Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Programming/Development

  • Rust

    • Tor ☛ Arti 1.5.0 released: | The Tor Project

      Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor implementation in Rust. We're happy to announce the latest release, Arti 1.5.0.

Leftovers

• Inside Towers ☛ Two Sentenced for Copper Theft That Toppled Oklahoma Radio Tower - Inside Towers

  Two Hugo, OK residents have been sentenced for a 2024 copper theft that caused the collapse of Payne Media Group’s 499-foot KITX “K95.5” radio tower, according to Inside Radio.

• [Old] Radio World ☛ Copper Thieves Destroy KITX's Radio Tower - Radio World

  “I haven’t had time to think much about what has to go into it. The three-inch coax might be the hardest to find. But there is a lot of work that will have to go into the rebuild,” he said.

• [Old] The Pulitzer Arts Foundation ☛ Claes Oldenburg, Ice Bag–Scale B, 1971

  Oldenburg produced twenty-five multiples of this sculpture in “Scale B,” relying on a partnership with artists’ workshop and publisher Gemini G.E.L. and Krofft Enterprises to realize its complicated structure. The artist created two additional ice bags, each in their own size: Ice Bag–Scale A, an outdoor work over sixteen feet tall, and Ice Bag–Scale C, roughly eleven by thirteen feet.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Build the forum you want to see in the web

  The good news is, none of the technologies that used to run the non-corporate web are gone. In fact, they have gotten much better and it’s become much easier to host your own. There are Platform-as-a-Service companies that offer pre-made images to be deployed for different forum software for example.

• Science

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ 30 Amazing Vintage Photographs of People Posing With Runestones in Sweden

    The runestone tradition began in the 4th century, but the vast majority of the over 3,000 extant runestones in Scandinavia date from the late Viking Age (c. 950–1100 CE), with a remarkable concentration in Sweden.

• Career/Education

  • BBC ☛ South Korea bans [skinnerboxes] in school classrooms nationwide

    Although it only bans phone use during class hours, the law gives teachers the power to stop students from using their phones on school premises. It also asks schools to educate students about the proper use of smart devices.

  • [Repeat] New York Times ☛ South Korea Outlaws Use of [skinnerboxes] During Class

    The legislation bans smartphone use only during class hours and does not stipulate punishment for violators. But it also gives school principals and teachers the power to stop students from carrying or using their phones on school premises. The new law also requires schools to teach students how to develop healthy digital habits.

  • The Atlantic ☛ If the University of Chicago Won’t Defend the Humanities, Who Will?

    These responses emphasize the cultural costs of shrinking the number of people trained in humanities fields, rather than focusing on the question of whether universities should be calibrating the production of Ph.D.s to the academic job market. No one I spoke to was insensitive to the pressures their grad students face when confronting the vanishing opportunities for tenure-track employment. But the professors also seemed reluctant to define the success of a program by how many professors it creates—after all, most humanities PhD students at Chicago do not pay tuition and receive stipends to cover their living costs, and getting paid to learn and read is not the worst fate.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Atlantic ☛ ‘It Feels Like the CDC Is Over’

    The departures leave a leadership void that, according to current and former CDC officials, has demoralized the agency’s staff and will further undermine its ability to provide reliable guidance to Americans. As Lakshmi Panagiotakopoulos, who resigned from the agency in June as co-leader of a group that advises outside experts on COVID vaccines, told me, “It feels like the CDC is over.”

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Trump administration says CDC chief ousted, but her lawyer says she hasn’t resigned or been fired

    “When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda,” wrote Mark S. Zaid and Abbe David Lowell. “For that, she has been targeted. Dr. Monarez has neither resigned nor received notification from the White House that she has been fired, and as a person of integrity and devoted to science, she will not resign.”

• Proprietary

  • Silicon Angle ☛ New research shows passkeys can be hijacked through malicious extensions

    A new report out today from browser security company SquareX Ltd. reveals a critical flaw in passkeys, the widely promoted alternative to passwords, that could allow attackers to hijack accounts across banking, e-commerce and enterprise software-as-a-service applications.

  • TechRadar ☛ UC giant Avaya has reportedly offered all its employees the chance to quit

    Avaya is reportedly offering voluntary exit packages to all employees as it becomes the latest tech firm looking to save money by reducing staffing costs.

    The move is aimed at shedding “a lot of employees,” an unnamed source told CX Today, which was declined a comment by Avaya.

    The news comes around a year after former Avaya CEO Alan Masarek announced his retirement, with Patrick Dennis stepping up as CEO very nearly a full year ago.

  • 2 additional Microsoft employees fired after protesters breached HQ

    Two additional Microsoft employees have been fired after protesters breached the company president’s executive office Tuesday at the headquarters in Redmond, according to KIRO 7.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Google's AI Is Committing a Unique Evil: Giving Gamers Tips That Are Actually False

      As comical as those instances may be, they also act as harbingers for more serious errors, especially because Google decided earlier this year to add health advice to AI Overviews — and it's troubling to imagine the same feature that once suggested that elephants can fit in the palm of one's hand spitting out medical information.

    • The New Leaf Journal ☛ Thinkbot Visits The New Leaf Journal

      My hunch was correct!

      I have had some cause lately to monitor my server logs. In recent months, we have been having occasional issues with web scraper traffic, which I suspect coincides with everyone trying to build a large language model. Every time I open the logs, I see “Thinkbot” with the same user-agent string reproduced in the article.

    • Don Marti ☛ why you should read my effective privacy tips and not use AI

      Don’t go to ChatGPT or some other LLM-based service for privacy advice. Here are four reasons you should read my article instead. (or find somebody’s. I have links.) Whatever the LLM puts out is based on the documents in its training set, and the Internet has a lot of material that looks like credible privacy advice but is either expired or wasn’t really useful in the first place. Some of the problem material that an LLM is going to be working from includes: [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Deloitte Australia writes government report with AI — and fake references

      A lot of the references were clearly chatbot fakes — titles and details that were the right shape, but just didn’t exist. Dr Chris Rudge said: [...]

    • Andy Bell ☛ Are people’s bosses really making them use AI tools?

      That’s pretty horrifying, I’ve got to say. Not just some of it, but all of it. Maybe I’m sensitive because I am people’s boss and couldn’t fathom outsourcing my responsibilities to a technology that often gets things completely wrong.

  • Social Control Media

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Bluesky now platform of choice for science community

      The slightly confounding thing is that this was Mastodon’s to lose: there are scientific communities there too, and its open source, federated nature theoretically makes it even safer and more welcoming for the science community (particularly as science-based instances can set their own rules). I’d love to dig into why Bluesky became the favorite; my assumption is that it’s fundamentally easier to understand, having taken its design and functional cues from Twitter. But it could also be that the overhead of finding and running instances is just too great.

    • Nathaniel Snelgrove ☛ The death of the follower & the future of…

      What follows that are some terrific thoughts on what creators can do to mitigate TikTok-style algorithms (which are now all over YouTube and Instagram), and what the responsibilities are of creator-focused platforms.

    • Wired ☛ Scientists Are Flocking to Bluesky

      A curious Shiffman decided to conduct a scientific survey, announcing the results in a new paper published in the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology. The findings confirm that, while Twitter was once the platform of choice for a majority of science communicators, those same people have since abandoned it in droves. And of the alternatives available, Bluesky seems to be their new platform of choice.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ AI-Powered Ransomware Has Arrived With 'PromptLock'

      ESET malware researchers Anton Cherepanov and Peter Strycek discovered the emerging strain, which they have named "PromptLock." Although it has not yet been observed in active cyberattacks, the researchers said the PromptLock ransomware appears to be under development and nearly ready to be unleashed onto the threat landscape.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Nevada's State Agencies Shutter in Wake of Cyberattack

      The office will not be disclosing technical details of the attack, as Nevada law protects the confidentiality of information related to homeland security, preventing disclosure that could threaten the safety of the general public.

    • PC World ☛ A [cracker] used AI to create ransomware that evades antivirus detection

      According to a blog post from ESET Research interviewing researcher Anton Cherepanov, they’ve detected a piece of malware “created by the OpenAI gpt-oss:20b model.” PromptLock, a fairly standard ransomware package, includes embedded prompts sent to the locally stored LLM. Because of the nature of LLM outputs (which create unique, non-repeated results with each prompt), it can evade detection from standardized antivirus setups, which are designed to search for specific flags.

    • The Register UK ☛ Ransomware crooks knock Swedish councils offline over $168K

      Miljödata runs HR, sick leave, and incident reporting systems for approximately 80 percent of Sweden's municipalities, making it a juicy single point of failure. Over the weekend, those systems went dark, leaving councils from Gotland and Halland to Karlstad and Skellefteå unable to access key services.

    • The Record ☛ Germany charges man over cyberattack on Rosneft subsidiary

      The Prosecutor’s Office of Berlin said on Wednesday the suspect faces two counts of data espionage, including one charge of particularly serious computer sabotage. Investigators from the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) previously alleged he stole around 20 terabytes of data and deleted information from critical systems during the March 2022 intrusion. The [cracker]’s identity has not been disclosed.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ “Education Reform” Has Undermined Public Schools’ Popularity

    School privatization efforts are making dangerous advances in states like Florida and Arizona. Neoliberal education reforms that have degraded public schools, from high-stakes testing to corporatized visions of education, are in part to blame.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Juan J Martínez ☛ It doesn't look good for GitHub

    Although I am self-hosting git repos, and before that had decided to leave GH and try GitLab –that wasn’t at the end what I was looking for, because they want too hard to be GitHub–, this makes the Microsoft owned service even less interesting to me. But it is also concerning, given the role of GH as hub for open source development.

  • Applications

    • GamingOnLinux ☛ The impressive app store Bazaar has arrived on Flathub

      There's many ways to install apps on Linux and Bazaar might be one of the slickest, with a focus on Flatpak and Flathub. First highlighted here on GamingOnLinux back in July when it was added to Bazzite. Since then, the developers have continued expanding it and now it's looking really good.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Truthdig ☛ Have Your ID Card Ready

      There are conversations to be had and improvements to be made regarding youth on the internet. One solution being proffered at the moment by governments and private social media companies are various age-verification laws and practices designed to prevent youth from accessing portions of the internet that are harmful and/or sexually graphic. But like so many conservative crusades of the past and present — anti-abortion campaigns, anti-transgender policies and anti-pornography legislations — these laws make props of “the children” to justify invasive and purposefully vague constraints that, in practice, do more to generally suppress than protect. These latest calls to protect youth are insidious in ways that have already been proven, from enforcing denials of gender-affirming care, contraceptive and abortion access, to using broad and nebulous constraints on browsing to expand the toolkit for 21st century censorship.

      You’re probably at least somewhat informed about these various civil right encroachments and culture war shifts. Age-verification laws could make it much harder to even keep informed.

    • The Verge ☛ Microsoft Word now automatically saves new documents to the cloud

      “We are modernizing the way files are created and stored in Word for Windows,” says Raul Munoz, a product manager on the Office shared services and experiences team at Microsoft. “Now you don’t have to worry about saving your documents: Anything new you create will be saved automatically to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination.”

    • PC World ☛ Microsoft Word documents will soon auto-save to the cloud by default

      When enabled, the Word document will automatically save to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination. The benefits [sic] include: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia Threatens to Ban Norwegian Ships Over EU Fishing Sanctions

    In May, Brussels sanctioned Murman Seafood and Norebo, accusing them of using ships for activities unrelated to fishing, including suspicious movements near NATO exercises, undersea cables and critical infrastructure. Some vessels were also alleged to have links to Russian state-backed surveillance.

  • Digital Music News ☛ TikTok Ad Blitz for Music Discovery Launches—What Ban?

    Despite these marketing efforts, TikTok faces an uncertain path in the United States. The app is technically banned nationwide under U.S. law unless ByteDance, its parent company, divests its U.S. operations. The deadline, now set for September 17, 2025, has been postponed multiple times by President Trump.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Why Iran Hit Australia

    Shutting down the Iranian embassy, the Australian government declared Ambassador Ahmad Sadeghi persona non grata and ordered him and three other Iranian officials to leave within three days. Additionally, it designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a terrorist organization.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Trump administration setting the stage for elections power grab, voting rights group warns

    Those interventions include attempts to enact state-level bans or restrictions on mail-in voting, the use of lawsuits or criminal charges against election officials who don’t follow President Donald Trump’s orders, pushing mass state voter roll purges based on potentially inaccurate citizenship data, the deployment of the military in American cities and towns to intimidate voters and state officials, and the potential decertification or seizure of voting machines.

    The scenarios are all based on actions the administration has already taken this year or in its first term, statements made by Trump and his aides, lawsuits filed by the Department of Justice and supporting efforts from Republican-led state legislatures.

  • Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law ☛ What to Expect Next in the Trump Administration’s Strategy to Meddle with the Vote | Brennan Center for Justice

    If we dig into the details of the March order, we can see the drumbeat of actions that are likely to come: from the spread of misleading claims and reports by federal agencies, to the instigation of spurious investigations and prosecutions, to attempts to meddle with vote counting. Laying out this strategy gives state and local governments, pro-democracy civil society, and voters time to prepare and ensure that we have free and fair elections this November, in 2026, and in 2028.

  • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Letter to Camarillo city council regarding local ICE activity

    In light of recent ICE activity, we've been pushing local officials to engage with and more proactively support the community. In light of that, I submitted a letter to our city council in advance of public. Given how these things work, that letter is a matter of public record. I thought I'd go ahead and post it below.

  • The Atlantic ☛ A Blueprint for Military Takeovers

    In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to the Atlantic staff writer Quinta Jurecic about which legal barriers stand in the way of Trump sending the military into American cities and how he is trying to push through them. We also talk with our staff writer Nick Miroff about the role immigration enforcement is playing in Trump’s plans.

  • The Nation ☛ American Democracy, RIP

    But Jeffries is wrong. American democracy is gone—not under siege, not threatened, but vanquished, with a generous assist from a 2024 electorate that endorsed (wittingly or otherwise) the institution-wrecking that is on display every day in Washington. And if Democrats can get themselves back into power using the only remnant of democracy that’s still barely on life support—national elections conducted by state authorities not yet in the bag for Trump—they need to understand that their task is not to defend an imperiled democracy but to prevent the GOP from further consolidating the autocracy that its craven politicians, reactionary intellectuals, complicit judges, and guileless voters have imagined for more than two decades and have finally put into practice over the last seven months.

  • The Register UK ☛ FBI cyber cop: Salt Typhoon pwned 'nearly every American'

    The Beijing-backed spying campaign began at least in 2019 but wasn't uncovered by US authorities until last fall. On Wednesday, US law enforcement and intelligence agencies along with those from 12 other countries warned the ongoing espionage activity expanded far beyond nine American telcos and government networks. According to Machtinger, at least 80 countries were hit by the digital intrusions.

  • Security Week ☛ China’s Salt Typhoon [Breached] Critical Infrastructure Globally for Years

    The China-linked cyberespionage group known as Salt Typhoon has been compromising backbone and edge routers globally for persistent access to networks across multiple industries, government agencies in the US and allied countries warn.

  • The Register UK ☛ China's Salt Typhoon gang still present in critical networks

    The 37-page advisory includes indicators of compromise associated with Chinese government spies seen as recently as June, and says targeted sectors include, but are not limited to telecommunications, government, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure networks.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ FBI and allies warn Salt Typhoon cyber campaign has targeted 200 US companies in 80 countries

    The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with other law enforcement agencies and international partners, is warning of an alleged Chinese government-backed “Salt Typhoon” [crack] campaign that has targeted [sic] more than 200 U.S. companies across 80 countries.

  • YLE ☛ Cargo ship suspected of carrying Russian spy drones heads towards Vaasa

    The HAV Dolphin, sailing under the flag of Antigua and Barbuda, is expected to arrive in the Finnish port city of Vaasa on Thursday morning, according to the shipping tracker Vessel Finder. Security services in Germany and the Netherlands suspect the vessel may have acted as a support ship for Russian surveillance drones.

  • Stars And Stripes ☛ US aircraft intercept fifth Russian surveillance mission near Alaska in the past week

    The flurry of Russian flights into Alaska zone began five days after a meeting between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska to discuss ending the war in Ukraine.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Northwestern University ☛ Lack of Local News Tied to Government Secrecy, New Report Says

    “Where there are no newspapers and weakened newspaper systems, government secrecy is flourishing,” said David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project at the Brechner Center and author of the report. “Government officials see that journalists are hurting, and they’re taking advantage of that.”

    To measure transparency, Cuillier and his colleague Brett Posner-Ferdman, a law student at Penn State, requested the same seven records from 44 state governments under each state’s public records law. They found that the states with fewer newspapers per capita were more likely to deny or ignore their requests. They also found that responsiveness to requests improved in states with stronger press associations. Overall, about a quarter of requests were fully complied with, while another quarter were outright denied or not responded to.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ As Congress returns, so does the Epstein scandal

    Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie plan to quickly force a House vote ordering the Justice Department to release the Epstein files.

    It is unclear whether the Justice Department would release the complete files, even if ordered to do so by Congress.

  • International Business Times ☛ Republican Representative Recorded Saying Trump Is In The Epstein Files

    In a shocking hot mic moment, Republican Representative Mike Collins 'admitted' that President Donald Trump appears in the Jeffrey Epstein files, intensifying calls for full disclosure in 2025's escalating political scandal.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Despite everything, US solar manufacturing continues to power up

      Some big manufacturers, such as First Solar and Hanwha Qcells, are expanding, while smaller players also see opportunities.

    • Eric Walker ☛ One Sign, One Run, and a Rabbit Hole

      Once I was home and looking at the map on the sign more carefully I noticed something interesting near the area marked Island Lake. It showed an abandoned line that had been rerouted. That sparked my curiosity because I know that area well and have had some questions about trails around there. However, what was more interesting is that the line that still exists in Eden Prairie today was missing from the map. I understand that the purpose of the map was not to show every train line but instead to highlight the depot and the old train line that no longer exists, which is the one I had just been running on.

    • The Nation ☛ Is Amtrak the End of the Line for US Public Transit?

      “Amtrak is a sad situation,” said then–special government employee and noted hater of mass transit Elon Musk at Morgan Stanley’s Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in March, where he called for the privatization of “anything that can be privatized.” Along with the US Postal Service, Musk named Amtrak as a target, contrasting it with high-speed rail development in China. “If you’re coming from another country,” he said, “please don’t use our national rail. It can leave you with a very bad impression of America.” But privatization wouldn’t solve Amtrak’s problems, and every major passenger rail system in the world relies on public funding. The Chinese government, for instance, has reportedly spent more than $1.5 trillion on high-speed trains since the early 2000s.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Cruel Policies and Starving Animals to Death (Based on False Reasoning)

      The pretext that bird-feeding will attract vermin is not supported by any evidence and it also discriminates against some particular animals, who do no harm. If policy changes are to be made, then evidence is needed. While policies remain unchanged it’s not OK to apply any on an ad hoc, improvised basis. When council workers issue contradictory instructions, it then necessarily means somebody is lying.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Google has cut 35% of managers overseeing small teams: Executive

    Google has cut over a third of its managers leading small teams, according to a report by CNBC. The move was shared with employees last week during an all-hands meeting by Brian Welle, the company's vice president of People Analytics and Performance, the report said.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Pentagon CTO says Defense Innovation Unit will remain independent

    Following previous DIU Director Doug Beck’s sudden resignation from the role Monday, the Pentagon announced Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Emil Michael would lead the organization in an acting capacity. While the decision at least temporarily puts DIU under Michael’s purview, he was adamant the move was not permanent.

  • The New Stack ☛ The Cyber Resilience Act: Fear, Confusion — And Reassurance

    While the CRA goes into effect in 2027, many organizations do not realize that the timeline for preparation is measured in months. This applies both to the legislation, which continues to be hashed out — adding to the confusion — and to knowing how to prepare for when it takes effect.

    Before going into an update on the CRA, what you can do now is prepare through the different available programs out there. If somebody says they can charge you to ensure compliance and you pay them for that, they are not telling the truth, because nobody knows exactly what you must do yet to be compliant with the CRA, since it has not been finalized.

  • Reuven Lerner ☛ You're probably using uv wrong — Reuven Lerner

    Like many others in the Python world, I’ve adopted “uv“, the do-everything, lightning-fast package manager written in Rust.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Techdirt ☛ DOGE [sic] alsely Targeted Him On Social Media. Then The Taliban Took His Family

      This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.

      The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.

      ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE [sic] should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.

    • Truthdig ☛ AI ‘Slop’ Is the Latest Face of Climate Denial

      MSN hosted AI-generated content downplaying the effects of climate change that cited nonexistent climate experts and institutions.

    • DeSmog ☛ AI ‘Slop’ Websites Are Publishing Climate Science Denial

      Climate Cosmos is “clearly the lowest possible level spam – they’re just trying to put out content out for some easy clicks, hence the clickbait-y titles,” said Philip Newell, communications co-chair of the Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD) coalition. “AI has brought the cost of disinformation down to nothing. It has automated bullshit.”

      “It appears to be mostly AI slop, rather than a concerted disinformation operation,” he said – adding that AI has “no concern for accuracy”.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • CBC ☛ The Handmaid's Tale among more than 200 books to be pulled at Edmonton public schools

    An internally distributed list obtained by CBC News shows more than 200 books deemed sexually explicit are slated for removal from library shelves for students in kindergarten to Grade 12. It comes after a policy from Alberta's education minister outlines new rules governing books in school libraries as of Oct. 1.

  • Techdirt ☛ From Book Bans To Internet Bans: Wyoming Lets Parents Control The Whole State’s Access To The Internet

    This is a textbook example of a “heckler’s veto,” where a single person can unilaterally decide what content the public is allowed to access. However, it is clear that the Wyoming legislature explicitly designed the law this way in a deliberate effort to sidestep state enforcement and avoid an early constitutional court challenge, as many other bounty laws targeting people who assist in abortions, drag performers, and trans people have done. The result? An open invitation from the Wyoming legislature to weaponize its citizens, and the courts, against platforms, big or small. Because when nearly anyone can sue any website over any content they deem unsafe for minors, the result isn’t safety. It’s censorship.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Northwestern University ☛ Does the decline of local news influence our politics? This former U.S. Senator thinks so

    “You’d be hard pressed to get an interview with the statewide officials, the senators or the house members, and the reason is because they don’t have to, because they know it isn’t that big of a deal anymore,” he said. “It used to be that if you did something stupid and the press reported on it, it could be politically devastating. But now, their reach just isn’t what it used to be. So that’s where we’re at.” Courtesy of U.S. Senate Former U.S. Senator Jon Tester said the loss of local news means fewer elected officials are held accountable.

    As a result, candidates who emphasize local issues in statewide races struggle more to gain traction, while civic engagement lags in local races. Is the decline of local news the reason for this? Maybe not completely, but Tester thinks they’re very much intertwined.

  • CPJ ☛ Russian strikes on Ukraine damage 3 media outlets 

    No media workers or journalists were injured in the attacks. The shelling on Kyiv killed at least 18 people and marked one of the rare instances in which Russian strikes have penetrated deep into the heart of the capital since the start of the full-scale invasion. Authorities reported no casualties in the Dnipropetrovsk region.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Cost Rica ☛ Costa Rica Court Rules Uber Driver an Employee, Orders Vacation and Severance Pay

    The case started when a driver, who had been working through the Uber app from October 2019 until February 2023, got cut off from the platform without warning. He took Uber to court, saying it was like getting fired without cause. His lawyer, Rafael Rodríguez, pointed out that Uber controls things like giving orders, making decisions, and handing out punishments to drivers. That setup shows a boss-employee link, he argued.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Mystery surrounds $1.2B Army contract to build detention tent camp

    Instead, it handed the project on a military base to Acquisition Logistics LLC, a small business that has no listed experience running a correction facility and had never won a federal contract worth more than $16 million. The company also lacks a functioning website and lists as its address a modest home in suburban Virginia owned by a 77-year-old retired Navy flight officer.

  • Air Force Times ☛ Prosecutors fail to indict Air Force vet who threw sandwich at feds

    The case is one of the examples of the legal pushback to President Donald Trump’s law enforcement surge in Washington that has led to more than 1,000 arrests. It is highly unusual for grand jurors to refuse to return an indictment, and it was once said that prosecutors could persuade a grand jury to “indict a ham sandwich.”

  • Truthdig ☛ The Suffocation of American Public Lands

    The Trump administration, however, is poised to divert hundreds of millions of dollars away from LWCF land purchases and spend it instead on routine maintenance at national parks and other federal lands. Essentially, the administration wants to use money intended for enduring conservation projects to cover up the most obvious consequences of its arbitrary budget and staff cuts at the National Park Service and other agencies. It’s an especially cynical tactic in Republicans’ long-running campaign to defund, and ultimately eliminate, the public lands.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • India Times ☛ YouTube reaches agreement with Fox to prevent disruption

    The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement.

    Earlier this week YouTube had been in negotiations with Fox, with the media company asking for payments above those received by partners providing comparable content.

  • Techdirt ☛ Here We Go Again: German Courts Reopen The “Is Ad Blocking Copyright Infringement?” Nonsense We Thought We’d Put To Bed

    It’s no secret that most publishers (though not us!) hate ad blockers. The idea that ad blockers are illegal or “an attack on free speech” get trotted out every so often, and they’re always silly. You should have control over how your own browser on your own computer works. That’s an important freedom. And that means you should be able to install apps that protect you from potentially malicious content. Or from anything at all. It’s your computer. It’s your browser.

    But publishers will bend over backwards to argue otherwise. And for years they’ve been doing so in Germany especially, relying on that country’s truly ridiculous copyright laws. Germany’s Axel Springer, one of the largest media orgs in Germany, has been on the warpath against ad blocking going back at least a decade. They and others kept taking ad blockers to court. And losing. Over and over again. But the German legal system never seems to come out with final precedential rulings, so past wins—even those at the Supreme Court—never quite seem final.

    Back in 2022, we thought maybe the issue was finally over, with yet another German court saying that ad blocking does not infringe on copyright.

  • [Repeat] Creative Commons ☛ We Asked, You Answered: How Your Feedback Shapes CC Signals

    In June we kicked off a public feedback period on our proposal for CC signals. CC signals is a preference signals framework designed to sustain the commons and ensure the continued sharing of knowledge in the age of AI.

    The goal is to give holders of large datasets a way to set criteria for how their data may be used within AI training models. To give an example, a dataset holder may wish to require that any AI training that uses their data gives credit back to the original source (e.g. attribution), or that the resulting AI model is open. Like the CC licenses, CC signals builds on the idea of ‘some rights reserved’ and that creators and knowledge holders deserve meaningful choices in how their work is used. You can learn more on our website.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post – Code Plagiarism and AI Create New Challenges for Publishing Integrity

    For example, unlike the usurpation of text, code plagiarism is not frequently discussed in responsible conduct of research or research integrity training. Given how common it is among software programmers to share and reuse code, it is not even clear what exactly constitutes code plagiarism or how to label or otherwise distinguish new code (Finley, 2017). The way researchers fork and reuse code makes this even trickier because a detailed history of where the code came from, how it evolved, and who contributed to it can be entirely absent.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Google is training its AI tools on YouTube videos. These creators aren't happy

    YouTube’s parent company, Google, is using a subset of the platform’s videos to train AI applications, including its text-to-video tool Veo. That includes videos made by users who have built their livelihoods on the service, helping turn it into the biggest streaming entertainment provider in the U.S.

    The move has sparked deep tensions between the world’s biggest online video company and some of the creators who helped make it a behemoth. Google, creators say, is using their data to train something that could become their biggest competitor.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Sci-Hub Blocked in India, Founder Tells Plaintiffs to Expect Disappointment

    Once again the target was Sci-Hub and site founder Alexandra Elbakyan, and by naming local ISPs as defendants, Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society aimed to have the shadow library blocked nationwide in India.

    The publishers left no stone unturned in their 2,169-page complaint, carefully following in the footsteps of universally successful cases that helped to create the framework for pirate site blocking in India. At least on paper, the Sci-Hub lawsuit stood out no more than any other. Dozens of similar cases had led to the blocking of thousands of pirate site domains in previous years, with each passing by relatively unnoticed.

  • [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ Anthropic settles high-profile class action lawsuit alleging copyright infringement

    According to Bloomberg Law, the settlement comes after Anthropic informed both the district court and the appeals court that the pursuit of billions of dollars in damages in the class action lawsuit posed a “death knell” for the company, compelling it to agree to a potentially unfair settlement. Santa Clara Law Professor Edward Lee estimated the potential damages Anthropic would have faced could reach upwards of $900 billion if a jury found the company’s infringement willful.