Leftovers

• Manchester Evening News ☛ Huge Therme Manchester water resort announces 2028 opening and promises 'paradise'

  Sound like paradise to you? Well, that's exactly what the bosses of Therme Manchester have promised this week, as work finally, finally begins on the vast, £450million wellness resort that is about to take shape right here in Greater Manchester - next to the Trafford Centre.

• Robert Birming ☛ Blogging builds bridges

  It’s part of the reason why you and I blog. And it’s what we should remind ourselves of whenever we’re in doubt.

  Keep on blogging!

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Why Make a Website in 2025?

  Do it for the fun of the thing itself.

• Science

  • Lawrence Tratt ☛ Why Firsts Matter

    Slowly I came to realise a common lesson behind all the discoveries or inventions of note: they create a dividing point in time. Before, there was, at least in one area, darkness; afterwards that area is at least dimly lit. Over time, we tend to find ways to increase the light further. Soon it becomes impossible to imagine that we ever lived in the darkness.

• Career/Education

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ The Louvre Stops Renting Out Nintendo 3DS Consoles, Which Helped Visitors Navigate the Massive Museum for 13 Years

    For the past decade, visitors to the Louvre could rent a Nintendo 3DS console for personalized tours, audio commentary and additional information about more than 700 artworks at the famed Paris museum.

  • International Business Times ☛ 'They're Taking Our Jobs': 56% of Americans Say H-1B Visa Holders Create 'Unfair Competition', Survey

    The survey, conducted by professional networking platform Blind between 25 August and 3 September 2025, gathered responses from 4,230 verified professionals across the United States, including US citizens, green card holders, and H-1B visa workers themselves.

  • Mandy Brown ☛ Not doing | everything changes

    Most employment in the US is what is known as “at will.” Legally, that means both you and your employer can end the job at any moment, for any reason or for no reason at all. But to “will” something is to choose it, to exercise the mind and body towards an act. Every choice you make in your work is an act of will, an act of your will, and the collective will of the people you make those choices with. And will is a powerful thing! The story of inevitability is a story that wants you to forget that you have the will to change things; but the future remains, as ever, unwritten.

  • Akseli Lahtinen ☛ The move from Blue Systems to TechPaladin

    Yeah, it's really messy. And I wish it had gone differently. But that's how things go.

  • Grizzly Gazette ☛ Resisting Self-Flanderization | The Grizzly Gazette

    When we post online and gain a bit of a following, or even just set out to gain a following with a specific topic in mind, we can quickly run into the trap of Self-Flanderization. Even here on Bearblog, you might be influenced by what you see on the Trending page or what posts of yours reached Trending. You now wonder: Is this what people want to see, what they follow me for?

• Hardware

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ Fletch and his Royal HH Standard Typewriters

    I noticed that just like Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein in All the President’s Men, Chevy Chase portraying the titular Fletch (Universal Pictures, 1985) has a Royal HH typewriter not only at his Santa Monica apartment, but he also has a matching one at his office at the Los Angeles Globe.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Verge ☛ Can Luigi Mangione get too big to jail?

    It’s hard enough to keep major events and causes in the news, but Mangione’s case has unique, complicating factors. The central character — who many see as sympathetic — is accused of stalking and shooting Thompson point-blank (Mangione has pleaded not guilty). UnitedHealth Group has waged an all-out attack on critics, targeting filmmakers, social media users, and news outlets. Tech companies are working to moderate Mangione-related content, though some supporters complain that their content and accounts are being taken down without explanation. There is also the general specter of violence that clouds current US political discourse. It’s never a good time to be an alleged assassin, but especially not now.

  • Manton Reece ☛ OpenAI policy for teens

    I’m highlighting this because yesterday I linked to a New York law for kids that would ban notifications from being sent at night. Social algorithms, games, and now AI can be so addictive that they keep teens up late into the night. It makes sense to focus on this.

• Proprietary

  • Wired ☛ A DHS Data Hub Exposed Sensitive Intel to Thousands of Unauthorized Users

    A misconfigured platform used by the Department of Homeland Security left national security information—including some related to the surveillance of Americans—accessible to thousands of people.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ The fundamental shift in Apple's software strategy

    Apple's new design language only continues this trend and makes it visual in a way that is impossible to ignore. More and more, the company that professed unique experiences across their platforms has become the company laser-focused on making those platforms run the same apps, look the same, and behave the same. It feels to me like any differences you could point to that prove that statement wrong are actually just todo items Apple just hasn't gotten to yet. Maybe they'll start to diverge again, but I haven't seen much evidence lately to back that up.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • The Register UK ☛ Google unveils masterplan for letting AI shop on your behalf

      The principle is that shoppers can use AI agents to create a shopping list, exchange information with merchants, and complete payment transactions, without the need for final, human approval. For example, a music fan could tell an agent to buy concert tickets that go on sale at midnight and then go to sleep, knowing that the agent would buy the number and location of tickets they had asked for (presumably with a price limit).

    • Pivot to AI ☛ UK government productivity not enhanced by Copilot AI

      The bot didn’t do so well on anything more complicated. Users could churn out PowerPoint slides faster, but worse. Excel data analysis was slower, and worse.

      And Copilot hallucinated all the way through the study.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Verge ☛ Charlie Kirk’s death got complicated by “extremely online” culture | The Verge

      In the absence of any reporters who could accurately explain gaming culture, brainrot culture, and online culture in general, the mainstream media is in a poor position to accurately cover Tyler Robinson. (Although, if this newsletter has been forwarded to you: may I point you to our monthlong subscription sale right now?) And the right-wing media, which has a vested interest in portraying Kirk as a victim of leftist violence, is filling that information hole.

    • Dhole Moments ☛ Are You Under the Influence? The Tail That Wags The Dog

      It is tempting and forgivable to believe that we’re in control of our social media experiences.

      After all, we write what we want in our bio, select our avatars, and even come up with our own handles. We decide who we follow, what we post, and which recommendations to consider.

      It never feels like we’re not in the driver’s seat the whole time, especially if you use a trustworthy adblocker (which I highly endorse as a security feature).

      But as tempting as this notion is, it’s simply not a fact. You and I are more prone to manipulation than anyone ever realizes.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Cyble Inc ☛ CrowdStrike Among Those Hit In NPM Attack Campaign

      The compromised packages were quickly removed and CrowdStrike said its Falcon security platform wasn’t affected, but coming just days after a massive NPM supply chain attack hit popular packages with more than 2 billion downloads a week, the latest incident is likely to bring renewed scrutiny to the packages used to run JavaScript outside of a browser.

      The latest NPM attack used a self-propagating worm, raising a new level of concern among security researchers.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Self-Replicating 'Shai-hulud' Worm Targets NPM Packages

      The campaign shares similarities with an attack that occurred earlier this month, when prolific developer Qix had its node packet manager (NPM) account hacked; threat actors then poisoned versions of 18 popular applications Qix maintained, accounting for more than 2 billion weekly downloads, with crypto-stealing malware. The malware was effective for a short time and the attack by most accounts fizzled quickly.

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Self-Replicating Worm Hits 180+ Software Packages

      “When a developer installs a compromised package, the malware will look for a npm token in the environment,” said Charlie Eriksen, a researcher for the Belgian security firm Aikido. “If it finds it, it will modify the 20 most popular packages that the npm token has access to, copying itself into the package, and publishing a new version.”

      At the center of this developing maelstrom are code libraries available on NPM (short for “Node Package Manager”), which acts as a central hub for JavaScript development and provides the latest updates to widely-used JavaScript components.

• Defence/Aggression

  • CS Monitor ☛ Trump ignored TikTok ban, then announced a deal. Here’s what it means.

    On the day before President Trump’s inauguration, U.S. app stores faced penalties of $5,000 per TikTok user if they continued to distribute or host the app. Congress, citing concerns that the Chinese government could gain access to TikTok users’ personal data, had come to a rare bipartisan consensus: It passed a law requiring TikTok to be banned unless China signed off on a sale by ByteDance, the app’s parent company.

    Extensions ordered by Mr. Trump have kept the app available and the ban from being enforced. But the future of TikTok remained unresolved.

  • 404 Media ☛ DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing

    Following Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the Trump administration’s promise to go after the “radical left” a study showing most domestic terrorism is far-right was disappeared.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses

    America’s entire power structure has been taken over by the very same sort of dumbasses who have been yelling at all of us on the [Internet] for years. Perhaps this was all foreordained from the very first day that email and message boards were invented. I don’t know. What I do know is that there is no need to look upon the dull, vindictive, racist monsters running our government as a new or inexplicable sort of villain. I see in them a much more familiar identity: [Internet] commenters.

    The shoddiness of their work, their love of spectacle, their constant speechifying, their disproportionate reaction to all setbacks, their dishonesty, their prejudices, their disdain for expertise, their willingness to trust quacks, their scapegoating of the less powerful, their embrace of performative gestures at the expense of substance, their misogyny, their ill-concealed social awkwardness funneled into needless displays of aggression—yes, this is all very much in character. The good news is that it is easy to diagnose this disease. The bad news is that if we don’t get it cleared up, our nation’s 250-year history will culminate in the same sort of recriminatory meltdown as an [Internet] comment thread that spirals from “What did you do today?” to full Nazism with stunning speed.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Trump's Homeland Security Advisor Denies Victims of Far Right Shooting Equal Protection

    His job is to keep Americans, all Americans — including the two kids killed and 21 people injured at Annunciation, the two kids injured at Evergreen, as well as his beloved political ally Charlie Kirk — safe. And yet his response to a wave of violence carried out by young people radicalized online is to try to address just one shooting, and to address it in the least effective way possible, by hunting down people who had nothing to do with the Kirk killing.

    I get that Miller has chosen to stoke fascism rather than grieve. I get the danger to all of this.

    But Miller’s screed did something else: it said that he doesn’t care about the 8 and 10 and 16 year olds who face radicalized people with guns in their schools, he won’t do the most obvious things to address those shootings.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Migrant boat pushed back to sea by sunbathers on Greek island

    Greece is assessing whether the new influx is a “cyclical phenomenon” or whether it is linked “to aggressive activities by smuggling rings”, Mr Plevris added.

    The reference to “instrumentalisation” is a reflection of Greek suspicions that the new migrant surge is being deliberately encouraged by General Khalifa Haftar, the warlord who controls much of eastern Libya.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Press Gazette ☛ Bill could make it illegal for public officials to lie to the media

    The bill, which was introduced to Parliament on Tuesday, includes a new professional and legal duty of candour, meaning public officials must act with honesty and integrity at all times and could face criminal sanctions if they breach it.

    In relation to authorities’ dealings with journalists, the proposed legislation states: “A public servant or official commits an offence if he or she intentionally or recklessly misleads the general public or media.”

• Environment

  • Renewable Energy World ☛ Young activists won a landmark state climate trial. Now they're challenging Trump's orders

    Young climate activists and their attorneys who won a landmark global warming trial against the state of Montana are trying to convince a federal judge to block President Donald Trump’s executive orders promoting fossil fuels.

    During a two-day hearing starting Tuesday in Missoula, Montana, the activists and their experts plan to describe Trump’s actions to boost drilling and mining and discourage renewable energy as a growing danger to children and the planet. They say the Republican’s stoking of global warming violates their constitutional rights.

• Finance

  • Rlang ☛ Reimagining Equity Solvency Capital Requirement Approximation (one of my Master’s Thesis subjects): From Bilinear Interpolation to Probabilistic Machine Learning

    In the world of insurance and financial risk management, calculating the Solvency Capital Requirement (SCR) for equity risk could be a computationally intensive task that can make or break real-time decision making. Traditional approaches rely on expensive Monte Carlo simulations that can take hours to complete, forcing practitioners to develop approximation schemes. Developing an approximation scheme was a project I tackled back in 2007-2009 for my Master’s Thesis in Actuarial Science (see references below).

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Kim Dotcom Extradition Decision Was Lawful, Judicial Review Denied

    Dotcom’s request raised seven causes of action; the seventh was dismissed leaving six for the consideration of the High Court. They appear here heavily summarized with additional detail available in the 59-page High Court decision linked below.

  • Python Software Foundation ☛ Python Software Foundation News: Announcing the 2025 PSF Board Election Results!

    The 2025 election for the PSF Board created an opportunity for conversations about the PSF's work to serve the global Python community. We appreciate community members' perspectives, passion, and engagement in the election process this year.

    We want to send a big thanks to everyone who ran and was willing to serve on the PSF Board. Even if you were not elected, we appreciate all the time and effort you put into thinking about how to improve the PSF and represent the parts of the community you participate in. We hope that you will continue to think about these issues, share your ideas, and join a PSF Work Group or PSF initiative if you feel called to do so.

  • Nate Graham ☛ A few corrections about the transition from Blue Systems to Techpaladin [Ed: Context here]

    By now, many have probably read Jonathan Riddell’s blog post yesterday about his departure from KDE and the events that led up to it. And today, an article has been published in ItsFoss about the topic that unfortunately seems to have misunderstood some of the details of Jonathan’s post. I didn’t want to have to write this post, but since I’m named personally in both places, and there are inaccuracies spreading out there, I thought it would make sense to correct the record before this becomes too much of a game of telephone.

  • Molly White ☛ Prediction markets are booming. Oversight is barely there.

    The US financial regulatory landscape is divided among several agencies, with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) overseeing stock markets and various other securities. The SEC aggressively pursues unlawful insider trading cases when people trade securities based on material non-public information. Former SEC official John Reed Stark explains, “The rationale for policing unlawful insider trading is that for the markets to work efficiently and fairly, everyone needs to be working with the same basic information, or at least, that those with special access to nonpublic information are prevented from taking advantage of it before other investors.”

  • Arduino ☛ Expanding innovation in India: Arduino partners with Millennium Semiconductors India Pvt Ltd

    Arduino is pleased to announce a new partnership with Millennium Semiconductors India Pvt Ltd., one of our leading value-added distributors in the semiconductor ecosystem for the Indian market. With strong technical and commercial expertise across industrial IoT, automotive, smart cities, and more, Millennium will bring the complete portfolio of Arduino products – including the Arduino Pro series – to customers across India. Together, Arduino and Millennium aim to build a long-term partnership that supports innovation and accelerates the growth of the Indian electronics industry.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Ars Technica ☛ Mods react as Reddit kicks some of them out again: “This will break the site” - Ars Technica

    1 percent of active mods will be affected, Reddit says.

  • The Nation ☛ Alleged Free Speech Champions Are Campaigning Against Speech They Don’t Like

    Unfortunately, politically motivated firings come with the territory when you’re a mainstream media commentator—often lamentable, but not uncommon. Much more unusual has been the dozens if not hundreds of firings of people whose jobs have nothing to do with politics.The Carolina Panthers fired a communications coordinator who posted: “Why are y’all sad? Your man said it was worth it…,” a reference to Kirk’s public statement that “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.”

  • Mike Brock ☛ On Cancel Culture

    Cancel culture was always a tactical disaster masquerading as moral progress. I worried about this years ago—privately, in safe conversations, because I knew it might be career suicide to critique these tactics openly. Everything I worried about has now come to pass. Now we're watching a reactionary right practice their own version of cancellation—backed by federal law enforcement, ICE raids, and systematic state persecution—while the left scrambles to figure out how to resist with muscles they've allowed to atrophy.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ State-Sponsored Cancel Culture After the Kirk Assassination

    Understand this comment for what it is: A threat to the American opposition’s constitutionally-protected free speech rights.

    But before we dig into that, we need to devote a brief word to the one-sidedness of Trump’s response. Just a few months ago, Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives was murdered along with her husband (and her dog!). Or that Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, another Democrat, was the target of an assassination attempt. A far-right militia’s plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 feels like ancient history.

  • JURIST ☛ Rights group condemns Morocco jail sentence over blasphemy [sic] T-shirt

    Human Rights Watch on Thursday called for Moroccan authorities to exonerate activist Ibtissame Lachgar, who remains jailed after being sentenced to 30 months in prison for posting a photo of herself wearing a shirt reading “Allah is lesbian.”

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ Woman in Morocco threatened with jail over ‘Allah is lesbian’ T-shirt

    The activist posted the photograph late last month, with a caption saying: “You tire us with your sanctimoniousness, your accusations. Yes, Islam, like any religious ideology, is FASCIST. PHALLOCRATIC AND MISOGYNISTIC.”

    She later said that her post had earned her “thousands of sexist insults, rape and death threats, calls for murder, stoning etc”.

  • New Statesman ☛ Why Charlie Kirk was killed

    It’s long been my contention that almost no one really believes in free speech in principle; people believe free speech is what we do, hate speech is what they do. It’s actually a difficult principle to hold to without contradiction. Even if you admit exceptions for direct incitement and libel, absolute free speech will always contain within it the possibility of repression, through the persuasion of large numbers to ostracise or persecute another person or group. What is “cancel culture” except an outcome of free speech? It begins with a public accusation, a calumny, a charge – an act of speech – and others are persuaded or incited and join in. It’s the most elementary form of political behaviour, writ large. Both the people celebrating Kirk’s death and the people calling for the repression of the celebrators, either through the state or through civil society, are exercising free speech. The only guarantee against absolute free speech creating its own form of intolerable tyranny is the protection of speech and association, even for unpopular groups and ideas.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Vox ☛ Trump defamation lawsuit against the New York Times: What to know

    Trump’s new attack on press freedom, briefly explained.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFERL ☛ How Protest Musicians Became Icons And Targets In Iran's Women, Life, Freedom Movement

    In the tense and transformative days after Mahsa Amini's death in police custody in September 2022 for allegedly wearing a head scarf improperly, a new anthem surged from Iran's streets: "Women, Life, Freedom."

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ What’s Happening with 600 MHz?

    600 MHz has been in the news lately. AT&T (NYSE: T) is paying EchoStar (NASDAQ: SATS) almost $23 billion to acquire approximately 30 MHz of 3.45 GHz mid-band spectrum nationwide and roughly 20 MHz of 600 MHz low-band spectrum nationwide, Inside Towers reported. A big deal? Maybe.

    In the aftermath of the AT&T-EchoStar deal and the previously announced T-Mobile (NASDAQ: TMUS)-UScellular acquisition, T-Mobile now controls 65 percent of the 2,912 600 MHz licenses across the country, according to Inside Towers Intelligence. AT&T holds 21 percent while roughly 40 regional mobile network operators around the country hold nine percent. The FCC retains five percent of the licenses that were not sold.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ I think Really Simple Licensing misses the mark

    In the real world, the latter two are equivalent. Unless I specifically say I want you to club me in the head with a mallet, the assumption is that I don’t want you to. Technically I haven’t expressly said no, but that’s understood to mean no unless consent is provided. This is how our legal systems have worked for hundreds of years, and its a social contract that has (broadly) worked well for us.

    The prohibits element isn’t just technically redundant, it’s ethically redundant too. Not including a specific permits element should mean the site has not consented to any such activity by default, and only granted permissions specified with permits. But unless I’ve missed it, a read of the RSL docs doesn’t indicate defaults. As always, the burden is on the scraping victim to raise their hand and say no.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: No such thing as selective censorship resistance

    The digital world is in the process of bifurcating. The dying, legacy systems are the zuckermuskian, centralized ones, where there's always one throat to choke. If you don't like the moderation, recommendation, or other policies on Google, Twitter, Facebook or Amazon, you know exactly who to blame. If you're a lawmaker or a regulator, you know exactly who to drag into court.

    Then there's the new, exciting, free and open digital technology that's crawling out of the half-dead carcass of Big Tech: federated and decentralized systems like Mastodon (and the Fediverse) and Bluesky (and the Atmosphere). While both of these networks have official maintainers who oversee their open source software projects, and while both groups of maintainers also run the servers that dominate their networks, you can absolutely join and participate without the consent of the organizations that created and maintain them, and they can't stop you or kick you off.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Thomas Rigby ☛ e-ink is an incredible technology

    It has highlighted the need for DRM-free e-books though! I have several titles that I can't access on the Kindle because they're locked to Kobo.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ The unlikely alliance between Netflix and Amazon

    A surprising new partnership for Netflix. After striking a deal in June with TF1 to stream France’s leading TV channel and its on-demand programs, the streaming giant is now teaming up with Amazon to sell its ad campaigns. Starting in the fourth quarter, advertisers will be able to buy space through the e-commerce behemoth’s ad-buying platform — even though Amazon, with Prime Video, is one of Netflix’s biggest rivals.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Internet Archive vs. Music Labels: $693m Copyright Battle Ends with Confidential Settlement

    A copyright lawsuit launched by several major record labels against the Internet Archive, over the ambitious Great 78 Project, is officially over. On Monday, the parties informed a federal court in California that they had reached a settlement. The details remain confidential, but a potential $693 million damages claim is off the table.

  • Tedium ☛ Publishers Hate Google’s AI Summaries, Too. One Just Sued.

    And one of those suitors emerged over the weekend. Penske Media, the publisher of The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, and Rolling Stone, took a big swing at the company’s AI-generated summaries, which have been designed in a way to dominate search results. I went on PACER and downloaded the complaint. A sample passage kind of nails down Penske’s main complaint with Google’s snippet endeavor: [...]