Leftovers

• Sean Monahan ☛ peak youth

  MTV was the central node for music in culture for roughly three decades. Arguably, it popularized both reality television and adult animation. Indisputably, it popularized music videos as a cultural form. MTV was simultaneously an arbiter of cool, a gatekeeper of mainstream relevance, and it had enough money and power that it could afford to be experimental.

  It’s the ability to be experimental that feels like it is missing in contemporary culture.

• Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0144 Use your Desktop

  We all know you shouldn't permanently store documents on your Desktop.

  Right? If you don't know that, call me for some one-on-one time.

  But your Desktop isn't useless. We gravitate towards it for a reason: it's right there.

• Science

  • Paul Krugman ☛ China Has Overtaken America - Paul Krugman

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Intrigued by Black Hole That Fell Into Star, Then Ate It From the Inside

    In an inversion of the well known scenario of a black hole devouring a star, the researchers propose that a star actually swallowed a black hole. Once subsumed, the massive infiltrator begins to rip apart the star’s core, then devour the rest of its host from the inside out, producing an incredibly energetic stream of particles called a jet.

• Career/Education

  • The Atlantic ☛ America Is Sliding Toward Illiteracy

    We are now seeing what the lost decade in American education has wrought. By some measures, American students have regressed to a level not seen in 25 years or more. Test scores from NAEP, short for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, released this year show that 33 percent of eighth graders are reading at a level that is “below basic”—meaning that they struggle to follow the order of events in a passage or to even summarize its main idea. That is the highest share of students unable to meaningfully read since 1992. Among fourth graders, 40 percent are below basic in reading, the highest share since 2000. In 2024, the average score on the ACT, a popular college-admissions standardized test that is graded on a scale of 1 to 36, was 19.4—the worst average performance since the test was redesigned in 1990.

  • New Yorker ☛ Yo-Yo Ma on What Our Descendants Will Inherit

    Earlier this month, the celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma turned seventy—an occasion that led him to reflect on not just his own past but also the planet’s future. In a letter to fans, he wrote, “Today, I am worried. In the year 2100, my youngest grandchild will be 76. She will be meeting a world I will not see. I wonder what the world will be like then?” Not long ago, Ma sent us recommendations for three books that have contributed to his thinking on this theme—books that interrogate timeless aspects of human nature, our complex relationships to one another, and our entanglement with the natural world. (He explores some of these subjects on his newest podcast, “Our Common Nature,” which premièred on WNYC last week.) Each book, he shows, offers a different kind of guidance on how to cultivate a better world for our descendants.

  • Joel Chrono ☛ Rambling about Science Fiction books

    There are plenty of science fiction books I’ve read that have stayed with me for one reason or another.

• Hardware

  • Matthew Weber ☛ Too Many Keyboards :: Matt's Blog

    I’ve been a good boy for about six months. I’ve not bought any new keyboards nor have I bought any new cap sets. I did buy some more switches, but that’s just because I had one die and need to replace like for like. I’m pretty well set on the switches I like (box purples), so I will only ever buy when I need some. Probably.

    For those of you who collect keyboards, how do you manage the cap situation?

  • Marcin Juszkiewicz ☛ Mechanicon 2025

    Last Saturday, I attended Mechanicon in Frankfurt. It was an event related to mechanical keyboards, gathering over 600 visitors, which made it the biggest event of its kind in Europe.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Task And Purpose ☛ To make grenades, the Army needs 30 tons of powdered sugar

    The Army’s use of sugar in grenades goes back at least two decades. According to a 2007 release from Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, Army scientists turned to sugar as a substitute for sulfur-based fuel as a way to make smoke grenades safer for troops and the surrounding environment.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Soybean bailout? Hard-hit farmers want China trade more than Trump aid.

    The U.S. is eager to sell, and China, presumably, is eager to buy the pea-sized yellow bean that produces vegetable oil for humans and feed for livestock. If Beijing and Washington can reach a soybean agreement in the near future, it may prove a stepping stone to a larger trade agreement. If they can’t, it may further sour relations between the two economic powers.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Fluorinated polymers can remove pharmaceuticals from wastewater

    To remove such persistent pharmaceuticals, researchers have explored the development of advanced adsorbent materials, such as covalent organic polymers (COPs). These porous materials can be engineered with diverse functional groups, allowing fine tuning of adsorption properties. Recently, COPs incorporating fluorine atoms have gained significant attention for their unusually high adsorption performance and consequently, potential for removing environmental pollutants. Yet, few studies have explored their application in removal of pharmaceuticals.

  • Overpopulation ☛ Don’t burn care: save contraceptives, save lives

    Flemish and European laws ban the destruction of still-usable medicines. Legal experts agree: the Flemish government can stop the burn, and help get these contraceptives to the women and girls who need them. [2] They just need the courage to act.

    This aid is vital for the health and lives of more than 1.4 million women and girls. [3] But Flemish leaders need to act now, before it’s too late.

  • Barry Hess ☛ Unplugging, Two Weeks Later

    Near to that post, I also logged out of my social networking accounts, both on my computer and on my phone. Since then my day-to-day baseline of anxiety has lowered noticeably. I heartily recommend it.

• Proprietary

  • Dark Reading ☛ Harvard University Breached in Oracle Zero-Day Attack

    The critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-61882, allows an attacker without authentication to remotely access EBS instances. The flaw has been exploited by the notorious Clop ransomware gang in attacks on Oracle customers.

  • Android Police ☛ Google is working on dedicated 'Bills' and 'Travel' folders for Gmail

    Found in Gmail's latest build version 2025.10.06.815599742.Release by the folks over at Android Authority, it looks like Google is working on adding distinct labels for emails that fall under 'Bills' and 'Travel' categories. The two categories are currently dormant, but their code strings make it very clear that they're coming.

  • Dedoimedo ☛ Scale up stubborn programs in Linux with xpra and run_scaled

    The nice thing is, you can use both these programs. But if you want KeePass2 itself, then you will need to contend with the scaling issues. And this is another regression, which did not exist in Kubuntu 22.04. For some reason, the mono stack for the 24.04 release does not offer the same experience as before.

  • Cord Cutters News ☛ TiVo Stops Selling DVRs Marking The End Of An Era

    This move culminates decades of gradual decline for TiVo’s hardware ambitions, which peaked in the early 2000s when the brand became synonymous with effortless time-shifting of television programming. Launched in 1999, TiVo’s DVRs introduced features like one-touch recording, commercial skipping, and intuitive search capabilities that made traditional TV schedules feel obsolete. At its zenith, the company boasted millions of subscribers, forcing cable providers and networks to adapt to empowered viewers who could pause live broadcasts or binge-watch at will. The TiVo Edge, introduced in 2021 as a hybrid device supporting both cable cards and streaming, represented the final evolution of this hardware legacy, blending OTA tuners with 4K support and expanded storage options. Yet, even as it garnered praise for superior interface design and reliability, sales dwindled amid the cord-cutting revolution.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Researchers Find It's Shockingly Easy to Cause AI to Lose Its Mind by Posting Poisoned Documents Online

      Security experts have also warned that developers using AI to code are far more likely to introduce security problems than those who don’t use AI.

      The latest research suggests that as the datasets being fed to AI models continue to grow, attacks become easier, not harder.

    • Futurism ☛ Two Months Ago, Sam Altman Was Boasting That OpenAI Didn't Have to Do Sexbots. Now It's Doing Sexbots

      It’s a remarkable change in the billionaire’s tune. Just two months ago, Altman boasted in an interview with YouTuber and science communicator Cleo Abram that the company hadn’t “put a sexbot avatar in ChatGPT yet.”

    • The Conversation ☛ How generative AI could change how we think and speak

      Could an over-reliance on AI produce similar problems? When language comes pre-packaged from screens, feeds, or AI systems, the link between thought and speech may begin to wither.

      In education, students are using generative AI to compose essays, summarise books, and solve problems in seconds. Within an academic culture already shaped by competition, performance metrics, and quick results, such tools promise efficiency at the cost of reflection.

    • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft seeding Washington schools with free AI

      Not content to shove Copilot into every corner of the enterprise it can think of, Microsoft has announced plans to force feed AI to students across its home state of Washington.

    • Pete Warden ☛ Why does a Local AI Voice Agent Running on a Super-Cheap Soc Matter?

      Frankly, I think we’re in a massive bubble that dwarfs the dot-com boom, and we’ll look back on these as crazy decisions. One of the reasons I believe this is because I’ve seen how much is possible running AI locally, with no internet connection, on low-cost hardware. The video above is one of my favourite recent examples. It comes from a commercial contract we received to help add a voice assistant to appliances. The idea is that when a consumer runs into a problem with their dishwasher, they can press a help button and talk to get answers to common questions.

    • Jamie Lawrence ☛ You are the scariest monster in the woods

      I don’t really believe in the threat of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence—human-level intelligence) partly because I don’t believe in the possibility of AGI and I’m highly skeptical that the current technology underpinning LLMs will provide a route to it. But I also think there’s something we should actually be afraid of long before AGI, if it ever comes.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Register UK ☛ X to combat bot problem by showing more info about users

      It’s hard to know the exact number of bots that infest X, but consensus suggests it’s significant. CHEQ, a firm that analyzes fake traffic, reported that during the 2024 Super Bowl, 75 percent of traffic X sent to advertisers it monitors appeared to come from bots. A 2023 study published in the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics estimated that about 14 percent of the Twitter respondents in US political conversations were bots with that number shrinking to a still-high 10 percent in the UK. A March 2025 study in Scientific Reports measured the percentage of bots in different types of discussions from politics and entertainment and found the numbers between 15 and 44 percent.

    • Lars Lofgren ☛ The Story of Codesmith: How a Competitor Crippled a $23.5M Bootcamp By Becoming a Reddit Moderator

      And then…

      A competitor gets control of the main subreddit for your industry by becoming a Reddit Moderator.

      That watering hole becomes their megaphone. They are not shy about using it. An all-out attack on your brand begins. The barrage of accusations and harassment are relentless. The attacks happen daily. You become a neurotic fixation of the moderator. Every little thing you do represents your failings as a company.

    • Robert Greiner ☛ The Three Infinity Stones That Can Erase Your Company

      Lars Lofgren documented a chilling case study: a coding bootcamp allegedly watching its reputation dissolve in slow motion. The pattern? Concerned posts pinned to the top. Defensive replies deleted as “too aggressive.” Critical threads climbing Google rankings while rebuttals disappeared. The moderator shaping the narrative? Someone who happened to run a competing program.

      The beauty was in the restraint. No rants, no smoking guns. Just a steady drip of concerned questions that somehow never got answered. Alumni defending the program? Their comments would disappear. Too aggressive, the mod would explain, if anyone asked. Meanwhile, every “I heard some troubling things” post would stick around, accumulating upvotes and anxiety.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Meta Takes a Principled Stance Against Having Principles

      The point is not Meta’s hypocrisy on what it will remove compared to what it will defend, but what this hypocrisy achieves. Meta spent years using a socially conscious image to help marginalized people feel safer, albeit only after a long history of controversy over privacy violations, harassment, and gender-based abuse (PDF).

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Strategist ☛ Qantas and Collins Aerospace breaches show need for extended assurance

      Effective corporate leadership will increasingly require looking beyond corporate perimeters. Just as the Australian government and its partners work to build regional cyber capacity among less-resourced states, businesses need to identify and address the less mature links in their own ecosystems. That could mean investing in co-funding joint security audits or rehearsing coordinated response plans. The point is not to dominate or compensate for partners but to pressure test and validate interdependencies and intersections. In a connected economy, one firm’s weakness becomes everyone’s exposure.

    • Dark Reading ☛ 'Mysterious Elephant' Moves Beyond Recycled Malware

      One of the additional payloads that BabShell downloads is a reflective PE loader, which basically is code that can load and run a Windows executable directly in memory, so the payload never touches disk. Kasperksy found the loader, dubbed MemLoader HidenDesk, performing anti-analysis checks, creating a hidden environment on the compromised system from which to operate, and downloading the commercial Remcos remote access tool. Another new loader that Kaspersky observed Mysterious Elephant using is MemLoader Edge, which the attacker uses to install another backdoor called VRAT.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ PowerSchool [cracker] sentenced to 4 years in prison

      Matthew Lane, 20, stole data from PowerSchool belonging to nearly 70 million students and teachers, extorted the California-based company for a ransom, which it paid, causing the education software vendor more than $14 million in financial losses, according to prosecutors.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • CBC ☛ OpenAI will allow mature content, including erotica, to verified adult users as of December

      OpenAI will allow mature content for adult ChatGPT users who verify their age on the platform starting in December, CEO Sam Altman said on Tuesday.

    • Techdirt ☛ Flock’s Gunshot Detection Microphones Will Start Listening For Human Voices

      Flock Safety, the police technology company most notable for their extensive network of automated license plate readers spread throughout the United States, is rolling out a new and troubling product that may create headaches for the cities that adopt it: detection of “human distress” via audio. As part of their suite of technologies, Flock has been pushing Raven, their version of acoustic gunshot detection. These devices capture sounds in public places and use machine learning to try to identify gunshots and then alert police—but EFF has long warned that they are also high powered microphones parked above densely-populated city streets. Cities now have one more reason to follow the lead of many other municipalities and cancel their Flock contracts, before this new feature causes civil liberties harms to residents and headaches for cities.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Florida Sues Roku Over Children’s Data Privacy

      Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has filed a civil enforcement action against Roku, Inc. and its Florida subsidiary, accusing the streaming platform of violating the Florida Digital Bill of Rights (FDBOR) and the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (FDUTPA). The complaint marks a major move by Florida’s newly established Office of Parental Rights to strengthen parental control over children’s personal data in the digital age.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Site36 ☛ 536 arrests after pro-Palestinian protest in Bern: Canton security chief calls for Antifa ban

  • FAIR ☛ Trump’s Portland Lies Euphemized as ‘Dueling Versions of Reality’

    As more and more US cities face the prospect of federal police and military patrolling their streets, the New York Times (10/10/25) began a recent article on the fight over sending National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon, with the following passage:

  • Techdirt ☛ Republican Governor Actually Steps Up To Criticize Trump’s Use Of National Guard Troops

    Stitt’s attempt to hedge this mild (but still surprising!) criticism of Trump’s National Guard deployments probably won’t save him from the wrath of a wholly subservient GOP. He should expect to be pilloried, then primaried, for even suggesting there might be a better way to engage in martial law. Still, it says something about how far Trump has strayed over the line of acceptable executive behavior that even people who know they’ll be punished for speaking out are doing so and, better yet, making it clear the GOP would have gone nuclear if any Democratic leader attempted to do things Trump is doing on a daily basis.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ These soldiers are finding ways to see enemy drones before they strike

    The soldiers have taken passive sensors — the size of a baseball home plate — and mounted them on armored vehicles to detect enemy drones and pass that information back to their air defense element.

    That’s created an air picture 3.5 kilometers in front of them, giving the vehicles about a 45-second warning for their airspace, Huntsinger said.

  • Vox ☛ Is it OK for my kids to watch YouTube? An expert explains.

    She says children’s media is very different from how it used to be. “I grew up in the 1980s when we would go watch Saturday morning cartoons all huddled together while my parents slept,” she told Vox. “There was a time and a place when technology could be watched, and that’s what’s really different about today. Now we have endless content on-demand and we have marketplaces and platforms where these pieces of content are competing for kids’ attention.”

  • CS Monitor ☛ Supreme Court seems poised to diminish the Voting Rights Act. What it could mean.

    A ruling in favor of Louisiana could potentially cement Republican control of the House for years to come and upend election maps from Congress down to city council and school district lines. During oral arguments, NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorney Janai Nelson warned that if the court struck down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the portion of the law still intact after an earlier Supreme Court ruling weakened another portion of the law, “the results would be pretty catastrophic” for minority representation.

  • Vox ☛ The Supreme Court appears determined to nuke the Voting Rights Act

    The first thing is that the Court will split along party lines, with all six Republicans voting to destroy the federal Voting Rights Act’s (VRA) restrictions on racial gerrymandering, and all three Democrats in dissent. The other thing is that there is no consensus among the Republicans about how they should write an opinion gutting these protections.

  • Mike Brock ☛ On Presuming the Tyrant's Virtue

    This is mind-bending concern trolling—5,000 words of sophistication disguising the claim that you’re too worried about authoritarianism, and your worry is the real problem.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ ICE took a 13-year-old they said had a gun. Local cops say he didn’t.

    The problem is that we have no way of confirming what the government referred to as “facts.” And in fact, some of the facts have already been proven not to be facts.

• Environment

  • Omicron Limited ☛ How Europe is using taxes to slow down fast fashion

    Did you know that making one cotton T-shirt uses around 2,700 liters of water, around the amount that a person drinks in three years? Fast fashion may offer cheap, on-trend clothes, but it also generates an annual 12 kg of textile waste per person in Europe, only 1% of which is recycled to make new garments.

  • 404 Media ☛ The End of Windows 10 Support Is an E-Waste Disaster in the Making

    Wednesday’s end of free Windows 10 support is an environmental disaster in the making, with as many as 400 million computers that cannot be upgraded to Windows 11 set to be cut off from receiving free security updates. The move is an egregious example of planned obsolescence that will inevitably result in the early deaths of millions of computers that would have otherwise had years of life left, and it is set to affect as many as 42 percent of all Windows computers worldwide.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • LRT ☛ Lithuania to triple daily train services to Poland

      According to LTG Link, travel times will also shorten, and connections with other European cities will become more convenient once the new schedule takes effect.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ World’s first fully dual-cation battery runs 1,000 stable cycles

      The pioneering work, was led by Associate Professor Hugh Geaney and Dr. Syed Abdul Ahad from UL’s Department of Chemical Sciences and Bernal Institute, in collaboration with researchers at the University of Birmingham.

      Unlike traditional sodium-only batteries, this new dual-cation design combines the strengths of both lithium and sodium to deliver improved performance while keeping sodium as the primary component, making the technology more efficient and sustainable.

    • Wired ☛ The AI Industry’s Scaling Obsession Is Headed for a Cliff

      Thompson says the results show the value of honing an algorithm as well as scaling up compute. “If you are spending a lot of money training these models, then you should absolutely be spending some of it trying to develop more efficient algorithms, because that can matter hugely,” he adds.

      The study is particularly interesting given today’s AI infrastructure boom (or should we say “bubble”?)—which shows little sign of slowing down.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Hindustan Times ☛ India sees ‘jumbo drop’, but small rise in UP’s tusker count

      The estimate of 22,466 elephants is lower than 27,000 elephants estimated in Synchronised elephant population estimation India 2017, but officials said a new DNA-based sampling method has been adopted this time and hence the numbers are not comparable with the previous estimation. The 2017 estimation was based on the direct count method.

    • The Revelator ☛ Mysterious Mushrooms: New Books About the Fabulous Fruit of the Fungi

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Meta taps Arm Holdings to power AI recommendations across Facebook, Instagram

    A deal with Meta would mark another major validation of Arm's technology as the SoftBank‑backed company competes with the entrenched x86 architecture used by Intel and AMD.

  • Futurism ☛ Gavin Newsom Vetoes Bill to Protect Kids From Predatory AI

    Supporters of the bill are disappointed, with some advocates accusing Newsom of caving to Silicon Valley’s aggressive, deep-pocketed lobbying efforts. According to the Associated Press, the nonprofit Tech Oversight California found that tech companies and their allies spent around $2.5 million in just the first six months of the session trying to prevent Bill 1064 and related legislation from being signed into law.

  • Techdirt ☛ Hey Zuck, Remember When You Said You’d Never Again Cave To Government Pressure? About That…

    Zuckerberg also made a pledge that they were supposedly going to stop being pushed around. From now on, he swore, there was a new Meta that wouldn’t bow at all to government officials demanding content be removed.

    He was a new Zuck. A Zuck who would stand up to oppressive government demands.

    So, about that.

  • C4ISRNET ☛ Early drops of new Army command software delight artillerists in drill

    The Anduril team, which was awarded a $99.6 million contract to deliver a prototype in less than a year, has other tech industry heavyweights like Palantir on board.

    The prototype architecture will consist of “integrated and scalable” C2 capabilities using hardware, software and applications through a common data layer, the Army stated in a July 18 announcement.

  • The Conversation ☛ Grokipedia: Elon Musk is right that Wikipedia is biased, but his AI alternative will be the same at best

    Wikipedia at least remains one of the few large-scale platforms that openly acknowledges and documents its limitations. Neutrality is enshrined as one of its five foundational principles. Bias exists, but so does an infrastructure designed to make that bias visible and correctable.

  • Garry Kasparov ☛ In Defense of María Corina Machado—and Freedom Fighters Everywhere

    For some strategic insight into what Machado’s win means, we have two pieces in The Next Move from my Renew Democracy Initiative colleagues. Uriel Epshtein responds to Machado’s critics by putting the morally-complicated decisions dissidents have to make into context. Jay Nordlinger, who quite literally wrote the book on the Nobel Peace Prize, explains how the award often functions as a “freedom prize.”

    Finally, because we don’t have enough good news—I want to celebrate these wins. To that end, we’ll have a special surprise coming at the end of the week. Stay tuned!

  • BoingBoing ☛ Trump manipulates Bitcoin price via China tariff posts, says Paul Krugman

    According to Krugman, the answer lies in the cryptocurrency markets. Bitcoin plunged 20 percent Friday following the tariff announcement. Trump's personal Bitcoin holdings, estimated at $870 million, took a substantial hit alongside the official Trump coin. The timing of his conciliatory tone toward China coincided precisely with these market losses.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Dissenter ☛ Pentagon Reporters Should Turn In Their Badges

  • BIA Net ☛ Europe's ripple effect: Media freedom reimagined

    As digital engagement grows, audiences increasingly abandon traditional outlets for social media and alternative platforms, often doubting the reliability of information, a shift that highlights an urgent need to rebuild trust and prioritize transparency and quality.

  • JURIST ☛ Calls mount for Türkiye to investigate killing of freelance reporter

    Disk Basin-is, one of the major national trade unions in Türkiye, pointed to irregularities in the investigation that it argues are part of a broader systemic trend of impunity for extrajudicial attacks. In particular, the union raised concerns over the fact that the attackers’ identities have not been made public, there has been no disclosure of Tosun’s belongings, it remains unclear why he was not identified at the hospital, and no officials have spoken on these issues. Footage of the attack is also fragmented, and there has been no attempt to collect fingerprints or provide clarification on the attackers’ motive. However, the IFJ report also noted that the neighbourhood where Tosun was attacked is known to have a higher-than-average crime rate.

  • CPJ ☛ Local publisher Nafiz Koca shot in Elazığ, Turkey

    “The shooting of Günışığı and Yeni Ufuk publisher Nafiz Koca in Elazığ requires a comprehensive investigation to determine the motive behind the assault,” said Özgür Öğret, CPJ’s Turkey representative. “Turkish authorities in Elazığ should ensure the security of Koca and prove that such violent attacks on the press have consequences.”

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Last Days of the Pentagon Press Corps

    Nearly all of the Pentagon press corps is leaving the building this week, barred from working there under restrictions imposed by the Trump administration. My fellow journalists and I will continue to do our jobs, reporting on the U.S. military in every way we know how. But something is lost when the leadership of the Department of Defense chooses to close itself off to scrutiny in the way it has. On the most basic level, the public loses access to information it has a right to know, along with the right to ask questions of those entrusted with spending nearly $1 trillion from taxes and managing 3 million employees. But something intangible is lost too, including the privilege of meeting people like Jimmy, whose names may never appear in print but who are essential to how we understand the U.S. military. Before I had even crossed the vestibule to enter the building this morning, I was thinking about the stories I would no longer hear, the people I would never meet.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Journalists turn in access badges, exit Pentagon rather than agree to new reporting rules

    Many of the reporters waited to leave together at a 4 p.m. deadline set by the Defense Department to get out of the building. As the hour approached, boxes of documents lined a Pentagon corridor and reporters carried chairs, a copying machine, books and old photos to the parking lot from suddenly abandoned workspaces. Shortly after 4, about 40 to 50 journalists left together after handing in badges.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Pentagon Journalists Vacate Workspace as New Restrictions Take Effect

    At least 30 news organizations, including Reuters, declined to sign the new policy, citing a threat to press freedoms and their ability to conduct independent newsgathering on the world's most powerful military.

    The policy requires journalists to acknowledge new rules on press access, including that they could be branded security risks and have their Pentagon press badges revoked if they ask department employees to disclose classified and some types of unclassified information.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Vox ☛ The ICE recruitment drive

    In the story ICE tells, you join up to be a hero, but, unlike with the military, you’re not going through any kind of hero’s journey. You already have the stuff. (Maybe that’s why you don’t get that much training?) The real story here is all about how America has changed — it’s being invaded, and you, the hero, must protect her. That’s why ICE’s recruiting slogan is “Defend the homeland.”

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Strategist ☛ 6G isn’t about speed. It’s about sovereignty

    The race to 6G isn’t just about bandwidth. It’s about control over spectrum, standards, supply chains and the values underpinning tomorrow’s infrastructure. If 5G taught us anything, trust and interoperability need to be built in from the start.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Can we repair the [Internet]?

    From addictive algorithms to exploitative apps, data mining to misinformation, the [Internet] today can be a hazardous place. Books by three influential figures—the intellect behind “net neutrality,” a former Meta executive, and the web’s own inventor—propose radical approaches to fixing it. But are these luminaries the right people for the job? Though each shows conviction, and even sometimes inventiveness, the solutions they present reveal blind spots.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Spotify, Max, Streaming Services Face Backlash for Anti-Immigrant Ads

    In the last week, specifically, music listeners on Spotify’s ad-supported free plan have reported hearing similar advertising on the platform, with some choosing to end their membership due to the ads. When reached for comment, a rep for Spotify told Rolling Stone that the DHS commercials were part of a “broad campaign” from the government agency and that it did not violate any advertising policies on the platform. “Users can mark any ad with a thumbs up or thumbs down to help manage their ads preferences,” the rep said.

  • Six Colors ☛ Apple wants “to own a sport end to end”

    Again, I don’t know what Apple’s working on with Formula 1, but Cue’s statement makes it clear that Apple’s ambition, for any sport, is to own the whole thing.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Microsoft, Tear Down That Wall!

    For all of this century, the USTR has been one of the greatest global impediments to a better world, hopping from country to country, demanding policies that would protect American tech firms from foreign competitors – especially the kind of competitor who would improve on American tech products by protecting users' privacy, consumer rights or labor rights while they used them.

    The most glaring example of this are "anticircumvention laws." Under these laws, it's illegal to modify any technology that has any kind of anti-modification defenses. In other words, if the manufacturer draws a kind of virtual dotted line around part of the product's software and labels it, "Do not look inside this box," then it becomes illegal to do so, even if you're trying to do something that's otherwise legal.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ Google’s Monopoly Sentence: Barely a Slap on the Wrist

  After years of legal process, the penalties for Google’s legally adjudicated search monopoly finally came down last month. After being ruled to have illegally controlled the industry (as well as the online ad-tech industry, the subject of a separate case), many observers anticipated serious penalties from the Donald Trump–initiated legal case. The Department of Justice (DOJ) sought to have the firm partially broken up through a forced sale of the company’s Chrome browser, to end the company’s exclusivity deal with Apple, and to hand over some search data to smaller competitors.

  Yet in the end, only the latter is being required of Google. The district judge, Amit Mehta, largely accepted the company’s arguments about remedies to its proven monopoly, leaving the disciplining of the company to “market forces” in the form of rising AI technology. If the verdict is a preview of the outcomes of the numerous other antitrust cases brought against the platform giants, it suggests a “techlash” with very little force.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • Court House News ☛ Ohio high school football star sues for name, image, likeness compensation

      A high school football player sued the Ohio High School Athletic Association on Wednesday, seeking permission to profit from his name, image and likeness as he rises to stardom as a top recruit in his class.

    • Walled Culture ☛ Good news: laws to tackle AI deepfakes are coming. Bad news: they are based on copyright

      The Italian AI law is about clarifying existing copyright law to deal with issues raised by AI. But some EU countries want to go much further in their response to generative AI, and bring in an entirely new kind of copyright. Both Denmark and the Netherlands are proposing to give people the copyright to their body, facial features, and voice. The move is intended as a response to the rising number of AI-generated deepfakes, where aspects such as someone’s face, body and voice are used without their permission, often for questionable purposes, and sometimes for criminal ones. There are good reasons for tackling deepfakes, as noted in an excellent commentary by P. Bernt Hugenholtz regarding the proposed Danish and Dutch laws: [...]

• Copyrights

  • Digital Music News ☛ Major Labels Fire Back in Cox Supreme Court Showdown

    “While Cox has much to say about the perils of hair-trigger liability for one-off infringement,” the majors retorted today, “it ignores the district court’s unchallenged holding that the three (and often more) infringement notices Cox received for each subscriber at issue sufficed to establish that Cox knew each was likely to infringe again.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Reddit Banned 709 Subreddits for Repeat Copyright Violations in First Half of 2025

    Most of these DMCA notices did not lead to any removals, with Reddit stating that the infringing content was often stored on external sites and that “links do not generally infringe copyright.”

    Today, that perspective has changed. Reddit’s current copyright overview clearly states that hyperlinks can trigger copyright violations. This is also evident from the many subreddits that warn members not to link to pirated material.

  • The Register UK ☛ Japan asks OpenAI to keep Sora 2’s hands off anime IP

    Japanese Minister of State for Intellectual [sic] Property [sic] Strategy Minoru Kiuchi revealed that the government made a formal request to OpenAI through the Cabinet Office's IP Strategy Promotion Secretariat last week during a press conference, as reported by Japanese media.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Y2Mate.com Among a Dozen YouTube Rippers Shut Down By IFPI

    The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is celebrating the shutdown of YouTube-ripping giant Y2Mate.com and 11 similar platforms. IFPI says that during the last 12 months alone, the twelve domains received over 620 million visits from a global audience. The Y2Mate brand has been a thorn in the side of the record labels for years and has been 'permanently' shut down at least once before. Circumstances suggest that the final curtain may prove elusive.