GNU/Linux

• AboutChromebooks ☛ Linux Development on Chromebook Statistics 2025

  Linux development on Chromebooks has evolved significantly over recent years. While ChromeOS devices were initially designed for cloud-based computing and web applications, the introduction of native Linux support has transformed these affordable machines into viable development platforms. Understanding the current statistics and trends around Linux on Chromebook usage provides valuable insights for developers, educators, and technology decision-makers evaluating their hardware options.

Leftovers

• Mike Brock ☛ The Birth of the Sociopath: Why Smart People Choose to Stop Seeing Goodness

  What makes a sociopath? How are intelligent people “so entirely blind to the virtues and beauties of compassion?”

  Understanding the answer matters not just philosophically but strategically—because if we don’t understand how people become this way, we can’t prevent it, recognize it early, or build effective resistance against it.

• Matan Abudy ☛ Thoughts & Things #1

  I haven’t written here for about six months. The idea always seemed to be drifting away from me, and there was always some excuse to put it off and say, “Not today, maybe tomorrow.” A huge source of this feeling for me is the need to put everything in its right place. Things have happened and my life has changed; how can I post about some random thought without updating my home page? Dependencies like this stop me from doing the actual thing.

• Dan Q ☛ Do Contact Forms Attract More Spam than Email Addresses?

  There’s a question being floated around my corner of the blogosphere, but I think my experience of the answer differs from other bloggers:

  It started when David Bushell observed that, despite having his email address unobscured on his website, he gets more spam via his contact form. Luke Harris followed-up, providing a potential explanation which basically boils down to the idea that it’s both more cost-effective and provides better return-on-investment to spam contact forms than email addresses. And then Kev Quirk described his experience of switching from contact forms to “bare” email addresses and the protections he put in place (like plus-addressing), only to discover that he didn’t need it at all.

• Greg Morris ☛ Free Content

  This post is interesting in terms of users thinking they 'own' a platform or offer value, but never will. Which is a weird thing to think as a platform user, but whats the alternative?

• Ben Tsai ☛ Text Is Best

  I wasn’t intending to rework my tasks and notes system. It just happened to me.

  At the end of the day, I’ve ended up with a lightweight process that is one tick more formal than what I had before. It’s good enough (and that’s a feature).

• Science

  • Henrik Forstén ☛ Synthetic aperture radar autofocus and calibration

    Earlier this year I made a polarimetric synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mounted on a drone. I have since worked a lot on the software side to improve the image quality and now the same hardware can generate much better quality images. The main contribution of this article is description of a new SAR autofocus algorithm that combines some of the existing SAR autofocus algorithms to make an algorithm that is well-suited for drone mounted SAR. Also antenna pattern normalization and polarimetric calibration suitable for drone mounted SAR with non-linear track is described.

  • OMGenomics Labs LLC ☛ Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT)

    In this interactive article, we explore the borderline-magical algorithm known as the Burrows-Wheeler Transform (BWT). It powers data compression in bzip2, and is used by sequence alignment tools like bowtie and bwa, both of which were named after the algorithm.

    The BWT has 2 key properties: [...]

• Career/Education

  • CBC ☛ 'Free to All': Winnipeg's 1st public library opened 120 years ago, soon to start new chapter

    Carved into the Tyndall stone above the arched entrance to Winnipeg's first public library are the words "Free to All," but for the past 11 years, it's been closed to everyone.

    Now, as the former Carnegie Library on William Street turns 120, it's about to begin a new chapter.

  • Jim Mitchell ☛ The Return to Work

    The first week back at work. It could have been much worse…

  • Dave Rupert ☛ Many years on the job and I still don't get it.

    I’m coming up on 20 years of professional web development and I still don’t get it sometimes. I tend to measure myself or view work productivity through the lens of “How much code did I write?” and that does a great disservice to myself and what I do.

    There’s a lot more to the job: [...]

• Hardware

  • Declan Chidlow ☛ Switching to Colemak-DH | Vale.Rocks

    I do not use QWERTY, instead opting for Colemak-DH. My intention for this article is to document my experience switching and if I believe it wise.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ An Astonishing Proportion of High Schoolers Have Had a "Romantic Relationship" With an AI, Research Finds

    A new survey found that nearly one in five high schoolers in the US — 19 percent — say that they or a friend have used AI to have a romantic relationship, an alarming figure that will surely raise new concerns over how the tech’s adoption among kids and teenagers may be impacting their mental health.

  • Center for Democracy & Technology ☛ Hand in Hand: Schools’ Embrace of AI Connected to Increased Risks to Students - Center for Democracy and Technology

    Artificial intelligence (AI) has continued to alter the educational experiences of teachers, students, and parents during the 2024-25 school year. The frequency and variety of AI uses continues to grow; at the same time, the increased use of AI in educational settings is correlated with heightened risks to students. This report details the current status of AI use in schools along with four emerging risks associated with this technology, all of which increase the more that a school uses AI: [...]

• Proprietary

  • AudioThing JUNE, a Roland Juno-60 Synthesizer emulation for mac, linux, win, and iOS

    AudioThing June is an authentic emulation of the legendary Roland Juno-60 Synthesizer for macOS, Linux, Windows, and iOS with extra features.

    The Roland Juno series is one of the most emulated synthesizers in the plugin world. No wonder it’s a super popular synth with a warm, timeless sound that defined 80s pop and electronic music to this day. There are authentic emulations from Arturia, AIR Music Tech, Cherry Audio, even Roland, Softube, TAL, u-he, and others.

  • The Verge ☛ Bose is yanking key features from its SoundTouch speakers | The Verge

    With this cloud services shutdown, Bose will also stop offering security updates for SoundTouch products. And Bose isn’t planning to offer a replacement app or platform: “we do not plan to support SoundTouch products through any other app,” the company says.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Outlook for Mac fun

    This is software developed by a company with the net worth of some countries! What’s the opposite of imposter syndrome?

  • Rich Trouton ☛ Unlocking FileVault via SSH on macOS Tahoe

    One of the changes Apple has introduced with macOS Tahoe is the ability to use SSH at the unified login screen available on Apple Silicon Macs. Apple has built on this to provide a way to allow a FileVault-encrypted Mac to be unlocked via an SSH session. Apple mentions this new capability as part of the following KBase article: [...]

  • India Times ☛ Microsoft's productivity software suite recovers after outage

    The number of users reporting issues with Microsoft 365 had fallen to 136 as of 5.38 p.m. ET, compared with 17,000 earlier, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources.

  • The Register UK ☛ SharePoint attackers add Velociraptor to ransomware tools

    The ransomware gang caught exploiting Microsoft SharePoint zero-days over the summer has added a new tool to its arsenal: Velociraptor, an open-source digital forensics and incident response app not previously tied to ransomware incidents.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Restarting or redoing something after a systemd service restarts

    Suppose, not hypothetically, that your system is running some systemd based service or daemon that resets or erase your carefully cultivated state when it restarts. One example is systemd-networkd, although you can turn that off (or parts of it off, at least), but there are likely others. To clean up after this happens, you'd like to automatically restart or redo something after a systemd unit is restarted. Systemd supports this, but I found it slightly unclear how you want to do this and today I poked at it, so it's time for notes.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Uwe Friedrichsen ☛ Solving the wrong problem

      I think a lot about AI-assisted and AI-based coding. The first one is a human who writes code with more or less support of an AI solution. We see it all the time already now. The second one is a human leaving the coding part to a fleet of AI agents. If the human does not even look into the code created but treats it as a black box and looks at the solution only from the outside, i.e., only watches what it is doing, it is usually called vibe coding.

      Especially in the second situation where the AI agents took the driver seat regarding coding, it is impressive to see what kind of solutions these AI agents are already able to create.

    • Sean Monahan ☛ the aura farm and the slop distillery

      If we farm aura i.e. grow it organically, then we distill slop from the detritus of our primary cultural activity. Sloptimism is nose-to-tail regenerative agriculture. In this sense, we should really call it regenerative AI. After all, it does not create anything new in and of itself. It re-interprets preexisting cultural materials. The pig farmer needs the leftovers from other crops and livestock to make his slop.

      I’m assembling a full report from my slop writing on 8Ball. If you want to review what I’ve written so far, links and graphics are below: [...]

    • The Independent Variable ☛ 🤖 The sort of mother fucker who makes SlopTok

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Google won’t fix ‘ASCII smuggling’ hack in Gemini AI

      One way to get around the filters is ASCII smuggling — where you hide your command in weird high-end Unicode characters.

      Viktor Markopoulos at FireTail tested a pile of chatbots on how well they block ASCII smuggling. ChatGPT, Copilot, and Claude all catch this attack and block it successfully. Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek do not.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Talking AI With Martin Wolf

      On Wednesday we had a terrific panel discussion about AI at the CUNY Graduate Center, which will eventually be available on YouTube. I had hoped to continue the discussion with some participants for this week’s video, but the logistics fell through. So here’s a conversation (which you have to watch on the YouTube site) I had on the same subject with Martin Wolf of the FT a few months ago. Transcript below.

    • Adnan Siddiqi ☛ Let’s talk about LLM guardrails

      Besides all the weird and funny aspects, the biggest benefit of implementing guardrails is saving costs. If you do not implement guardrails, people can exploit or abuse your system one way or another. It is not Claude Chat or ChatGPT that you use for free or pay for once a month and send messages without thinking of the cost. It is the implementation of APIs, stupid! Someone could go rogue and screw you so hard that you could end up crying in a corner.

    • Futurism ☛ MrBeast Concerned That AI Slop Will Put Him Out of Business

      Arguments over the merits of his content — which often turn financially desperate people into living spectacles, lining Donaldson’s pockets but allowing him to pass along some fraction of the gains to better his subjects’ lives — have been rehashed for years.

      But now, a telling new data point has emerged: Donaldson is worried that his niche could be threatened by AI.

    • The Register UK ☛ Staff, schmaff: Business leaders racing to adopt unproven AI

      The study found that a further 43 percent of business leaders expect to further reduce entry-level roles (which includes both cutting existing roles and not hiring new people) in the next year in favor of AI. A full 50 percent "specifically" said AI is helping them reduce headcount.

      Not that those initiatives are paying off, mind you. A recent study from MIT found that 95 percent of enterprises have seen zero ROI on their AI projects - and that's hardly a new story. IT decision makers surveyed last year were saying the same thing back then, and IBM found this past May that 75 percent of CEOs it surveyed were still looking for those elusive AI gains.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ “Written by Humans, Not AI” badges

      But I also overthink everything! So I have a few reservations.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Feedback on those “Written by Humans” buttons

      Yesterday I wrote a post about why I wasn’t using those Written by a Human buttons, despite appreciating their intentions (or at least, I thought I did, more on that in a moment). I’ve since received a few additional perspectives.

    • Nick Heer ☛ ‘Give Me a Single Reason Why Sora 2 Should Exist’

      This technology may, to some extent, break down the barriers involved in making video, but we should not pretend that is the objective here, or even halfway considered by any of these A.I. companies. They want to make gimmicks. They want to do the problems of the last twenty years of social media, but all of it is fake, and they want to call that “innovation”. I will echo Green’s call: give me a single reason why this should exist.

    • Chris Coyier ☛ Oatmeal on AI Art

      Reading Oatmeal stuff is always such a seesaw for me. It’s so riddled with like boobshark jokes and I’m like, yeah yeah ha ha. I don’t hate that kind of humor or find it offensive, I just don’t think it’s very funny. Then it’s also so riddled with such earnest heartfelt well-articulated thoughts that I’m super into it. None more than Let’s talk about AI art.

  • Social Control Media

    • BIA Net ☛ Trapped in the algorithm: Rethinking media’s role in a 'rigged' digital world

      In the panel titled “Fueling the machine causing issues we are fighting against - Ethical dilemma about using social media for civil society causes,” held on Oct 3 at Sarajevo University, the discussion focused on how journalists, activists, and rights organizations can navigate the tension between engaging audiences and participating in exploitative digital systems.

    • New Statesman ☛ Was the left wrong to leave X for BlueSky?

      What’s really striking, though, is the pool of broadly centre-left online opinion havers who are conspicuous by their absence. “While the dynamic is most advanced on X,” Montford writes, “we’re seeing similar shifts on TikTok, Instagram, and beyond.” At no point does the report mention BlueSky.

    • Juan J Martínez ☛ I'm NOT on Mastodon

      There are some good things I’m going to miss, specially the interaction with some people I met there –others are long time acquaintances coming from Twitter–, but there is nothing to do about it: you can’t not be and be there. May be we can keep in touch using email, IRC, XMPP, or Signal. My contact details are public.

    • El País ☛ Ultraconservative housewives on OnlyFans: The paradox of the ‘MAGA’ women who strip naked on social media

      The twist involves OnlyFans, a platform that already contains another twist: it began as a way for influencers and content creators to provide their followers with extra or more curated content in exchange for a monthly subscription. But (and this is the twist) the extra content quickly became sexually explicit material. This platform, then, should be considered by these conservative women as a digital hell. However, people like Anya Lacey are part of a new spectrum of tradwives with OnlyFans accounts. That is, conservative housewives who show off their naked bodies on social media and make a lot of money doing so.

    • India Times ☛ EU grills Apple, Snapchat, YouTube over risks to children

      Inspired by Australia's social media ban for under-16s, Brussels is analysing whether to set bloc-wide limits on minors' access to platforms -- with 25 of 27 EU countries coming out Friday in support of at least studying such a measure.

    • Android Police ☛ YouTube gives banned creators a second shot, but with a catch

      However, YouTube is drawing firm boundaries. The program excludes channels that were removed for severe offenses like copyright violations, abuse of the Creator Responsibility policy, or repeated and egregious misconduct. Creators who deleted their own accounts won’t qualify either. The option to request a new channel will appear in YouTube Studio on desktop, but only for creators who meet all requirements.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Straits Times ☛ Your phone, home and car all talking to one another: Xiaomi’s AI ecosystem explained

      Company data shows that millions of users worldwide now own several Xiaomi devices – from smartphones and wearables to robot vacuums and smart appliances – all managed through a single app.

    • Michigan Advance ☛ Despite widespread interest, only 3 states passed license plate reader laws this year

      Lawmakers in at least 16 states this year introduced bills to regulate the use of automated license plate readers responsible for collecting large amounts of data on drivers across the country.

      But just three states — Arkansas, Idaho and Virginia — enacted laws this session that establish or amend rules for law enforcement agencies using the high-tech camera systems and the manner in which license plate data should be stored. And this month, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would have restricted use of such data.

    • Kyle Kingsbury ☛ Geoblocking Multiple Localities With Nginx

      Now Mississippi’s 2024 HB 1126 has made it illegal for essentially any web site to know a user’s e-mail address, or other “personal identifying information”, unless that site also takes steps to "verify the age of the person creating an account”. Bluesky wound up geoblocking Mississippi. Over on a small forum I help run, we paid our lawyers to look into HB 1126, and the conclusion was that we were likely in the same boat. Collecting email addresses put us in scope of the bill, and it wasn’t clear whether the LLC would shield officers (hi) from personal liability.

    • [Old] Kyle Kingsbury ☛ Geoblocking the UK with Debian & Nginx

      A few quick notes for other folks who are geoblocking the UK. I just set up a basic geoblock with Nginx on Debian. This is all stuff you can piece together, but the Maxmind and Nginx docs are a little vague about the details, so I figure it’s worth an actual writeup. My Nginx expertise is ~15 years out of date, so this might not be The Best Way to do things. YMMV.

    • India Times ☛ Austria finds Microsoft 'illegally' tracked students: privacy campaign group

      Austria's data protection authority has determined that Microsoft "illegally" tracked students using its education software and must grant them access to their data, a privacy campaign group said Friday. In a statement on Friday, Noyb announced that the regulator had issued a decision this week, which "finds that Microsoft 365 Education illegally tracks students and uses student data for Microsoft's own purposes".

    • NYOB ☛ noyb win: Microsoft 365 Education tracks school children

      The Austrian Data Protection Authority ("DSB") issued a decision finding that Microsoft 365 Education illegally tracks students and uses student data for Microsoft's own purposes. The software giant also did not answer an access request related to Microsoft 365 Education, which is widely used in European schools. Instead, Microsoft tried to shift all responsibility to local schools. While the relevant schools also have to provide more detailed access data and additional privacy information according to the decision, it is now for Microsoft to finally answer how it uses user data for their own business purposes.

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft adds Copilot adoption benchmarks to Viva Insights

      Viva Insights is Microsoft's vaguely creepy monitoring tool, designed to slurp data from employee activities, verfiying how their teams stack up against everyone else in their own organization and at other corporations.

      Since one of the uses of the tool is to track productivity through metrics, it is inevitable that Microsoft would add benchmarks for the adoption of Copilot.

    • The Record ☛ Microsoft violated EU law in handling of kids’ data, Austrian privacy regulator finds

      The decision from Austria’s Datenschutzbehörde (DSB) came in response to a 2024 complaint lodged by the Austrian privacy advocacy group noyb, which accused the tech giant of violating Europe’s General Data Privacy Regulation for its handling of children’s data.

    • Android Police ☛ Copilot on Windows now connects to Gmail, Google Drive, and more

      This change allows Copilot to serve as a more unified productivity hub, combining messaging, storage, and content creation in one place. Connecting Outlook or Gmail lets Copilot retrieve inbox content, such as invoices or contact information, from your email accounts. The idea is to make Copilot feel like a central assistant for Windows 11, bringing together document creation and cloud-account sync in a way that’s more integrated and less fragmented.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Atlantic ☛ Trump’s Dodgy Plan for TikTok

    In 2024, Congress ordered TikTok’s parent corporation to divest its U.S. operations or face a U.S. ban. The Trump administration delayed enforcing the law, but on September 25, the White House issued an executive order to set a plan in motion. Important details of this plan remain undisclosed, but what has been released should alarm anyone concerned about this administration’s drive to consolidate wealth and media power in the hands of a loyal few.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Maine joins multi-state lawsuit over Trump deploying National Guard in cities

    Over the summer, Trump ordered National Guard troops and U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in response to immigration protests. That action was ruled by a federal judge in California in September to be a violation of federal law against military members conducting domestic law enforcement.

  • India Times ☛ Children plug into AI chatbots, leaving reality, parents behind

    Rayna Mehta, a clinical psychologist and a school counsellor who runs a private practice in Mumbai, has encountered cases with problematic usage with these AI chat apps and virtual reality games in kids from 6th grade onwards.

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ In 1776, Thomas Paine made the best case for fighting kings — and for being skeptical

    Saying “no” — especially to those in power — is an underrated American pastime, and Paine was its Babe Ruth. If you plan on joining No Kings rallies and have yet to find a slogan for your sign, Paine’s got you covered: “In America, the law is king!” “No King! No Tyranny!” “Monarchy hath poisoned the republic.”

    I could go on. Because he did.

  • El País ☛ Social media completes its shift to the right: ‘TikTok is consequential’

    TikTok is turning right-wing. The fastest-growing social network in the world and the most popular among young people is set to operate in the U.S. under a company independent of its Chinese parent company, with a board of directors controlled by the White House, which has already expressed its preferences.

  • India Times ☛ Brazil to begin construction on TikTok data center in six months, minister says

    Plans for the project, which is expected to be based in the northeastern state of Ceara, were disclosed by Reuters in April, when three people familiar with the matter had said TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance was weighing the move.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • US News And World Report ☛ How a Quiet Dutch Retiree Helped Uncover Nazi-Stolen Art in Argentina

    “We were not looking for the paintings in particular,” said Rosman. “At that time we were mostly thinking about the diamonds that were looted, so we wanted to know what happened to that.”

    When Schouten rang the bell at Patricia Kadgien’s home in August, there was no answer. But he saw a for-sale sign in her yard. The reporters checked the real-estate listing and spotted the painting in one of the photos of the property. They could barely believe their luck.

• Environment

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The curious, intertwined history of climate and digital rights activism

    Over the decades, there've been many moments where I've been struck by the parallels between climate activism and tech activism. In both cases, the foundational challenge is getting people to care about the looming catastrophic effects of bad policies. In both cases, those policies and their effects are highly abstract and technical, and are downstream of a huge, weird, cross-cutting set of contingencies and circumstances, which makes it hard for anyone to truly take their measure. You don't just have to master the technical issues – you have to get your arms around the economic, social and political issues, too. Bad tech policy and bad climate policy are both wicked problems, hard to define and even harder to solve.

  • The Register UK ☛ Coal making a comeback as US datacenters demand power

    This spike in demand is driving an unexpected resurgence in coal generation, which has increased nearly 20 percent year-to-date. The research note, seen by The Register, states: [...]

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Recycling breaks new ground as PET plastics shattered by pure force

    Researchers at Georgia Tech developed a mechanochemical method to recycle PET plastics efficiently without heat or solvents.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • LRT ☛ Lithuania wins EU bid to set up €130m AI factory

      A Lithuanian consortium has secured 65 million euros in EU co-financing to establish LitAI, a 130-million-euro artificial intelligence (AI) factory that will be the only facility of its scale in the Baltic states.

    • The Atlantic ☛ The Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Tesla

      The radio is just one feature that Tesla has left out of two new cars in the name of affordability. Earlier this week, the company released the Model 3 Standard and Model Y Standard, two long-awaited, less expensive cars that are heavily pared-down versions of the company’s best sellers. The “vegan leather” seats are now partially cloth. The sound system isn’t as nice, and the side-view mirrors now have to be manually folded. Cheaper shock absorbers mean a harsher ride. Compared with their more nicely equipped siblings, these new cars are more Temu than Tesla. (Tesla and Musk did not respond to a request for comment.)

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ The U.S. high-voltage grid is at a crossroads U.S. high-voltage grid at a crossroads

      These changes are creating significant stress on a system designed for a different era. Transmission congestion, bottlenecks, and reliability concerns are becoming more common, with some regions experiencing severe delays in interconnecting new generation projects. According to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) analysis, meeting near-term electricity demand and clean energy goals will require an estimated 60% increase in transmission capacity by 2030. Without major upgrades, the lack of adequate transmission infrastructure threatens to slow the clean energy transition and increase costs for consumers.

• Finance

  • Polymarket traders accused of ‘insider trading’ Nobel Peace Prize

    Polymarket traders are being accused of “insider trading” the Nobel Peace Prize, with some betting $68,000 on Venezuelan activist María Corina Machado to win the award hours before it was announced.

    Onlookers on X spotted that one trader called “6741” had created a Polymarket account specifically for this market. They started betting on Machado to win as early as 10:42 pm UTC the day before, spending $29,000 on yes bets over five hours.

    They also placed bets on several other candidates, including Greta Thunberg and Julian Assange, that were priced between $30 and $400.

  • Mike Brock ☛ A Note on Sustainability and Access

    Not all of it. The vast majority of what I publish here will remain free—especially the shorter pieces that respond to real-time events and cultural shifts as they unfold.

    But pieces like The Wire Still Holds and The Sociopaths Are Shocked That Most People Aren’t Sociopaths take days of research, reading, and reflection to produce. They represent the deeper current of what I’m trying to build here: a space for serious, accessible public philosophy that treats readers as partners in thought rather than consumers of content.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Scam Altman-backed college startup Campus acquires Sizzle AI; hires Meta’s exec as technology head [Ed: Giving illusion of growth to a Ponzi scheme]

    Campus will integrate its personalised AI-generated educational content in Sizzle AI. Thus, students or users of Sizzle AI will get tailored learning materials based on AI recommendations.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ I was wrong about Steven Pinker

    For one, I’m no longer convinced that looking back on a more polluting, violent past is that helpful a way to look at current challenges. We were objectively bad before, but that doesn’t mean past solutions are necessarily repeatable (or were even the reason for that progress), that there isn’t space for improvement, and that those pushing for the change he wants to see aren’t the irrational actors he portrays them to be.

  • Don Marti ☛ you can’t spell #Eurostack without U

    People mock US politicians for exaggerated claims about the importance of coal, even as coal is a steadily declining part of the energy mix here. But EU politicians are doing the same thing with the IT market. Somehow they assume that the problem of replacing today’s Big Tech platforms is as hard as it would have been back in the days when people were lining up for the latest Microsoft Windows version or Apple iPhone, and US-based firms such as Oracle were the leaders in large-scale server software. But all that has changed. It is not 1995 or 2007 any more, and EU policians need to catch up with the times. Johnny Ryan asks, "Will Brussels ever stand up to Donald Trump and US big tech?"

  • India Times ☛ EU need for 'digital sovereignty' does not mean protectionism, German minister says

    Germany’s digital minister Karsten Wildberger urged Europe to build its own digital infrastructure to reduce reliance on US tech firms while maintaining cooperation. He emphasised achieving digital sovereignty by becoming active players, not just customers, and fostering European innovation, while ensuring companies have choices over data storage, infrastructure, and technology supply chains.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ UPS reportedly destroying packages due to customs confusion — thousands of parcels per day are seemingly affected by delays due to documentation issues

    The primary reason for these delays is the missing information, according to the company. “Because of changes to U.S. import regulations, we are seeing many packages that are unable to clear customs due to missing or incomplete information about the shipment required for customs clearance,” the company told NBC. Unfortunately, UPS cannot hold packages in limbo indefinitely. It said that it attempts to contact the shippers three times to complete the data that U.S. customs requires. If the company is unable to reach the shipper, it’s left with two choices.

  • NBC ☛ UPS is 'disposing of' U.S.-bound packages over customs paperwork problems

    They described shipments of tea, telescopes, luxury glassware, musical instruments and more — some worth tens of thousands of dollars — all in limbo or perhaps gone.

    Others have deep sentimental value: notebooks, diplomas and even engagement rings.

  • Cyble Inc ☛ Bipartisan Bill Revives Cybersecurity Safeguards

    In a renewed push to safeguard America’s digital infrastructure, U.S. Senators Gary Peters (D-MI) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) have introduced the Protecting America from Cyber Threats Act — a bipartisan bill aimed at restoring critical cybersecurity protections that expired on September 30.

  • Christianity Today ☛ You Don’t Have to Be Radical

    Christianity is not reserved for radicals. The Lord does not help those who help themselves. By a miracle, he helps the utterly and pathetically helpless—of whom I am chief. That’s truly good news. It’s also a terrible scandal. And that’s the point.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • New Eastern Europe ☛ Operation Matryoshka: Russia’s direct intrusion into Moldova’s parliamentary elections

      Throughout the campaign, the Chișinău-based think tank WatchDog.Md worked tirelessly to counter Russia’s hybrid threats. From a modest Soviet-era house, its president, Valeriu Pașa, explained: “The intensity of Russian interference and disinformation is extremely high.”

      WatchDog itself came under attack, becoming a target of smear campaigns and cyberattacks. Pașa compared Operation Matryoshka’s output to “five times the amount of content targeting Moldova’s elections than was seen during the last two US elections.”

      The Moldovan government also confronted these challenges head-on. Prime Minister Dorin Recean reported that state systems had been targeted by more than 1,000 cyberattacks since the beginning of the year, and that authorities had removed 100,000 fake TikTok accounts spreading disinformation. Officials noted that this information war extended across multiple platforms.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Techdirt ☛ Apple Decides ICE Agents Are A Protected Class, Because Apparently Government Accountability Is Now “Hate Speech”

    Apple is now treating federal agents—who are public employees exercising government power—as if they’re a vulnerable minority group in need of protection from “discrimination.” This isn’t just a misapplication of content policies; it’s a fundamental inversion of what those policies were designed to do.

    Of course, this is not entirely unprecedented. As we’ve covered over the years, whenever laws and rules against hate speech exist, inevitably the powerful seek to use them to protect themselves rather than those who are actually marginalized or vulnerable.

  • CBC ☛ Librarian fired after refusing to censor 2SLGBTQ+ books wins $700K US settlement

    “People that want to keep pushing an agenda to go against these library materials and the First Amendment [right to free speech], I hope they see this, and I hope it's a deterrent.”

  • US News And World Report ☛ MIT Refuses to Accept White House Terms for Funding, Other Schools Still Mulling

    In an open letter to U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Kornbluth said some of the policies would restrict MIT's independence and freedom of expression.

    "The premise of the document is inconsistent with our core belief that scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone," Kornbluth said in her letter, which was posted to an MIT website.

  • The Verge ☛ OpenAI allegedly sent police to an AI regulation advocate’s door | The Verge

    “One Tuesday night, as my wife and I sat down for dinner, a sheriff’s deputy knocked on the door to serve me a subpoena from OpenAI,” Calvin writes on X. In addition to subpoenaing the organization he works for, Calvin claims that OpenAI subpoenaed him personally, with the sheriff’s deputy asking for his private messages with California legislators, college students, and former OpenAI employees.

  • The San Fancisco Standard ☛ OpenAI thinks its critics are funded by billionaires. Now it’s going after them

    The subpoena was filed as part of the ongoing lawsuits between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in which Encode had filed an amicus brief supporting some of Musk's arguments. It asked for any documents relating to Musk’s involvement in the founding of Encode, as well as any communications between Musk, Encode, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whom Musk reportedly (opens in new tab) tried to involve in his OpenAI takeover bid in February.

    Calvin said the answer to these questions was easy: The requested documents didn’t exist.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ Conservative distrust of journalism threatens to spread among liberals

    I am paraphrasing: “What do we do with all of these journalism companies bending to the Trump administration? It seems like it’s time to discard them and move on to something different.”

    I understand his point.

  • RFERL ☛ Don’t Shoot! Photo Ban Looms In Uzbekistan

    Some fear the law will give the authorities the power to pre-emptively stifle the work of independent journalists and activists. Bukharsky says, “the most important thing is that this new law does not become a source of manipulation or tool for repression against "unreliable" bloggers and media outlets.”

  • Locus Magazine ☛ On Spec to Close – Locus Online

    Canadian SF magazine On Spec is closing after 35 years. December’s issue #134 will be the last. Managing editor Diane Walton explained in an editorial to issue #133: [...]

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ Truth, morality and independence in journalism under the second Trump regime

    A lesson it took me much too long to learn is that you don’t have to wait for anyone to give you the opportunity to be a writer or reporter. You simply start writing and reporting. In many ways that’s never been easier, and it’s basically what I did. I started a newsletter and just started writing, knowing it was possible my work would never go far beyond my family and friends. I think there’s this old idea that you need to be ASSIGNED a story, or given permission to pursue something, when in reality all you need is to be a nosy bitch with a smartphone. You’d be amazed at how open people are to talking if you simply ask.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • RFERL ☛ Iran's Streets 'Transformed' As More Women Shun The Mandatory Hijab

    Iranian journalist Zeinab Rahimi has refused to wear the mandatory hijab for over two years, despite the risk of arrest and imprisonment.

  • [Old] Den Odell ☛ The Web Is About to Get Better for Everyone, Everywhere — Den Odell

    Starting summer 2025, the European Accessibility Act will require digital products provided in the EU to meet actual, enforceable accessibility standards. Not “we added some alt text” accessibility. Real accessibility. The kind you can be sued over.

    And that means the internet is about to get a lot more usable.

    Turns out “do the right thing” works better when it’s legally enforced.

  • NDTV ☛ For Taliban, Women Not Human, Says Taslima Nasreen On Row Over Journalist Ban

    Nasreen, who escaped from Bangladesh in 1994, said the Taliban "refuse to grant women human rights because they do not consider women to be human."

    She also criticised male journalists who attended the Afghan leader's press conference in Delhi, saying they would have walked out if they had any conscience.

  • The Hindu ☛ No women journalists at Afghanistan Foreign Minister Muttaqi’s press conference in Delhi

    It is learnt that the decision on inviting journalists to the media interaction was taken by Taliban officials accompanying the Foreign Minister.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ No Women Journalists at Taliban FM Muttaqi’s Press Meet

    The Taliban administration has largely rolled back rights for women and girls established by elected governments in recent decades. The UN has noted that Afghan women are being denied opportunities to join the workforce and access essential services without a male relative, while girls continue to face restrictions on education.

    Muttaqi, the first senior Taliban official to officially visit India, appeared relaxed during the news conference and answered questions in Urdu. He was seated in a room beneath a painting of the 6th-century Buddha statues at Bamiyan, which were destroyed on the orders of former Taliban chief Mullah Omar.

  • The Nation ☛ Portland’s Dancing Protesters Are Showing Us How to Stand Up to Trump

    Needless to say, these are all ridiculous lies. The thankless task of correcting Trump has been left to journalists, local officials in Oregon, and even a Trump-appointed federal judge. But many residents in Portland have taken a more creative approach to combating Trump’s dishonesty.

  • Vox ☛ The backlash against Saudi Arabia’s Riyadh Comedy Festival, briefly explained

    But as Abdullah Aloudh, senior director for countering authoritarianism at the Middle East Democracy Center, explains, speech is far from free in the kingdom. There is a Saudi counterterrorism law that says questioning the wisdom of the king or crown prince is an act of terrorism. Another law addressing “anti-cybercrime” criminalizes anything that they describe as threatening the public value or questioning the tranquility of society. These laws have led to the jailing of thousands, including former aid worker Abdulrahman al-Sadhan, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for tweeting some jokes about the Saudi government.

  • Tommy Palmer ☛ Grapefruit

    The strike continued until 1987, when, due to public pressure, the Irish government banned the importation of South African goods. The ban was the first ban of South African imports by a Western Government.

    A few years later, when the striking workers met Nelson Mandela, he told them that their strike showed “ordinary people far away from the crucible of apartheid cared for our freedom”.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Africa's next terrestrial [Internet] leap might come from the sea

    However, what if we flipped the model? We aim to explore an innovative new concept: utilising submarine cable technology to address the longstanding challenges in Africa’s terrestrial infrastructure.

    Seacom and Nokia have conceptualised using subsea technology over land. The key problem is that building a direct fibre route from East Africa to West Africa has never been done. Why? Because it’s complicated, and there are two main reasons for this: [...]

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Mobile internet service restored in Leh

    A day after the Leh Apex Body and Civil society had a meeting with chief secretary Ladakh Pawan Kotwal, all remaining restrictions were lifted in Ladakh, including restoration of mobile internet services. However, the Leh district administration has invoked legal provisions to prohibit the spread of misinformation on social media platforms in the district, which had witnessed violence last month.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ Trump called the Digital Equity Act ‘racist.’ Now Internet money for rural Americans is gone.

    The Digital Equity Act is part of the sweeping 2021 infrastructure law, which included $65 billion to build high-speed internet infrastructure and connect millions without access to the [Internet].

    This year, Congress once again pushed for a modern approach to help Americans, mandating that state leaders prioritize new and emerging technologies through its $50 billion Rural Health Transformation Program.

  • KFF Health News ☛ Dead Zone - KFF Health News

    Millions of rural Americans live in counties with doctor shortages and where high-speed internet connections aren’t adequate to access advanced telehealth services. A KFF Health News analysis found people in these “dead zones” live sicker and die younger on average than their peers in well-connected regions. KFF Health News and partner InvestigateTV tell the stories of residents whose health care falls into the gap.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Cable vandalism likely resulted in Verizon service outage, firm says

    Other companies and utilities have complained of similar acts by thieves, who seek out copper or scrap metal in exposed wiring. On Monday, Assemblyman Mark González, who represents District 54 and drafted a bill that would require a state license to resell copper wire and other recycling, said in a news conference on Monday that the city has gone “dark” since the rise of copper wire theft.

    “Californians are tired of paying the price for that theft that steals more than copper,” Gonzalez said. “It steals safety, it steals connection, and it steals community.”

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ This L.A. landmark was hailed as a 'ribbon of light.' Scrap metal thieves have made it dark and invisible

    The 6th Street Viaduct was the city’s most expensive bridge project to date, costing an estimated $588 million, and was meant to set off a wave of other public projects across the city. According to estimates from city officials, the thieves who stripped the bridge’s copper wiring probably netted about $11,000.

    But it will cost the city $2.5 million to assess and repair the damage, according to Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, whose district includes downtown and Boyle Heights.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  "" ☛ https://taoofmac.com/space/links/2025/10/09/0823 | Source: Rui Carmo

  • Rui Carmo ☛ Synology walks back HDD/SSD lock-in policy

    The interesting thing for me here, having followed some of the less visible discussions, is that Synology was, if not openly hostile to some reviewers that criticized them, at least “more selective” of the influencers they partnered with, which seems par for the course these days but really doesn’t help restore confidence.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Neil Young Pulls Music From Amazon Due to Jeff Bezos

    Neil Young’s message to his fans is a direct one, urging them to avoid shopping on Amazon and Whole Foods Market—which is owned by Amazon. He connected his protest to broader concerns over government shutdowns and national direction, stating: “They shut down our government, your income, your safety. Your family’s security. Take America Back together, stop buying from the big corporations, support local businesses. Do the right thing. Show who you are.”

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Neil Young Says to 'Forget' Amazon: 'Soon My Music Will Not Be There'

    As the singer explained in his note that called for fans to “forget” Amazon and the companies under its umbrella, including Whole Foods Market, “It is easy to buy local. Support your community. Go to the local store. Don’t go back to the big corporations that have sold out America. We all have to give up something to save America from the Corporate Control Age it is entering. They need you to buy from them. Don’t.”

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage

    Here's the latest victory from the land of wallet-based elections: Synology, a leading maker of "network-attached storage" (NAS) devices, has done a quiet (but total) 180 on its enshittificatory policy of blocking third party hard drives from its products: [...]

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Alex Russell ☛ The App Store Was Always Authoritarian

  And now we see it clear, like a Cupertino sunrise bathing Mt. Bielawski in amber: Apple will censor its App Store at the behest of the Trump administration without putting up a fight.

  It will twist words into their antipodes to serve the powerful at the expense of the weak.

  To better serve autocrats, it will talk out both sides of its mouth in ways it had previously reserved for dissembling arguments against threats to profits, like right-to-repair and browser choice.

  They are, of course, linked.

• Patents

  • University of Michigan ☛ UMich deepens pharma partnerships amid AstraZeneca lawsuit 

    Partnerships provide access to additional resources but also introduce potential complications. When corporations are involved in early-stage research, disputes can arise over ownership of findings and revenue rights, and may shift research focus toward patentable or marketable outcomes.

  • Software Patents

    • EFF ☛ PERA Remains a Serious Threat to Efforts Against Bad Patents

      PERA would overturn long-standing court decisions that have helped keep some of the most problematic patents in check. This includes the Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision, which bars patents on abstract ideas. While Alice has not completely solved the problems of the patent system or patent trolling, it has led to the rejection of hundreds of low-quality software patents and, as a result, has allowed innovation and small businesses to grow.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • The Independent UK ☛ Posthumous ‘fan’ videos of Robin Williams demonstrate everything that’s wrong with AI

      The likeness to the Mrs Doubtfire star not only struck me as uncanny, it disturbed me to my core – because, although it looked and sounded like him, it wasn’t. Someone had gone out of their way to create an AI-generated version of him, some 11 years after his death.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pinterest Accused of Sending 'False' DMCA Claims to Delist Downloader From Google

    With the aim of making popular Pinterest downloader Pintere.com more difficult to find, the social media giant sent DMCA anti-circumvention notices to Google Search. Pintere.com URLs subsequently disappeared from Google's indexes, provoking a response from the site's operator. In correspondence with Google, Pintere.com accuses Pinterest of filing "false" claims and requests that its domain is immediately restored.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ It’s Sam Altman: the man who stole the rights from copyright. If he’s the future, can we go backwards?

    If that joke seems off-colour, or crass, or some kind of manipulative stretch – please, don’t worry. I’m using the OpenAI gold standard of giving-a-toss, where the unwilling subjects of any generated content have to formally, time-consumingly and bureaucratically opt out of being used/abused/exploited any way anyone likes. I haven’t heard from Sam, so my assumption is that he’s fine with me saying that he knows exactly where Sheila is because he put her there. He is, after all, fast emerging as precisely the type to appear alongside the phrase “in plain sight”.

  • India Times ☛ Apple sued over use of copyrighted books to train Apple Intelligence

    Apple was hit with a lawsuit in California federal court by a pair of neuroscientists who say that the tech company misused thousands of copyrighted books to train its Apple Intelligence artificial intelligence model. Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, professors at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York, told the court in a proposed class action on Thursday that Apple used illegal "shadow libraries" of pirated books to train Apple Intelligence. A separate group of authors sued Apple last month for allegedly misusing their work in AI training.

  • The Verge ☛ Hollywood has no idea what to do about AI

    I lost count of how many times a version of the phrase “we care about copyright” was invoked at Screentime like a prayer. At the same time, no one at the event wanted to specifically address the fact that OpenAI clearly trained on their IP without permission and unleashed a product that, at least initially, had no shame in making that clear. The fact that Hollywood’s leaders are unable to share a public perspective on this issue, or more importantly, what they are going to do about it, should be alarming to everyone working in the business.