Leftovers

• Crooked Timber ☛ The care economy, or radical economic growth?

  I’m in the midst of doing research, teaching, and outreach activities on a set of questions around economic growth and its relationship to what we value. My research team has Tim Jackson visiting tomorrow, who will give a talk on postgrowth economics and also talk a bit about his new book, The Care Economy. The main claim of that book is that the economy should not be about welfare understood as GDP per capital, with the corresponding economic policy goal being economic growth. Rather, the economy should be about people’s health (using the WHO definition, which I interpret as ‘well-being’), and hence economic policy should be about what we do to preserve and improve our health, which is care – care for ourselves, for others, for the planet including its ecosystems that allows us to live well.

• Evan Hahn ☛ People read your blog in many different ways

  I read a lot of tech blog posts and have written a few of my own. I think a lot about the varied ways people read.

• Howard Oakley ☛ Paintings of Dante’s Inferno: 9 Violence against God – The Eclectic Light Company

• Science

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ First 3D-printed ion traps hit 98% fidelity in quantum operations

    Now, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the University of California may have found a way to combine the best of both. Working with UC Berkeley, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Barbara, the team has miniaturized quadrupole ion traps using high-resolution 3D printing.

  • Philip Zucker ☛ Proof Rules for MetaSMT

    The internals of the Proof datatype are irrelevant to the user. At minimum it should store the formula in question that has been proven, but it may also contain a record/trace of the steps/api calls that led to it’s production. A sufficiently complete API trace such that it can be replayed is a proof object/tree. Complete API traces are very powerful, for example a trace of all syscalls of a IO reading and writing program are succificent to completely determinize it.

  • Bartosz Milewski ☛ Identity Types

    There is a deep connection between mathematics and programming. Computer programs deal with such mathematical objects as numbers, vectors, monoids, functors, algebras, and many more. We can implement such structures in most programming languages. For instance, here’s the definition of natural numbers in Haskell: [...]

  • Rlang ☛ A Note on the Dirichlet Distribution

    In 1839, the gifted mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet was attached to the Philosophy department at the University of Berlin working for less than full pay even though he had become a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1832. At that time, to become a “full professor” at the university it was required that a candidate deliver a Habilitationsschrift lecture in Latin. Apparently, Dirichlet’s facility with Latin wasn’t up to the task, so like many proficient “adjunct professors” today, Dirichlet took a side gig to support his family. He taught math at a military school. Anyway, I digress. It was about that time that Dirichlet began to work on a problem in celestial mechanics which involved this integral: [...]

  • Allen Downey ☛ Think Linear Algebra

    I have published the first five chapters of Think Linear Algebra! You can read them here or follow these links to run the notebooks on Colab. Here are the chapters I have so far: [...]

• Career/Education

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Trump’s push for more admissions data collides with a hollowed-out Education Department

    But with the agency’s research offices gutted, various data collection contracts in limbo and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) — the agency’s statistical branch — left with just three employees, questions swirl over whether the task is feasible.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Hey, Let’s Undermine America’s Technology, Education and Research!

    We attracted investment from around the world in part because we had rule of law: Businesses trusted us to honor property rights and enforce contracts. So the Trumpists turned us into a nation where the government extorts ownership shares in corporations and masked government agents seize foreign workers, put them in chains, and imprison them under terrible conditions.

    We lead the world in science thanks to our unmatched network of research universities and globally admired government agencies like the National Institutes of Health. So the Trumpists are doing their best to destroy both university and government research.

  • Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Notebooks Need Follow-up

    The famed Field Notes tagline is all very well but what if, even having written it down, you fail to remember it? Quasi-disaster ensues, if you’re me. As usual, the culprit is past me not paying enough attention to future me’s needs.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Essay by a Librarian About Having a Controversial Job and My Thoughts About the Responsibilities of Being a Librarian in the Public Eye

    I have been a Public Librarian since the summer of 2000, so a full 25 years, and this will come as no surprise to any of you, while the job has never been easy (or as easy as the general public seemed to think it was), the last 5 years have been beyond hard. We have become the public enemy to many.

    There are many library workers fighting the good fight, losing their jobs, getting doxxed, etc... I am not alone in speaking out publicly for public libraries and librarianship. But there are not enough of us speaking out into the general media and communications landscape. We need to all start addressing how messed up it is that being a librarian is one of the US's most controversial jobs.

  • Slate ☛ I have one of the U.S.’s most controversial jobs. Moments like this make it all worth it.

    I had no concept of how the world would change so significantly as I became a librarian. Public libraries are often first on the chopping block when towns and cities are looking to decrease their budgets. Somehow, it’s easier to argue for more police than more books. Libraries are enduring book bans, mental health crises, drug overdoses, and more as we try to provide resources and assistance far beyond our means, both fiscally and emotionally. (We can stock Narcan and take de-escalation training, but nothing prepares you for standing over a slumped, unresponsive person praying that they wake up, or a stranger yelling in your face that you’re a clone sent by Obama.) And during all of this, librarians like me, who help young patrons find books that reflect their inner lives, have been called pedophiles and harassed into resigning, if not fired.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ MediaTek reportedly mulling US chip production — could use TSMC's Arizona fab to avoid tariff fallout

    MediaTek is negotiating production of certain chips in the U.S. with TSMC in a bid to meet customer requirements for locally manufactured components. While the plan is still under evaluation, if MediaTek manages to place orders through TSMC's Fab 21 in Arizona, it will be the first non-American company to demand production of its chips at the site. While chips made by TSMC in the U.S. are more expensive than those fabbed in Taiwan, U.S. production may enable MediaTek to address certain customers and/or avoid potential tariffs.

  • Tedium ☛ Drum Machine History: Even Better Than The Real Thing?

    Today in Tedium: A few years ago, I gave a writer with an interesting interest in the machinations of the Billboard chart a place to publish. As a fellow chart nerd, I was impressed with the work that Chris Dalla Riva had done to connect data with musical styles. (Not every pitch includes the line, “I spent the last 3.5 listening to and collecting data about every Billboard Hot 100 number one hit.”) His resulting piece, “The Death Of the Key Change,” remains one of Tedium’s biggest hits. Chris, meanwhile, has gone on to his own successful newsletter, Can’t Get Much Higher. Recently he wrote a book based on his years of research, Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves, and it’s a truly special document of how data and music come together in one piece. With that in mind, I asked if I could excerpt a portion of the book—and I chose this bit, on the rise of the drum machine. It shows his approach—tying story, musical style, and data. Not every song can make it to the top of the Hot 100, but the ones that do tell a hell of a story. Anyway, I’m going to hand today’s Tedium over to Chris. His book comes out in November (pre-order on Bookshop or Amazon)—and it’ll make you a Billboard obsessive if you aren’t already one. — Ernie @ Tedium

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Pro Publica ☛ Psychiatric Hospitals Are Violating EMTALA by Turning Patients Away

    Late one Saturday night in May 2023, Melissa Keele’s phone rang. Her son had been found alone in the desert of Colorado’s Grand Valley. He was naked; his clothes, phone, keys and car were nowhere to be found.

    Keele rushed out to her own vehicle and floored it, her headlights piercing through the pitch black. For years, her son had been dealing with severe mental illness. At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he hit a breaking point and attempted suicide by driving off a cliff on the highway. “God told him he needed to die,” Keele recalled him telling her.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Mayday: Optus emergency calling crisis

    If mobile customers were in scope for the outage then it raises serious concerns about the ability of mobile handsets to route emergency calls to alternative networks.

  • Chris Coyier ☛ Flies

    Flyswatters are fricking amazing. You can’t do it with your hands. If you’re mad enough you can do it with your baseball cap. But hands? It’s not happening. I’m not Daniel LaRusso over here ripping flies out the air with chopsticks. But a flyswatter makes me an instant Mr. Miyagi. A flyswatter makes you a fly mascaraing machine. They are also like 99 cents.

• Proprietary

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Kimmel is returning as Republicans wonder, “are we the baddies?”

    Well, I’d like to see ABC not bow down to government censorship in the first place, but I guess the next best thing is to reverse the decision a few days later.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Techdirt ☛ AI Slop Startup To Flood The Internet With Thousands Of AI Slop Podcasts, Calls Critics Of AI Slop ‘Luddites’

      Meanwhile, the rushed application of undercooked automation is having hugely problematic impacts across privacy, energy, climate, propaganda, mental health, public safety, and labor. Often thanks to the kind of people in power who are shaping AI’s application across the culture. A lot of these folks (see: major media owners) aren’t looking to make our lives better, they’re looking to leverage automation as a way to attack labor, mislead people, or create a badly automated ouroboros of ad-engagement bullshit.

    • Harvard University ☛ AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity

      A confusing contradiction is unfolding in companies embracing generative AI tools: while workers are largely following mandates to embrace the technology, few are seeing it create real value. Consider, for instance, that the number of companies with fully AI-led processes nearly doubled last year, while AI use has likewise doubled at work since 2023. Yet a recent report from the MIT Media Lab found that 95% of organizations see no measurable return on their investment in these technologies. So much activity, so much enthusiasm, so little return. Why?

    • The Register UK ☛ AI experts urge UN to draw red lines around the tech

      Ten Nobel Prize winners are among the more than 200 people who've signed a letter calling on the United Nations to define and enforce “red lines” that prohibit some uses of AI.

      "Some advanced AI systems have already exhibited deceptive and harmful behavior, and yet these systems are being given more autonomy to take actions and make decisions in the world," the signers argue, before arguing that AI “could soon far surpass human capabilities and escalate risks such as engineered pandemics, widespread disinformation, large-scale manipulation of individuals including children, national and international security concerns, mass unemployment, and systematic human rights violations.”

    • Simon Willison ☛ ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as Spouses Use AI to Attack Their Partners

      Maggie Harrison Dupré for Futurism. It turns out having an always-available "marriage therapist" with a sycophantic instinct to always take your side is catastrophic for relationships.

    • Simon Willison ☛ Why AI systems might never be secure

      This is the clearest explanation yet I've seen of these problems in a mainstream publication. Fingers crossed relevant people with decision-making authority finally start taking this seriously!

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ Why China no longer wants US AI chips - by Jérôme Marin

      It’s hard to see this as mere coincidence. Last Thursday, after two years of silence, Huawei finally acknowledged the existence of its new Ascend chips, designed for generative artificial intelligence. The company even laid out a roadmap, pledging to double their power every year.

      The announcement came just days after Beijing ordered Chinese companies to stop using Nvidia’s graphics cards, long seen as essential for training and running AI models. Officially justified by “security concerns,” the ban is also a clear signal: China wants to boost homegrown alternatives from Huawei, Alibaba, and Baidu, which are now deemed powerful enough to take over. “Competition is undeniably here and only getting stronger,” admits Nvidia.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ AI company finds a way to be even more cartoonishly evil

      Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models: [...]

    • Amit Patel ☛ Harnessing ChatGPT hallucinations

      The web server I use (nginx) logs errors to a file. I check this occasionally to make sure nothing’s going wrong with my server. I typically get these kinds of 404 requests: [...]

    • Pivot to AI ☛ The UK public doesn’t trust AI — the Tony Blair Institute is very worried!

      The Tony Blair Institute is the brains trust for Keir Starmer’s Labour government in the UK. The TBI is the driving force behind the UK government plan to go full AI — it has a pile of tech donors, who just happen to be the companies the government’s giving all the AI contracts to. And TBI has been pushing hard for AI in government since before Labour was re-elected in July last year.

      Now, with AI Britain in full swing, TBI has surveyed the British public — and the public doesn’t like AI so much.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ ‘Stop Worrying About AI’s Return on Investment’ said the wallet inspector

      Everyone on these panels just presumes AI is obviously the best thing in the world. But they cannot tell you what a business is supposed to get back from all that money.

    • Futurism ☛ ChatGPT Has a Stroke When You Ask It This Specific Question

      It’s an odd way of addressing the question. ChatGPT correctly identifies that those names do end with s, but why bring them up?

      Then it looks like it’s cutting to the chase — at least, that is, until it goes off the rails yet again.

    • Futurism ☛ Using AI Increases Unethical Behavior, Study Finds

      “Using AI creates a convenient moral distance between people and their actions — it can induce them to request behaviors they wouldn’t necessarily engage in themselves, nor potentially request from other humans,” said behavioral scientist and study co-author Zoe Rahwan, of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, in a statement about the research.

  • Social Control Media

    • Court House News ☛ Meta remains on the hook in false advertising suit

      U.S. Senior District Judge Jeffrey S. White denied Meta’s motion to dismiss the breach of contract and breach of the covenant of good faith and fair dealing, finding that Meta’s Terms of Services and Community Standards created an obligation for Meta to take action against deceptive advertisers.

    • US Navy Times ☛ Navy issues instructions for reporting improper social media use

      The social media purge was not confined to posts related to Charlie Kirk.

    • Manton Reece ☛ Mastodon quote posts in Micro.blog

      Today we’re announcing support for Mastodon quote posts in Micro.blog. This is a new feature in Mastodon 4.5 that has been in development for quite some time. It is live on mastodon.social and mastodon.online, the two servers run by Mastodon gGmbH, and it will be rolling out to other Mastodon servers when version 4.5 is final.

    • Joel Chrono ☛ Social network nitpicks

      Can we go back to like, sharing stuff we actually write, saying stuff in our own words, and having conversations about things we think?

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Ransomware behind global airport outage, says ENISA

      The company at the heart of the problems is Collins Aerospace, based in the US, which confirmed cyberattack on Friday evening.

      Collins Aerospace provides ARINC SelfServ cMUSE software, which is used by airport workers to process traveler check-ins and bag drop functions.

      The company is owned by RTX, a company that also oversees US military contractor Raytheon Intelligence & Space, which supplies air, space, and cybersecurity technologies.

    • Security Week ☛ European Airport Disruptions Caused by Ransomware Attack

      The cyberattack hit services provided by US-based Collins Aerospace, which is owned by RTX (formerly Raytheon). Collins Aerospace is one of the world’s largest suppliers of aerospace and defense solutions. The company was recently awarded a NATO contract for electromagnetic warfare solutions.

    • Wired ☛ A Cyberattack on Jaguar Land Rover Is Causing a Supply Chain Disaster

      Almost immediately after the cyberattack, a group on Telegram called Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, claimed responsibility for the hack. The group name implies a potential collaboration between three loose hacking collectives— Scattered Spider, Lapsus$, and Shiny Hunters—that have been behind some of the most high-profile cyberattacks in recent years. They are often made up of young, English-speaking, cybercriminals who target major businesses.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Military commissaries could be privatized under Pentagon plan

    The Department of Defense wants to see if private commercial grocery operators or investment firms are willing and able to run 178 commissaries at military bases across the U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, according to a Request For Information, or RFI, posted to Sam.gov, the federal government’s website for contract opportunities.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Vietnamese Magazine ☛ Massive Data Breach: 160 Million Vietnamese Credit Records Stolen in CIC Hack

      According to the Vietnam Cyber Emergency Response Team (VNCERT), the breach involved unauthorized access to the State Bank of Vietnam’s database; the full scope is still being assessed. The data being sold on dark web forums includes names, addresses, ID numbers, debt and income records, risk analyses, and other sensitive personally identifiable information (PII).

    • International Business Times ☛ Palantir Merchandise Sparks Ethical Concerns — From AI to T-Shirts and Tote Bags

      The company previously shut down a similar store in 2023 after complaints about quality and design. The latest version comes with a different approach, aiming to push both branding and loyalty.

    • The Record ☛ As scientists show they can read inner speech, brain implant ‘pioneers’ fight for neural data privacy, access rights

      It was an easy decision for J. Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old quadriplegic living in Southern California, to undergo a craniotomy in 2024. The operation — which involved inserting 384 electrodes in his brain and a large titanium plate in his skull — allows researchers to record data about how his neurons operate, potentially helping future paralysis patients.

      The hard part, Buckwalter says, has been giving up the right to access and own his neural data and feel assured that it will be kept private.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Nation ☛ Nepal’s Revolution Wasn’t Televised, but It Was on Discord

    “The Parliament of Nepal right now is Discord,” the chat app popular with young gamers, a 23-year-old online content creator from Kathmandu, Sid Ghimiri, told The New York Times. The comment was typical of the enthusiastic international press coverage. You may be forgiven if it triggers your Silicon Valley BS detector. Yet, amazingly, this wasn’t hyperbole—Karki defeated four other short-listed candidates in a vote held in a Discord chat room with 16,000 members, organized by a Nepali nongovernmental organization (NGO) involved in the negotiations with army leaders. Although Internet tech has played a key role in recent revolutions—memorably during the Arab Spring as well as the so-called color revolutions—the facsimile of direct democracy held in an online chat room is something rather new.

  • New Yorker ☛ Nepal’s Violent Gen Z Uprising

    The protesters had by then mutated into a mob. And, as the state receded, the mob set fire to the symbols of state power in Kathmandu: Singha Durbar, Nepal’s administrative headquarters; the health ministry; the Parliament building; the Supreme Court; the Presidential palace; and the Prime Minister’s residence. Private properties, from the offices of the governing Communist Party to the glass-and-steel tower housing the Kathmandu Hilton, were also set ablaze. Outsiders called this mayhem a revolution. And those participating in it dispensed revolutionary justice to members of the ancien régime unlucky enough to be caught. Sher Bahadur Deuba—who had served five terms as Nepal’s Prime Minister, most recently in 2022—and his wife, Arzu Rana, the foreign minister in Oli’s cabinet, were beaten savagely in their home. Rajyalaxmi Chitrakar, the wife of another former Prime Minister, was reported to have been burned to death inside her residence. (She turned out to have survived, though with severe injuries).

  • Wired ☛ Elon Musk Is Out to Rule Space. Can Anyone Stop Him?

    It’s hard to quantify, even with those numbers, the geopolitical power that Musk now commands by way of his two space businesses. When Starlink went down for a couple of hours in late July, troops on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine conflict had trouble connecting with their drones—and one another. “Everyone thought it was purely on the front lines, until reports started coming in that he had fallen all over the world,” one officer stationed near the city of Kupiansk, along the Oskil River in eastern Ukraine, texts me. That’s how central Musk is to modern warfare. Two days after the launch I watched from the hotel roof, another Falcon 9 took off from Cape Canaveral, this one carrying four astronauts aboard a Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. SpaceX’s Dragon is currently America’s only way to get humans into space, as Musk reminded his onetime ally Donald Trump when the president threatened Musk’s government contracts.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ A Cynical Game: How Belarus’s Pro-Russia Dictator Plays the West

    Here’s what actually happened, and how Lukashenko—and Vladimir Putin—scored a triple victory: Good press, sanctions relief, and opening a backdoor for Russia into the West.

  • US Navy Times ☛ China and Russia conduct joint sub patrols — should America worry?

    While the exercise only involved two subs, the warning was clear: America should contemplate the prospect of confronting a China-Russia alliance.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • 404 Media ☛ We’re Suing ICE for Its $2 Million Spyware Contract

    404 Media has filed a lawsuit against ICE for access to its contract with Paragon, a company that sells powerful spyware for breaking into phones and accessing encrypted messaging apps.

  • The Nation ☛ Donald Trump’s Corruption of the Law Is Destroying American Democracy

    This is one of the most concrete examples of Trump’s authoritarian threat to democracy—avoiding a fight on this issue is basically admitting that American democracy is finished.

• Environment

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Heat waves in US rivers increasing up to four times faster than air heat waves, analysis finds

    Analysis of data from nearly 1,500 sites in the contiguous United States between 1980 and 2022 revealed that heat waves in rivers are accelerating faster than and lasting nearly twice as long as air heat waves, according to a new study by researchers at Penn State.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Wired ☛ Louisiana Hands Meta a Tax Break and Power for Its Biggest Data Center

      On August 20, Louisiana’s Public Service Commission voted four to one to approve the construction of the plants, which will be run by the utility company Entergy Louisiana. The decision was met with criticism from members of the public who testified against Entergy and Meta’s plan, claiming that the process was rushed. They voiced concerns about rising energy bills and water shortages.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Skinned for Profit: How Global Trade Is Driving Africa’s Donkeys to the Brink

• Finance

  • Reuters ☛ K&L Gates closes Beijing office as US law firms continue China market retreat

    Sept 19 (Reuters) - U.S. law firm K&L Gates will close its office in Beijing, marking the latest major U.S. law firm to scale back in China amid geopolitical and market headwinds.

    A K&L Gates spokesperson on Friday said the Pittsburgh-founded firm will consolidate its Beijing office into its outpost in Shanghai after the firm's new leadership team reviewed its global operations, including real estate.

  • Seattle tech layoffs shake regional economy as Microsoft, Amazon cut tens of thousands

    The wave of mass layoffs by big tech (large technology corporations) that has continued since last year is shaking the economy of Seattle, Washington, one of America’s major “technology hubs.” The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) assessed that, compared with other areas where big tech is concentrated such as San Francisco, Seattle is taking a bigger hit from the layoffs.

  • The Olympian ☛ Microsoft president bashes WA taxes, saying they are ‘driving people and jobs away’ [Ed: Microsoft does not want to pay taxes]

    Microsoft President Brad Smith delivered a scathing critique of new taxes passed by the Washington state Legislature while speaking at an event earlier this month.

    The comments from Smith came at the Sept. 11 annual policy dinner hosted by the Washington Policy Center (WPC), a pro-business think tank that has lambasted the state’s recent tax hikes.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Common Dreams ☛ Further | A Martyr For Truth and Faith and Memorial Plazas | Opinion

    In the ten days since Kirk's assassination on a Utah campus by a lone shooter addicted to guns and video games with a murky, shifting political profile - raised MAGA, possibly moving left - Kirk, 31, has been sanitized, glorified, venerated, his death used as a cudgel to stifle political dissent. Though he founded Turning Point USA in 2012 largely as a pro-free-market organization, over time he slowly re-shaped it into an increasingly extremist, anti-democratic part of a Christian right that somehow fell under the spell of a crooked, blasphemous, sexually assaulting felon. "He embodied the MAGA warrior," boasted one fan. "He was all Trump." Little wonder, after his killing, that Christian nationalists claimed him as a martyr in their unholy war.

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ CRA compliant curl

    curl is not a manufacturer as per the legislation’s terminology so we as a project don’t have those requirements, but we always have our ducks in order and we will gladly assist and help manufacturers to comply.

  • The Register UK ☛ Linux has the lineage to out-evolve cyber threats

    Apply this model of selection pressures to our overview of three microkernels in the Linux context, and you can see that viable mutations are generally Rustafarian - personal motivation and skill sets are changing in that direction. Rust has itself evolved in response to those selection pressures, so selection pressure will favor those entities that can evolve to embrace it more easily. Mainstream Linux, with its very high institutional inertia about maintainers, leaves opportunities to the smaller, more nimble. All of the microkernels here have different focuses, different priorities, and the art of predicting their future success is in matching each focus to the imperatives of reality.

  • Sean Monahan ☛ the new lost generation

    The story is mostly inspired by my friends who are mostly millennials. There’s something self-effacing about claiming we are lost…at forty. But statistics bear it out, with record-low fertility, marriage rates, and homeownership. This means being lost at forty doesn’t look very much like the midlife crises of generations past.

    you are not stuck. you are lost.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ How aesthetics destroyed privacy and polarized us

    Tracy has written a super-interesting discussion about how the online disinhibition effect has dovetailed with our tendency to send aesthetic signals to our communities, arguing that this has been a key ingredient into our polarization.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Moldova accuses Russia of election interference ahead of key vote

      Allegations of Russian interference have become a routine feature of Moldovan elections in recent years. During the country’s 2024 presidential election, the Kremlin reportedly spent $217 million funding Russian proxies, representing nearly 1 percent of Moldova’s GDP. Despite these efforts, incumbent Maia Sandu narrowly defeated pro-Russian candidate Alexandr Stoianoglo.

    • The Record ☛ Russia steps up disinformation efforts to sway Moldova’s parliamentary vote

      Russia is ramping up disinformation campaigns and covert influence operations ahead of Moldova’s parliamentary election in an attempt to block its path to the European Union, according to Western researchers, leaked documents and Moldovan officials.

      Moldovans will elect a new parliament on September 28 when President Maia Sandu’s ruling Party of Action and Solidarity (PAS) faces off against a coalition of pro-Russian opposition forces.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Details About Chinese Surveillance and Propaganda Companies

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • TMZ ☛ Sinclair Won't Air 'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' on ABC Affiliates When Show Returns

    Sinclair, which owns a ton of ABC affiliates across the country, says ... "Beginning Tuesday night, Sinclair will be preempting Jimmy Kimmel Live! across our ABC affiliate stations and replacing it with news programming."

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Admin Continues To Order The Erasure Of American History From Our National Parks

    Examples of this abound. The National Park Service asked visitors to tell them which parts of American history exhibits make them feel bad so they can be removed. The Smithsonian Institute was ordered to do-wokeify itself, which meant getting rid of references to America’s little oopsies like slavery, genocide, internment camps, and CIA coups both successful and otherwise. Proud of our shared American military history? Well, go enjoy it on our federal websites… unless it’s about black, brown, or gay people, because they’re accomplishments mean nothing. The Enola Gay, as it turns out, was entirely too gay while nuking Japan for Trump’s taste.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Commentary: Please, Jimmy, don't back down. Making fun of Trump is your patriotic duty

    It all depends on Tuesday night, when we see if Kimmel returns undaunted, or if he has been subdued. Of all the consequential, crazy, frightening events that have taken place in recent days, Kimmel’s return should be a moment we all watch — a real-time, late-night look at how successful our president is at forcing us to censor ourselves through fear.

  • New York Times ☛ Jimmy Kimmel’s Show to Return to ABC on Tuesday Night

    Disney did not say whether all ABC affiliates, some of which balked at carrying “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” last week, would carry Tuesday’s show. At least one television group that owns some ABC affiliates said on Monday evening that it would not broadcast it.

  • New Yorker ☛ Why Won’t America’s Business Leaders Stand Up to Trump?

    There’s another clarifying takeaway: as long as Trump continues to abuse his executive power with the presumptive backing of the legislature and the Supreme Court, the titans of American capitalism can’t be relied on to push back against him. This was evident not only in Kimmel’s suspension but during the recent dinner at the White House attended by more than twenty tech moguls including Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, who took turns praising Trump and thanking him for his leadership.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ The Taliban begins implementing fiber optic internet ban to ‘prevent immorality’ in Afghanistan — swathes of the country plunged into cyberspace darkness

    10 out of 34 provinces are affected, so far, with repercussions feared by the business and educational sectors.

  • Variety ☛ David Letterman Slams Jimmy Kimmel Suspension

    “In the world of somebody who is an authoritarian, maybe a dictatorship, sooner or later, everyone is going to be touched,” said Letterman.

    Letterman also said, “The institution of the president of the United States ought to be bigger than a guy doing a talk show.” Kimmel’s removal from late-night TV, he said, “was predicted by our president right after Stephen Colbert got walked off, so you’re telling me this isn’t premeditated at some level?”

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: It’s still censorship (even if it doesn’t violate the First Amendment)

    Censorship isn't limited to government action: it's the act of preventing a message from a willing speaker from reaching a willing listener. The fact that it's censorship doesn't (necessarily) mean that it's illegitimate or bad: there may be times when it's totally reasonable to prevent a willing speaker from reaching a willing listener. If you own a speech forum (say, a restaurant), and a patron stands on a table and starts declaiming about "illegals ruining America" and you 86 that racist fuck, that's totally OK with me – even if there a few other racists in the booths are shouting, "Right on, brother!"

    But don't pretend it's not censorship. You are managing a speech forum by preventing certain consensual communications from taking place because of your views. Which is fine. It's even fine if you support doing this only in some cases, for example, if you support the right of protesters to disrupt a Klan rally without being removed, but not the right of a racist to ruin everyone's dinner by shouting racist garbage in a restaurant.

  • Techdirt ☛ Disney’s Lawyers Successfully Defended Jimmy Kimmel (About Fair Use, Not His Free Speech Mocking Trump)

    At the time, we pointed out that was nonsense, and the use here would clearly qualify as fair use, and the district court agreed. So this is the follow up to that, which is that the Second Circuit has affirmed what should have been obvious from the start: Jimmy Kimmel’s use of George Santos’ Cameo videos was clearly fair use.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ Journalist targeted by protesters at Kent anti-asylum rally

    Leader told Kent Online: “It was pretty alarming to become the centre of vitriolic attention, simply for doing our jobs and trying to provide a balanced and accurate record of events.

  • Truthdig ☛ As Ellison Buys Out TikTok, US Moves Toward One-Party Media - Truthdig

    Enter Larry Elliason’s son David, who was born into the kind of riches most can barely dream of. As I wrote for FAIR, the younger Ellison is the CEO of Skydance, which recently merged with Paramount, giving him control over CBS. David Ellison’s campaign contributions trend more to the Democratic establishment, but it’s his father’s politics that seem to be reshaping the newly bought network: “CBS Shifts to Appease the Right Under New Owner,” as an NPR headline put it.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Pro-Trump Billionaires Are Consolidating Media Control

    TikTok is being sold to an investor consortium that includes Oracle, the tech company of pro-Trump billionaire Larry Ellison. The move is yet another big step in the consolidation of major media sources under right-wing control.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ, Free Press lead call for journalist Mario Guevara’s release from ICE detention

    An Emmy-winning, Spanish-language reporter who covers immigration, Guevara faces imminent deportation back to his native El Salvador after the Board of Immigration Appeals on September 19 re-opened his 13-year-old immigration case, dismissing the government’s appeal of a July 1 judge’s order to release him on bond. In an emergency hearing on Friday on a previous habeas petition filed by ACLU, a judge requested both sides file briefs with additional information.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ There is simply too much shit

    There is no readily available legal justification for striking these boats, leading to the appropriate conclusion that it is illegal.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Michigan Advance ☛ Fewer households, businesses will get high-speed internet under revamped federal plan • Michigan Advance

    The Trump administration’s changes to the program, however, have disqualified hundreds of thousands of locations — including homes, businesses and community buildings — from receiving internet access. And the program’s new technology-neutral approach will also shift a large portion of the federal funds toward satellite internet companies, including Elon Musk’s Starlink, that cost less to build but have more uneven service than underground fiber optic cable. That means households and businesses that were looking forward to reliable, high-speed internet will no longer get support from the BEAD program.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Register UK ☛ Windows 11 update leaves Blu-ray and TV apps stuttering

    The glitches - interruptions, freezing, or a black screen - occur when HDCP is enabled or when Digital Rights Management (DRM) is applied to digital audio. Streaming services are not affected.

  • Giles Turnbull ☛ A chat with 19-year-old me

    “Yeah. Well, streaming music over the [Internet] will initially seem like the best thing in the world, but eventually it will go to shit, like lots of big [Internet] services. Spotify and lots of other [Internet] companies will spend years building up services, luring in millions of customers, basically creating monopolies. Then they’ll crank up the prices and start indulging in all sorts of questionable business practices, and end up trying to shove AI down your throat even if you don’t -”

  • Cory Dransfeldt ☛ Cloudflare proposes the Spotify model for the web

    Cloudflare posted a 2025 founder's letter and I haven't seen much discussion of it. But, when you read through it, what they discuss and propose is deeply troubling for the web as have and currently know it.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• New York Times ☛ Amazon Faces Trial on F.T.C. Charges Related to Prime Service

  The Federal Trade Commission claims, in a lawsuit filed two years ago, that Amazon tricked tens of millions of people into signing up for its Prime membership program, and then made it hard for customers to cancel when they wanted out.

• New York Times ☛ U.S. Asks Judge to Break Up Google’s Advertising Technology Monopoly

  Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in April that Google had built a monopoly over tools that websites use to sell ad space. Google also monopolized the software that connects those publishers with markets looking to buy space, she said.

• Nick Heer ☛ Amazon to End Inventory Commingling

  I had no idea Amazon did this until I complained on Mastodon about how terrible its shopping experience is, and Ben replied referencing this practice, nor did I know it has been doing so for at least twelve years. I am certain I have received counterfeit products more than once from Amazon, and I think this is how it happened.

• Digi Day ☛ Amazon to end commingling program after years of complaints from sellers

  The decision marks the end of a controversial practice in which Amazon pooled identical items from different sellers under one barcode. The system, intended to speed deliveries and save warehouse space, had also allowed counterfeit or expired goods to be mixed in with authentic ones, according to The Wall Street Journal. For years, brands complained that commingling made it difficult to trace problems back to specific sellers and left their reputations vulnerable when customers received knockoffs. In 2013, Johnson & Johnson temporarily pulled many of its consumer products from Amazon, arguing the retailer wasn’t doing enough to curb third-party sales of damaged or expired goods.

• Copyrights

  • [Old] Ars Technica ☛ Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models

    The 32-page legal decision tells the story of how, in February 2024, the company hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for the Google Books book-scanning project, and tasked him with obtaining "all the books in the world." The strategic hire appears to have been designed to replicate Google's legally successful book digitization approach—the same scanning operation that survived copyright challenges and established key fair use precedents.