Leftovers

• The Cyber Show ☛ Bistrotech: The Riddle Of The Cubes

  When I taught tech to MBA students at a UK business school it was hard work because, to put it bluntly most had already acquired an 'Artful Dodger mindset' which narrowed their horizons. By this I mean they were always trying too hard, to beguile, to spot a new ruse or caper. I could relate to them from a hacker mindset, but they missed the mark with strategic vision, always choosing to short-cut or defect at the first opportunity. They missed core functional issues in their haste to satisfy frivolous NFRs and did not think in terms of systems of value, only in parochial short-term trickery, grift and extraction.

  This is the prevailing "Silicon Valley" attitude to products today which are designed with deception in mind. They set out to promise something and not deliver, to sneak in some unwanted payload, to get you to tacitly "agree" to something you are unaware of, to "bait and switch"…Cory Doctorow calls this strategic treachery "enshitification". It affects everyone on the planet because we're not just overproducing at the cost of the environment, we're producing things of no value, or of negative value.

• The Telegraph UK ☛ Model aircraft club goes to war with Amazon over drone deliveries

  Amazon has been warned by a local flying club in Darlington, County Durham – where it is planning drone deliveries later this year – that the tech giant faces a campaign of disruption from the group.

  They fear Amazon’s deliveries will disrupt local hobbyists.

• Science

  • Hackaday ☛ World's Largest Neutrino Detector Is Collecting Data In China

    To say that neutrinos aren’t the easiest particles to study would be a bit of an understatement. Outside of dark matter, there’s not much in particle physics that is as slippery as the elusive “ghost particles” that are endlessly streaming through you and everything you own. That’s why its exciting news that JUNO is now taking data as the world’s largest detector.

• Career/Education

  • Annie Mueller ☛ Encourage purposeful friction

    We can use purposeful friction to make dumb things more difficult, to make familiar but shitty defaults less convenient.

    Friction can force more awareness. When doing something is so easy it requires no pause, no thought, it’s easy to act without conscious choice. Inserting friction does not guarantee we’ll be more thoughtful, but at least it gives us an opportunity for it.

• Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ Ambiq Apollo510B ultra-low-power Cortex-M55 Edge Hey Hi (AI) MCU adds Bluetooth LE 5.4

    After the release of Apollo510, Ambiq has released Apollo510B, an ultra-low power Edge Hey Hi (AI) MCU that adds a 48 MHz network coprocessor for Bluetooth 5.4 LE (BLE) support. The new SoC combines Cortex-M55 with Helium MVE for AI/ML acceleration, secureSPOT 3.0 security, and graphiqSPOT 2.0 graphics for connected wearables, healthcare devices, and industrial IoT applications.

  • Hackaday ☛ A Label Printer Gets A New Brain

    The internals of a printer, whatever technology it may use, are invariably proprietary, with an abstracted more standard language being used to communicate with a host computer. Thus it’s surprisingly rare to see hacks on printers as printers, rather than printer hacks using the parts for some other purpose. This makes [Oelison]’s brain-swap of a Casio thermal label printer a welcome surprise, as it puts an ESP32 in the machine instead of whatever Casio gave it.

  • Hackaday ☛ Building A Halloween Vending Computer That Talks

    Our hacker from [Appalachian Forge Works] wrote in to let us know about their vending machine build: a Halloween vending computer that talks.

  • Hackaday ☛ Robotic Canoe Puts Robot Arms To Work

    Most robots get around with tracks or wheels, but [Dave] had something different in mind. Sufficiently unbothered by the prospect of mixing electronics and water, [Dave] augmented a canoe with twin, paddle-bearing robotic arms to bring to life a concept he had: the RowboBoat. The result? A canoe that can paddle itself with robotic arms, leaving the operator free to take a deep breath, sit back, and concentrate on not capsizing.

  • Hackaday ☛ Old Projects? Memorialize Them Into Functional Art

    What does one do with old circuit boards and projects? Throwing them out doesn’t feel right, but storage space is at a premium for most of us. [Gregory Charvat] suggests doing what he did: combining them all into a wall-mountable panel in order to memorialize them, creating a functional digital clock in the process. As a side benefit, it frees up storage space!

  • Hackaday ☛ Tiny Datasette Uses USB For The Modern Day

    While you can still find tape being used for backup storage, it’s pretty safe to say that the humble audio cassette is about as out of date as a media format can be. Still, it has a certain retro charm we’re suckers for, particularly in the shape of a Commodore Datasette. We’re also suckers for miniaturization, so how could we not fall for [bitluni] ‘s tiny datasette replica?

  • Android Police ☛ UFS 4.0 storage still doesn't make all the difference for storage speed

    But one savvy, skeptical Android Police reporter pushed back ever so slightly, pointing out that UFS 4.0 was unlikely to make much real-world difference in either loading apps or increasing battery life. While I’m not always right, Android Authority’s recent comparison of the Pixel 10’s storage to other phones’ proves that this time, I was — to at least some degree.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • RFERL ☛ Afghan Women And Girls 'Bear The Brunt' Of Earthquake Amid Taliban Restrictions

    Women are banned from being treated by male doctors, and a shortage of female medical staff has left many without adequate care, worsening their vulnerability.

  • Freedom From Religion Foundation ☛ FFRF: Kennedy, a menace to public health, must go

    When pharmacists are afraid of losing their jobs for doing their jobs, our public health is in deep trouble.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Nostalgia for the 1850s? Why do Alabama leaders want our kids to be sick? | Alabama Reflector

    Children bore the brunt of this calamity. Infant mortality rates were horrifically high and even higher if you were poor, Black or Native American. Life expectancy as a whole fell in the first half of the 19th century. Many of those who survived adolescence experienced stunted growth or carried health problems for the rest of their lives. According to “Health and Wellness in 19th Century America” by John C. Waller, a soldier in the Civil War was, on average, an inch shorter than a soldier who served in World War II and an inch shorter than a soldier who served in the American Revolution.

    I wouldn’t want to live in 1750, but when it comes to public health, I might prefer it to 1850. Progress is neither preordained nor secure from reversals. And we have examples of this in our own lifetime.

• Proprietary

  • GeekWire ☛ Latest layoffs at Oracle impact 101 employees in Washington state

    Oracle is laying off more workers in Washington state.

    The cloud and database giant is laying off 101 employees in Seattle, according to a new filing with the Washington state Employment Security Department.

    This follows a separate filing from Aug. 13 which indicated that Oracle was laying off 161 workers as part of broader reported cuts across the company’s operations.

    We’ve contacted the company about the latest cuts and will update this post if we hear back.

  • Windows Central ☛ Microsoft engineer found dead at Silicon Valley campus — sparks renewed debate over tech burnout

    Pratik Pandey, a 35-year-old Microsoft software engineer, was found dead at the company’s Mountain View, California, campus in the early hours of August 20, 2025.

  • 35-year-old Indian IT worker dies in Microsoft office, suspected of "work overload"

  • The Verge ☛ Microsoft gave Perfect Dark’s developers a chance to save the game — after it was already canceled

    In July, Microsoft’s sweeping layoffs hit Xbox hard, and shuttered the entire game studio that was building Perfect Dark. Officially, the game was canceled. But unofficially, reports Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Microsoft gave Perfect Dark’s other set of developers — Tomb Raider studio Crystal Dynamics — a chance to revive the game.

    Here’s where it gets potentially confusing: Microsoft doesn’t own Crystal Dynamics — that studio belongs to the Embracer Group, which has had many troubles of its own. So Embracer was trying to cut a deal with yet another publisher, the giant Take-Two, to buy, fund, and publish the game.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • CBC ☛ Real or fake? AI, editing tools make severe storm photos more difficult to verify

      But in recent years, people have begun fabricating weather stories using photo editing software to modify images, creating photos and videos using AI (artificial intelligence) and even lying about the date and time a photo was taken.

    • EFF ☛ What WhatsApp’s “Advanced Chat Privacy” Really Does

      For example, if you and your buddy are chatting, and your friend types in @Meta AI and asks it a question, that part of the conversion, which you can both see, is not end-to-end encrypted, and is usable for AI training or whatever other purposes are included in Meta’s privacy policy. But otherwise, chats remain end-to-end encrypted.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Chinese social media firms comply with strict AI labelling law, making it clear to users and bots what's real and what's not

      Chinese officials claim the law is designed to help combat AI misinformation and fraud, and is applicable to all the major social media firms. That includes Tencent Holdings' WeChat - a Chinese WhatsApp equivalent - which has over 1.4 billion users, and Bytedance's TikTok alternative, Douyin, which has around a billion users of its own. Social media platform Weibo, with its 500 million plus active monthly users, is also impacted, as is social media and ecommerce platform, Rednote.

    • SCMP ☛ China’s social media platforms rush to abide by AI-generated content labelling law | South China Morning Post

      Major Chinese social media platforms, including Tencent Holdings’ WeChat and ByteDance-owned Douyin, have launched new features to abide by Monday’s roll-out of a new law that mandates labelling of all artificial intelligence-generated content online.

    • Ben Tsai ☛ It’s a trap

      For a long time, I’ve been trying to articulate why interacting with an LLM is so irksome. Essentially, it is because the text being generated does not originate from a person, but is designed to entirely to appear as a person.

      This is the height of deceptive design. And no matter how many guardrails and systems you put around an LLM, it is impossible to curb this behavior. It is exactly this behavior that makes them so enticing, and that makes them feel useful at all.

    • Baldur Bjarnason ☛ The melancholy of history rhyming

      The “AI” Bubble feels more like the all-encompassing wasteland that was the 2007 bubble in Iceland than anything else I’ve experienced.

      Even many of the critics have completely integrated “AI” propaganda and myth-making into their worldview, assuming Large Language Model progress as inevitable, blinding them to the inherent weaknesses of the tech, and leading them to promote “careful” adoption of a tech whose variability is inherently destructive to productivity, reliability, and quality.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Vibe coding is getting rancid even for venture capital

      That’s a rundown on how vibe coding startups have huge numbers of users! But they don’t make a profit or have a path to making a profit, and all they do is set money on fire as fast as they can. Anysphere is losing money every time someone uses Cursor.

    • Techdirt ☛ Wired, Business Insider Editors Duped By Completely Bogus ‘AI’ Using ‘Journalist’ Who Made Up Towns, People That Don’t Exist

      This is less surprising for Business Insider (which increasingly traffics in clickbait and recently fired 25% of its staff) and more surprising for Wired, which has been doing a lot of great journalism during the second Trump term. It’s particularly embarrassing given the parade of extremely talented writers and editors that have repeatedly been shitcanned by many of these same outlets over the last decade.

      Wired was at least transparent about the fuck up, publishing an article explaining how they were tricked, noting they only figured things out when the freelancer refused payment via traditional systems. But they acknowledge they didn’t adhere to traditional standards for fact checking (who has the time, apparently): [...]

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Even Sam Altman fears an AI bubble

      Sam Altman is not the first to warn about the risks of an AI bubble. But his words carry more weight. In mid-August, during a meeting with US journalists, the OpenAI CEO admitted that “investors are too enthusiastic about AI,” comparing the situation to the dot-com bubble of 2000.

      He found it “insane” that start-ups with “three people and an idea” could raise tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, with valuations sometimes exceeding the symbolic billion-dollar mark. “This is not rational behavior,” he said.

    • The Register UK ☛ Goldman Sachs warns AI bubble could burst datacenter boom

      Datacenter capacity is forecast to surge 50 percent by 2027 driven by AI demand, with the sector's energy consumption doubling by 2030, according to the latest research from Goldman Sachs. But the financial services biz says it's watching for signs that AI adoption may fall short of current hype.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • 404 Media ☛ Hackers Threaten to Submit Artists' Data to AI Models If Art Site Doesn't Pay Up

      Artists&Clients, a website for connecting artists with gigs, is down after a group called LunaLock threatened to feed their data to AI datasets.

• Pseudo-Open Source

  • Openwashing

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Tencent open-sources Hunyuan-MT translation model series

      Tencent Holdings Ltd today open-sourced a new lineup of language models, the Hunyuan-MT series, that is optimized for translation tasks. The Chinese tech firm says that the algorithms significantly outperform Surveillance Giant Google Translate on a popular artificial intelligence translation benchmark.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Justin Duke ☛ What follows GitHub?

    It seems fairly clear that, as far as product lifecycle goes, GitHub is in its “Azure metered billing” stage. I don’t mean this as a negative value judgment in of itself — who am I to argue that GHE is not, from a certain utilitarian point of you, more valuable to the world than all of the things I’m about to kvetch about? — but two things seem quite clear: [...]

• Security

  • The Register UK ☛ Frostbyte10 bugs put thousands of refrigerators at major grocery chains at risk

    Ten vulnerabilities in Copeland controllers, which are found in thousands of devices used by the world's largest supermarket chains and cold storage companies, could have allowed miscreants to manipulate temperatures and spoil food and medicine, leading to massive supply-chain disruptions.

    The flaws, collectively called Frostbyte10, affect Copeland E2 and E3 controllers, used to manage critical building and refrigeration systems, such as compressor groups, condensers, walk-in units, HVAC, and lighting systems. Three received critical-severity ratings.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EPIC ☛ EPIC, NCLC, and 45 Other Organizations Call on Congress to Strengthen Financial Privacy

      EPIC, the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), and 45 other civil society organizations submitted a letter in response to the House Financial Services Committee’s request for feedback on current consumer financial data privacy law and potential legislative proposals. Federal financial privacy laws often leave consumers’ sensitive financial information vulnerable, especially with the effective shuttering of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The letter urges the committee to strengthen financial privacy in the United States by requiring financial institutions to follow data minimization rules and obtain affirmative, opt-in consent to share consumer data with third parties. The letter also recommends that the committee refrain from amending the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) or passing new privacy laws that preempt state privacy laws or prevent states from adopting new privacy protections. Further, the letter recommends the committee to strengthen the GLBA and other federal privacy laws by including a private right of action that would allow consumers to seek legal remedies when their rights are violated.

    • Techdirt ☛ OpenAI’s Answer To ChatGPT-Related Suicide Lawsuit: Spy On Users, Report To Cops

      There are plenty of questions about how liability should be handled with generative AI tools, and while I understand the concerns about potential harms, we need to think carefully about whether the “solutions” we’re demanding will actually make things better—or just create new problems that hurt everyone.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Therapists are secretly using ChatGPT during sessions. Clients are triggered.

      Declan would never have found out his therapist was using ChatGPT had it not been for a technical mishap. The connection was patchy during one of their online sessions, so Declan suggested they turn off their video feeds. Instead, his therapist began inadvertently sharing his screen.

      “Suddenly, I was watching him use ChatGPT,” says Declan, 31, who lives in Los Angeles. “He was taking what I was saying and putting it into ChatGPT, and then summarizing or cherry-picking answers.”

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Disney agrees to pay FTC $10 million over YouTube videos for children

      Regulators at the FTC said the company failed to flag certain videos on its platform as “Made for Kids” — a required label designed to shield children from data tracking and targeted ads. In response, Disney agreed to overhaul its policies to stay in line with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which mandates parental consent before collecting any data from users under 13.

    • The Verge ☛ Disney will pay $10 million to settle FTC claim it used cartoons to collect YouTube data on kids

      The result was that videos with content from kid-friendly movies like “The Incredibles,” “Toy Story,” and “Frozen” would be marked as “Not Made for Kids,” according to the government, circumventing YouTube’s heightened restrictions, including allowing YouTube to autoplay other “Not Made for Kids” videos after the Disney ones finished. That resulted in Disney collecting information on kids and serving them targeted ads on videos that were technically designed at not for kids, the FTC alleges, in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection (COPPA) Rule, which requires parental consent to collect information on kids under 13.

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ Passkeys and Modern Authentication

      One potential source of problems here is the attestation system. It allows the authenticator to provide more information about what it is to the website that you’re authenticating with. In particular it is what tells a website if you have a Yubikey plugged in versus something like 1password. This is the mechanism by which the Austrian government, for instance, prevents you from using an Open Source or any other software-based authenticator to sign in to do your taxes, access medical records or do anything else that is protected by eID. Instead you have to buy a whitelisted hardware token.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Strategist ☛ Silence as strategy: Southeast Asia and China’s persistent cyber campaigns

    Google’s revelation that China mounted a cyber-espionage campaign against Southeast Asian diplomats should surprise no one.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ NATO takes aim at Russia’s GPS hacking after EU leader’s plane jammed

    Rutte said the jamming was part of a complex campaign by Russia of “hybrid threats” like cutting of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea, a plot to assassinate a German industrialist, and a cyberattack on the National Heath Service in the United Kingdom.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ She Found a Tattered Logbook in the Trash. It Turned Out to Be a Rare Record From the 1941 Pearl Harbor Attack

    The volume turned out to be a logbook from the naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Now, half a century later, the National Archives has recovered the text, which includes records from before, during and after the attack on December 7, 1941.

  • The Register UK ☛ Reg readers say UK govt should move away from Microsoft

    Official estimates suggest £1.9 billion will be spent every year under the existing agreement with Microsoft. In a poll of more than 1,500 readers, 93 percent advocated some kind of move away from Microsoft.

    Last year, the government negotiated a Strategic Partnership Arrangement 2024 (SPA24) memorandum of understanding (MoU) that took effect in November and is scheduled to last until 2029.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Freedom Fraud: How the Right Weaponized Liberty Against Democracy

    The silence is deafening. And revealing.

    This isn’t principled constitutional conservatism. This is a protection racket masquerading as freedom advocacy. They don’t defend freedom as a principle—they weaponize it as a tactic. And tactics serve one goal: power.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ Is World War III Already Underway? - by Garry Kasparov

    Today, a new Axis is coming together in plain sight.

    Over the weekend, we were treated to images of Vladimir Putin rubbing elbows with Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi. In other words: the criminal waging Europe’s bloodiest war in eight decades chumming with the leaders of the world’s two largest countries, representing over a third of humanity.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • France24 ☛ US House committee releases first batch of documents in Epstein investigation

    More than 33,000 pages of records related to Epstein were uploaded to a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform website after being handed over by the Justice Department.

• Environment

  • New York Times ☛ Searching the Rubble After Afghanistan’s Deadly Earthquake

    Hundreds of people were killed and at least 2,500 others were injured in a difficult to reach mountainous region. Officials warned many more people may still be awaiting rescue.

  • Truthdig ☛ Is It Too Late To Save the Swiss Alps?

    When the mountain came down, he responded instinctively — filming, reporting, bearing witness. Only later did the truth settle in, “Then you realize that there is nothing left.”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ Making The World’s Smallest E-Bike Battery

      Often times, e-bikes seek to build the biggest battery with the most range. But what if you want to take a couple lunch loops on your bike and only need 20 minutes of charge? That’s [Seth] from Berm Peak set out to find out with his minuscule Bermacell battery.

    • David Rosenthal ☛ Luke 15:7

      Because Bitcoin is useless for anything except speculation, most of the time the demand for transactions is low, meaning transaction fees are low and miners' income depends upon the block reward. The characteristic of speculators is herd behavior, so occasionally they all want to transact at the same time and fees spike enormously for a brief interval. A payment system in which not merely is the value of the coin volatile but so is the cost of transacting is not useful.

    • ABC ☛ When it comes to power, solar could leave nuclear and everything else in the shade

      Whereas nuclear power is barely growing, and is shrinking as a proportion of global power output, The Economist reported solar power was growing so quickly it was set to become the biggest source of electricity on the planet by the mid-2030s.

      By the 2040s — within this next generation — it could be the world's largest source of energy of any kind, overtaking fossil fuels like coal and oil.

    • YLE ☛ E-scooter accidents barely decline despite Finland's tougher laws

      A stricter limit on blood alcohol content and a ban on use by under-15s have only had a slight impact, officials say, but in Helsinki the number of accidents has doubled since July 2024.

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Anti-Trump Strategy That’s Actually Working

      The plan was to file a Hail Mary lawsuit to force the Department of Justice to release any documents in its possession that tie Epstein, a convicted child sex offender, to Trump. Eisen’s team had already filed the request for anything that connects the two men, under the Freedom of Information Act. The FOIA is normally a weak tool for unlocking investigative records gathered for criminal investigations, but Eisen had a legal theory: Because the DOJ had argued under pressure after Bondi’s announcement that the extraordinary public interest in the Epstein case required the unsealing of grand-jury testimony, they could argue the same thing. And that was just the beginning.

      Eisen, who has pursued more than 100 legal matters against Trump since his second inauguration, explained that he wanted to try the case in the court of law and the court of public opinion. He asked for an update on an op-ed he had written raising questions about “a potential cover up” of Trump’s dealings with Epstein. He wanted a plan from Lavora Barnes, the former Michigan party chair, about how they would get elected leaders to discuss the Epstein records. He wanted a press plan to publicize the requests they had already filed, and the lawsuit they would file a few weeks later. A discussion followed about whether they should also try to intervene in the Justice Department’s effort to unseal grand-jury testimony, how many of the Epstein records they should demand to release, and how the Epstein issue fit with other arguments against Trump. “We have an extremely strong horse right now. Let’s just ride that,” said Bill Kristol, the resident neoconservative. “We want to know what’s going on with the Epstein files.”

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Wildlife Trade: Does the ‘Livelihoods Depend on It’ Defense Hold Up?

• Finance

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Gaming consoles are becoming more expensive as they age for the first time in history — gamers blame tariffs for PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch price increases

    Gamers are frustrated by the high prices of current generation consoles which haven't seen the usual mid-generation price drops. Indeed, they're actually much higher than they were at launch as much as five years ago.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Register UK ☛ Salesforce sacrifices 4,000 support jobs on the altar of AI

    Speaking ahead of Labor Day – celebrated in the US to recognize the nation's labor movement – Salesforce CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff said the company had slashed 4,000 customer support roles through the application of AI agents.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft wants to give US government Copilot for free

    The General Services Administration (GSA) announced its new deal with Microsoft on Tuesday, describing it as a "strategic partnership" that could save the federal government as much as $3.1 billion over the next year. The GSA didn't mention specific discount terms, but it said that services, including Microsoft 365, Azure cloud services, Dynamics 365, Entra ID Governance, and Microsoft Sentinel, will be cheaper than ever for feds.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Seeing like a software company

    It’s the same way in software companies. It’s almost a truism among software engineers that a single engineer can be more efficient alone than they can by working as part of a team. That’s why there are so many anecdotes about engineers taking leave to finally get some work done, or about productive work being done on nights and weekends.

  • Dark Reading ☛ NIST Enhances Security Controls for Improved Patching

    Discussion updates also voiced concerns around least-privilege access, flaw-remediation testing, customer agreements and notification, and coordinating updates.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts accused of ‘cancelling’ playwright in anniversary campaign

    A prominent playwright has accused her alma mater, the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA), of “cancelling” her appearance in the school’s anniversary promotional campaign without justification.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Graham Linehan arrested by five armed police officers for trans tweets

    Graham Linehan was arrested by armed police officers at Heathrow airport for writing gender-critical posts on social media.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Graham Linehan claims he was arrested at Heathrow Airport for posts about trans people

    Linehan, 57, shared further details of the arrest on his blog, which he said occurred as he was returning from Arizona. He claimed to have “been flagged” and “arrested at an airport like a terrorist”.

    “The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five,” he wrote. “They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets [posts].”

  • Wales UK ☛ Father Ted creator says he was arrested at UK airport over tweets | Wales Online

    Linehan said he has been bailed until October and ordered not to post on social media platform X as part of his conditions.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Northwestern University ☛ Too many Americans are losing faith in the role of journalists

    More than 55 million Americans live in news deserts, with little to no local journalism. Many remaining news outlets are threadbare, milked dry by distant corporate owners or beaten down by economic disruption.

    We read less and spend more time in social media and streaming video bubbles. Only 17% of Americans pay for news subscriptions, instead of scrounging for free stuff online.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ Patch the market bugs!

    I really oppose market capitalism and it’s up to its defenders to patch the bugs, for example by acquiescing to environmental regulation (like an ETS) and labor laws. And I’ve proposed banning the network effect and ending copyright.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Country music no longer owns the troops, and that’s a good thing

    This reflects generational change. As of 2023, nearly half of service members are 25 years or younger. That places most troops in Gen Z or younger Millennials, groups raised on Spotify algorithms rather than regional radio stations. In 2003, when the Iraq invasion began, iPods were just becoming popular.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• RTL ☛ Landmark ruling: Google not required to sell Chrome in antitrust victory

  Mulholland added that Google has "concerns" about how court-imposed requirements to share search data and limit distribution of services will affect user privacy.

  Judge Mehta's decision represents one of the most significant rulings against corporate monopoly practices in two decades and could fundamentally reshape the tech giant's future.

• Silicon Angle ☛ In major antitrust ruling, Google gets to keep Chrome and Android but still faces lesser penalties

  The ruling is seen as a significant win for Google, which avoided the most severe potential penalty that could have been imposed on it during the trial’s remedies phase. Investors agreed, lifting the stock almost 7% in after-hours trading late today.

• The Register UK ☛ Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly orders modest remedies

  In his 230-page ruling Mehta, who last August ruled that Google broke US competition law, decided the search behemoth will not have to divest its Chrome browser or Android operating systems, and can continue to pay billions to the likes of Apple to secure a prominent place for its search engine.

• Stephen Hackett ☛ Google Gets to Keep Chrome and Android, Apple Gets to Keep Its $20 Billion - 512 Pixels

  It’s a big day for Google, as Judge Amit Mehta has ruled in its favor in several areas:

  • Google will not have to sell off Chrome
  • Google will not have to sell off Android
  • Google can continue paying Apple and others for search engine placement

• CNBC ☛ Google stock jumps as judge rules it can keep Chrome in antitrust case

  "Google will not be required to divest Chrome; nor will the court include a contingent divestiture of the Android operating system in the final judgment," the decision stated. "Plaintiffs overreached in seeking forced divestiture of these key assets, which Google did not use to effect any illegal restraints."

  Mehta, who oversaw the remedies trial in May, ordered the parties to meet by Sept. 10 for the final judgment.

• Scoop News Group ☛ Microsoft to offer Copilot for free to some government customers

  Under the new agreement, Microsoft will offer its subscription service, Microsoft 365, Azure Cloud Services, and Dynamics 365 — the company’s suite of business management apps — for a “discounted price” for up to 36 months. Other Microsoft cybersecurity and monitoring tools, like Microsoft Entra ID Governance, are also included.

• Patents

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Intel files patent monopoly for 'Software Defined Supercore' — increases single-thread performance and IPC by mimicking ultra-wide execution using multiple cores

    Intel's Software Defined Supercore (SDC) lets multiple CPU cores fuse into a virtual high-performance core to boost single-thread speed without building wider physical cores.

  • JUVE ☛ Carpmaels next UK firm to expand in Germany [Ed: Sponsors of JUVE get puff pieces/marketing]

    Niels Hölder (54) and Mike Gruber (42) are moving to Carpmaels & Ransford. As the firm’s first German lawyers, they will expand the Munich office into a full-service location. Until now, the UK patent monopoly attorneys have mainly used the Munich outpost for EPO proceedings.

  • Techdirt ☛ U.S. Appeals Court: USPTO Must Reconsider If Fucks Are For Everyone

    But my answer to Brunetti would simply be that all he’s done is point out that there are other simple, commonplace words that should probably have their registrations rescinded. This isn’t an argument that “FUCK” should be a trademark, in other words. It’s an argument that the USPTO often times sucks at their jobs.

  • Software Patents

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Intel files patent for 'Software Defined Supercore' — increases single-thread performance and IPC by mimicking ultra-wide execution using multiple cores

      Intel's Software Defined Supercore (SDC) technologies combine two or more physical CPU cores to cooperate as a single high-performance virtual core by dividing a single thread's instructions into separate blocks and executing them in parallel. Each core runs a distinct portion of the program, while specialized synchronization and data-transfer instructions ensure that the original program order is preserved, maximizing instructions per clock (IPC) with minimal overhead. This approach is designed to improve single-thread performance without increasing clock speeds or building wide, monolithic cores, which can increase power consumption and/or transistor budgets.

• Copyrights

  • Nick Heer ☛ Automated Copyright Takedown Requests Are the Bane of the Civilized Web

    I obviously have no answers here, only two observations. The first is that it shows a limitation of offloading legal processes to corporations. Fair use is, famously, a nebulous concept, and trying to figure out whether a single YouTuber’s video is in violation would take significant time and expense — and this simply is not feasible at YouTube’s scale. Second, automation has made some of this easier — it is harder to find full-length Hollywood films on YouTube than you might expect for a video-based website — while also requiring each party to more carefully check their work.

  • [Old] PC Mag ☛ The Rise of DOS: How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract

    Still, the controversy over DOS and CP/M continued. For years, Kildall and DRI would claim that Paterson's QDOS just copied CP/M. (Back then, software could not be patented, though it could be copyrighted.) In Big Blues, Kildall was adamant that a lot of QDOS was stolen: "Ask Bill [Gates] why function code 6 [in QDOS and later in MS-DOS] ends in a dollar sign. No one in the world knows that but me."

    But Tim Paterson always denies it. He told the authors of Hard Drive, "At the time, I told [Kildall] I didn't copy anything. I just took his printed documentation and did something that did the same thing. That's not by any stretch violating any kind of intellectual [sic] property [sic] laws. Making the recipe in the book does not violate the copyright on the recipe."