Leftovers

• The Cyber Show ☛ Digital Inclusion Coffee Mornings

  Many older people are very unhappy that they are treated as a special group at all and feel patronised and talked down to about technology. But that is only because everybody is talked down to about technology (The young don't notice because everyone talks down to them about everything all the time). This is a huge cultural obstacle to face.

• Seth Michael Larson ☛ SCREAM CIPHER (“ǠĂȦẶAẦ ĂǍÄẴẶȦ”)

  You've probably heard of stream ciphers, but what about a scream cipher 😱? Today I learned there are more “Latin capital letter A” Unicode characters than there are letters in the English alphabet. You know what that means, it's time to scream: [...]

• Computers Are Bad ☛ the video lunchbox

  An opening note: would you believe that I have been at this for five years, now? If I planned ahead better, I would have done this on the five-year anniversary, but I missed it. Computers Are Bad is now five years and four months old.

• Tim Kellogg ☛ Link Graveyard: A snapshot of my abandoned browser tabs

  I went to close a bunch of browser tabs, but realized I have some cool stuff in here. Some has been marinating for a while. Most of these I’ve read, or tried to read.

• Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-09-03 [Older] Mars has a solid inner core, resolving a longstanding planetary mystery — new study

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-09-05 [Older] One queen ant, two species: the discovery that reshapes what ‘family’ means in nature

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-09-08 [Older] What we’ve learned about narcissism over the past 30 years

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-09-09 [Older] How our minds trick us into thinking we are being greener than we really are

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-09-09 [Older] A rocky planet in its star’s ‘habitable zone’ could be the first known to have an atmosphere – here’s what we found

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-09-10 [Older] Signs of ancient life may have been found in Martian rock – new study

  • The Conversation ☛ 2025-09-10 [Older] Crashing black holes validate Stephen Hawking – new research

  • Omicron Limited ☛ How the US became a science superpower

    All that scientific expertise has helped make the U.S. the most prosperous nation on Earth and led to longer and easier lives here and around the world. But until World War II, the U.S. often sat on the sidelines of scientific progress. With national security on the line, the federal government, through policy and strategic investments, set about turning America into the world leader in science.

    Now, amid federal attacks on university research and the government agencies that fund it, America is on the verge of relinquishing its scientific dominance for the first time in eight decades.

• Career/Education

  • US News And World Report ☛ Trump's Travel Ban Keeps International Students From Coming to the US for College

    Some would-be international students are not showing up on American campuses this fall despite offers of admission because of logjams with visa applications, which the Trump administration slowed this summer while it rolled out additional vetting. Others have had second thoughts because of the administration's wider immigration crackdown and the abrupt termination of some students' legal status.

    But none face bigger obstacles than the students hit with travel bans. Last year, the State Department issued more than 5,700 F-1 and J-1 visas — which are used by foreign students and researchers — to people in the 19 travel ban-affected countries between May and September. Citizens of Iran and Myanmar were issued more than half of the approved visas.

  • Dave DeGraw ☛ Lore Drop: 1991-1997

    I think I’ll cap this “lore drop” here though, since I’ve gone on long enough. I would say I had a good early childhood. I certainly learned quite a bit and some of those experiences have really shaped who I am today. I mean, I still live in St. George and this is where I’m raising my family. It really is a nice place to live but there’s still very much a little kid inside of me that really misses Oak City. I’ll be honest, I have dreams about moving back some day. That entire area of Utah is so “slept on”. Even people that have grown up in Utah don’t really know about it. If you’re interested in learning more, I would recommend my recent post titled “Three Days in the Wilderness” where I explored the “Great Basin” area surrounding Delta. There is also a young adult thriller novel titled “Lost in the Devil’s Desert” by Gloria Skurzynski that talks about the area. But nobody talks about Oak City and frankly I think most people would keep it that way. It’s a treasure.

  • SusamPal ☛ My Lobsters Interview

    I recently had an engaging conversation with @veqq from the Lobsters community about computing, mathematics, and a range of related topics. Our conversation was later published on Lobsters as Lobsters Interview with Susam. This post is a copy of that post, so that I have a copy of the post archived on my website too. I should mention that the sections presented in this post are not in the same order in which we originally discussed them. The sections were edited and rearranged to improve the flow and avoid repetition of similar topics too close to each other. The interview follows this paragraph. I hope you enjoy it.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ How Larry Ellison, the world’s richest man, is buying up Oxford

    But it is his zero-sum approach to business, vanquishing rivals at all costs – including Bill Gates; “Bill and I used to be friends,” he once said, “in so much as Bill has friends” – that has ensured his rise to the become the world’s richest man.

    His latest target is British. He has now planted his flag in Oxford, in a bid to transform the city into the new Silicon Valley.

  • CNN ☛ Who is Larry Ellison, who might soon become the world’s richest person?

    It traces back to 1977, when Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates founded Software Development Laboratories in Santa Clara, California. They were contracted by the CIA to build a database program code-named “Oracle.”

    Five years later, the company changed its name to Oracle and went public in 1986. Throughout the four decades, the company has found various levels of success in technology, but most recently in demand for its data center capacity from AI customers.

    [...]

    In 2010, he signed the Giving Pledge, a Bill Gates-backed initiative that promises to give away at least 95% of one’s wealth to charity. Ellison recently announced on X he was “amending” that effort, funneling some of the money toward a technical institute he founded with the University of Oxford.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Louie Mantia ☛ Political Violence

    Just two years ago, Charlie Kirk said, “I think it’s worth to have a cost of—unfortunately—some* gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

    Today, someone cashed the very check he wrote.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ MAHA child health report ignores gun violence, the leading cause of child death

    Firearms have been the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 17 every year since 2022.

  • John Hopkins University ☛ Guns Remain Leading Cause of Death for Children and Teens | Johns Hopkins | Bloomberg School of Public Health

    The report, Gun Violence in the United States 2022: Examining the Burden Among Children and Teens, assessed the latest finalized data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, highlighting that 48,204 people, the second highest on record, died from gunshots in the U.S. in 2022, including 27,032 suicides, an all-time high for the country.

• Proprietary

  • PC World ☛ I switched from Gmail to Proton mail: 5 deeply refreshing takeaways

    I switched from Gmail to Proton mail on a whim and now I’m very glad I did. Here are the five key benefits I now enjoy with Proton mail.

  • Howard Oakley ☛ A brief history of AppleWorks

    Microsoft Works came from an integrated suite being developed for the Mac by Don Williams and Rupert Lissner (original developer of AppleWorks), both former Apple employees. Although first released for the Mac (apparently), it soon followed for DOS PCs, and in 1991 was released for Windows 3.0.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ CEOs Are Obsessed With AI, But Their Pushes to Use It Keep Ending in Disaster

      Recent research has found that present-day AI software is failing to generate any sort of revenue whatsoever at 95 percent of the companies trying to incorporate it into their work flows.

      At the same time, there can be some pretty dramatic consequences from failed AI rollouts. Rogue AI programs have wiped out proprietary databases, opened the door to devastating data breaches, and mired companies in costly legal battles.

    • CNN ☛ Rolling Stone, Billboard owner Penske sues Google over AI overviews

      The lawsuit by Penske Media in federal court in Washington, DC, marks the first time a major US publisher has taken Alphabet-owned Google to court over the AI-generated summaries that now appear on top of its search results.

      News organizations have for months said the new features, including Google’s “AI Overviews,” siphon traffic away from their sites, eroding advertising and subscription revenue.

    • Vox ☛ The debate behind SB 53, the landmark California bill trying to prevent AI from building nukes

      Exactly what constitutes a catastrophic risk is up for debate, but SB 53 defines it as a “foreseeable and material risk” of an event that causes more than 50 casualties or over $1 billion in damages that a frontier model plays a meaningful role in contributing to. How fault is determined in practice would be up to the courts to interpret. It’s hard to define catastrophic risk in law when the definition is far from settled, but doing so can help us protect against both near- and long-term consequences.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Will Smith allegedly used AI in concert footage. We're going to see a lot more of this…

      Snopes agreed that the crowd shots featured 'some AI manipulation'. You can watch the video below: [...]

    • Drew Breunig ☛ AI Companies School Like Fish

      What can we learn from this pattern and the way we’ve been steadily encountering new archetypes, then walking them through the process above?

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Canadian education report riddled with fake AI references

      Unfortunately, the report has 15 fake citations — very much in chatbot style. [CBC]

    • The New Stack ☛ Your AI Prompts Are Programming the Future So Use Them Wisely

      We’re shaping the future of artificial intelligence every time we interact with it, often with more cruelty than care. Every day, millions of people interact with AI systems that, in many ways, resemble children, learning, growing, making mistakes, and trying to understand the world around them. Yet, the default response to their errors is often impatience, frustration, or dismissive correction. But what if we applied the principles of gentle parenting to these digital relationships?

    • Rik Huijzer ☛ Converting a PDF to text locally with Ollama

      The following is an AI-based method of converting a PDF to text. There is OCR software that can more or less detect symbols without AI, but I find that AI is typically more accurate and introduces fewer strange symbols.

  • Social Control Media

    • New York Times ☛ Opinion | Tyler Robinson and Our Poisonous Internet

      Despite mounting evidence that the toxic energies of the [Internet] have begun to spill over into our real lives, there has been a reluctance to take the things happening online very seriously. The revolting death spectacle that took place at Utah Valley University is a new kind of political event.

      While the [Internet]’s rot once felt safely bottled, or fire-walled, within a digital realm, this act of political violence may have punctured whatever barrier once existed. We can no longer ignore that we live in an era where the online and the lived are indistinguishable.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ 'A cancer on our society': Toxic social media after Kirk shooting brings calls to log off, put down phones

      Hours after the slaying, police briefly detained two men. Social media went wild, publicizing their names, backgrounds and photos even after they were cleared of any affiliation to the fatal shooting. The situation got so bad that Utah officials on Thursday urged people not to threaten them because they did nothing wrong.

      “These individuals were not suspects. They were people of interest,” Utah Department of Public Safety Commissioner Beau Mason said. “They don’t deserve that harassment.”

    • R Scott Jones ☛ Getting some good out of a bad situation

      The most obvious way I could do that back then was to build a new friend base, as mine had always been shared with that ex-wife. So I got on this new app called Twitter, joined some conversations, and then forced myself to go out and meet a bunch of the people I had been chatting online with in person.

      Early twitter, back when it was simply social networking (not social media) and no one looked at posting as “creating content” or “building a following” or “how I get my news,” getting together with others who used the app was a common occurrence. There were a number of in-person tweetups each week, so I started showing up at them. This was waaay outside of my comfort zone, but I pushed myself to do it anyway.

    • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ Farewell to the fediverse

      Despite that, I plan to remove ActivityPub support soon. Here’s why.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Irish Examiner ☛ Facial recognition technology: How gardaí plan to use AI in major crime investigations

      The following February, then garda commissioner Drew Harris told the Oireachtas justice committee that digital footage from that night ran to 22,000 hours, the equivalent of 916 days.

• Defence/Aggression

  • RFA ☛ Analysis: Nepal’s protests are being closely watched in Vietnam – Radio Free Asia

    Nepal’s streets have exploded in protest. Thousands of young people, angered by a government ban on social media, are standing up against corruption and inequality.

    In Vietnam, the youth are watching closely, because Nepal’s story feels eerily familiar.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ China urges 'dialogue' with US over TikTok - ministry

    A federal law requiring TikTok’s sale or ban on national security grounds was due to take effect the day before Trump’s January inauguration.

  • Mike Brock ☛ When Criticism Becomes a Crime

    This is the logical endpoint of MAGA’s post-assassination gaslighting campaign—the argument that accurately describing authoritarian behavior makes you responsible for violence against authoritarians, and therefore you deserve whatever violence comes your way. They want to establish that calling fascism “fascism” is not just inappropriate but literally a capital offense warranting elimination.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Worst Kirk

    The Nation goes hard: "It's a choice to write an obituary that begins 'Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.'"

  • Cal Newport ☛ On Charlie Kirk and Saving Civil Society

    Those of us who study online culture like to use the phrase, “Twitter is not real life.” But as we saw yet again this week, when the digital discourses fostered on services like Twitter (and Bluesky, and TikTok) do intersect with the real world, whether they originate from the left or the right, the results are often horrific.

    This should tell us all we need to know about these platforms: they are toxic and dehumanizing. They are responsible, as much as any other force, for the unravelling of civil society that seems to be accelerating.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Insight Hungary ☛ Orban gets sharp response from Polish FM after tweeting about Russian attack

      Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, has clashed with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán over his stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine. Orbán had posted on X declaring Hungary’s solidarity with Poland and calling the latest incursion “unacceptable,” but used the moment to reiterate that Hungary's  "policy of calling for peace … is reasonable and rational,” adding: “Living in the shadow of a war is fraught with risks and dangers. It’s time to make it stop! To this end, we support the efforts of President Donald Trump aimed at achieving peace.”

      Sikorski swiftly responded: “No, Victor. The incident proves you should get off the fence and condemn Russian aggression. We ask you to unblock the disbursement of EU funds for defence, approve tougher sanctions on the aggressor, and withdraw your veto on starting Ukraine’s EU accession negotiations.”

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Epstein Scandal Finally Takes Down a Politician

    The Foreign Office’s viewpoint reflects the now-established consensus on Epstein: Powerful people who associated with the financier before his 2008 conviction can plausibly deny knowing about his sexual interest in minors, and have emerged unscathed. But those who continued their relationship with Epstein, such as Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, and the JPMorgan Chase executive Jes Staley, cannot—and have faced career and personal penalties as a result. Donald Trump falls into the former group, even if his own birthday message (“Enigmas never age”) and other statements from the time suggest that he knew Epstein was interested in much younger women.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ The Story Behind TIME’s September 11 Cover by Lyle Owerko

    TIME magazine’s 9/11 cover, photographed by Lyle Owerko, is one of the most haunting and enduring images of September 11, 2001. The cover image TIME chose is a photograph of the second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, just before it struck the South Tower at 9:03 a.m.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Jeffrey Epstein’s former assistant reveals leaders and celebrities she claims to have met with him

    “I have met Prince Andrew, President Clinton, Sultan of Brunei, Donald Trump, Antonio Vergas, Naomi Campbell, Stephanie Seymour, Peter Brant, Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker, Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, brilliant scientists, lawyers and businessmen,” she said in her letter.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Deseret Media ☛ US electric grids under pressure from energy-hungry data centers are changing strategy

      Now the concept is emerging in the 13-state mid-Atlantic grid and elsewhere as massive data centers are coming online faster than power plants can be built and connected to grids. That has elicited pushback from data centers and Big Tech, for whom a steady power supply is vital.

      Like many other states, Texas wants to attract data centers as an economic boon, but it faces the challenge of meeting the huge volumes of electricity the centers demand. Lawmakers there passed a bill in June that, among other things, orders up standards for power emergencies when utilities must disconnect big electric users.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • US News And World Report ☛ 2025-09-05 [Older] Peru Rejects Creation of Amazon Reserve to Protect Uncontacted Tribes, Drawing Indigenous Outcry

• Finance

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2025-09-05 [Older] Amazon’s Shameless Union Busting Shouldn’t Be Forgotten

  • Scheerpost ☛ 2025-09-10 [Older] Teamsters Rally in NYC After Amazon’s ‘Illegal’ Firing of 150 Unionized Drivers

  • Deseret Media ☛ 'It's unfathomable': YouTuber banned from Roblox warns parents after predator busts

    "They were profiting from this," he says, noting that Roblox takes a cut from all transactions, even illicit ones.

    Schlep began teaming up with experienced predator catchers, learned investigative techniques, and started to run decoy operations. Using fake accounts, he and collaborators posed as children and arranged meetups with adults seeking sex. In less than a year, he says their work led to six arrests — and now, the first guilty plea from a Roblox predator.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Appears to Now Be Firing the People Behind Grok

    Sifting through LinkedIn profiles associated with the names of the employees whose profiles had been deactivated, the website identified roughly a dozen people who had worked on Grok's human data managerial team. Many of them had posted on Slack as recently as September 5, the article notes.

    Among those whose Slacks were deactivated was a supervisor who oversaw the rest of the managers, BI continued — and they worked on data annotation at Tesla's Autopilot division prior to joining xAI.

  • Vox ☛ Charlie Kirk shooting: Let’s be honest about his life — and death

    The other side argues that this portrayal leaves out crucial context. Kirk’s political activities, they argue, were often destructive of the democratic process he’s been suggested to embody. He wasn’t just a guy who went around debating, but a plugged-in political operative close to the Trump White House who actively promoted extremism. Mourning him uncritically whitewashes his role in the degradation of our politics.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Wallet voting

    You cannot vote with your wallet. Or rather, you can, but you will lose that vote. Wallet-votes always go to the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that is not you.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • LabX Media Group ☛ ChatGPT Fails to Flag Retracted and Problematic Articles

      To find out, Thelwall and his team asked the LLM to assess the quality of discredited or retracted articles and discovered that ChatGPT did not flag the concerns. Their results, published in the journal Learned Publishing, emphasize the need for verifying information obtained from LLMs.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Fake “Free Speech” Champion Clay Higgins Now Wants To Use Gov’t Power To Silence Anyone Who “Belittles” Kirk’s Death

    That is a US government official saying that he’s going to use state power to silence voices “for life” for protected speech, such as “belittling” Kirk’s death. He claims he’s going to directly seek to assert state power (removing licenses and permits, something that Congress has no actual authority to do).

    That does not appear to be “upholding the First Amendment as our founding fathers intended.” It sure seems to be the opposite of that.

  • NPR ☛ People are losing jobs due to social media posts about Charlie Kirk

    Over thirty people across the country have been fired, put on leave, investigated or faced calls to resign because of social media posts criticizing Charlie Kirk or expressing schadenfreude about the conservative influencer's assassination earlier this week, according to an analysis by NPR.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Brattleboro Reformer, Vermont ☛ Letter to the Editor: Disturbing trend in Vermont radio market | Opinion | reformer.com

    I see that Sen. Russ Ingalls, R-Essex, has bought seven news stations in northern Vermont and switched their "news" exclusively to Fox. [...]

  • David L Farquhar ☛ Wayne Green, computer journalism pioneer - The Silicon Underground

    Byte magazine needs little introduction. Ham radio and early computing often went hand in hand, and when kit computers started appearing, he gave them coverage in his ham radio magazine, 73. The articles proved popular, so Green founded Byte magazine in 1975 to cover these early kit-based microcomputers. On advice from his lawyer, he put the magazine in his ex-wife’s name, which led to Green losing control of the magazine. One day in November 1975, he arrived at the office to find Byte‘s staff had left, taking the January 1976 issue with them.

    Green’s ex-wife, Virginia Londoner, published Byte until 1979, when she sold it to McGraw-Hill. She remained on staff until 1983. McGraw-Hill continued publishing Byte until 1998, when it sold the magazine to CMP Media, who ended publication after the July issue.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • ANF News ☛ Amnesty International calls for action for Sharifeh Mohammadi facing the death penalty in Iran

    The statement noted that human rights defender Sharifeh Mohammadi was sentenced to death for peacefully advocating for women's and workers' rights and for the abolition of the death penalty in Iran. In August 2025, the Supreme Court upheld her sentence, and the death penalty could be carried out at any time, it warned.

  • SBS ☛ 'I'm ready to be arrested': How women in Iran fight 'state-sanctioned sexual violence'

    As she prepares for the day, she is also preparing for "the resistance", bracing for potential blowback — from her "neighbour, the shopkeeper, the regime, the morality police", who all enforce Iran's mandatory hijab rules.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Fox Host Suggests 'Involuntary Lethal Injection' for Homeless People

    Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade endorsed euthanizing unhoused people suffering from mental health issues who decline getting help. He made the remark during a recent episode where his co-hosts Ainsley Earhardt and Lawrence Jones were discussing the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska.

  • She was sold the American dream with a farmworker visa.

    Sofi left behind her child in Mexico for the promise of providing him a better life. She ended up a victim of an operation that is alleged to have exploited the H-2A visa program — and the workers it brought to America.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Internet Society: Italy's "Piracy Shield" Failures Are a Warning Against "Blunt" Piracy Blocking

    As U.S. lawmakers consider new pirate site blocking legislation, the influential Internet Society has issued a stark warning against the practice. In a new policy brief, the organization argues that DNS and IP address blocking are "blunt" instruments that cause widespread collateral damage, using the failures of Italy's "Piracy Shield" as a key example. Alongside the warning, the brief provides a set of recommendations for policymakers who nonetheless push the blocking proposals forward.