Leftovers

• Rob Weychert ☛ V7: Launch day

  I started redesigning this site in January of 2020. Remember January of 2020? We didn’t know we were living in the Before Times. There were still a few people in the White House who weren’t Fox News hosts or meme coin shills or raw milk evangelists. Our tech bro billionaires hadn’t yet entered the endgame of their persistent campaign to annihilate whatever sense of objective reality we once shared. We were so young.

• Robert Birming ☛ The mess we hide

  Often, the homeowners apologize for the mess, convinced their house is a disaster compared to others. When I tell them it’s actually very average, they look both relieved and surprised.

• Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0132 Personal and work systems: how do they interact?

  I have P76 Johnny's personal life and D25 Johnny.Decimal. To each, it is like the other does not exist.

  They're different parts of my life and I find the separation helpful. Also, for example, I share the business with Lucy, but not my personal stuff. As soon as you merge them, you lose the ability to do that sort of thing.

• Joel Chrono ☛ This post was written in a notebook

  A little experiment where I write a post with pen and paper, but I transcribed it as well, just for fun

• Science

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Is the Prob Method `Just Counting'- I say no and HELL NO

    (After I wrote this post Lance tweeted a pointer to a great talk by Ronald de Wolf with more examples, and also examples of quantum proofs, see here.)

    I was teaching the prob method for lower bounds on Ramsey Numbers (see my slides here).

• Career/Education

  • Louie Mantia ☛ Finding Work

    Do you stay pretty busy as an indie designer… is the work consistent or sporadic?

• Hardware

  • The Register UK ☛ VMSCAPE Spectre vulnerability leaks cloud secrets

    The attack, dubbed VMSCAPE (CVE-2025-40300), is said to be the first Spectre-based exploit that allows a malicious guest user in a cloud environment to leak secrets from the hypervisor in the host domain without code changes – injected Return-oriented programming gadgets – and in default configuration.

  • The Register UK ☛ Arm wrestles away 25% share of server market thanks to Nvidia's home-grown CPU

    That’s up from 15 percent of the server market a year ago, Dell’Oro analyst Baron Fung tells El Reg.

  • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Wireless earphones: a belated review

    Since the early days of this Manual, my goal has been the “slow web,” which here translates to being the last to cover a topic. Even so, I didn’t expect I’d ever write about something eight years late.

    Anyway — here we are. Let’s talk wireless earphones.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ We can’t “make American children healthy again” without tackling the gun crisis

    But there’s a glaring omission. The leading cause of death for American children and teenagers isn’t ultraprocessed food or exposure to some chemical. It’s gun violence.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Outlook out in North America, Microsoft scrambles for a fix

    On the plus side we'll all be getting fewer unwanted emails

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ A Tribute To Hoyle's Official Book Of Games

    In 1989, Sierra On-Line released Volume 1 of their Hoyle: Official Book of Games on MS-DOS, a card game collection where you could play Crazy Eights, Old Maid, Hearts, Gin Rummy, Cribbage, and Klondike Solitaire according to Edmond Hoyle’s rules as recorded in his foundational work Hoyle’s Rules Of Games. Hoyle meticulously recorded and explained all games “of skill and chance” he encountered from as early as 1672, including expert advice on strategies and even how to settle disputes. Sierra managed to procure a license boasting the name Hoyle not only in the title but also in some of the card faces that USA manufacturers Brown & Bigelow also branded Hoyle—hence the addition of “official”.

  • Security Week ☛ Akira Ransomware Attacks Fuel Uptick in Exploitation of SonicWall Flaw

    The targeted flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-40766 (CVSS score of 9.3), is described as an improper access control issue that could allow attackers to access restricted resources and crash the firewall in certain conditions.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Citizen Lab ☛ Canada’s New Minister of AI Must Not Be Naive to Its Harms - The Citizen Lab

      Psyops and cybercrimes that used to take large amounts of time and resources have been streamlined with the help of AI. “Poorly regulated, ethically dubious startups now offer industrial-scale ideological manipulation as a service,” writes Deibert.

    • The Verge ☛ Aligning those who align AI, one satirical website at a time

      At first glance, CAAAC seems legitimate. The aesthetics of the website are cool and calming, with a logo of converging arrows reminiscent of the idea of togetherness and sets of parallel lines swirling behind black font.

      But stay on the page for 30 seconds and the swirls spell out “bullshit,” giving away that CAAAC is all one big joke. One second longer and you’ll notice the hidden gems tucked away in every sentence and page of the fantasy center’s website.

    • Jeff Sheets ☛ Where is the GenAI Deployment Shovelware?

      Mike Judge recently wrote a viral post asking “Where’s the shovelware?” - basically arguing that if AI coding tools were really making developers extraordinarily productive, we’d be drowning in new apps by now. He put together compelling data showing flat growth across every software category despite widespread AI tool adoption.

      Mike’s frustration is palpable and his data is solid. He captures this perfectly: [...]

    • Six Colors ☛ Reverse Centaurs

      I think this is exactly right. AI working for us is great. Us working for AI is a horror story.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox

      A "centaur" is a human being who is assisted by a machine (a human head on a strong and tireless body). A reverse centaur is a machine that uses a human being as its assistant (a frail and vulnerable person being puppeteered by an uncaring, relentless machine).

      Let me give you an example: remember at the start of the summer, when Hearst published a summer reading guide that was full of nonexistent books that had been "hallucinated" by a chatbot?

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Question All Colleges Should Ask Themselves About AI

      Widespread AI use also subverts the institutional goals of colleges and universities. Large language models routinely fabricate information, and even when they do create factually accurate work, they frequently depend on intellectual-property theft. So when an educational institution as a whole produces large amounts of AI-generated scholarship, it fails to create new ideas and add to the storehouse of human wisdom. AI also takes a prodigious ecological toll and relies on labor exploitation, which is impossible to square with many colleges’ and universities’ professed commitment to protecting the environment and fighting economic inequality.

    • 404 Media ☛ The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes

      Linkedin has been joking about “vibe coding cleanup specialists,” but it’s actually a growing profession.

    • David Revoy ☛ The Amphora of Great Intelligence (AGI) - David Revoy

  • Social Control Media

    • Vox ☛ The Charlie Kirk shooting brings out the worst in social media

      The [Internet] devolved into a series of echo chambers years ago, but the current state of social media feels more like a series of pressure chambers, heating up with each extra post, until things are ready to boil over.

    • International Business Times ☛ Charlie Kirk Video on YouTube, Social Media Spreads in the UK, Other Countries — Where's the Censorship?

      While some commentators have accused platforms of restricting access, available evidence suggests that social media companies are applying existing rules for sensitive or graphic content rather than imposing blanket bans. The situation highlights the complexities of moderating international political material in the UK, where platforms are now operating under a stricter legal framework.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ FTC should investigate Microsoft after Ascension ransomware attack, senator says

      A U.S. senator is blaming faulty Microsoft technology for a ransomware attack on Catholic healthcare giant Ascension Health last year.

      Democratic Sen. Ron Wyen asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Microsoft’s responsibility for the incident, accusing the tech giant of “gross cybersecurity negligence” that has led to several ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure in the U.S.

    • The Register UK ☛ Senator blasts Microsoft for 'dangerous, insecure software'

      "I urge the FTC to investigate Microsoft and hold the company responsible for the serious harm it has caused by delivering dangerous, insecure software to the US government and to critical infrastructure entities, such as those in the US healthcare sector," Wyden wrote.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Students Pose Inside Threat to Education Sector

      While most of the activity is fairly innocent — such as changing grades, viewing school records, or simply testing their hacking abilities — the insider threat still poses a risk to the education sector. The biggest concern is the added pressure it puts on underfunded and understaffed schools with small or no dedicated security teams.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ How Palantir Is Mapping Everyone’s Data For The Government

      Palantir’s two main platforms are Foundry and Gotham. Each does different things. Foundry is used by corporations in the private sector to help with global operations. Gotham is marketed as an “operating system for global decision making” and is primarily used by governments.

    • The Register UK ☛ Brussels faces privacy crossroads over encryption backdoors

      Representatives from member states will meet on Friday to consider legislation critics call Chat Control, aka "laying down rules to prevent and combat child sexual abuse," which seeks to require ISPs or messaging app providers to scan user content or backdoor encryption so that intelligence agencies can do it themselves. It's the latest attempt in a three-year campaign by some in the community to allow government agencies unprecedented access to private communications.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Pro Publica ☛ Massachusetts’ Statute of Limitations for Rape Is One of the Shortest in the Nation

    Seventeen years had passed by the time Boston police knocked on Louise’s door to say they had identified the man who allegedly raped and stabbed her in October 2005.

    The suspect was now a father of two, a possible serial rapist and likely beyond the reach of the law, investigators told her. Police had taken so long to identify him that they missed the state’s deadline to prosecute her case.

  • Krebs On Security ☛ Bulletproof Host Stark Industries Evades EU Sanctions

    In May 2025, the European Union levied financial sanctions on the owners of Stark Industries Solutions Ltd., a bulletproof hosting provider that materialized two weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine and quickly became a top source of Kremlin-linked cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. But new findings show those sanctions have done little to stop Stark from simply rebranding and transferring their assets to other corporate entities controlled by its original hosting providers.

  • Air Force Times ☛ Pentagon stages first ‘Top Drone’ school for operators to hone skills

    The goal, he said, is to provide a chance for service members, industry and academia to prove out tactics, operational procedures and drone capabilities on a test course that mimics the kinds of terrain and adversary effects an operator might see in the field. It also allows the department to validate and refine its own counter-uncrewed aircraft system sensors.

  • New Yorker ☛ Did Trump Just Declare War on the American Left?

    And in case there was any mistaking the official view of such pronouncements, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller on Thursday joined in from the West Wing, promising in a lengthy post on X to wage war on the “wicked ideology” that had killed Kirk and the proponents of it who, he claimed, were online cheering Kirk’s death. “The fate of our children, our society, our civilization hinges on it,” Miller added. Dialing it down, they were not.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Trump’s Dangerous Response to the Kirk Assassination

    Rather than condemning violence and calling for unity, the president of the United States accused his political opposition of being accessories to murder.

  • Deseret Media ☛ Brazil's Bolsonaro guilty of coup charges, court majority decides in landmark trial

    Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was convicted by a Supreme Court majority on Thursday of plotting a coup to remain in power after losing the 2022 election, a powerful blow to the movement he created.

  • Truthdig ☛ The Life and Legacy of Charlie 4Chan

    Public officials who went silent after Democratic lawmakers were executed in their homes are tripping over themselves to honor the man who franchised internet chan culture as politics.

  • The Register UK ☛ Intel loses chief architect behind its Xeon CPUs

    His innovations aren't limited to the datacenter either, with his architectural contributions playing a significant role in the success of Intel's Core and Atom processor families as well.

  • New York Times ☛ Nepal’s Social Media Ban Backfires as Politics Moves to a Chat Room

    “The Parliament of Nepal right now is Discord,” a user said of the platform popular with video gamers, where tens of thousands are debating the nation’s future.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ America’s Biggest Post-9/11 Failure Is Not What You Think

    That’s because Russia’s war was never about terrorism or religious extremism, but colonial control. And that agenda received American blessing after 9/11.

    In the years since, Putin has adopted an ever more expansive definition of terrorism to include anyone who speaks out against the regime. In fact, the Russian government officially designated me as a terrorist just last year!

    Looking back, it’s easy to criticize Bush’s approach to Russia in the aftermath of 9/11. Indeed, there is a lot worth criticizing.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Nepal's Young Protesters Back Former Chief Justice as Interim Head

    Government buildings, from the Supreme Court to ministers' homes, including Oli's private residence, were set ablaze in the protests, which only subsided after the prime minister resigned.

    Businesses set on fire included several hotels in the tourist town of Pokhara and the Hilton in Kathmandu.

  • New York Times ☛ Nepal’s Capital Is Choked With Smoke and Gripped by Fear

    Many of the capital’s mighty institutions — a palace complex turned seat of government, the Supreme Court, ministry buildings — lay in ruins. Reams of documents, bank notes and official finery were turned to ash. A former prime minister and his wife, who is the foreign minister, were attacked by a mob. Another former prime minister’s wife suffered extreme burns and underwent surgery on Thursday.

  • Mike Brock ☛ A Dangerous Moment

    Political violence is incompatible with democracy. The entire point of democratic governance is settling our differences through deliberation rather than force, through ballots rather than bullets, through argument rather than assassination. When political disagreements escalate to physical attacks on speakers, we’re witnessing the breakdown of democratic discourse itself. Civil war—political violence taken to its most extreme form—becomes more likely when democratic alternatives get systematically eliminated. I worry our nation is heading in that direction.

  • US Navy Times ☛ Navy awards drone contracts to the ‘big five’ defense contractors

    The CCAs are uncrewed systems that would be launched from carriers to augment the Navy’s power to deliver airstrikes in a maritime setting, and also complement manned fighter aircraft launched from carriers. Development appears to be in its early stages.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Vox ☛ Russia just inched closer to open war with NATO

      But Polish authorities have made clear that this time is different. They are treating this as a deliberate provocation, rather than an accident.

      “When one or two drones does it, it is possible that it was a technical malfunction,” said Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister. “In this case, there were 19 breaches, and it simply defies imagination that that could be accidental.”

    • NL Times ☛ Dutch foreign minister summons Russian ambassador over drone incursion into Poland

      The Minister of Foreign Affairs, David van Weel, has summoned the Russian ambassador to account for the Russian drones that flew over Poland on Wednesday. Some of the drones were shot down by Dutch fighter jets. The caretaker VVD minister announced this on Thursday before the start of a parliamentary debate.

    • The Zambian Observer ☛ What would happen if NATO country was attacked as Russia commits ‘act of war’ in Polish airspace - The Zambian Observer

      How have NATO countries responded to Russia’s drones in Polish airspace? Poland’s military called it ‘an act of aggression that posed a real threat to the safety of our citizens’ as one of the drones is believed to have hit a residential building in Wyryki.

      This event marks a shift in the Russia and Ukraine war, as it is the first time since the war began in 2022 that NATO military assets have engaged Russian equipment.

      Russia has been increasingly using Poland’s airspace in its bid to target Ukraine.

    • New Eastern Europe ☛ Russian drones in Poland, will NATO pass the test?

      The purpose of such a provocation is to rather conduct reconnaissance activities, to test NATO’s air defence systems, and prepare for the moment when the Russian military-political command decides to take more dangerous steps, including an operation to establish control over the Suwałki Corridor or intervention in other potential areas of the Baltic region.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Wieslander on Swedish radio

      September 11, Wieslander also comments on the absent US response to the incident, saying that it is “curious” that neither the President nor any secretary in the administration has condemned Russia’s actions.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Says an OpenAI Whistleblower Was Murdered

    The late 26-year-old software engineer had gone to the New York Times months before his passing, decrying what he deemed to be illegal copyright violations by his employer. He was also prepared to testify as a witness in the newspaper's lawsuit against the company.

  • India Times ☛ Former OpenAI employee Suchir Balaji was murdered, alleges Elon Musk

    In August 2023, Balaji resigned from OpenAI and began speaking publicly about his concerns. He accused the company of illegally using copyrighted material to train its generative AI (GenAI) models.

    Altman said he hasn't spoken to the authorities about their investigations, but he did offer to reach out to the mother, who refused to speak with him.

  • Vox ☛ Charlie Kirk death: Trump wrongly blames the left for rise in political violence

    There are two major problems with the right’s rush to blame the incident, and political violence more broadly, on the left. First, even if the shooter turns out to be a left-wing extremist — certainly within the realm of possibility — the urge to immediately blame the left before facts emerge is reckless. As we learned from the assassination attempt on Trump last year on the campaign trail, shooters might not always have clear ideological motives. Second, and more importantly, the attempt to frame political violence as a problem that solely plagues the left is not just irresponsible; it’s factually inaccurate.

  • New Yorker ☛ The Epstein Birthday Book Is Even Worse Than You Might Realize

    You have likely heard about the Presidential submissions to this anthology, which the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform obtained from Epstein’s estate and released to the public this week. A vapid, near-illegible note attributed to Bill Clinton salutes “all the years of learning and knowing” that Epstein has logged, and praises his “childlike curiosity” and his “drive to make a difference.” The entry attributed to and apparently signed by Donald Trump invents an innuendo-heavy conversation between himself and Epstein, who was later revealed to be a serial rapist of girls as young as fourteen. Surely taking inspiration from the concrete poems of John Hollander or perhaps James Merrill’s “Christmas Tree,” the author fits the lines of dialogue inside a female silhouette, adding pen strokes that represent breast buds. He alludes to a shared love of secrets. Epstein, Trump once observed, likes women “on the younger side.” (The White House has denied that Trump contributed the drawing or signed it.)

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ US Senate votes down measure to force release of Epstein files | Alabama Reflector

    In a procedural vote, senators voted 51-49 to table the amendment filed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, effectively stopping the chamber from considering the measure. Republicans Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rand Paul of Kentucky voted with all Democrats to advance the amendment.

• Environment

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Water Found At Origin Points Of Only 7 Of 32 Rivers, Visited By MP Minister

    He could find water in the origin points of only seven out of the 32 rivers he has visited in the last one month, the minister told the media here on Wednesday.

  • The Nation ☛ Are We Distracting Ourselves Into Climate Catastrophe?

    When shocking news about how soon civilization might collapse is overshadowed by Taylor Swift’s engagement, we might have a problem.

  • Peter Moulding ☛ Recycling old disks in 2025

    You have some old disks. Are they best reused as disks or recycled as metal? Here are guidelines based on practical experience. We look at age, capacity, use, and technology generations.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • India Times ☛ Malaysia reins in data centre growth, complicating China's AI chip access

      The Southeast Asian country has drawn in data centre investments from US technology giants like Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet's Google and their Chinese counterparts Tencent, Huawei and Alibaba in recent years, spurred by cheap land and electricity costs and robust local AI demand prospects.

    • California ☛ California Considers Solar Farms as Water Runs Dry

      As a teen, Franson hauled a water tank to spray down the dust on roads like this — rolling past rows of almond and pistachio trees, the CD on his Discman skipping with every bump.

      A quarter of a century later, with water supplies squeezed by climate change and regulation, the dust has spread beyond the sunbaked track to barren fields. Now, on one side of the road, a field sits empty — fallowed, tire-tracked and dry. On the other stands a new crop: solar panels, in glassy black rows behind a chain-link fence.

    • Positech Games ☛ A solar farm after 6 months: Maintenance report – Cliffski's Blog

      So…my site has actually been live for 11 months now, but there has been a bunch of stuff that needed fixing after initial energization, so the six monthly maintenance thing happened a bit later. If you are asking ‘does it really need maintenance every six months?’ the answer seems to be yes. I pushed back on this, as I thought it was overkill, but have been talked around. if I owned 10 solar farms, I’d totally let one have maintenance every year or 18 months to see if it was worth it, but with a single asset I likely shouldn’t risk it.

    • Hindustan Times ☛ Ensuring rooftop solar for every household

      First, pair bigger roofs with batteries. Systems larger than 5 kWp often generate more mid-day power than a home can use. Without storage, surplus is pushed to the grid and “withdrawn” at night, turning the grid into a near-free virtual battery. As adoption scales, those daytime injections can stress local feeders, and evening withdrawals raise distribution company’s (Discom) procurement costs. Storage flips that script. With a home battery, households shift solar to the evening — when their own demand is higher and supply is costlier for the grid. Because RTS-plus-storage raises upfront costs and stretches paybacks, meaningful, targeted subsidies are essential. Offering elevated subsidies only for systems that integrate storage would nudge larger RTS adopters toward configurations that help both consumers and the grid.

    • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Nebraska lawmaker, passenger rail advocates host town hall in North Platte

      Kuzelka was among a trio of speakers on the third leg of a five-stop town hall tour organized by State Sen. Margo Juarez of Omaha and ProRail to educate Nebraskans on the possibilities and benefits of passenger rail options, gauge interest and broaden support. ProRail is associated with the Rail Passenger Association and seeks improved passenger rail and other forms of surface public transportation serving Nebraska.

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ OpenAI’s staggering numbers

      It reportedly centers on new data centers announced in July, designed to deliver 4.5 gigawatts of power — enough to supply a city of four million people. The deal could also partially replace the stalled $500 billion Stargate project, unveiled in January but left in limbo for lack of funding.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Science News ☛ Octopus arms are adaptable but some are favored for particular jobs

      A new, detailed analysis of how octopuses wield their famously flexible appendages suggests that all eight arms share a skill set, but the front four spend more time on exploration and the back four on movement. The findings, published September 11 in Scientific Reports, provide a comprehensive accounting of how subtle arm movements coordinate the clever invertebrates’ repertoire of behaviors.

  • Overpopulation

    • Sean Monahan ☛ are you unc?

      This year, for the first time in history, the United States population is on track to decline. As a result, the old will soon outnumber the young, an event analyst Marko Jukic calls "the flippening". What will this mean? The most obvious implications are already happening: [...]

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Verge ☛ Microsoft and OpenAI have a new deal that could clear the way for an IPO

    Microsoft has invested $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, and shares in the revenue earned by ChatGPT as well as its API. Microsoft also now includes OpenAI as a competitor, allows OpenAI to lean on other cloud providers for compute power, and has started to increase its reliance on its own AI models.

  • El País ☛ Trump heckled while celebrating first month of his Washington ‘takeover’: ‘You’re the Hitler of our time!’

    Inside, however, a group of disgruntled residents who disagreed with that diagnosis awaited him. They greeted him with shouts of “Free Palestine!” “Free D.C.!” and called him “the Hitler of our time.” In a city that in the last elections gave 92% of its votes to Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, those protesters are not exactly isolated cases, as was evident last Saturday, when thousands of people took to the streets to protest what they see as a worrying authoritarian move by the Trump government.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Verge ☛ Internet detectives are misusing AI to find Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter

      Earlier today, the FBI shared two blurry photos on X of a person of interest in the shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. Numerous users replied with AI-upscaled, “enhanced” versions of the pictures almost immediately, turning the pixelated surveillance shots into sharp, high-resolution images. But AI tools aren’t uncovering secret details in a fuzzy picture, they’re inferring what might be there — and they have a track record of showing things that don’t exist.

    • India Times ☛ False AI 'fact-checks' stir online chaos after Kirk assassination

      The trend highlights how chatbots often generate confident responses, even when verified information is unavailable during fast-developing news events, energizing misinformation across platforms that have largely scaled back human fact-checking and content moderation.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • JURIST ☛ Myanmar man sentenced to hard labor for criticizing upcoming elections

    Nay Thway’s criticism was directed toward election laws introduced by Myanmar junta chief Min Aung Hlain in July. According to an exiled Burmese-run news outlet, the law would impose harsh penalties on any dissenters or individuals who attempt to condemn the junta’s proposed policies: [...]

  • Wired ☛ How China’s Propaganda and Surveillance Systems Really Operate

    A trove of internal documents leaked from a little-known Chinese company has pulled back the curtain on how digital censorship tools are being marketed and exported globally. Geedge Networks sells what amounts to a commercialized “Great Firewall” to at least four countries, including Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Myanmar. The groundbreaking leak shows in granular detail the capabilities this company has to monitor, intercept, and hack internet traffic. Researchers who examined the files described it as “digital authoritarianism as a service.”

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ US Court Rules Against Noem & DHS's Attacks On The Press

    A United States court concluded that border patrol and other federal agents “unleashed crowd control weapons indiscriminately and with surprising savagery,” targeting journalists who were covering protests against ICE in Los Angeles

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ calls on Haitian authorities to ensure media leader’s protection after threats

    “Guy Delva, a highly respected veteran journalist and the founder and leader of SOS Journalistes, a trusted defender of press freedom, should not be forced to live in fear of doing his job,” said CPJ U.S., Canada and Caribbean Program Coordinator Katherine Jacobsen. “The Haitian government should focus on restoring order to the country rather than stoking false and dangerous narratives about its press corps and media support groups.”

  • RFERL ☛ RFE/RL Journalist Ihar Losik Freed After More Than 5 Years Of Brutal Detention In Belarus

    Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Ihar Losik has been freed after spending more than five years in brutal Belarusian detention on trumped-up charges, part of the latest release of political prisoners amid a thawing of relations between Minsk and the United States.

  • CPJ ☛ Azerbaijan upholds lengthy sentences for 7 journalists from Abzas Media and RFE/RL

    “The rejection of the appeals of seven journalists in the Abzas Media case only confirms that Azerbaijani authorities cannot withstand the outlet’s uncompromising coverage of alleged corruption by state officials,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “Azerbaijan must free the journalists, along with nearly two dozen other members of the press arrested since late 2023.”

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Techdirt ☛ Waymo Tells Cops: ‘Get A Warrant’

    By making this demand of law enforcement, Waymo may be setting up the entire nation for another limitation of Fourth Amendment rights. Between the Third Party Doctrine and the automobile exception, cops may decide to press the issue in court after their warrantless demands for data are rebuffed, citing both of the above doctrines in support of their claims.

    The automobile exception tends to lower the standard for searches from “probable cause” to “reasonable suspicion” under the assumption that vehicles traveling on public roads are not generally afforded an “expectation of privacy.” That’s why cops can look in windows and run drug dogs around cars and perform inventory searches of any vehicles they choose to tow.

  • Court House News ☛ States, tribes revive long-running lawsuit after Trump nixes fish deal

    Those dams continue to harm salmon and steelhead, according to Bill Arthur, director of the Sierra Club’s Snake/Columbia River Campaign.

    “We have a responsibility to return to court to improve and modernize our hydropower system so we can have affordable and reliable clean energy well into the future, alongside healthy and salmon and steelhead runs,” Arthur said in a statement.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ 'I am not the same person.' SoCal man details 13 days in ICE 'basement'

    After waiting hours to be booked, “the first person I spoke to didn’t understand why they arrested me,” Othmane said. “He said my application was legit.”

  • Site36 ☛ Snitch in left-wing movements in France exposed: He is said to have operated in Germany and Belgium as well

    In addition to his intensive surveillance activity in France – in particular in Paris, in the anti-nuclear protest location Bure and during the uprisings of ‘Soulèvements de la Terre’ – the snitch was also active in Germany. Just a few weeks ago, he is said to have attended the ‘Anarchist Barrio’ at the ‘Disarm Rheinmetall!’ camp in Cologne. He also apparently informed his handlers about a camp against the arms manufacturer Elbit planned for the third week of September in Ulm, in southern Germany. The dossier also reports on a mission in Belgium. Accordingly, he is said to have passed on information about activists from Berlin and Athens as well.

  • BIA Net ☛ Six child workers under 14 killed on the job in Turkey in one month

    At least 192 workers were killed on the job in August, according to the Health and Safety Labor Watch.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Internet Outage Hits Secretariat

    Officials said the blackout of [Internet] and cable services was set to continue, or even worsen, with the southern discom (TGSPDCL) on the back of a court order cutting down cables illegally strung from electricity poles, even as service providers have not moved in a big way to remove their cables. The crackdown on the illegal cables started after the electrocution of six persons during a religious procession last month.

  • Doc Searls ☛ Privacy is a Contract

    In the natural world, privacy is a social contract: a tacit agreement that we respect others’ private spaces. We guard those spaces with the privacy tech we call clothing and shelter. We also signal what’s okay and what’s not using language and gestures. “Manners” are as formal as the social contract for privacy gets, but those manners are a stratum in the bedrock on which we have built civilization for thousands of years.

    We don’t have it online. The owner of a store who would never think of planting tracking beacons inside the clothes of visiting customers does exactly that on the company website. Tracking people is business-as-usual online.

  • Inside Towers ☛ NTIA: Most States Have Submitted Final BEAD Proposals

    The NTIA says 36 out of 56 states and territories have submitted Final Proposals that outline how they will use BEAD funding to close broadband gaps and connect all Americans to high-speed [Internet]. The NTIA is projecting an “at least” $13 billion savings for taxpayers by the submitted plans, “driven by a rise in participation by the private sector, increased matching commitments by subgrantees, and a surge of innovative technology solutions to deliver high-speed connectivity.”

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Artists Who've Left Spotify Over CEO Daniel Ek's Military Tech Ties

    Over the past few months, a groundswell of indie artists have chosen to cut ties with Spotify in protest of CEO and co-founder Daniel Ek’s ties to the defense company Helsing.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • The Register UK ☛ Appeals court blocks Trump bid to ax top copyright official

    The DC Circuit's ruling grants Perlmutter an injunction, meaning she keeps her job while the case grinds on. The court said the Copyright Act makes clear that only the Librarian of Congress, not the president, can remove the register of copyrights, adding that Trump's effort to install two executive branch officials – US deputy attorney general Todd Blanche and associate deputy attorney general Paul Perkins in the roles of librarian of Congress and register of copyrights, respectively – was "likely unlawful".

    In other words, the White House can't just email the nation's top copyright official and tell her to pack up her desk.