Leftovers

• Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0152 The Japanese web is delightful

  The Japanese web feels like it stopped at 1.0 and it's a delight.

  Remember when webpages were simply dense information-delivery mechanisms? I present: the Iwate Prefectural Library. I mean come on.

• Anil Dash ☛ Founders Over Funders. Inventors Over Investors.

  I've been following tech news for decades, and one of the worst trends in the broader cultural conversation about technology — one that's markedly accelerated over the last decade — is the shift from talking about people who create tech to focusing on those who merely finance it.

  It's time we change the story. When you see a story that claims to be about "technology", ask yourself: [...]

• Science

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ DNA study reveals what really killed Napoleon’s army in 1812

    Scientists from the Institut Pasteur in France used advanced DNA analysis to reexamine the remains of Napoleon’s fallen troops.

    They found no evidence of typhus. Instead, the soldiers carried bacteria that cause enteric fever and relapsing fever, two diseases that may have hastened the army’s downfall.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Part Four of The Kryptos Sculpture

    Two people found the solution. They used the power of research, not cryptanalysis, finding clues amongst the Sanborn papers at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art.

  • New York Times ☛ Solution to CIA’s Kryptos Sculpture Is Found in Smithsonian Vault

    What led to that moment is a blend of mishandled paperwork and nerdy spycraft. An amateur cryptographer and his friend had found the solution in plain view for anyone willing to dig through the archives of the Smithsonian Institution.

    The hidden text had been uncovered, with potentially damaging effects for the sale — what is the value of a secret that someone else knows?

  • Wired ☛ Inside the Messy, Accidental Kryptos Reveal

    Jim Sanborn couldn’t believe it. He was weeks away from auctioning off the answer to Kryptos, the sculpture he created for the CIA that had defied solution for 35 years. As always, wannabe solvers kept on paying him a $50 fee to offer their guesses to the remaining unsolved portion of the 1,800-character encrypted message, known as K4—wrong without exception. Then, on September 3, he opened an email from the latest applicant, Jarett Kobek, which started, “I believe the text of K4 is as follows …” He’d seen words like this thousands of times before. But this time, the text was correct.

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ Non-coherent FSK BER

    It is well known that the formula for the bit error rate of 2-FSK using non-coherent demodulation is \(\exp(-\frac{E_b}{2N_0})/2\). However, I can never quickly find a source where this formula is derived, so I decided to figure this out and write down the derivation. I will use my post about m-FSK symbol error rate as a starting point.

  • Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Thu, 23 Oct 2025 - Modern perfect hashing

    Wojciech Muła posted about modern perfect hashing for strings and I wanted to make some comments about my own implementation (that sadly never got productionized because doubling the speed compared to gperf wasn't really that impactful in the end).

    First, let's define the problem, just so we're all on the same page; the goal is to create code that maps a known, fixed set of strings to a predefined integer (per string), and rejects everything else. This is essentially the same as a hash table, except that since the set of strings is known ahead of time, we can do better than a normal hash table. (So no “but I heard SwissTables uses SIMD and thus cannot be beat”, please. :-) ) My use case is around a thousand strings or so, and we'll assume that a couple of minutes of build time is OK (shorter would be better, but we can probably cache somehow). If you've got millions of strings, and you don't know them compile-time (for instance because you want to use your hash table in the join phase of a database), see this survey; it's a different problem with largely different solutions.

• Career/Education

  • Henrik Karlsson ☛ When is better to think without words?

    I’m not sure what is going on here. But here’s a speculation. As I understand it, when one part of our brain is working, it often inhibits another—if you put words to distressing feelings, for example, the language-oriented parts of your brain inhibit the amygdala, which reduces the emotional distress. Similarly, when you are focused on a task at hand, the executive control network of your brain will tend to inhibit the default mode network which is responsible for mind wandering. (This might explain why illuminations tend to occur mainly in the shower, when the executive control networks downregulate and the mind is allowed to wander.)

  • Kansas Reflector ☛ In my Kansas college courses, writing feels like a digital zombie footrace 

    The pursuit that I found in many of those assignments fuels my nostalgia today. I fear we are watching the experience of academic writing being shrugged off by artificial intelligence.

    Before we get to that, let’s rewind.

    There are three generations of academic writers alive today, in my thinking. I’m not talking about Boomers and Gen Xers and Millennials. These cohorts are based on what writing was like for them in high school and college.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ AMD reportedly establishes $280 million silicon photonics hub in Taiwan — new R&D center could accelerate company's co-packaged optics roadmap

    According to a new report, AMD has made the decision to establish two new R&D centers in Taiwan, focusing on silicon photonics, heterogeneous integration, and AI-related technologies, reports the Liberty Times. Both heterogeneous integration of system-in-packages (SiPs) and silicon photonics with co-packaged optics (CPO) are crucial technologies for current and next-generation AI and HPC components, as performance scaling via traditional methods is too slow to meet market requirements.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Reunited with a Blue and White Power Mac G3

    It’s funny that this specific machine is largely in the same condition as that Power Mac G3 I picked up in 2006, save for a full compliment of memory. I’d love to get a Zip drive and bezel for it, and I’ll likely forgo the Sonnet IDE controller this time for a 64-bit SCSI interface, or even SATA card. The only major difference is the side panels are in significantly better cosmetic condition, which is nice.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Case Western Reserve University ☛ Yes, people may stare, and, yes, you should still wear a mask

    In times like these, it is of utmost importance to protect yourself and others, often in the form of wearing a mask. Yet, I have seen too many people who have been visibly sick but also visibly barefaced—that is, with no masks in sight. This is in no manner an accusatory statement, but rather one in observance and solidarity. I myself at times have been the perpetrator of this issue, even though I would like to say that, for the majority of the time, I do wear a mask when I am sick. So, why do so many of us not wear masks when we feel sick?

  • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ Govern or Be Governed: Chatbots as the new threat to Children Online

    What’s in it for the AI companies in abusing humans this way, Smithing asks? Humans are collateral damage on the race to AGI, a term she rejects, Meetali tells us. Harms like psychosis, grooming or death are seen as necessary costs in building something allegedly good for society. And Megan Garcia reminds us that profit is a powerful incentive as well. The people who developed Character.AI did so at Google, but were discouraged to develop it due to the dangers. So Google spun it out as a startup and licensed back the tech at $2.7 billion – that model of spinning out risk and acquihiring it back is another structural danger of the AI industry.

    The lawsuit against Google and Character.AI, as well as the company’s founders, is a reaction to the fact that Garcia couldn’t find a law that made the company’s behavior illegal. She reached out to her state’s AG, to the Department of Justice and the Surgeon General: “They didn’t know what the technology was.” Parents were just getting caught up to a product released in “stealth mode”, she says – the lawsuit is the only possible redress because there’s no meaningful policy about these systems.

• Proprietary

  • El País ☛ What the Amazon cloud outage reveals about the weaknesses of the [Internet]

    Many of the fallen services were back up and running after a few hours, but a few continued to experience problems throughout the day. On Monday night, Amazon released a statement that AWS had “returned to normal levels.” The problem now, say experts, is knowing to what extent the [Internet]’s global infrastructure has become overly dependent on a handful of cloud service providers — and what, if anything, is to be done about it.

  • University of Michigan ☛ Discord’s overlooked games might not be so bad

    However, the apparent slop running rampant throughout the Activities tab only heightened my curiosity. I wanted to know: were these games really as bad as they looked, or were there some hidden gems waiting to be discovered? To find out, I took it upon myself to play five of Discord’s most popular, odd and intriguing games.

  • The Register UK ☛ Windows Server WSUS bug exploits underway, Microsoft's mum

    Plus, there's at least one proof-of-concept attack floating around in cyberspace, and it only takes one specially crafted request to exploit the bug for full system takeover - so we know what Microsoft admins are doing this weekend.

  • Security Week ☛ Critical Windows Server WSUS Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild 

    CVE-2025-59287 allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code and a PoC exploit is available.

  • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ Cory Doctorow on the weird upside of the Trump presidency

    One possibility is “the euro stack”, made in Europe alternatives to the US tech stack. But very shortly, the euro stack will hit a wall. You need a way to transition data from the US stack to the euro stack equivalent – no one is going to manually copy and paste all their documents out of the Google or Office cloud.

    Don’t expect interoperability to come easily. The DMA has weak provisions designed to open the Apple app store. When the EU threatened to damage the App Store’s fee, Apple has threatened to leave and filed eighteen “frivolous law suits”.

  • John Ozbay ☛ What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail?

    In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented.

    This year, things have gotten so bad that I'm starting to think they've stopped caring about user experience, accessibility, and detailed QA tests altogether.

    I'd rather write less and show you more. So let's go through a couple of examples that made me feel heartbroken and eventually made me stop using some Apple products.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI's New AI Browser Is Already Falling Victim to Prompt Injection Attacks

      Cybersecurity researchers are particularly alarmed by its integrated “agent mode,” currently limited to paying subscribers, that can attempt to do online tasks autonomously. Two days after OpenAI unveiled Atlas, competing web browser company Brave released findings that the “entire category of AI-powered browsers” is highly vulnerable to “indirect prompt injection” attacks, allowing hackers to deliver hidden messages to an AI to carry out harmful instructions.

    • Futurism ☛ Training AI on "Brain Rot" Content Causes Lasting Cognitive Damage, New Paper Finds

      As it turns out, it’s not just human minds getting rotted by low-effort memes like “6-7” and “skibidi toilet“: in new research, a team from Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Purdue University found that “continual exposure to junk web text induces lasting cognitive decline in large language models (LLMs).”

    • The Conversation ☛ The hardest part of creating conscious AI might be convincing ourselves it’s real

      As far back as 1980, the American philosopher John Searle distinguished between strong and weak AI. Weak AIs are merely useful machines or programs that help us solve problems, whereas strong AIs would have genuine intelligence. A strong AI would be conscious.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ AI policy without proof is just politics

      History shows us that regulation without verification rarely works. Imagine if Wall Street firms were allowed to audit their own books, or if pharmaceutical companies could approve their own drugs. The risks would be obvious and unacceptable. Yet, in AI today, much of the information policymakers see about model performance and safety comes straight from the companies developing those systems, leaving regulators dependent on the very firms they are meant to oversee.

    • 404 Media ☛ AI Dataset for Detecting Nudity Contained Child Sexual Abuse Images

      The Canadian Centre for Child Protection found more than 120 images of identified or known victims of CSAM in the dataset.

    • Jamie Lawrence ☛ Why you need to adopt AI (as a software engineer)

      It’s this AI-as-LLMs that we need to discuss today.

    • Geoffrey Litt ☛ Code like a surgeon

      A surgeon isn’t a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at.

    • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ Govern or Be Governed: Gary Marcus on Shorting Neural Networks

      Lots of people have been seduced by Sam Altman’s invocation of “scaling laws”. Marcus notes that Altman is a consummate salesman, and managed to carry on the illusion of improvement for years, but is reaching the end of his powers. In August, when GPT 5 came out – extremely late – it’s possible that we are seeing the beginning of a bubble bursting. GPT5 was a little better, but not a lot better, and the promise of infinite scaling seems to be petering out.

    • Arjen Wiersma ☛ The Dutch are WEIRD, and so is ChatGPT

      It’s an impressive claim, and the demos are slick. But in our line of work, we’re paid to be paranoid. We’re trained to ask the follow-up questions, the ones that spoil the party. When I hear “human-level performance,” one question comes to mind: “Which humans?”

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Sora 2 Can Generate Videos of Celebs Appearing to Shout Racist Slurs

      Yet the AI companies are so caught up in a race to dominance that these concerns hardly enter into the equation until the damage is already done. The rich and powerful, at least, might have the means to protect their reputations from an onslaught of deepfakes. The rest of us, however, will have to learn to navigate a world in which seeing is rarely believing.

  • Social Control Media

    • Georgetown University ☛ What Does ‘6-7’ Mean? We Don’t Know Either, So We Asked a Linguist - Georgetown University

      For Cynthia Gordon, a linguistics professor in the College of Arts & Sciences, the trend is not just a funny — or perhaps frustrating — social phenomenon but also a point of study. Gordon researches online and social media discourse and how linguistic patterns can shape communities. When she first heard of the “6-7” trend, she didn’t know what it meant, so she researched and discussed the phenomenon with students in her Discourse of Social Media class to better understand the phrase.

    • [Old] CNN ☛ Meta ignored warnings on Instagram’s harm to teens, whistleblower says

      Meta’s top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, ignored warnings for years about harms to teens on its platforms such as Instagram, a company whistleblower told a Senate subcommittee on Tuesday.

      Meta instead fosters a culture of “see no evil, hear no evil” that overlooks evidence of harm internally while publicly presenting carefully crafted metrics to downplay the issue, said Arturo Bejar, an ex-Facebook engineering director and consultant.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Register UK ☛ Iran's MuddyWater spies wade into 100+ government networks

      Each message carried a weaponized Word attachment that asked users to "Enable Content." Anyone who did set off a macro that unpacked a loader nicknamed "FakeUpdate," which then installed an updated version of the crew's custom backdoor, "Phoenix." Once installed, the malware allowed the operators to poke around infected systems, lift credentials, upload or download files, and maintain persistence.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Ransomware Attacks Have Soared This Year

      Ransomware attacks have soared 50% in 2025 despite major changes among the leading ransomware groups, according to a new Cyble report.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Shutdown Sparks 85% Increase in US Gov't Cyberattacks

      Experts emphasize, too, that the most serious cyber consequences of the shutdown won't come in the form of immediate breaches. Threat actors targeting employees today might lie in wait until some future day. Add to that all of the recruiting challenges and eroding trust in government institutions and it's the long-term fallout that should worry everyone most.

    • Dark Reading ☛ MEA Hackers Target Gov'ts, Finance, and Small Retailers

      The report details some other counterintuitive findings, too. For example, most MENA ransomware attacks are going unattributed, and Pakistan faces twice as many ransomware attacks as any other country in the region.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • RTL ☛ New framwork: More than 60 UN members sign cybercrime treaty opposed by rights groups

      "There were multiple concerns raised throughout the negotiation of the treaty around how it actually ends up compelling companies to share data," said Sabhanaz Rashid Diya, founder of the Tech Global Institute think tank.

      "It's almost rubber-stamping a very problematic practice that has been used against journalists and in authoritarian countries," she told AFP.

    • The Register UK ☛ UK digital ID plan recast as time-saver

      Digital ID will be compulsory for anyone taking a new job after the scheme goes live by the end of this parliamentary session, the prime minister said.

    • Wired ☛ DHS Wants a Fleet of AI-Powered Surveillance Trucks

      US border patrol is asking companies to submit plans to turn standard 4x4 trucks into AI-powered watchtowers—combining radar, cameras, and autonomous tracking to extend surveillance on demand.

    • PC World ☛ This popular 'privacy browser' is actually tracking users and stealing data

      According to a security report from Infoblox, in cooperation with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the China-focused Universe Browser is advertised as a safe and private way to bypass censorship and web blocks. It has a specific use case for would-be online gamblers. But just underneath its surface, the browser is recording the user’s location, routing all traffic data through servers in China, installing keyloggers, and changing network settings.

    • Nick Heer ☛ The Verge Delivers a Bad Article About Amazon’s Ring

      The word “almost” and the phrase “very close” are working very hard to keep the core of Siminoff’s claim intact. What he says is that, by this time next year, “normal” communities with enough Ring cameras and a magic dusting of A.I. will have virtually no crime. The caveats are there to imply more nuance, but they are merely an escape hatch for when someone revisits this next year.

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Europe vs. App Tracking Transparency

  • Confidentiality

    • Toys “R” Us Canada affected by data breach hitting personal data

      On Thursday morning, Toys ‘R’ Us Canada notified its customers in an email saying that it learned of a data breach on July 30. The breach may have included names, addresses, emails and phone numbers, according to a statement from Toys ‘R’ Us. However, the company announced that passwords, credit card details or similar confidential data weren’t exposed.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Tennessee Lookout ☛ Trump’s National Guard deployments raise worries about state sovereignty

    “I don’t want this to be a political conversation but, I mean, the fact you bring people from other states who maybe have different politics — I think it shows an administration that’s trying to pit people against other people,” Shaoul said.

  • Court House News ☛ TikTok tells top Iowa court the state lacks jurisdiction in fraud suit

    Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird sued TikTok in January 2024 claiming the app violates the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act by misrepresenting the frequency of profanity, sexual content and nudity available to teenage users.

    Lawyers for TikTok told justices of the Iowa’s highest court that the state’s argument would amount to a blank check for jurisdiction, prompting pushback from Iowa Supreme Court Justice Christopher McDonald.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Buying the Ruins

    And paying for it? Apple and Amazon. Google and Meta. Microsoft, Palantir, Coinbase, Ripple, Tether—the Winklevoss twins too. The empire’s benefactors, writing checks to history’s undoing.

    The same oligarchs who destroyed American democracy through algorithmic manipulation are now literally purchasing its architecture. They’re not just funding authoritarianism—they’re renovating it. Etching their names into it. Building monuments to their own power on the bones of institutions designed for public service.

    Let’s be precise about what’s happening here.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Trump’s Gilded Ballroom and the Fall of the American Republic

    I assume that everyone reading this newsletter knows that Donald Trump is in the process of destroying a large part of the White House so he can construct a 90,000 square foot gold-encrusted ballroom. And this is being done without any historical or architectural review, treating a national treasure that belongs to the people as if it were his own personal property. In true Trumpian style, this act of vandalism is being paid for by large corporate donors — mostly tech and [cryptocurrency] companies — seeking to buy Trump’s favor. I am sure there will be a Trump meme-coin dispenser installed on every table.

  • Watts Martin ☛ Collaboration or privacy: pick one

    But there’s a difference between “playing ball” and proactively offering to pay for a new baseball field. Apple could be doing the least of what they need to do to get by in this current moment; they’re actively choosing to go above and beyond. Giving obsequious gifts is a choice, not a necessity. Taking down ICEBlock due to an informal demand rather than a legal injunction is a choice, not a necessity. And funding the destruction of the East Wing of the White House is a choice, not a necessity.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Apple putting your hard earned money towards a ballroom for you know who

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ We Have to Move

    The work doesn’t stop when we fail or when we’re disappointed. There is always a next step, always another challenge, and I know that I cannot allow myself to freeze up, rather than turning the next corner.

    I am not saying there’s no time for rest. Sometimes, you have to take a beat and reset your nervous system, rather than remaining activated and on edge at all times. This is a long struggle, and we have to move as sustainably as we can. But we cannot stop pushing forward because things feel irreparably fucked.

  • ABC ☛ Satellite images show White House's East Wing has been demolished for Donald Trump's ballroom

    The White House released a full list of donors this week, which included tech giants such as Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Meta.

  • International Business Times ☛ White House Trees Cut for MAGA Ballroom: Trump Shrugs as East Wing Heritage Vanishes Without Timeline

    Satellite imagery confirms the scale of the change, showing a flattened landscape where a historic part of the building once stood. Along with the building, at least six historic trees have been axed or removed, wiping away living pieces of American history.

  • Daily Kos ☛ White House demolition is getting funded by tech bribes

    Under the Oakland, California, federal court settlement, nearly 10% of the ballroom’s estimated construction costs will now come from Alphabet. CNBC reports the money will be donated on Trump’s behalf “to the Trust for the National Mall, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity dedicated to restoring, preserving, and elevating the National Mall, to support the construction of the White House State Ballroom.”

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump says a Canadian ad misstated Ronald Reagan's views on tariffs. Here are the facts and context

    Reagan did not, in fact, love tariffs. He often criticized government policies — including protectionist measures such as tariffs — that interfered with free commerce and he spent much of the 1987 radio address spelling out the case against tariffs.

  • Seattle Times ☛ Ex-Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold named in Epstein flight logs

    Myhrvold, who was among those who contributed to a 2003 birthday book made for Epstein, was named as a passenger for two flights on Epstein’s private jet in the 1990s, according to flight log documents filed in a defamation suit by Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell in 2015. Though sealed for years, the last of the records were made public in 2024.

• Environment

  • teleSUR ☛ Interpol Detected Over 400 Environmental Crimes

    On Friday, Interpol confirmed that the seventh edition of Operation Mother Earth concluded with the detection and control of over 400 environmental crimes, of which 203 were related to forestry, 26 to illegal fishing, 23 to illegal mining and 16 to pollution. The operation served to uncover deforested areas linked to organized crime networks that cover more than 50,000 hectares.

  • Maine Morning Star ☛ New England says goodbye to coal as Merrimack Station powers down

    Merrimack Station had supplied electricity to the region since the 1960s. But as coal’s financial viability waned and environmental pressures mounted, the era of coal power production in New England may now be officially over. In the coming years, on-site solar and battery storage could take coal’s place at the site.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Breach Media ☛ Ontario’s plan to ban bike lanes is ripped from the business lobby’s wish list

      And, buried deep inside the Fighting Delays, Building Faster Act is a ban on municipalities constructing bike lanes that would take away a lane of car traffic.

      Ford‘s anti-bike crusade is about more than just whipping up a culture war to gain favour with his suburbanite voters and speeding up his personal commute from Etobicoke to Queen’s Park. The new bill is, in fact, a gift to corporate lobbyists, crossing an item off a wish list the Toronto Region Board of Trade released in the form of a report nine months ago.

    • Wired ☛ How Data Centers Actually Work

      Tech giants have been investing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI data centers just this year alone. But as the deals pile up, so have the concerns around their viability and sustainability. Michael Calore and senior correspondent Lauren Goode sit down with senior writer Molly Taft to discuss how these energy hungry facilities actually work, the different industry interests at stake, and whether it’ll all come crumbling down.

  • Overpopulation

    • Overpopulation ☛ It’s not racist to say: we are full

      So it is the migrants, after all? Let’s be real: where could new houses possibly be built in a country that already has – at over 500 people per square kilometre – one of the highest population densities in the world? A country that is chock full of humans and livestock, to the detriment of everything else. A flat, nearly treeless country that needs to import its building materials from abroad, because it can’t mine enough on its own soil. A country that already sits, for about a fourth of its area, below the sea level – and the sea level is rising.

• Finance

  • Inkl ☛ Target is eliminating 1,800 corporate jobs as it looks to reclaim its lost lustre

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Anthropic signs deal with Google Cloud to expand TPU chip capacity — AI company expects to have over 1GW of processing power in 2026

    Google Cloud just announced that Anthropic has signed a major deal that will expand its use of the search giant’s TPU chips for training future Claude models. According to the press release, this will allow the AI company to use up to a million TPUs from Google, as well as access other cloud services that it offers, giving Anthropic over a gigawatt of compute capacity by 2026.

  • Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Október 23

    Today, Republic Day is celebrated in Hungary. It is one of three national holidays that Hungarians celebrate. Republic Day commemorates two important events in Hungary history.

    The first is the 1956 revolution when the Hungarians stood up to the Soviet Union for 18 days. The day also celebrates the first free parliamentary elections in 1989 that led to the declaration of Hungary as a free republic. The two are related in that the aspirations of Hungarians in 1956 were finally realized in 1989.

  • Dan Sinker ☛ What I Need You To Understand, Notes from Chicago in Late October | dansinker.com

    This is how it works: We protect each other, period. These are our neighbors, our friends, our family. We do the things we have to do to ensure that as many of us can make it to tomorrow as possible. Not everyone does. I need you to understand that we tried.

  • Chris Enns ☛ American Apple(s)

    I don't think tech and political writers inside the USA fully recognize how insane Apple's bending the knee to Trump looks from outside. It's turned a company that I thought was fairly apolitical in terms of the left / right divide in the USA, but very interested in caring about humanity, to a company that's willing to follow the political winds whichever way they may blow—as long as the iPhones keep flowing.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • CBC ☛ We analyzed 200 cancer and autism videos on TikTok and found the majority contain misinformation

      Marketplace journalists analyzed 100 videos discussing cancer treatments and another 100 for autism therapies. We found that at least 80 per cent of the remedies in the videos — totalling more than 75 million views — weren’t supported by scientific evidence.

      Many of these clips get traction because they are grounded in compelling personal stories, said Tim Caulfield, a health misinformation researcher.

    • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Artificial Intelligence Is Hitting Politics. Nobody Knows Where It Will End.

      AI videos have gone fully mainstream in political campaigns, and lawmakers are grappling with what it could mean for politics — and maybe their own careers.

      “We need to have a big conversation on AI,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, one of the leading Republicans pushing for AI regulation. “Because pretty soon like everything, if we don’t have limits, all of it’s gonna be fake — every single thing.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Man arrested for taunting DC troops with ‘Star Wars’ files lawsuit

    In a federal lawsuit, O’Hara alleges that an Ohio National Guardsman called local police on him and interrupted his right to protest. The complaint filed Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation describes O’Hara as being “deeply concerned about the normalization of troops patrolling D.C. neighborhoods,” and thus he took to the troll-ish form of protesting. However, the National Guard was “not amused by this satire.”

  • Ethan Zuckerman ☛ Govern or Be Governed: What are the Threats to Freedom of Speech?

    Agreeing with the top down and bottom up diagnoses wonders who we can empower to help us in this perilous situation. She references Jack Balkin’s “free speech triangle” – censorship used to be about states censoring individuals. Now speech requires a democratic state and responsible corporate power, as well as individual bravery. Where do we find out power if states and corporations are cooperating to silence us?

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Beyond Banned Books Displays: How Did Your Library Celebrate Intellectual Freedom Earlier This Month?

    We all know that book banning gets people's attention but the issue is so much deeper. In fact, because Intellectual Freedom in general is in jeopardy, it is important for us to pivot and focus on advocacy and information about our rights over just putting up displays of books that have been banned.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Musicians Who Fled Afghanistan After Taliban Invasion Seek Aslyum

    Qudrat Wasefi fled Kabul after the fundamentalist regime, with its violently enforced prohibition of music, returned to power in 2021. He's part of a generation of refugees the world has largely forgotten

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ Mirror journalists back strike action over redundancies and AI

    Some 95% of participating Daily Mirror and Sunday Mirror National Union of Journalists (NUJ) members have voted in favour of strike action over compulsory Reach redundancies, the impact of artificial intelligence in the newsroom and rota changes.

    Not all Mirror NUJ journalists took part in the ballot: of the 83 members entitled to vote, 44 (53%) cast votes in the ballot. Some 42 voting members said ‘yes’ to striking, while two members voted against action.

  • CPJ ☛ Ethiopian authorities suspend licenses of Deutsche Welle’s local correspondents

    The suspension comes amid a broad expansion of the Ethiopian Media Authority’s powers, following an April 17, 2025 amendment to the country’s media law. The amendment weakened public participation and transparency requirements in the authority’s board appointments and transferred key regulatory powers, including the ability to suspend, revoke, or fine media licenses, directly to the authority.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Futurism ☛ Secret Plans Reveal Amazon Plot to Replace 600,000 Workers With Robot Army

    Amazon has spent years automating its warehouses with robots. Its mechanical workforce is more than one million strong, rivaling the size of its human workforce of some 1.56 million people. Robots, in fact, are on track to outnumber Amazon employees.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ The burka is a symbol of repression, not freedom for women

    If the burka truly symbolised empowerment, women would have embraced it when given freedom to choose. The opposite is true. Look at Iran before the 1979 revolution: women wore miniskirts and red lipstick. When the ayatollahs came to power, they didn’t politely “invite” women to cover up – they made it compulsory.

    Or take Afghanistan. After the Taliban were ousted in 2001, women eagerly shed the heavy blue burkas that had smothered them for years. Their act of unveiling became a symbol of liberation. When the Taliban returned to power 20 years later, the burka returned too, enforced, once again, by men with guns.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • FULU Foundation ☛ Fund bounties that move digital ownership forward.

    Back in August, FULU announced and awarded two bounties. In both cases, the manufacturer broke a device by pushing a firmware update that removed features unless the owner paid a subscription.

    After the success of those bounties, FULU is now adding additional campaigns. The bounties on each product included in our program will include a base award of $10,000. On top of that, we’re upping the ante: We’ll match each dollar donated by you, the public, to any specific bounty, up to an additional $10,000. That means that your donation goes twice as far.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Bruce Lawson ☛ Apple App Store guilty of abuse of its dominant position in UK, and arse-weasels

  The complaint alleges that Apple abuses its dominant position through exclusion of any other app stores from iOS devices and the 30% surcharge that it imposes on apps that require payment at the point of download, subscription payments, or allow for in-app purchases (but not for “physical goods or services that will be consumed outside of the app”, for Reasons).

  Yesterday (23 October 2025) the Competition Appeal Tribunal handed down its unanimous judgement: [...]

• Patents

  • Tony Finch ☛ how to draw a tetrapod

    There is a patent for tetrapods written by the inventors of the tetrapod, Pierre Danel and Paul Anglès d’Auriac.

• Copyrights

  • Futurism ☛ OpenAI's Copyright Situation Appears to Be Putting It in Huge Danger

    “Courts might accept copying for transformative learning, but they may be less forgiving when AI models generate recognizable… images where infringement risk is likely higher,” copyright law scholar Abdi Aidid told the outlet.

  • Techdirt ☛ Reddit’s ‘AI Scraping’ Lawsuit Is An Attack On The Open Internet

    Most reporting on this is not actually explaining the nuances, which require a deeper understanding of the law, but fundamentally, Reddit is NOT arguing that these companies are illegally scraping Reddit, but rather that they are illegally scraping… Google (which is not a party to the lawsuit) and in doing so violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clause, over content Reddit holds no copyright over. And, then, Perplexity is effectively being sued for linking to Reddit.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Reddit’s data becomes a battleground in the AI gold rush

    Scraping the web itself is not illegal, but if it is used as a way to violate copyright protection, the scraper could be found liable. Reddit will have to explain why it’s not harmful to have summaries of its content appear in Google search results (Google doesn’t pay for those), but it is harmful when the content shows up on Perplexity.