survival of human life as we know it.

  • The Register UK ☛ Google games numbers to make AI look less thirsty

    However, Google's claims are misleading because they draw a false equivalence between onsite and total water consumption, according to Shaolei Ren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside and one of the authors of the papers cited in the Google report.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • American Oversight ☛ American Oversight Obtains Startling DHS Admission: It No Longer Preserves Text Messages for Noem, Other Top Officials

      DHS decision to halt text message retention coincided with timing of scrutiny over Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation.

    • American Oversight ☛ As DOGE [sic] Cuts Harm Millions, Americans Are Denied Basic Information About the Agency

      What has followed threatens the foundation of democratic accountability itself: DOGE [sic] operatives have been dismantling programs that provide essential services for millions of people with almost no oversight or independent scrutiny.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Kilowatt Madness

      And this is only the start. Many analysts expect further large increases in electricity prices over the next year or more, largely because of surging demand from AI data centers. The electricity outlook is sufficiently scary that Texas — Texas! — has passed a new law giving the grid operator the right to cut off data centers during periods of power shortage.

      An aside: In the America I grew up in, people who made big boasts about what they would achieve then completely failed to deliver were considered unserious blowhards. What happened to that country?

    • Inside Towers ☛ Data Center Boom Straining U.S. Electric Grid

      Large data center developments that are connecting to PJM, one of largest regional transmission organizations (RTO) in the U.S., should provide their own power generation, according to U.S. electricity market researcher, Monitoring Analytics, MobileWorldLive reported. The research firm warns that the existing electrical grid infrastructure is unable to handle surging demand.

    • Tavis Ormandy ☛ Anubis.

      If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s similar to how bitcoin mining works. Anubis is not literally mining cryptocurrency, but it is similar in concept to other projects that do exactly that, perhaps most famously Coinhive and JSECoin.

      So how do some useless SHA-256 operations prove you’re not a bot? The argument goes that this simply makes it too expensive to crawl your website. The typical datacenter used by an AI crawler

      This… makes no sense to me. Almost by definition, an AI vendor will have a datacenter full of compute capacity. It feels like this solution has the problem backwards, effectively only limiting access to those without resources or trying to conserve them.

• Finance

  • Borneo ☛ Applications for jobless benefits increase as layoffs remain subdued

    More Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, but United States (US) layoffs remain in the same historically healthy range of the past few years.

    Applications for unemployment benefits for the week ending August 16 rose by 11,000 to 235,000, the Labor Department reported.

    That’s slightly more than the 229,000 new applications that economists had forecast.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Meta partners with Midjourney to license AI tech for future products

    The move signals Meta's push to differentiate its products on visual quality, as it looks to revitalize its artificial intelligence efforts amid heated competition with rivals, including ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Google.

  • IT Wire ☛ Netplus selects Nokia for IPTV services delivery in India

    Indian ISP Netplus has deployed Nokia routing and networking technology to deliver IPTV services across the Punjab and other regions on the subcontinent.

  • The Verge ☛ The power shift inside OpenAI

    When I asked if he imagined OpenAI eventually resembling Alphabet, where search profits bankroll a constellation of experimental bets, he didn’t hesitate about the need for another leader. “We have a big consumer tech company. We have this mega-scale infrastructure project for humanity. We have a research lab. And then we have all of the new stuff—the robots, the devices, the BCI, the crazy ideas. I can’t run four companies. It’s an open question if I can run one, but I certainly can’t run four.”

  • New York Times ☛ Intel Agrees to Sell U.S. a 10% Stake in Its Business

    The deal is among the largest government interventions in a U.S. company since the rescue of the auto industry after the 2008 financial crisis.

  • BBC ☛ US government announces 10% stake in chipmaker Intel

    The funds were set to come from grants that were previously awarded but not yet paid, Intel said, including monies promised under the US CHIPS and Science Act which was passed during President Joe Biden's administration.

  • CNBC ☛ U.S. takes 10% stake in Intel Trump expands control of private sector

    Earlier this week, Intel announced that SoftBank would make a $2 billion investment in the chipmaker.

  • The Register UK ☛ US government snaps up 10% of Intel for $8.9B

    The funds were already allocated under the CHIPS Act and Secure Enclave program

  • NBC ☛ U.S. takes 10% stake in Intel, Trump says

    While the U.S. held temporary stakes in firms at the center of the 2008-2009 global financial meltdown as part of a bailout, this move is unusual since the economy is not embroiled in a crisis. Congress published a study in 2003 that examined the impact of the federal government taking direct stakes in public companies, concluding that doing so would “not offer a free lunch” and expose taxpayers to “greater risk” alongside the upside potential.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ U.S. gov't will take a 9.9% ownership stake in Intel — Trump administration won't get a board seat and is set to serve as passive investor (Update)

    That money will come from $5.7 billion in grants that have yet to be paid out to Intel under the CHIPS and Science Act alongside $3.2 billion for the Secure Enclave program, for which the company is making chips for the U.S. Department of Defense. Intel has already received $2.2 billion of its CHIPS Act funding.

  • Wired ☛ The Trump-Intel Deal Is Official

    The United States government is making an $8.9 billion investment in Intel, representing a 9.9 percent stake in the company, according to a press release the company published on Friday.

    The investment will be funded by $5.7 billion in grants Intel was awarded under the 2022 CHIPS Act and $3.2 billion the company was awarded as part of the Secure Enclave program, the press release says.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Radical juries

    The inability of the public to get its way isn't just an impressionistic view – it's an empirical finding, based on a representative sample of 1,779 policy outcomes, that politicians ignore the will of the people in favor of the will of billionaires: [...]

  • The Verge ☛ Microsoft’s new NFL deal could let you blame Copilot for terrible playcalls

    Along with their multiyear contract extension, Microsoft and the NFL announced that the Sideline Viewing System for every team is now connecting to more than 2,500 Surface Copilot Plus PCs (complete with massive “Copilot” logos on the case carrying strap).

  • The Verge ☛ Longtime Bungie head Pete Parsons steps down

    Bungie CEO Pete Parsons has announced that he’s leaving the company one decade after taking on the role. In an update on Thursday, Parsons wrote that he has “decided to pass the torch” to longtime Bungie developer Justin Truman.

  • EPIC ☛ Sanity Prevails: Second Circuit Rules that Section 230 Doesn’t Protect Technology Company That Created “Defeat Devices” to Enable Clean Air Act Violations

    Yesterday, a federal appeals court beat back one of the most egregious recent tech industry attempts at securing overbroad Section 230 interpretations. In United States v. EZ Lynk, the government sued a company that creates “defeat devices,” which overrule automobiles’ on-board computers to help drivers evade the Clean Air Act’s emissions controls. EZ Lynk—supported by an amicus brief from organizations such as the Chamber of Progress, NetChoice, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation—argued that it could not be held liable under Section 230. Luckily, in this case, the court saw through the tactic and ruled that the lawsuit could proceed.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Advertising Is Spotify's 'Achilles' Heel,' Report Claims

    Not too favorably, according to the mentioned Business Insider report, which pointed first to buyers’ qualms with Spotify’s customer service. Of course, the profitability-minded company has been on a (relative) cost-cutting tear – with CEO Daniel Ek having acknowledged the involved layoffs as more operationally disruptive than anticipated.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • DeSmog ☛ Murdoch-Owned TalkRadio Airs Anti-Climate Attacks Six Times a Day

      Analysis by campaign group Stop Funding Heat, shared with DeSmog, reveals that guests and hosts on TalkRadio spread climate misinformation 190 times over the month — an average of six times a day — with interviews and call-ins peppered with climate science denial.

    • Techdirt ☛ Hundreds Of HHS Staff Sign Letter Begging RFK Jr. To Stop Making Them Targets With Misinformation

      As you will recall, a single gunmen opened fire on a CDC campus in Atlanta earlier this month, claiming to have been injured by COVID vaccines. The rhetoric he had used prior to the shooting closely aligned with what RFK Jr. had been spouting for years. While Kennedy took nearly a day to even publicly comment on the shooting, more local CDC leadership was fielding questions from the Atlanta team that amounted to how the organization was going to ensure that misinformation stopped flowing from Kennedy’s mouth such that they had become targets for this gunman in the first place. They got their answer when Kennedy commented publicly the next week, reiterating all that same rhetoric that caused them to be targeted.

      It’s perhaps not surprising then that hundreds of CDC staff signed an open letter essentially begging Kennedy to stop putting them in potential crosshairs.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ PragerU Wants to Propagandize to Your Kids

      Right-wing media outlet PragerU is known for its misleading viral videos that it has long created for teens and adults. The operation is increasingly seeking to reach children, hoping to fill the Sesame Street–sized hole left by the defunding of PBS.

    • Bitdefender ☛ Europol says Telegram post about 50,000 Qilin ransomware award is fake

      Now, that certainly would be news worth writing about if it were true (although, if I can be churlish, I view the size of the reward as not really being in the same league as other bounties offered in the past), but it has been confirmed as nonsense by Europol itself.

      As with much of social media, it's easy for anyone to create an account claiming to be whoever they like. And if any posts they make happen to generate some traction, it can soon be the case that the news is multiplying and spreading uncontrolled around the world.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Futurism ☛ Instagram Caught Hiding Posts That Say "Immigrants Make the Country Great"

    The company claims an automated post-screening system was to blame — not human intervention.

  • The Record ☛ US warns tech companies against complying with European and British ‘censorship’ laws

    The letter said that “censoring Americans to comply with a foreign power’s laws” could be considered a violation of Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act — the legislation enforced by the FTC — which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices in commerce.

  • Techdirt ☛ Amy Klobuchar Wants To Break The Internet Because Someone Made A Stupid Satirical Video About Her

    She was also the key Democratic senator behind the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which did pass into law, and which Donald Trump himself has promised to use to silence criticism of himself.

    Somewhere in all of this, you would hope that Senator Klobuchar and her staff might take a second to think through the consequences of these bills they keep pushing. But, no, Senator Klobuchar is instead completely freaked out because someone made a stupid satirical video “deepfake” pretending to make her say some stuff that no human being actually thinks she said.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ ACLU Demands US Court Release Journalist From ICE Detention

    The American Civil Liberties Union filed a habeas petition that demands the immediate release of Mario Guevara, a Spanish-language journalist who United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained for two months.

  • 404 Media ☛ 404 Media at Two Years: How We've Grown, and What's Next

    Last week, we were talking to each other about the fact that we were about to hit the second anniversary of 404 Media. The conversation was about what we should say in this blog post, which obviously led us to try to remember everything that has happened in the last year. “I haven’t considered a thing beyond what’s been five seconds behind or in front of me for the last year,” Sam said.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • EFF ☛ Fourth Amendment Victory: Michigan Supreme Court Reins in Digital Device Fishing Expeditions

    When police have a warrant to search a phone, should they be able to see everything on the phone—from family photos to communications with your doctor to everywhere you’ve been since you first started using the phone—in other words, data that is in no way connected to the crime they’re investigating? The Michigan Supreme Court just ruled no.

    In People v. Carson, the court held that to satisfy the Fourth Amendment, warrants authorizing searches of cell phones and other digital devices must contain express limitations on the data police can review, restricting searches to data that they can establish is clearly connected to the crime.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ To Protest British Taxes, Men Dumped Tea Into Boston Harbor. With the Edenton Tea Party, Colonial Women Took a Different Approach

    While her husband was stranded abroad amid the outbreak of the American Revolution, Barker convened a group of 50 women in her hometown of Edenton, North Carolina, asking them to sign a resolution supporting the boycott of British goods, including tea and cloth. “We cannot be indifferent on any occasion that appears nearly to affect the peace and happiness of our country,” the document stated. The 51 signatures, affixed boldly and publicly in a resolution shared with newspapers throughout the Thirteen Colonies, represented a daring stand against British authority at a time when women’s political opinions were often confined to their homes.

  • Techdirt ☛ ICE Goes Full Hegseth: Adds Random Person To Group Chat Discussing Ongoing Manhunt

    And that brings us to the latest OPSEC failure from this hideous administration. Again, to be far more fair to ICE than it deserves, it’s possible no one from ICE added this random person to a chat group discussing a manhunt already in progress. Joseph Cox has the hilariously gory details at 404 Media: [...]

  • Finland ☛ (UPDATED 21.8.) The Trump administration's decision is currently affecting transport of goods to U.S.

    The last sending date for gifts and documents is 22 August 2025.

    Letters and cards dropped into mailboxes after 22 August will be returned if the sender’s address details are provided. If no sender details are given, the letters will be forwarded to Traficom for processing.

  • YLE ☛ Posti suspends all mail to US amid Trump law change confusion

    The change means that customers must pay a customs fee before shipments can be sent to the United States, but postal companies across the world do not currently have systems in place to collect the required fee.

  • Wired ☛ Kanye West Said Memecoins ‘Prey On Fans.’ Then He Apparently Launched One

    the hip-hop artist who goes by Ye, appears to have launched his own cryptocurrency, YZY, sparking a riot of trading activity.

    In February, West rejected the idea that he might launch a crypto coin. “I’M NOT DOING A COIN,” he wrote, in a since-deleted post on X. “COINS PREY ON THE FANS WITH HYPE.” He seems to have changed his mind.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • FAIR ☛ Joseph Torres on the FCC and Structural Racism

  • University of Toronto ☛ Websites and web developers mostly don't care about client-side problems

    This is absolutely true but it's not new, and it goes well beyond anti-crawler and anti-robot defenses. As covered by people like Alex Russell, it's routine for websites to ignore most real world client side concerns (also, and including on desktops). Just recently (as of August 2025), Github put out a major update that many people are finding immensely slow even on developer desktops. If we can't get web developers to care about common or majority experiences for their UI, which in some sense has relatively little on the line, the odds of web site operators caring when their servers are actually experiencing problems (or at least annoyances) is basically nil.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • [Old] Samuel Tulach ☛ The issue of anti-cheat on Linux - Samuel Tulach

    The number of people choosing Linux as their primary operating system to play games has been slowly but steadily going up, at least according to the Steam hardware survey. This is most likely because of the Steam Deck release and the increasingly obnoxious features being added to Windows.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Trademarks

  • John Gruber ☛ MSNBC, Spinning Out of NBCUniversal, Rebrands as ‘MS NOW’ With a Godawful Backronym and Even Worse Logo

    The “My Source News Opinion World” backronym is so dumb it boggles the mind. I genuinely wonder if someone had ChatGPT do that. You can have a series of letters as a name — especially as a TV channel — without those letters really standing for anything. CNN is technically an acronym for “Cable News Network” but they’ve effectively just been “CNN” for decades now. The name “MSNBC” came from the fact that, at launch in the 1990s, it debuted as a collaboration between Microsoft’s MSN and NBC News. But Microsoft hasn’t been involved with the cable channel for 20 years — the “MS” in “MSNBC” hasn’t stood for anything since 2005. (In fact, MSN itself is another good example. It originally stood for “Microsoft Network”, even though Microsoft has never styled their name with a camel-cased S.1 But it’s really just “MSN” now.)

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Lithuanian Regulator Clashes With Data Firm Over "Misleading" Piracy Stats

    Lithuania's broadcasting regulator (LRTK) challenges the accuracy of data reported by piracy tracking firm MUSO, which is the main input for key EUIPO reports. Citing flaws such as the inclusion of legal sites and an inability to track VPN or IPTV use, LRTK argues that its country is being unfairly portrayed as a piracy leader. In response, MUSO says the LRTK's statements are themselves misleading and the company demands a correction.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Alleged Pirate Site Operator Arrested, Family Crowdfunds "David vs. Goliath" Defense

    With millions of monthly visits, sports streaming service 'Al Ángulo TV' was a massive success. The operator of the service, who wasn't shy about appearing in public, was very active on social media. This brazen stance didn't go unnoticed by rights holders. This week, Argentinian authorities arrested the alleged operator, Alejo Leonel Warles, who now faces a criminal prosecution. His family is reportedly backing a fundraiser to aid a "David vs. Goliath" defense.