Leftovers

• Lionel Dricot ☛ How I fell in love with calendar.txt

  Months ago, I discovered calendar.txt. A simple file with all your dates which was so simple and stupid that I wondered 1) why I didn’t think about it myself and, 2) how it could be useful.

• Jono Alderson ☛ If you want your blog to sell, stop selling

  That’s industrialised mediocrity: a process optimised to churn out content that looks like content, without ever risking being interesting.

• Science

  • PC World ☛ Earth's core has 'reversed' its rotation. What does that mean for us?

    This current slowdown in the rotation of the Earth’s core began as early as 2009. At that time, the Earth’s core and crust moved more or less in unison, but since then, the movement of the Earth’s core has become even slower. It seems that the Earth’s core changes its rotational direction relative to the Earth’s crust every 35 years. Therefore, the fluctuations that comprise an entire cycle last 70 years.

• Career/Education

  • Ness Labs ☛ Cognitive Multiculturalism: Training Your Brain to Switch Between Worlds

    When you see yourself as many things at once – whether that’s your profession, your neighborhood, your hobbies, your generation – you become more nuanced and flexible as a person.

  • Austin Kleon ☛ Why our house is a library

    At the library, there are strict rules for behavior that create an environment in which anyone can learn, but there is no agenda, no plan — only time, space, and resources.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ This Plotter Knows No Boundaries

    If your school in the 1980s was lucky enough to have a well-equipped computer lab, the chances are that alongside the 8-bit machines you might have found a little two-wheeled robot. These machines and the Logo programming language that allowed them to draw simple vector graphics were a popular teaching tool at the time. They’re long-forgotten now, but not in the workshop of [Niklas Roy], who has created a modern-day take on their trundling.

  • Nate Graham ☛ The perfect laptop

    I’ve gotten pickier over the years as I’ve discovered what I really want in a laptop, and looked for a cheap “good-enough” stop-gap that could be recycled to another family member after I located the perfect final replacement.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Techdirt ☛ Disney, ESPN Sue Sling TV For The Crime Of Streaming TV Pricing Innovation

    While Disney may or may not be legally correct (the exact terms of these agreements aren’t made public), it’s still annoying. In large part because the streaming video sector has been busy lately demonstrating that they’re all out of original ideas and want to make nickel-and-diming consumers a central pillar of their business strategy. Just like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted.

• Proprietary

  • Seeking Alpha ☛ Microsoft is said to cut French workforce by 10%

  • HowTo Geek ☛ So You've Set Up Linux On Windows Using WSL, Here's What You Can Do With It [Ed: Windows is not GNU/Linux; this is a trap set up by Microsoft after it had approached Canonical]

    So you just installed and set up Windows Subsystem For Linux (WSL) on your Windows machine, and now you’re wondering what this blinking terminal can do. Here’s a quick guide to get you started.

  • Dark Reading ☛ [Cracked] Routers Linger on the Internet for Years

    While trawling Internet scan data for signs of compromised infrastructure, researchers found that asset owners may not know for years their devices had been [breached].

  • Six Colors ☛ Instagram adds iPad support (finally)

    For more than a decade, we’ve all been wondering why Instagram doesn’t have an iPad app. I’m not sure we ever got a good answer—but earlier this year reports said one was coming, and here we are—on Wednesday Instagram released an app update that supports the iPad: [...]

  • GreyCoder ☛ The Best Email Privacy Solutions For 2025

    Choosing the right privacy email solution isn’t just about ditching mainstream options—it’s about sidestepping data surveillance and winning back control of your communications.

  • Andrew Eikum ☛ Passkeys are incompatible with open-source software (was: “Passkey marketing is lying to you”)

    Update: After reading more of the spec authors’ comments on open-source Passkey implementations, I cannot support this tech. In addition to what I covered at the bottom of this blog post, I found more instances where the spec authors have expressed positions that are incompatible with open-source software and user freedom: [...]

  • Wired ☛ What Is a Passkey? Here’s How to Set Up and Use Them (2025)

    Passwords suck. They're hard to remember, but worse is playing the ever-evolving game of cybersecurity whack-a-mole with your most important accounts. That’s where passkeys come into play. The so-called “war on passwords” has taken off over the past two years, with titans like Google, Microsoft, and Apple pushing for a password-less future that the FIDO Alliance (a consortium made to “help reduce the world’s over-reliance on passwords”) has been trying to realize for over a decade.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Phoronix ☛ New GIMP Plug-In Integrates Surveillance Giant Google Gemini Hey Hi (AI) Image Creation

      Separate from yesterday's upstream new GIMP 3.2 development release, open-source developer Josh Ellithorpe announced the creation of a new GIMP plug-in dubbed "Dream Prompter" for bringing the power of Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash Image Preview model to this open-source photo/image editing software...

    • Press Gazette ☛ Publishers call for CMA to include Gemini in Surveillance Giant Google investigation

      Google has said Gemini is “not a market leader in Hey Hi (AI) assistants”.

    • Futurism ☛ White House Orders Government Workers to Deploy Elon Musk's "MechaHitler" AI as Quickly as Possible

      When Elon Musk's Grok AI had a Nazi meltdown the other month and started calling itself "MechaHitler," the General Services Administration — the agency in charge of government technology — quietly dropped its plans to use it by removing it from a list of approved vendors.

    • Sightline Media Group ☛ That’s not a real soldier: campaign warns troops, families of AI scams

      “It has obviously been happening for years, but these scams are getting more and more sophisticated with the use of generative AI,” said Ellen Gustafson, a Navy spouse and executive director of the advocacy group. “We know that foreign adversaries are using them, and we know that they are targeting people across the country, especially using the veteran voice or the veteran brand.

    • The Atlantic ☛ I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education.

      During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.

    • 404 Media ☛ Shein Used Luigi Mangione’s AI-Generated Face to Sell a Shirt

      United Healthcare CEO murder suspect Luigi Mangione is not, in fact, modeling floral button-downs for Shein.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Against LLM Assistants

      Prompt injection isn’t just a minor security problem we need to deal with. It’s a fundamental property of current LLM technology. The systems have no ability to separate trusted commands from untrusted data, and there are an infinite number of prompt injection attacks with no way to block them as a class. We need some new fundamental science of LLMs before we can solve this.

    • Ava ☛ is AI psychosis nonsense?

      That's what makes it more dangerous than some conspiracy bubbles or meeting "the wrong person" online. Sure, strangers in corners of the internet have always radicalized one another with weird shit, so what if it's AI now? But it's different: the radicalizing machine is embedded into their computer OS, and using it feels like asking a literal all-knowing oracle, a Magic 8-Ball, and get immediate answers that sound really, really smart, even able to generate "proof" on the go. That is far more available and far more convincing than another internet rando agreeing with you on a forum whenever they choose to respond. Instead of touching base with other people engaging in delusions online for a couple hours here and there whenever there is something to engage about, you can now stay chatting 24/7 about it with the bot, becoming downright obsessed. It even caused many of the cases linked above to stop sleeping or eating while completely enveloped by it.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ DragonCon ejects AI ‘artist’, to approval of all

      On Saturday, Dane got onto the convention staff about the AI slop mongers. The staff running Artist’s Alley investigated over Saturday and Sunday.

      The AI guys apparently gave the staff a proof video of their artistic process — a time lapse of how they made the pictures — and the proof video was also AI-generated!

    • The New Stack ☛ Stop Force-Feeding AI to Your Developers

      This isn’t a new problem; it’s common for a top-down productivity drive from management to be a smokescreen that hides a deeper problem in their organization. Often, the underlying issue is managers who have lost touch with their teams’ work.

    • YLE ☛ Turku University suspends four students for cheating

      The university has decided to increase the penalties for cheating — and the rules went into force as the new academic term began in August. Going forward, any students found cheating will always face a temporary expulsion.

      The four students who were caught cheating were excluded for periods of two months up to an entire term.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • New York Times ☛ A Hidden Camera Protest Turned the Tables on China’s Surveillance State

      Before fleeing China, an activist in Chongqing staged an elaborate one-man demonstration against the Communist Party that doubled as performance art.

    • New York Times ☛ What Will Happen to Surveillance Giant Google After the Antitrust Ruling?

      The judge’s decision positions Surveillance Giant Google to keep its search business running largely without interruption.

    • New York Times ☛ Google Must Share Search Data With Rivals, Judge Rules in Antitrust Case

      Judge Amit P. Mehta said the company must hand over some of its search data to rivals, but did not force other big changes the U.S. wanted.

    • France24 ☛ Google not required to sell Chrome, federal judge rules in antitrust case

      A US judge on Tuesday rejected a government bid to force Surveillance Giant Google to sell its Chrome browser but ordered sweeping changes to restore competition in online search. The ruling follows Judge Amit Mehta’s August 2024 finding that Surveillance Giant Google maintained illegal search monopolies through billion-dollar exclusive agreements.

    • EFF ☛ EFF Statement on ICE Use of Paragon Solutions Malware

      The reactivation of the contract between the Department of Homeland Security and Paragon Solutions, a known spyware vendor, is extremely troubling.

      Paragon's “Graphite” malware has been implicated in widespread misuse by the Italian government. Researchers at Citizen Lab at the Monk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and with Meta found that it has been used in Italy to spy on journalists and civil society actors, including humanitarian workers. Without strong legal guardrails, there is a risk that the malware will be misused in a similar manner by the U.S. Government.

    • The Register UK ☛ EU court allows Data Protection Framework to stand

      For those who don't recall the specifics of the EU-US DPF, it was the third iteration of an attempt to standardize rules for transmitting data from European companies to American ones (and vice versa) by establishing rules to guarantee that Europeans had rights to their data transferred to the US. The first two attempts at such a framework, Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield, were thrown out after privacy activist and lawyer Max Schrems successfully argued to the EU Court of Justice that neither deal adequately protected Europeans' data in the hands of American companies.

      One of the key components of the DPF that helped it survive to implementation was an executive order signed by President Joe Biden in 2022 that directed the US to fulfill its DPF obligations. That order included the creation of a Data Protection Review Court (DPRC) to hear issues related to the DPF.

    • The Record ☛ FTC fines toy manufacturer for allowing Chinese third-party to collect kids' data | The Record from Recorded Future News

      The complaint, which was filed after a referral from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), alleges that the toy manufacturer Apitor published a privacy policy saying that it complied with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA Rule), but in reality violated the law by collecting the location data from children without parental consent.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Disney Settles COPPA Violations Put Forth By FTC For $10M

      The problem wasn’t mere negligence. YouTube had flagged over 300 such misclassified videos in mid-2020 — changing their status to “made for kids.” Despite this warning, Disney maintained channel-level defaults, meaning newly uploaded videos automatically inherited the incorrect labels. This practice persisted even on channels explicitly intended for younger audiences, such as Disney Junior, Mickey Mouse, and Pixar Cars.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Not paying with cash

      I’m also wary of online tracking and digital surveillance, to which my years of blogging on the subjects here can attest. I always get a chuckle from people saying you shouldn’t use loyalty cards in grocery stores and the like… when they pay with credit cards! Our spending habits are ripe for data mining, selling, or worse; to say nothing about the potential financial pitfalls and predatory nature of credit card companies that can snare you. You either use credit cards, or credit cards use you, as my dear late friend Jim Kloss used to say.

    • Nick Heer ☛ U.K. Sought Broad Access to Apple Customers’ Data

      The filing also apparently throws cold water on Tulsi Gabbard’s claim that the U.K. is rescinding its demands for an Advanced Data Protection backdoor. Again, the secrecy around this prevents us from gaining specificity or clarity. It even requires the judges to rely on “assumed facts” which, as Bradshaw and Gross write, are “not the same as asserting that [they are] factually the case”, because they cannot confirm the existence of the technical capability notice. Insert your personal favourite dystopian literary reference here.

    • Natalie Pang ☛ Your Phone Already Has Social Credit. We Just Lie About It.

      Social credit, in its original economic definition, means distributing industry profits to consumers to increase purchasing power. But the term has evolved far beyond economics. Today, it describes any kind of metric that tracks individual behavior, assigns scores based on that behavior, and uses those scores to determine access to services, opportunities, or social standing.

    • BoingBoing ☛ The invisible social credit system in your smartphone

      Your smartphone is a snitch, and it's been ratting you out for years. Every app you use, every ride you take, every post you like — it's all part of an invisible social credit system that's been shaping your life without your knowledge.

• Defence/Aggression

  • NYPost ☛ Anti-ICE Fentanylware (TikTok) influencer films her own arrest by federal agents — as it’s revealed she crossed the border illegally

    "This influencer drove under the influence — and got convicted for it in Los Angeles," ICE said in an X post following the arrest.

  • Site36 ☛ A-level student first honoured for criticism of German Gaza War reporting – then cancelled with AI

  • FAIR ☛ Media Dance Around Illegality of Trump’s Third-Country Deportation Scheme

    Back in March, 29-year-old Maryland man Kilmar Ábrego García—a Salvadoran native who had lived and worked in the United States for nearly half his life—became the face of Donald Trump’s sadistic mass deportation campaign when he was unlawfully sent to CECOT, El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison and torture center.

  • RFERL ☛ Understanding How GPS Jamming Works Amid Rise In Reported Cases

    This was only the latest episode in a growing and worrying tactic in modern conflict zones: GPS jamming.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Russian Spies Turn Everyday Websites Into Watering Holes

    Amazon’s threat intelligence team just uncovered their latest scheme and they seem to have tweaked their playbook of digital deception. The Russian operatives didn’t just hack a single target—they compromised multiple legitimate websites that everyday people visit regularly. Then they played the long game, waiting for the right victims to show up.

    They didn’t attack everyone who visited these compromised sites. That would have been too obvious. Instead, they programmed their malicious code to randomly select just 10% of visitors for redirection to their fake security pages. It was like having a digital bouncer who only let certain people into the trap.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Futurism ☛ A Strange Conspiracy Theory Is Reportedly Spreading Inside OpenAI

    In the filing, OpenAI demanded that Encode release any information it had about Musk's involvement in the founding of the nonprofit and any exchanges the group had had with him and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was apparently pitched to help Musk with his takeover bid in February.

    As Calvin told the Standard, no such documents exist, and no such exchanges occurred. But to OpenAI's increasingly paranoid executives, that seems hardly to matter. At least two other AI safety nonprofits, who were not named in the article, have been served similar documents in recent months, both with a similarly illusory goal: to find the mysterious billionaires funding this disparate cabal as it tries to hamstring OpenAI.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ ‘Congress must choose’: Epstein survivors demand vote to release case files

    In speech after speech, the victims urged Congress and President Donald Trump to make public what federal authorities uncovered about the reach of Epstein’s abuse, and specifically voiced support for Massie’s bipartisan effort that would bypass House leadership and force the release of volumes of records.

    “Congress must choose — will you continue to protect predators, or will you finally protect survivors?” said Lisa Phillips, who was victimized by Epstein on his private Caribbean island and now hosts a podcast about healing after abuse.

  • The Nation ☛ Trump’s Release of the MLK Jr. Files Was a Pathetic Gamble

    The MAGA faithful were waiting for the deliverable. Trump, however, found himself trapped, knowing that he’s part of whatever materials exist and that he will not look good (whether he did anything illegal or not) if the Epstein files are actually released. His constantly changing excuses have spread dissent among his own worshipers and led a panicked Trump to throw out any shiny objects he could think of to change the subject.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Demand Progress Condemns Speaker Johnson’s New Epstein Coverup

    The following is a statement from Demand Progress Policy Director Emily Peterson-Cassin:

    “Speaker Johnson keeps trying to do everything he can to keep the Epstein files under wraps. His latest phony resolution will only help House members look like they’re doing something without actually releasing the files. Real people were trafficked and harmed by Jeffrey Epstein, who also was close friends with the sitting president and many of the richest and most powerful people on earth. The American people deserve to know what the government knows about these crimes and the responsible way to accomplish that is by supporting the Massie-Khanna effort to release the files.”

  • [Repeat] Bruce Schneier ☛ 1965 Cryptanalysis Training Workbook Released by the NSA

    In the early 1960s, National Security Agency cryptanalyst and cryptanalysis instructor Lambros D. Callimahos coined the term “Stethoscope” to describe a diagnostic computer program used to unravel the internal structure of pre-computer ciphertexts. The term appears in the newly declassified September 1965 document Cryptanalytic Diagnosis with the Aid of a Computer, which compiled 147 listings from this tool for Callimahos’s course, CA-400: NSA Intensive Study Program in General Cryptanalysis.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Pro Publica ☛ Texas Says It’s Strict on Oil Field Emissions. New Data Shows It’s Not.

      Hakim Dermish moved to the small South Texas town of Catarina in 2002 in search of a rural lifestyle on a budget. The property where he lived with his wife didn’t have electricity or sewer lines at first, but that didn’t bother him.

      “Even if we lived in a cardboard box, no one could kick us out,” Dermish said.

    • US Navy Times ☛ Remembering the Shenandoah, the Navy’s first rigid airship

      Seen at the time as the future of aviation, these airships, however, had short and perilous careers.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ The Roadless Rule Is on the Chopping Block — and So Are Our Wildest Forests

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Nation ☛ Stephen Miller Calls Democrats a “Domestic Extremist Organization”

    We are all familiar with the Trump presidential strategy of “flooding the zone.” Its premise is that the mainstream media is incapable of running with more than one or two stories at a time. Therefore, if you hit the system on multiple fronts simultaneously this will take the wind out of any opposition. Hence the Trump regime’s accelerating addiction to outrage upon outrage.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ GitLab delivers solid quarter with revenue up 29%, but guidance and CFO exit weigh on stock

    For the quarter that ended on July 31, GitLab reported adjusted earnings per share of 24 cents, up from 15 cents per share in the same quarter of the previous fiscal year, on revenue of $236 million, up 29% year-over-year. Both figures were ahead of the 16 cents per share and revenue of $227 million expected by analysts.

  • Molly White ☛ Trump Jr.-advised prediction markets invite bets on president’s demise

    By the weekend, both prediction markets had embraced the speculation head-on, introducing explicit bets on whether Trump would be “out as President” by the end of the year.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Straits Times ☛ Malaysia summons Fentanylware (TikTok) management over delays in tackling fake news

      Meta will also be summoned, said the country's communications minister.

    • The Gray Zone ☛ UK funded radio show to sway Nigerian voters, leaked docs show

    • 404 Media ☛ AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History

      “It’s completely shocking to me,” Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told me in a phone interview. “It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I’m fearful because this is everywhere.”

      “I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they’re historically inaccurate,” Kelly added. [...]

    • 404 Media ☛ Google AI Falsely Says YouTuber Visited Israel, Forcing Him to Deal With Backlash

      Then someone sent him a screenshot of the AI generated summary of a Google search result that explained the deluge of messages. If you typed “Benn Jordan Israel” into Google and looked only at its AI summary, this is what it told you: [...]

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Afghan Taliban Vows To Rebuild Uzbek Poet's Statue Days After Destroying It

    Speaking to RFE/RL on condition of anonymity, residents said the authorities justified the move on religious grounds, stating that images and statues of human beings are banned by Shari'a law.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Admin Broke Law With Harvard $2 Billion Funding Freeze: Judge

    The Trump administration’s freeze of more than $2 billion in grant funds for Harvard University over allegations of antisemitism on campus was ruled illegal by a federal judge on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs’ decision moves to restore the crucial research funding and sided with Harvard’s arguments that the administration had violated First Amendment protections under the Constitution.

  • CNBC ☛ Harvard funding freeze by Trump administration reversed by judge

    A federal judge on Wednesday ruled that the Trump administration's freeze of $2.2 billion in funds for Harvard University was illegal.

  • BBC ☛ Harvard: Judge overturns Trump's research funding cuts at school

    Boston-based Judge Burroughs wrote in Wednesday's ruling: "The Court vacates and sets aside the Freeze Orders and Termination Letters as violative of the First Amendment."

    She blocked the administration from stopping any more federal funding to the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based college and barred the government from withholding payment on existing grants.

  • Associated Press ☛ Judge reverses funding freeze on Harvard by Trump administration

    U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs ruled the cuts amounted to illegal retaliation for Harvard’s rejection of the Trump administration’s demands for changes to Harvard’s governance and policies.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Censorship Crybabies Are Now The Censors: FDA’s Vinay Prasad Uses Copyright Claims To Silence Critic

    Now that some of these same people are running health agencies under Trump, we’re getting to see what actual censorship looks like—and surprise, surprise, it’s coming from the very people who complained the loudest about being silenced.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ Putting Profits Over Press Freedom: Interview With Jeff Cohen

  • CPJ ☛ Azerbaijan brings new charges against Meydan TV, arrests another journalist

    “The latest financial crimes charges against the prize-winning Azerbaijani outlet Meydan TV echo those recently used to sentence seven other journalists to lengthy prison terms, underlining the unprecedented scale of Azerbaijan’s drive to crush the independent press,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Azerbaijan should release more than two dozen journalists and media workers unjustly incarcerated in their recent crackdown, including the latest detainee, Ahmad Mukhtar.”

  • CPJ ☛ Indonesian journalists attacked while covering nationwide protests

    “Targeting reporters during civil unrest is unacceptable and violates the public’s right to be informed,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative. “President Prabowo Subianto’s administration must act decisively to end these attacks on the press and ensure that journalists can report freely and safely on the protests.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Digital Music News ☛ Living Wage for Musicians Act is Back, Reintroduced to Congress

    The union is encouraging artists and fans alike to write to their Congress members and ask them to support the bill when it hits the floor later this month. In May, the New York City Council passed a resolution backing the bill in anticipation of its reintroduction, showing strong evidence of support.

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Military Wasn’t Built to Fight Crime

    The new tactics represent a shift away from the vision, dating back to the colonial revolt against an overbearing superpower, that U.S. armed forces should defend the country from external threats but not be used to routinely enforce the law.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ When Historians Rediscovered These Frederick Douglass Letters, They Were Surprised by His Candid Opinions About Abraham Lincoln

    At the outset of the war in April 1861, Douglass publicly called for Lincoln to free the enslaved and allow Black men to fight in the Union Army. The president rebuffed such calls, concerned that emancipation lacked a clear military justification and would provoke the loyal border slave states, such as Maryland and Kentucky, into joining the Confederacy. A year and a half later, on September 22, 1862, with the border states firmly within Union control but the rebellion ongoing, Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, threatening to free enslaved people on New Year’s Day if the rebel states did not return to the Union.

    In a letter to Griffiths written on November 11, 1862, Douglass observed that a swift Union victory would have left slavery untouched. He also noted the irony that emancipation was finally coming about because a slow-moving, anti-abolitionist general, George B. McClellan, had been kept in command of the Union Army for so long: “Had his place been filled by an earnest man, with the means at his command, the rebellion might have been crushed in its infancy, and slavery might have lived to entail horrors on the slave and to insult Heaven yet a long time.”

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ All the Things That You Need a Billion Dollars to Buy Are Bad

    America’s 1,135 billionaires make up 0.0003% of the country’s population. Collectively, they own $5.7 trillion, about 4% of the nation’s wealth. Their comrades in the top 0.1% of the wealth distribution—a group you can enter with a paltry $50 million—own 14% of the nation’s wealth. The top 1% of the wealth distribution owns 31% of the nation’s wealth. The top ten percent owns two-thirds of the nation’s wealth. The bottom half of the wealth distribution in America owns 2.5% of the wealth. Effectively nothing.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Implementing an unlimited PTO policy

    In order to be fully effective, happier, healthier, and receive the full value of their benefits, every employee should use their full PTO. In a world where everyone is taking 2-4 weeks of vacation a year, the lack of payouts on an unlimited PTO plan is moot. So as long as the company strongly encourages that people take theirs — as Jen notes here, they can’t require vacation — and doesn’t create a culture of performative productivity, it’s actually a pretty good deal.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Trump unlawfully cancelled $2.2bn in Harvard research grants, judge rules

    The Trump administration has since sought to bar international students from attending the school; threatened Harvard’s accreditation status; and opened the door to cutting off more funds by finding it violated federal civil rights law.

  • Reuters ☛ Trump administration unlawfully cut Harvard's funding, US judge rules

    The decision, opens new tab by U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Boston marked a major legal victory for Harvard as it seeks to cut a deal that could bring an end to the White House's multi-front conflict with the nation's oldest and richest university.

  • Politico LLC ☛ Harvard secures win in fight with Trump over federal research funding

    Wednesday’s ruling is a major victory for the Ivy League school in its high-profile showdown with the federal government. Harvard President Alan Garber had previously said the university chose to sue because the demands to reinstate its federal grants were unreasonable, an attempt to “to control whom we hire and what we teach” and did not address antisemitism.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Caribbean island of Anguilla makes millions from .ai web domain

    Last year, Anguilla generated $39 million selling its domain, almost a quarter of the island’s total revenue. With only 16,000 people, it expects to make $48.8 million this year and $51 million in 2026 from the service.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• New York Times ☛ The Government Just Walloped Google. That’s Good Business.

  Curbing Surveillance Giant Google is an overdue return to the government’s longtime role in encouraging competition among tech companies.

• Simon Willison ☛ Google antitrust remedies

  That looks like a huge sigh of relief for Mozilla, who were at risk of losing a sizable portion of their income if Google's search distribution revenue were to be cut off.

• Los Angeles Times ☛ Google won't be forced to sell its Chrome browser, judge rules

  A federal judge ruled Tuesday against the U.S. government’s proposal that Google should sell its Chrome web browser to restore competition in online search, saving the tech giant from having to spin off one of its biggest businesses.

  In the more than 200-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta said forcing Google to divest Chrome went too far and the remedy was a “poor fit for this case.”

• Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Substack subscriptions in the iOS app: inflated prices and a new “walled garden” for newsletters

  The risk that I’ve long warned about — getting locked into Substack — now unfolds into being locked into two platforms: Substack and Apple. (As Isabelle put it, Substack has effectively delivered its users onto Apple.

• Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ US “remedies” to curb Google’s online search monopoly

  The US ruled the “remedies” to be applied to Google in the case where the company was found guilty of monopolistic practices in the search market: [...]

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The worst possible antitrust outcome

  Some people in the antitrust world didn't see it that way. Out of a misguided kind of privacy nihilism, they called for Google to be forced to share the data it stole from us, so that potential competitors could tune their search tools on the monopolist's population-scale privacy violations.

  And that is what the court has ordered.

  As punishment for being convinced of obtaining and maintaining a monopoly, Google will be forced to share sensitive data with lots of other search engines. This will not secure competition for search, but it will certainly democratize human rights violations at scale.

• Patents

  • JUVE ☛ The exodus at Klaka continues

    According to JUVE Patent sources, patent monopoly lawyer Wolfgang Götz (60) and trademark and design lawyer Stefan Abel (57) are moving from Klaka to mixed IP law firm Meissner Bolte. Another partner duo will join Lubberger Lehment in January: leading German trademark lawyer Ralf Hackbarth (64) and soft IP specialist Carola Onken (46). >

• Trademarks

  • TTAB Blog ☛ Current Roster of TTAB Administrative Trademark Judges

    With the recent appointment of Christina Hieber as Acting Chief Judge and the retirement of Judge Albert Zervas, the Board’s membership now stands at twenty-four (24) Administrative Trademark Judges. The current roster is set forth below, beginning with Acting Chief Judge Hieber and Deputy Chief Judge Thomas V. Shaw, and then proceeding alphabetically. [Corrections welcome].

    Hieber, Christina (Acting Chief Judge): Appointed to TTAB in 2025. Prior Professional Experience: Senior Counsel for Trademark Policy and Litigation in the USPTO’s Office of the Solicitor; private practice, Washington, D.C.; Education: B.A., Dartmouth; J.D., George Washington University Law School.

  • TTAB Blog ☛ TTAB Posts September 2025 Hearing Schedule

    The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (Tee-Tee-Ā-Bee) has scheduled two oral hearings for the month of September 2025. Both will be held virtually. Briefs and other papers for each case may be found at TTABVUE via the links provided.

    September 11, 2025 - 1 PM [Virtual]: Mobigame v. Edge Games, Inc., Cancellation No. 92075393 [Petition for cancellation of a registration for the mark EDGE GAMES for computer game software [GAMES disclaimed] in view of the common law mark EDGE for computer games.]

  • Digital Camera World ☛ How iconic is Polaroid’s square format? Courts to decide as years-long dispute between camera makers heats up

    The trademark infringement case dates back to 2017 and has been in and out of courts since, but a judge for the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York has recently dismissed Fujifilm’s requests for a summary judgment. Last month, Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald partially dismissed Fujifilm’s motion for summary judgment, a move that likely means the case will be headed for a trial.

  • Right of Publicity

    • 404 Media ☛ Almost Every State Has Its Own Deepfakes Law Now

      Michigan just became the 48th state to enact a law addressing deepfakes, imposing jail time and penalties up to the felony level for people who make AI-generated nonconsensual abuse imagery of a real person.

• Copyrights

  • Court House News ☛ TikTok faces copyright questions

    TikTok must face some copyright claims brought by a Chinese software company in a California federal court. The judge ruled that the copyrightability of the source code at issue, as well as the disputed ownership of trade secrets at hand in in this case, is a matter for a jury to consider.

  • Walled Culture ☛ Top German court says maybe the Web should be more like television in order to protect copyright

    Springer’s argument was that a Web page is actually a kind of program, and as such was protected by copyright. An ad blocker installed in a browser, Springer maintained, infringed on its copyright by modifying that Web page program without permission. This is a novel way of looking at browsers and the Web pages they display. For the last 35 years, Web pages have been regarded as an arrangement of raw data in the form of text, images, sounds etc. The Web browser is a specialised program for displaying that data in various formats, controlled by the user. Springer is asserting something far reaching: that a Web page is itself a program that must be run “as is”, and not modified by a Web browser and its add-ons without the explicit permission of the page’s copyright holder.

    As the Mozilla blog post points out, if the German courts ultimately adopt this position, the implications would be profound, because this would affect not just ad blockers. There are many other reasons why people use tools like browser extensions to modify Web pages before they are displayed: [...]

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Court of Appeal Throws Bell Canada a Lifeline in $291m Movie Piracy Lawsuit

    A group of movie companies known for targeting ISPs in the U.S. went on to file a similar lawsuit against Bell Canada. They argued that since Bell failed to forward ~40,000 infringement notices to its subscribers, the ISP can be held liable. After a series of setbacks, the Federal Court of Appeal has thrown Bell a lifeline in lawsuit worth up to CAD$400m (US$291m) in damages.