Leftovers

• Cryptography.doc OÜ ☛ Diversifying your search engine portfolio

  I recently wrote about how Google is abusing their dominant market position to control the future of the web, but I held off on making any practical recommendations on how to reduce their power because that article was quite long enough as it was. I'll keep this one (relatively) short and focus on one thing: search.

• Science

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ New Tiny chip creates 'rainbow laser' for faster data speeds

    “As we sent more and more power through the chip, we noticed that it was creating what we call a frequency comb,” says Andres Gil-Molina, a former postdoctoral researcher in Lipson’s lab.

    A frequency comb is a type of light that contains many distinct colors, each precisely spaced apart. Every color, or frequency, can carry its own stream of information, allowing dozens of signals to travel side by side without interference.

• Career/Education

  • The Register UK ☛ Classrooms embraced AI - training didn’t keep up, CDT warns

    Prior research and experts warn that spending too much time with AI bots can have a negative effect on in-real-life (IRL) social skills - an outcome which may be more severe for young, developing minds. Teachers who responded to CDT's research appear to agree, as 71 percent said that they're worried AI weakens key academic skills such as writing and critical thinking. Again, that's been shown to be the case in a study from MIT, which found that students using AI to assist in writing papers showed less brain activity and, unsurprisingly, worse recall of their written work.

    Half of the students surveyed said that they thought using AI in class made them feel less connected to their teachers. In other words, kids can see that AI is having negative effects on them, too.

  • Yordi Verkroost ☛ Your Time Deserves Your Attention

    But keeping track of exactly how many hours go into each part? I have no idea, and I couldn’t care less. The only time I’ve ever had to track my hours was when I worked on a subsidized project. After all, every granted euro needs to be accounted for. That everything and everyone gets made up and reality has long since been thrown out doesn’t seem to matter.

  • Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Six months

    I started a new job as a UX Developer for Revive Our Hearts ministry six months ago today. I had planned to write a post when I celebrated my two month mark in June. But life got in the way and now the calendar is on <del>September</del> October. I wanted to share a little bit about my new role and things that I learned from the process.

  • Fast Company ☛ Are you're experiencing a form of burnout called 'rust out'?

    The literal definition of rust out is to decay and become unusable through the action of rust. Rust out is a type of burnout that comes from not using your unique skills and talents at work, lacking learning opportunities, and ultimately, dreading the repetitive tasks at work that sap your creativity.

  • Guy LeCharles Gonzalez ☛ Five Things: October 9, 2025

    While there’s nothing revelatory in Thompson’s advice, I do like and subscribe to the idea that you always have to advocate for your talents. I’ve been lucky over the years to have roles that were either designed specifically for me or notably revamped to leverage my strengths. It’s also an approach I try to take with anyone who works for and with me. We can’t always co-create our ideal roles, but if you can’t find a few aspects to tweak and make parts of the job more engaging, it might be time to start looking for another job before “rust out” leaves you unemployable.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — The Economics of AI in Academic Research

    On a recent webinar, I hosted a panel with a group of rockstar university librarians from the DC area. We discussed how academic organizations, more than most private companies, prioritize mission alignment when working with vendors.

    And in the fast-moving world of AI research tools, there are many community-focused concerns that vendors should have strong opinions on and plans for, from privacy and security to sustainability and copyright.

    But the most misunderstood issue, in my view, is the one at the heart of it all — how AI will reshape the economics of academic research.

• Hardware

  • PC World ☛ Yes, 'USB condoms' are real, and they protect your gadgets from danger

    Some people call these “USB condoms,” usually referring to a dongle that you can buy that blocks data from being transferred over the USB connection. In this case, “data” equals malware. Is a foreign government or hacker group building in standalone devices to push malware to your phone? Do credit-card skimmers exist? Okay then. If a malicious cable can be used to conceal malware, the wall port sure can.

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ Intel details Panther Lake architecture expected to start shipping January 2026

    Intel have now revealed a whole lot more on Panther Lake, their next-generation chip architecture with RibbonFET and PowerVia.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Discord: Attackers accessed about 70,000 user photo IDs

    The breach, which Discord insists occurred at an unidentified third-party customer service provider, involved government ID scans that users upload to verify their age.

  • The Register UK ☛ RondoDox botnet fires 'exploit shotgun' at edge devices

    A new RondoDox botnet campaign uses an "exploit shotgun" - fire at everything, see what hits - to target 56 vulnerabilities across at least 30 different vendors' routers, DVRs, CCTV systems, web servers, and other network devices, and then infect the buggy gear with malware.

  • Google ☛ Oracle E-Business Suite Zero-Day Exploited in Widespread Extortion Campaign

    Our analysis indicates that the CL0P extortion campaign followed months of intrusion activity targeting EBS customer environments. The threat actor(s) exploited what may be CVE-2025-61882 as a zero-day vulnerability against Oracle EBS customers as early as Aug. 9, 2025, weeks before a patch was available, with additional suspicious activity dating back to July 10, 2025. In some cases, the threat actor successfully exfiltrated a significant amount of data from impacted organizations.

    This post provides an in-depth analysis of the campaign, deconstructs the multi-stage Java implant framework used by the threat actors to compromise Oracle EBS, details the earlier exploitation activity, and provides actionable guidance and indicators of compromise (IOCs) for defenders.

  • Eliseo Martelli ☛ Apple, how is this legible?

    Today I was using Apple Podcasts on my iPhone, and I noticed something that made me do a double take. The text in the player, in the section where you ca change the playback speed, was rendered in a light gray color on a slightly less light gray background. It was so faint that it was nearly impossible to read.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Here’s how federal agencies say they’re tackling AI use under Trump

      For nine of the roughly two dozen Chief Financial Officers Act agencies, FedScoop was unable to find either a plan or a strategy. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meanwhile, produced only strategies.

    • Michael Kjörling ☛ Why I donʼt use a “not by AI” badge

      (And just in case you think I am exaggerating, just a week or two ago, OpenAI – which, as you might know, is the company behind ChatGPT – made available a video generation service while requiring rightsholders to explicitly opt out on a character by character basis. The Motion Picture Association reacted and barely before the ink was dry, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backtracked in a personal blog post. All of that just a month after another well-known generative AI company, Anthropic, agreed in court to pay copyright holders USD 1.5 billion – about half the nominal annual GDP of San Marino – to settle a different copyright infringement lawsuit regarding their Claude large language models. And back in May of this year, a former UK deputy prime minister and former Meta – as in Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, … – executive argued that passing a law to require asking for consent from copyright holders would "basically kill" the generative AI industry overnight. To mention just a few examples from just the past few months. Yes, this is truly an industry where in a short period of time many industry-leading companies and lots of people in corporate leadership positions within those companies have made themselves known as paragons of virtue. The last two sentences of this paragraph may contain sarcasm.)

    • New Yorker ☛ Will A.I. Trap You in the “Permanent Underclass”?

      The idea of a permanent underclass has recently been embraced in part as an online joke and in part out of a sincere fear about how A.I. automation will upend the labor market and create a new norm of inequality. In an A.I.-dominated future, those with capital will buy “compute” (the tech term for A.I. horsepower) and use it to accomplish work once done by humans: anything from coding software to designing marketing campaigns to managing factories. Those without the same resources will be stuck with few alternatives. A sense of dread about this impending A.I. caste system has created a new urgency to get ahead while you still can. “You have 2 years to create a podcast in order to escape the permanent underclass,” one Silicon Valley meme account, @creatine_cycle, posted recently on X, suggesting that perhaps fame can still save you. “Honestly if you don’t want to be a part of the permanent underclass you should probably ship slop asap,” another person posted, using the slang term for any A.I.-generated or augmented content; in other words, start leaning in to A.I. products or stay poor forever. The creator of @creatine_cycle is Jayden Clark, a former musician turned entrepreneur working in San Francisco. His niche posts satirize the id of the tech industry, which he has seen change radically since the advent of the A.I. gold rush. In the future that A.I. hustlers envision, Clark told me, “nobody’s working anymore.” He continued, “whoever hasn’t gotten in, you have no other chance to climb the ladder.”

    • Vox ☛ ChatGPT is more popular than ever, but is the AI bubble about to pop?

      Math like this is what’s got more and more people talking about the AI bubble and its imminent popping. On Wednesday, the Bank of England cautioned that the risk of a “sudden correction” to global markets is growing as the valuations of top AI companies increase. The same day, IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva issued a similar warning and said tech company valuations “are heading toward levels we saw during the bullishness about the internet 25 years ago.” The Nasdaq index reached a peak on March 10, 2000, before imploding. The Nasdaq closed at an all-time high on October 6.

    • The Verge ☛ DC Comics won’t support generative AI: ‘not now, not ever’

      “People have an instinctive reaction to what feels authentic. We recoil from what feels fake. That’s why human creativity matters,” said Lee. “AI doesn’t dream. It doesn’t feel. It doesn’t make art. It aggregates it.”

    • Jérôme Marin ☛ AI’s House of Cards

      To finance their breakneck expansion, these companies have taken on enormous debt. By the end of June, CoreWeave owed $11 billion, while Nebius’s debt exceeded $1 billion. Lamba Labs has borrowed more than $700 million, and Crusoe recently secured nearly $1 billion in credit facilities. To reassure lenders, the neo-clouds have pledged their GPUs as collateral — hardware that can be sold off if financial trouble hits.

    • Matthew Inman ☛ A cartoonist's review of AI art

      And if that's the case, consuming AI art is like eating styrofoam.

      It's a farce.

  • Social Control Media

    • Futurism ☛ Top Official Horrified When Trump Thought He Was Sending Direct Message But Accidentally Posted It on Main Account

      At the time, some suspected the highly personal post was meant to be a private message which the President had bungled, instead blasting it out to the entire world. Then again, that type of fumble would be pretty extraordinary, even for Trump — would a sitting president really be conducting official businesses through his own social media app, consequences be damned?

      Luckily, the Wall Street Journal has now set the record straight. According to the paper’s sources inside the White House, the post was indeed meant for Bondi’s eyes only. One anonymous official said Trump was “surprised” when he learned it was public, because he had specifically addressed it to “Pam.”

    • RFERL ☛ Watchdog Says Taliban Restricting Social Media In Afghanistan Days After Internet Blackout

      The report confirms statements from social media users inside Afghanistan earlier in the day, who told Radio Azadi that they had been unable to access social media networks without using a filter breaker or VPN since the previous evening.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Daily Mail appoints 'world's first' influencer correspondent

      Clayton joined the Mail as a trainee in 2020 and has been showbiz correspondent working across the Mail titles since January 2024.

    • International Business Times ☛ Video of Chinese Hiker Plunging to Death Goes Viral: Man Removed His Safety Hooks to Take a 'Selfie'

      A 31-year-old Chinese hiker has died after reportedly unhooking his safety line to take photographs on a snow-covered mountain in Sichuan province moments before plunging hundreds of metres to his death, in an accident captured on video and now circulating online.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ What AI means for the business of: journalism

      Earlier this week I keynoted FediForum and also used the metaphor of trusted archipelagos — it’s really interesting to see the way Tony Haile’s used them here. I strongly agree with his conclusions, and I think everyone in media needs to pay attention to this argument.

      There’s a difference between social media and social networks. Social media is the wide-open town square that we’ve heard so much about; social networks are communities of interest, practice, or shared values.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ Chaos Ransomware Upgrades With Aggressive New Variant

      Researchers from FortiGuard Labs have identified a new version of Chaos ransomware written in C++, the first not written in .NET, they revealed in a report published Wednesday. This evolution also introduces a host of new features that make the ransomware harder to disrupt once it's in execution, as well as more destructive than previous versions.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Dark Reading ☛ GitHub Copilot 'CamoLeak' AI Attack Exfiltrates Data

    "It’s just meant for a very small amount of data [exfiltration]," Legit Security chief technology officer (CTO) Liav Caspi says of his colleague's work, but that small amount of data could include passwords, private keys, etc. "We predict that had we carried that out in the real world it probably would have gone undetected by the user and by GitHub," Caspi adds.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Independent UK ☛ The most common problems drivers face with ‘clunky’ mobile parking apps

      The RAC, which commissioned the study, is now calling on parking operators to ensure at least two different payment methods are available, stressing that "no-one should be forced" to use an app.

    • Techdirt ☛ Hey, San Francisco, There Should Be Consequences When Police Spy Illegally

      A San Francisco supervisor has proposed that police and other city agencies should have no financial consequences for breaking a landmark surveillance oversight law. In 2019, organizations from across the city worked together to help pass that law, which required law enforcement to get the approval of democratically elected officials before they bought and used new spying technologies. Bit by bit, the San Francisco Police Department and the Board of Supervisors have weakened that law—but one important feature of the law remained: if city officials are caught breaking this law, residents can sue to enforce it, and if they prevail they are entitled to attorney fees.

    • EPIC ☛ California Enacts Privacy Law Allowing Residents to Protect their Personal Data Online with One Click

      AB 566 requires browsers to give users the ability to opt out of the sale of their personal data across the web with one click instead of requiring Californians to exercise this right with each individual website they visit. All browsers will now be required to support opt-out preference signals like Global Privacy Control.

    • EFF ☛ EFF and Other Organizations: Keep Key Intelligence Positions Senate Confirmed

      In a joint letter to the ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, EFF has joined with 20 other organizations, including the ACLU, Brennan Center, CDT, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and Demand Progress, to express opposition to a rule change that would seriously weaken accountability in the intelligence community. Specifically, under the proposed Senate Intelligence Authorization Act, S. 2342, the general counsels of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) would no longer be subject to Senate confirmation.

    • EFF ☛ California Targets Tractor Supply's Tricky Tracking

      In addition to the fine, the company also must take an inventory of its digital properties and tracking technologies and will have to certify its compliance with the California privacy law for the next four years.

      It may surprise people to see that the agency’s most aggressive fine isn’t levied on a large technology company, data broker, or advertising company. But this case merely highlights what anyone who uses the internet knows: practically every company is tracking your online behavior.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ She found an LAPD official's AirTag. Lawsuit claims it derailed career

      Bell found the Apple tracking device under her friend’s car while on a weekend getaway in Palm Springs in 2023. The friend suspected her former domestic partner, Alfred “Al” Labrada, who was then an assistant chief in the Los Angeles Police Department, had secretly planted the AirTag to monitor her movements after they broke up. The women contacted San Bernardino County authorities, who opened an investigation.

  • Confidentiality

    • GnuPG ☛ GnuPG to protect citizen rights (was: Announced chat control by the EU)

      Now that I attended this mail thread anyway, let me assure that I will never accept a backdoor in GnuPG or related libraries. I spent the majority of my working life on that software [1] and the reason I got into this was and still is privacy for the people. Meanwhile my company is on very solid financial grounds and I actually could stop working and keep on helping with GnuPG maintenance and oversee developments without financial compensation.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Site36 ☛ German army and police expand cooperation with Israel: On drone defence, Hamas, AI and ‘prison affairs’

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Combat mass and speed: Europe moves to unlock Ukraine’s drone insights

    Experts say that while foreign militaries are not required to copy all Ukrainian tactics, they should still integrate key know-how shared with them, starting with the ability to build defensive systems quickly.

    “No one should be thinking they can store millions of drones [or countermeasures], they can’t just store them in a warehouse, and even if they did, they shouldn’t expect them to be useful given how quickly things are evolving,” Scott Boston, senior defense analyst at RAND, said.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Half of girls exposed to harmful content online with teens twice as likely to see it on TikTok and X

    Suicide prevention charity the Molly Rose Foundation, who conducted the research weeks before the implementation of the Online Safety Act, said their findings suggest teenagers were being algorithmically recommended harmful content at an “incredibly disturbing scale”.

  • Court House News ☛ NYC sues social media companies over keeping kids scrolling in 'flow state'

    Pointing to a national crisis, New York said social media platforms have triggered depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicidality among thousands of children, including youth in New York City, who fall under the plaintiff city’s care.

    Over one-third of kids ages 13 to 17 nationwide report using one of the defendants’ platforms “almost constantly,” the city claims in the lawsuit, yet more than half say they would struggle to cut back. Locally, citing 2021 numbers, the city said more than 77% of New York City high school students reported spending an average of three or more hours per school day in front of a screen.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ A Married Couple in New Orleans Found a Stone in Their Backyard. It Turned Out to Be an Ancient Roman Soldier’s Gravestone

    This summer, Lusnia traveled to Italy, having already planned to conduct research there, and she visited the museum in Civitavecchia. Lusnia learned that a 1954 museum inventory mentioned the inscribed gravestone, but it was compiled based on earlier documents—not an actual observation of the piece. Gray writes, “This made it all the more likely that the item was lost in the chaos after the war.”

  • Molly White ☛ Issue 94 – Backdoor deals

    New corruption concerns have emerged around Trump’s cryptocurrency ventures as reporting has revealed even more troubling connections between his World Liberty Financial and the Emirati firm MGX. Senator Warren is demanding answers about the “shady Abu Dhabi firm” that has “already cut deals to get sensitive American technology while enriching the Trump family’s crypto firm” and is now poised to take a 15% stake in TikTok. A valuation far below analyst estimates has also prompted concerns that Trump is steering the platform to allies at below-market prices.

• Environment

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Elon Musk’s Starlink fleet is burning up in orbit, scientists say

    Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told EarthSky that he has recorded “an average of between one to two Starlink satellites deorbiting each day in 2025.” That number, he said, could climb to around five per day as SpaceX continues to expand its global network.

  • teleSUR ☛ EU Climate Agency Reports World's Third-Warmest September

    The EU’s climate monitoring network said that the global average surface temperature in September this year was 16.11 degrees Celsius, down by 0.27 degrees and 0.07 degrees from the same month in 2023 and 2024, respectively, but still 1.47 degrees above pre-industrial level.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Nebraska Examiner ☛ Jack Daniel’s is ending a program that helped farmers feed cows with its scraps. What happens now?

      Jack Daniel’s is terminating a decades-long program that provided the company’s corn byproduct “slop” to local cattle farmers at low or no cost, allowing the farmers to inexpensively feed their cattle.

      The “Cow Feeder Program” will end on March 31 as the company transitions to a new partnership with Michigan-based 3 Rivers Energy Partners, which will instead convert the waste into renewable fuel and fertilizer.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Diary of a Nature Nerd: New Graphic Novel Celebrates Kids’ Love of Wildlife

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • FAIR ☛ CBS’s Suck-Up to Barrett May Be a Taste of Propaganda to Come

    A softball interview (10/6/25) with Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett—headlined “As Justices Confront Harassment, Death Threats and an Assassination Attempt, Barrett Declares ‘I’m Not Afraid'”—provides a glimpse of the kind of journalism we can expect from CBS News now that it’s controlled by MAGA billionaire Larry Ellison, and anti-“woke” ideologue Bari Weiss has been named its editor-in-chief (Defector, 10/6/25).

  • FAIR ☛ Jared Kushner ‘Out of the Spotlight’—But Not Out of Mideast Politics, or Out of the Money

    President Donald Trump dispatched his son-in law Jared Kushner and the United States’ Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to Egypt last weekend to sort out the remaining details of the president’s so-called “peace plan” for the Gaza Strip, much of which territory has been obliterated over the past two years of Israel’s US-backed genocide. The official Palestinian fatality count has surpassed 67,000, although some scholars suggest the real death toll may be more in the vicinity of 680,000.

  • The Register UK ☛ Meta will move React to Linux Foundation

    The React Foundation will start with seven corporate members – Amazon, Callstack, Expo, Meta, Microsoft, Software Mansion, and Vercel – and its responsibilities will include maintaining React's infrastructure and trademarks, organizing React Conf, and sponsoring the React ecosystem. The first executive director will be Seth Webster, Meta's head of React.

  • The Record ☛ Renewal of cyber information-sharing law must mind the gap, senator says

    The Protecting America from Cyber Threats Act from Sens. Gary Peters (D-MI) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) would extend the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015 for a decade. It also includes a retroactive provision to ensure that there is no gap in the liability protections afforded to private entities that have continued to share threat information.

    “We have to continue to get real-time information on threats in order to stand up against persistent cybersecurity attacks,” Peters, who previously introduced a bipartisan bill that made no changes to the original legislation beyond extending it for another 10 years, told reporters during a call on Thursday.

  • India Times ☛ Softbank-owned chipmaker Graphcore will invest $1.3 billion in India over 10 years: CEO Nigel Toon

    Graphcore, a UK chip firm, will invest $1.3 billion in India over the next decade. The company is opening its first office in Bengaluru, hiring 100 AI engineers initially. This move taps into India's talent pool for chip design. Graphcore's smartchips power AI data centers. The investment signals a significant expansion into the Indian market.

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Sociopaths Are Shocked That Most People Aren’t Sociopaths

    Because what followed wasn’t just political victory—it was moral validation for people who’d spent years convinced that kindness is weakness, that cynicism equals intelligence, that power and profit are all that matter. The surrender confirmed their worldview: everyone is ultimately self-interested, morality is performance, and when the masks come off, the strongest simply take what they want.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Delighted to be proved wrong

    But creating coalitions again and again to fight off stupid, dangerous nonsense is hard. Civil society and real movement politics, as so many of CT’s enduring readers know, is hard fucking work. I’m glad that we do it and that we have deep knowledge and experience of it, but I’m also exhausted. Again and again I find myself wondering, if we didn’t have to expend most our energies saying ‘No’ to this stupid, ghastly shit, and saying ‘No’ to the stupid, ghastly shit of the tech oligarchs, what might we have built instead? How productively and joyfully could we be spending our lives? Actually growing good things? Showing what can and must be done for us to live decent lives for our own purposes and in service of others, and not repeatedly campaigning so that a few less lives will be wrecked?

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • New York Times ☛ What the Arrival of A.I. Video Generators Like Sora Means for Us

      In the past, consumers had more confidence that pictures were real (“Pics or it didn’t happen!”), and when images became easy to fake, video, which required much more skill to manipulate, became a standard tool for proving legitimacy. Now that’s out the door.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Viral MAGA Social Media Accounts Run by Macedonian Rumen Naumovski

      The issue of foreign interests influencing American politics through anonymous X influencer accounts is an ongoing one. Last year, federal prosecutors alleged that the conservative media company Tenet, which pays a network of major right-wing influencers like Benny Johnson and Tim Pool, was secretly being paid by Russian state operatives to disseminate propaganda to a large American audience. Johnson, Pool, and other Tenet content creators maintain they were unaware of the alleged Russian influence campaign and were victims of deceptions.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Admits: “We Took The Freedom Of Speech Away”

    For those who’ve been following Trump’s systematic assault on the First Amendment—which we’ve covered extensively at Techdirt—this admission is remarkable not for its content, but for its candor. Here’s a president whose supporters claimed he would “bring free speech back” explicitly acknowledging that his administration has done the opposite.

    He said this at the White House’s bizarre roundtable on antifa, which involved a bunch of serial fabulists and conspiracy theorists feeding the President’s delusional need to justify using the military on American citizens who live in states that didn’t vote enough for him.

    If you can’t see the video, the transcript is pretty straightforward: [...]

  • JURIST ☛ Comedians criticized for silence on Saudi Arabia human rights record after comedy festival

    On Wednesday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged comedians who performed at Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Comedy Festival to address the nation’s concerning human rights record and raise awareness of unjustly detained Saudi dissidents, journalists, and human rights activists.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ CUNY Workers Against the New McCarthyism

    In July, House Republicans held yet another hearing grilling university leaders, this time calling on CUNY chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez as well as the leaders of Georgetown University and the University of California’s flagship campus at Berkeley. A day prior to the hearing, the PSC held a rally with members and elected officials outside city hall, demanding an end to the attacks on universities.

  • Newsweek ☛ Antifa Expert Moves to Europe After Death Threats, Turning Point Petition - Newsweek

    Bray believes he’s being targeted due to his prior research and views that are “out of favor” with the Trump administration, including his 2017 best-seller, “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” which analyzed the history of anti-fascism.

  • BoingBoing ☛ US professor flees to Spain after death threats over antifa views

    UPDATE, 10:45am ET, Oct 9: Turns out Bray and his family were blocked from leaving the United States right as they were about to board their flight out of Newark on Wednesday.

    "'Someone' cancelled my family's flight out of the country at the last second," Bray posted on Bluesky. "We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation 'disappeared.'"

  • The Guardian UK ☛ US anti-fascism expert blocked from flying to Spain at airport

    “‘Someone’ cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second,” Bray posted on Bluesky social media. “We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’”

  • Court House News ☛ Trump brags flag burning ban 'took the freedom of speech away’

    “President Trump may believe he has the power ‘to take away the freedom of speech,’ but he doesn’t,” Corn-Revere said. “ The Supreme Court settled this question almost four decades ago — the First Amendment protects burning a flag as a form of symbolic protest, even if crowds who witness it get ‘agitated.’ No executive order can change that.”

  • The Nation ☛ What’s Behind Saudi Arabia’s Surge in Executions?

    The type of controversial legal ruling used to justify his execution—the ta’zir verdict—is another sign that the Saudi government is blatantly lying about its pledge to reform the judicial system. The ta’zir ruling is a judicial interpretation for charges that are not explicitly defined in Shariah law, covering discretionary crimes. Almost all of the ta’zir rulings are handed down by the Saudi Specialized Court (SCC), which was established in 2008 to handle indictments related to terrorism and national security.

    The court has been heavily criticized by Saudi activists and international human rights organizations. During his trial at the SCC, Saudi activist Waleed Abu al-Alkhair refuted the legitimacy of the court, arguing that it was established to deal with terrorism cases, not to prosecute peaceful activists. Nevertheless, the SCC convicted Abu al-Alkhair in 2014 for publicly criticizing the country’s human rights record and sentenced him to 15 years in prison. Amnesty International accused the Saudi government of exploiting the SCC to “create a false aura of legality around its abuse of the counter-terror law to silence its critics.”

  • Freedom From Religion Foundation ☛ New report exposes the ongoing scourge of book-banning  — Freedom From Religion Foundation

    The level of censorship in the United States remains at an alarmingly unacceptable level, as PEN America’s recently released banned-books report reveals. We at the Freedom From Religion Foundation are deeply familiar with the awful history of censorship — and the recent trendline is profoundly troubling.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ US Judge Bars Attacks By ICE On Journalists And Protesters

    Also, Ellis restricted the use of crowd control weapons on journalists, protesters, or clergy, including a prohibition against shooting individuals “to strike the head, neck, groin, spine, or female breast, or striking any person with a vehicle.”

    The order [PDF], which applies to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other agencies, will remain in force for two weeks while a court reviews a lawsuit alleging significant First Amendment violations.

  • JURIST ☛ Press freedom group decries killing of Sudan journalist

    According to the CPJ, a drone strike hit journalist Alnor Suleiman Alnor’s home on Friday in El Fasher, the besieged Sudanese city in North Darfur. Alnor was taken to the only operational hospital in the city, and died from his injuries the following day. The Sudanese Journalists Syndicate (SJS) reflected on Alnor’s journalistic contributions, namely his contributions as an editor and presenter of El Fasher Radio, and Media Director in the North Darfur Governor’s office.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ "I was injured twice, kidnapped, and tortured." Conflict photographer Jonathan Alpeyrie discusses his approach to capturing life in warzones

    He describes himself as a minimalist by nature. "Camera, flak jacket, phone, bag, computer," he says. "I’ve been carrying the same thing for the past 20 years." Simplicity is crucial when every ounce of weight counts and when mobility can mean the difference between getting the shot and getting caught in danger.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • US News And World Report ☛ LA Times Journalists Vote to Authorize Open-Ended Strike

    Negotiations with management have dragged on for over three years without resolution, the guild said, adding that during that period, the newspaper has endured multiple rounds of layoffs and buyouts, leaving the union with slightly more than 200 members, down from about 450 in 2022.

  • The Nation ☛ “True Bruin Values”: How UCLA Justified a Crackdown on Protest

    “While I was banned, I continued to receive e-mails about a workplace violence prevention training,” said Martin, who said he was present at UCLA encampments to provide support for his students. “It was ironic, because I got fired precisely for trying to prevent violence at my workplace. It was just that the violence came from the admin and the police. Apparently, trying to stop someone from firing a gun at students doesn’t count as violence prevention,” he said. “I was arrested while in the encampment—while I was standing there, pleading with police officers not to open fire on my students.”

  • Freedom From Religion Foundation ☛ BREAKING! FFRF sues to defend right of S.C. atheists to be poll workers

    The legal complaint charges that the defendants are coercing a statement of belief in a monotheistic deity, thereby denying nontheists or those worshiping more than one deity the right to serve as poll workers. Not only is Reel, as an atheist, barred from becoming a poll worker under this policy, but the rights of other South Carolina citizens who have no religious affiliation (16 percent of the South Carolina population), among others, are also injured. Additionally, the defendants are denying Christians who belong to sects that eschew swearing oaths to a deity, such as some Mennonites, Baptists and Quakers, the right to serve as poll workers.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ ‘I felt like my life didn’t matter’: 73-year-old Harjit Kaur recalls deportation experience after 30 years in US

    Her family, she said, acted swiftly to secure her release once she was detained. “My lawyer reached out to the Indian Consulate and discovered that, all these years, ICE never formally submitted a request for my travel documents,” Kaur said. Despite efforts to have her released into family custody to “say my goodbyes and leave with dignity,” she was instead transferred to a Georgia facility.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Techdirt ☛ Republicans Are Trying To Make Government Efforts To Help Poor People Afford Broadband Illegal

    Quick background: the $8 billion FCC Universal Service Fund (USF) applies a small surcharge on traditional phone lines to fund broadband expansion to unserved rural homes, schools, and libraries (of which the U.S. has a lot thanks to rampant telecom monopolization).

    While it hasn’t been without its flaws and sporadic examples of waste, the program has seen broad, bipartisan support and wasn’t deemed all that controversial. It really does fund a lot of useful broadband expansion to poor and rural schools, libraries, and communities.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Register UK ☛ Millions of business PCs still on Windows 10 as D-Day nears

    Omdia reached this figure by tracking market shipments, studying replacement cycles and net new purchases based on 25 years of data.

    Jessop estimates that around 20 percent of those machines that don't upgrade in time do not meet the hardware requirements to install Windows 11, as specified by Microsoft: the requisite Trusted Platform Module and a relatively modern CPU.

  • Beej ☛ Stop Using DRM on your Books

    And you've heard about this DRM thing that supposedly prevents them from doing exactly that! Problem solved!

    Except that by putting DRM on your books, you're preventing people who purchased the book from keeping a copy of it in their own library to read whenever they wish. Seems right that if they bought it (unless you're renting your book out), that they should be able to keep what they purchased. Also, maybe they buy a different e-reader later and want to be able to read their already-purchased books on that other reader. DRM can prevent this from happening—

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Wired ☛ Apple Took Down These ICE-Tracking Apps. The Developers Aren't Giving Up

  Mark’s app, a platform built to serve as a repository for videos and other materials documenting ICE activity, is not alone in getting kicked off Apple’s App Store. Earlier in October, ICEBlock was among the first ICE-related apps Apple removed. The decision followed claims from US attorney general Pam Bondi that such tools endanger ICE officers. Apple has also removed other tracking apps—including Red Dot and DEICER—as well as Eyes Up.

• 404 Media ☛ Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses

  Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.

• India Times ☛ Google wants right to bundle Gemini AI app with Maps, YouTube

  Google wants to bundle its AI service, Gemini, with popular apps like Maps and YouTube, a move the Justice Department opposes. A federal judge is considering whether to allow this practice, as Google argues the AI market is still developing and it shouldn't be restricted from using common bundling tactics.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: California bans algorithmic price-fixing

  The one weird trick that these guys have hit upon is to use industry-wide "pricing consultancies" – clearinghouses that pretend to offer individualized price advice to each seller in a market. In reality what these companies do is aggregate all the prices charged by every major seller in the market, then advise all of them to raise their prices in sync: [...]

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ DAZN Letters to IPTV Pirates Demand €500, Compliance in 7 Days - Or Else

    Sports broadcaster DAZN has made good on its promise to target pirate IPTV subscribers and make them pay for dodging its official products. All of those who received a physical letter in the mail this week were previously fined by the government after police linked their identities to a busted IPTV service. DAZN was granted access to the same data, which now supports demands for €500 in compensation and just 7 days to commit before the deal gets taken off the table.

  • Ethan Marcotte ☛ A right to copy.

    I mean, here’s the thing: my books are copyrighted. They became copyrighted the minute they were published, and that applies to everyone who wrote a book for my former publisher. Heck, the Copyright Office itself says that registration is voluntary. The fact that copyrighted works aren’t eligible unless they’ve formally registered feels like a lawyerly dodge: a legal maneuver to help Anthropic reduce the size of its payout pool, and thereby keeping the company from getting rendered down into its component parts during bankruptcy proceedings.