Leftovers

• Futurism ☛ If You're a Tech Worker With an Attractive Girlfriend, We Have Extremely Bad News

  “Showing up, marrying a target, having kids with a target — and conducting a lifelong collection operation, it’s very uncomfortable to think about but it’s so prevalent,” the source claimed.

• US News And World Report ☛ June Lockhart, Actor in TV's 'Lassie' and 'Lost in Space,' Dies at 100

  Lockhart, a space aficionado who attended NASA space shuttle launches, learned that despite all the rubbery monsters and far-fetched plot lines, "Lost in Space" inspired future astronauts.

  "I spend a lot of time at NASA with the astronauts," she told the New Jersey newspaper the Record in 2002, "and to a man, or woman, they say that watching 'Lost in Space' made them know what they wanted to do when they grew up. So when I'm down there, of course, they treat me like a duchess. It's wonderful."

• Phil Gyford ☛ More 1995 [Internet]

  A couple of people who kindly linked to my post about getting online in 1995 liked the amount of period material it contained. So, let’s give the people what they want!

• Matthew Brunelle ☛ Testing Out BLE Beacons With beaconDB

  Stationary BLE beacons are often used to mark locations in places where GPS signals are weak, like inside malls. Also, there is no single BLE beacon standard. Instead we have: [...]

• [Repeat]Jim Nielsen ☛ Everything Is Broken

  I call maybe 12 hotels. About two give me humans at the front desk. Both of those are booked solid for the night.

  But you know what? Props to those hotels for having direct lines to a human. YUGE props.

• Alvaro Montoro ☛ Bad CSS-Dad Jokes (IV)

  I haven't shared any terrible dad jokes in a while... did you think the nightmare was over? Think again! This time, I'm back with a whole batch of Halloween-themed Web Developer Dad Jokes.

• Science

  • Daniel Estévez ☛ Non-coherent m-FSK BER

    Yesterday I posted about how to compute the well known formula for the bit error rate of FSK with non-coherent demodulation. Later I realized that the same kind of argument can be extended to cover the case of \(m\)-FSK in which the \(m\) tones are orthogonal. The formula for this is not so well known, and I don’t recall having seen it before, although surely it is somewhere in the literature. Here I show the calculations and the closed-form expression that is obtained.

• Career/Education

  • Yordi Verkroost ☛ Falling in and out of Books

    I have a strange relationship with reading books. There are periods when I devour one book after another, whether it's a gripping thriller or a serious non-fiction title. In every quiet moment, I grab my book and can quickly lose myself in an adventure.

  • Mark Nottingham ☛ Principles for Global Online Meetings

    As someone who has participated in such organisations from Australia for nearly two decades, I’ve formed some fairly strong opinions about how their meetings should be arranged. What follows is an attempt to distill those thoughts into a set of principles that’s flexible enough to apply to a variety of situations.

    Keep in mind the intended application is to a series of global meetings, not a single one-off event. Also, if the set of people who need to attend a given meeting are in timezones that lead to an agreed-to “good” time, you should use that time – but then I question if your organisation is really global. For the rest, read on.

• Hardware

  • Jonathan Dowland ☛ franken keyboard

    For some reason I can't fathom, I was persuaded into buying an 8bitdo retro mechanical keyboard. It was very reasonably priced, and has a few nice fun features: built-in bluetooth and 2.4GHz wireless (with the supplied dongle); colour scheme inspired by the Nintendo Famicom; fun to use knobs for volume control; some basic macro support; and funky oversized mashable macro keys (which work really well as "Copy" and "Paste")

    The 8bitdo keyboards come with switch-types I had not previously experienced: Kailh Box White v2. I'm used to Cherry MX Reds, but I loved the feel of the Box White v2s. The 8bitdo keyboards all have hot-swappable key switches.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Advance Local Media LLC ☛ Anti-science bills hit statehouses, stripping away public health protections built over a century

    More than 420 anti-science bills attacking longstanding public health protections – vaccines, milk safety and fluoride – have been introduced in statehouses across the U.S. this year, part of an organized, politically savvy campaign to enshrine a conspiracy theory-driven agenda into law.

  • The Nation ☛ We’ve Entered the Gaslighting Phase of Covid in Prisons

    Thousands of people were packed, often without access to masks, into cellblocks and dormitories. Public health officials recommended that jails and prisons release people to avoid outbreaks. Some states did. But with hundreds of thousands still held behind bars and staff coming in and out each day, that was not enough to avoid outbreaks and preventable deaths. Although the number of people behind bars decreased, the prison mortality rate jumped 77 percent in 2020 compared to 2019, or 3.4 times the rate of the general public. Not every state distinguishes Covid from other causes of death, but in the 19 states that did, Covid was seen to have caused nearly one-third of prison deaths. When vaccinations became available, prison staff were prioritized over incarcerated people.

  • Android Police ☛ 6 ways to use your phone less — and none involve screen-time alerts

    The best way to stop using your smartphone is to have it nowhere near you. This sounds obvious, but how often do you reach for your smartphone without really thinking about it?

  • Matthew Weber ☛ Update On Tracking My Habits

    Back in June, I wrote a post about how I had started keeping track of certain habits. These were things I wanted to improve upon by doing every single day. I’ve done a somewhat good job of actually doing this since then. First, as I said in that post, I used an Obsidian daily note to track these habits. Obsidian, with the use of some plugins, would help me track and graph my progress.

• Proprietary

  • 1981 Media Ltd ☛ Xbox’s biggest competition ‘isn’t another console’ but ‘TikTok and movies’, claims exec [Ed: Microsoft makes excuses for the XBox failing and being removed from stores [1, 2]]

    Matt Booty, the president of Xbox game content and studios, discussed the gaming division’s multiplatform strategy in an interview with The New York Times, published to coincide with news that Xbox’s historical flagship franchise, Halo, is coming to PlayStation for the first time.

  • Fans revolt against Microsoft after price hikes, rumors about the future of Xbox consoles

    Following widespread layoffs during the summer, Microsoft and other businesses increased the pricing of their products. However, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate implemented an unusually high price rise of 50%, which goes above the typical inflationary price increase.

  • India Times ☛ For 20 years, he lived and breathed Microsoft, then was laid off, and now he shares a warning about Big Tech

    For two decades, Joe Friend lived and breathed Microsoft. From managing teams and shaping products to moving across continents for meaningful work, his life was intertwined with the tech giant. He planned every step carefully, imagining a steady path to retirement at 65, with years of experience and stock grants as his safety net. But life, as it often does, had other plans. In May this year, Friend, 62, received the kind of news no veteran of Big Tech ever wants to hear, he was laid off. Alongside 14 colleagues, including four managers, his long career at Microsoft abruptly came to an end.

  • The Center for Investigative Reporting ☛ Find Your Lost Google Videos - Reveal

    On this week’s Reveal, we are telling a very different kind of story: investigations into questions that might be inconsequential in the grand scheme of things but matter quite a bit to one person. We went looking for an old short film, made by Garrison Hayes, that disappeared when Google Video shut down.

  • PC World ☛ 183 million email accounts just got breached. Check if you're affected

    In some cases, this results in huge data sets containing the access data of millions of people. Often these people are unaware of this unless they fall victim to a targeted attack shortly afterwards—or they regularly check whether their data is included in fresh data leaks.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ What Happened to Apple’s Legendary Attention to Detail?

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Sam Hartman: My First Successful Hey Hi (AI) Coding Experience [Ed: 'Vibe Coding' Doesn't Work]

      I’ve used Hey Hi (AI) coding tools before—and come away disappointed. The results were underwhelming: low-quality code, inconsistent abstraction levels, and subtle bugs that take longer to fix than it would take to write the whole thing from scratch.

    • Futurism ☛ What Tech Insiders Actually Think of AI Is Extremely Revealing

      Tech companies are committing hundreds of billions of dollars to enormous data center buildouts, while industry leaders are promising an inevitable future in which superintelligent machines will usher in an era of unprecedented prosperity.

      But many tech insiders are quietly singing a very different tune, expressing a growing conviction that’s been circulating for a while now: that AI is immensely overhyped.

    • Futurism ☛ Bystanders Horrified by Slightly-Too-Honest AI Billboard

      “Our AI does your daughter’s homework. Reads her bedtime stories. Romances her. Deepfakes her,” reads a billboard asking you to visit a website called Replacement.AI. “Don’t worry, it’s totally legal [winking emoji].”

    • Futurism ☛ Law School Tests Trial With Jury Made Up of ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude

      The case, thankfully, was fictional. But all three of the AI chatbots serving on the “jury” have been used by professional lawyers in real court cases — often resulting in embarrassing blunders — meaning that to some extent the technology is already affecting legal outcomes across the country.

      Organizers said that the stunt, called “The Trial of Henry Justus,” is meant to raise questions about AI’s role in the justice system.

    • Hindustan Times ☛ Baltimore student handcuffed after AI flags bag of Dorito chips as possible firearm, county officials call for review

      An empty bag of chips led to a police search at a high school in Baltimore County, Maryland, after an AI system reportedly misidentified it as a possible firearm. A student of Kenwood High School was handcuffed, and the entire school was searched by armed police.

    • Futurism ☛ An AI Mistook a Doritos Bag for a Gun and Called the Cops on a Teenager

      “It was like eight cop cars that came pulling up for us,” he told WBAL-TV 11 News. “At first, I didn’t know where they were going until they started walking toward me with guns, talking about, ‘Get on the ground,’ and I was like, ‘What?'”

      “They made me get on my knees, put my hands behind my back, and cuffed me,” Allen added. “Then, they searched me and they figured out I had nothing.”

      “I was just holding a Doritos bag — it was two hands and one finger out, and they said it looked like a gun,” the student said.

    • TMZ ☛ Police Handcuff Teenager After AI Security System Mistakes Doritos For Gun, Body Cam

      After searching him, they found nothing ... an officer on the body cam tries to explain it away as the AI system firing off the alarm because of "the way you guys were eating chips, Doritos whatever, it picked it up as a gun."

    • The Register UK ☛ UK Ministry of Justice signs up to ChatGPT Enterprise

      The agreement will deploy ChatGPT Enterprise on the desktops of 2,500 employees for use in "routine tasks," such as writing support, compliance and legal work, data and research processes, and document analysis.

    • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Beyond Gutenberg: How AI Is Teaching Us to Think About Thinking

      At breakfast the other day, I was thinking about those old analogy questions: “Hot is to cold as light is to ___?” My kids would roll their eyes. They feel like relics from standardized tests.

      But those questions were really metacognitive exercises. You had to recognize the relationship between the first pair (opposites) and apply that pattern to find the answer (dark). You had to think about how you were thinking.

      I was thinking about what changes when reasoning becomes abundant and cheap. It hit me that this skill, thinking about how you think, becomes the scarcest resource.

    • Dayvi Schuster ☛ AI’s Trap Settling for Boilerplate Over Elegant Code

      We are all familiar with Picasso’s “the bull” series, where he progressively simplifies the image of a bull down to its most basic still recognizable form. Steve Jobs was famously inspired by this concept, leading him to advocate for simplicity and elegance in design and technology above countless features and excessive complexity. Distill a concept even as complex as software or UX down to it’s essence, and what you are left with is something beautiful and elegant that fulfills its purpose with minimal fuss.

    • The New Stack ☛ Why PyTorch Won

      During this week’s PyTorch Conference 2025 in San Francisco, I sat down with Luca Antiga, the head of the Technical Advisory Council for the PyTorch Foundation and the CTO of end-to-end AI platform Lightning AI. Antiga was part of the team that wrote the original PyTorch paper and co-authored the “Deep Learning with PyTorch” book. Who better to talk to about the state of PyTorch itself and get an update on the PyTorch Foundation?

  • Social Control Media

    • Security Week ☛ $1M WhatsApp Hack Flops: Only Low-Risk Bugs Disclosed to Meta After Pwn2Own Withdrawal

      Much of the cybersecurity community was disappointed to learn on Thursday that a researcher scheduled to demonstrate a $1 million WhatsApp exploit at the Pwn2Own hacking contest had withdrawn from the event, but it appears that some have correctly speculated regarding the exploit’s technical viability.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Gen Z Men So Scared of Getting Filmed They've Stopped Dating

      Trends such as “fail compilations” or “cringe challenges” — posts showing awkward mistakes or uncomfortable situations meant to make others laugh — encourage people to document embarrassing moments. Popular Instagram accounts post people’s dating profiles, text conversations, and awkward pickup lines. Sometimes they’re anonymous, but not always. Before long, strangers are watching, liking, and commenting on a moment that was meant to be private.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Jono Alderson ☛ The Hotmail effect

      And those assumptions didn’t come from nowhere – we engineered them. An entire generation of marketers trained businesses to look the part. We told them that trust was a design problem. That confidence could be manufactured. Custom domains. Grid-aligned logos. Friendly sans-serifs and a reassuring tone of voice. We built an industry around polish and convinced ourselves that polish was proof of competence.

    • University of Toronto ☛ What little I want out of web "passkeys" in my environment

      I'm extremely not interested in the security versus availability tradeoff that passkeys make in favour of security. I care far more about preserving availability of access to my variety of online accounts than about nominal high security. So if I'm going to use passkeys at all, I have some requirements: [...]

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • TruthOut ☛ ICE Just Spent Millions on a Social Media Surveillance AI Program

      The five-year contract with government technology middleman Carahsoft Technology, made public in September, provides Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) licenses for a product called Zignal Labs, a social media monitoring platform used by the Israeli military and the Pentagon.

    • Ava ☛ legal justifications for a default opt-in?

      It recently came to my attention that LinkedIn is planning to begin AI training on the content on their platform, just like Meta had previously decided this year, and that there is only a limited time to opt-out (until 2nd of November). That means: Users are automatically opted into the training, even the ones in the EU.

      I wondered how that was possibly in alignment with current EU law.

  • Confidentiality

    • IT Tavern ☛ Encryption using SSH Keypairs with age in Linux

      Common use cases are to encrypt data to allow you to store ore transfer it securely in an untrusted or unknown environment. You can make sure that only recipients with the right private key can decrypt the files, messages, or whatever.

• Defence/Aggression

  • El País ☛ Tim Weiner, CIA journalist: ‘Trump is the greatest danger to American national security’

    As a young man, Weiner imagined that spies were undercover heroes who drank martinis in far-off capitals and felled entire governments before escaping on a speedboat in the middle of the night. But when he encountered them in real life, they turned out to be quite different than the version he’d seen at the movies. In 2006, the reporter from The New York Times published Legacy of Ashes, a seminal book about what happened behind the scenes in U.S. intelligence services during the 20th century. Now, he’s presenting The Mission (Mariner Books), a detailed account of the CIA’s recent history and the fragile state it is in after the return of Donald Trump to the White House. “Trump is the greatest danger to American national security,” says the Pulitzer winner in an interview about his latest book and his country’s current political reality, which took place on October 21 in Madrid.

  • The Nation ☛ The Fate of Our Cities Is Now in the Supreme Court’s Hands

    In a separate case, a three-judge panel, randomly stacked with two Trump judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, gave a preview of what the Supreme Court’s eventual argument will look like. That panel removed a restraining order imposed by a district court judge (who was also a Trump appointee, for what it’s worth) preventing Trump from sending troops into Portland. The panel took Trump’s lies about the situation on the ground in Portland at face value. The Ninth Circuit said that the district court did not give appropriate “deference” to Trump’s “assessment of the facts.” They further said that the district court placed too much emphasis on the words Trump used to justify his invasion of Portland.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Take the GOP’s Nazi Group Chats Seriously

    Beyond the “kids” dodge, the problem with Vance’s defense is that these seem very unlike bog-standard online edgy jokes that trade on apparent absurdity. The joke doesn’t seem to be, “Of course I don’t like Hitler.” It seems instead to be, “Maybe I do. What of it?”

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Elite Precariat: The Betrayed Class That Will Decide America’s Next Revolution

    Something is breaking in America. But it’s not where everyone’s looking.

    The headlines talk about gig workers and service jobs. But the real danger isn’t the working class struggling to survive. It’s the educated class that did everything right and got nothing for it. The people who built the system and are now being crushed beneath it. The betrayed educated class. The elite precariat.

    They’re getting by, but none of it feels permanent. It feels liminal, like at any moment it could all collapse.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Buying the Military

    But let’s set aside the question of who this person is and focus on what’s actually happening: A private citizen is paying members of the United States military.

    Read that again slowly.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Coinbase, Google and Meta among list of donors for Trump’s Multi-million-dollar White House ballroom - The Zambian Observer

    The list of donors released by the White House includes the following entities and individuals: [...]

  • FAIR ☛ As Millions March Against Fascism, NYT Warns Against Progressives

    What does this political moment in our country call for? The MAGA president and right-wing Supreme Court are shredding the Constitution at lightning speed, with the full acquiescence of Trump’s merry band of sycophants in Congress. Masked men are kidnapping people off the streets, disappearing them to detention centers across the country, and deporting them to countries our State Department warns travelers not to visit. Meanwhile, protesters against this lawlessness are attacked by federal troops with “less-lethal” weapons.

  • New York Times ☛ How Netflix’s Nuclear War Movie Holds Up to the Real World

    ‘A House of Dynamite’ presents a terrifying glimpse of the modern nuclear risk.

  • France24 ☛ Israel launches air strike in Gaza allegedly targeting Islamic Jihad militant

    Israel's military on Saturday said it had launched an air strike in the Gaza Strip despite the ongoing US-brokered ceasefire, saying it was targeting a "terrorist" allegedly belonging to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad militant group.

  • France24 ☛ ‘What the US really wants is regime change’: US military build-up in the Caribbean

    The Pentagon on Friday ordered the deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group to counter drug-trafficking organisations in Latin America, marking a major escalation in a US military build-up that Venezuela’s leader warned was aimed at “fabricating a war”. Citing expert opinion, FRANCE 24’s Philip Turle said “what the US really wants is regime change,” adding that the key question now is whether Washington would launch attacks on Venezuelan soil.

  • France24 ☛ 'Every reason' to expect attacks inside Venezuela, expert warns as US escalates operations

    The Pentagon has deployed an aircraft carrier strike group to counter what it claims are drug-trafficking organisations in Latin America, escalating a military build-up that has fuelled fears of conflict. Earlier, the US targeted boats in international waters, killing those on board. Cynthia J. Arnson, Director of the Latin American Programme at the Wilson Centre, said there is “very little evidence” the vessels were involved in drug trafficking, calling the legality of the strikes questionable. She added that the operation appears to be “far beyond a counter–drug-trafficking operation” and warned: “There is, I think, every reason to believe or expect that there will be attacks inside Venezuelan territory aimed at deposing the current dictatorship of Nicolás Maduro.”

  • France24 ☛ Pentagon sends US carrier to Latin America amid fears of war

    The Pentagon on Friday ordered the deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group to counter drug-trafficking organizations in Latin America, a major escalation of a US military buildup that Venezuela's leader warned was steered at "fabricating a war." Since September, the US has launched at least ten air attacks in the Caribbean and Pacific, killing dozens of suspected traffickers. Click on the video by FRANCE 24's Olivia Bizot for more.

  • France24 ☛ US sends aircraft carrier to South America as tensions mount

    The Pentagon on Friday ordered the deployment of the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier and its strike group to an unidentified location off South America, a dramatic increase in regional combat power that the White House says is aimed at disrupting drug trafficking throughout the Western Hemisphere.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump’s Tantrum Over Accurate Reagan Quotes Backfires: Millions Learn Reagan Opposed His Tariff Policy

    Now, thanks to Trump’s meltdown, millions more people are watching Reagan’s actual words. And learning that Trump’s entire tariff philosophy directly contradicts what Reagan believed and said.

    The ad that triggered all this is pretty straightforward. A few weeks ago, Ontario Premier Doug Ford launched a $75 million campaign using clips from a 1987 Ronald Reagan radio address about the evils of tariffs and the benefits of free trade. You can see it here: [...]

  • International Business Times ☛ Donald Trump Humiliated as 'AI-Generated Reagan Ad' Rant Backfires - Fact-Checker Says Canada's Audio is Real

    However, a fact-checking tool on X (formerly Twitter) quickly debunked Trump's claim, confirming that Reagan's remarks were real. 'Ronald Reagan's statements praising free trade, as reported in a commercial broadcast in Ontario, were not generated by artificial intelligence, the fact-checking tool stated, according to The Irish Star. 'This can be easily verified through the original audio transcript from a reliable source.'

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • El País ☛ Sandra Steingraber, environmentalist: ‘Fracking is one of the worst US technologies since the atomic bomb’

      Her search for an answer led to a seminal book, Living Downstream (1997), in which she combined her scientific knowledge with cancer registries and toxic waste inventories. The biologist discovered that she wasn’t alone: she was part of a large group of people in a community with high levels of cancer, due to the fact that they were all drinking from the same contaminated water wells.

    • Futurism ☛ Space Junk Now Almost Constantly Crashing Down to Earth

      Regardless of where exactly it came from, it’s evidence of a universal problem in an accelerating space industry: pollution. Rocket launches are more frequent than ever, and Elon Musk has thousands of Starlink satellites in orbit. There’re so many of these expendable satellites, in fact, that there’s now at least one of them falling to Earth every single day.

    • New York Times ☛ An E.P.A. Plan to Kill a Major Climate Rule Is Worrying Business Leaders

      And yet carmakers, electric utilities and even the oil and gas industry have asked the E.P.A. to tread carefully. If the federal government were to stop regulating greenhouse gases, it could clear the way for states and municipalities to sue companies for damages from climate change. And it could spur individual states to come up with their own pollution limits, creating a patchwork of regulations. Environmental groups have also promised to sue the E.P.A. if it repeals the finding, leading to more uncertainty for businesses.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ TikTok, Meta in breach of transparency obligations: EU

    TikTok and Meta, the company which owns Facebook and Instagram, are in breach of transparency obligations under the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA), the European Commission said Friday.

    A statement by the European Union's executive body said its preliminary findings show that the social media giants were "in breach of their obligation to grant researchers adequate access to public data under the DSA."

  • The Register UK ☛ MPs urge UK government to stop phone theft wave through tech

    As well as trying to catch the criminals stealing phones, the government should focus on cutting demand, according to the House of Commons' Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, a cross-party group of MPs that looks closely at related spending, policies and administration.

  • Dark Reading ☛ CISA Layoffs Weaken Civilian Cyber Defense

    Since its creation in 2018, CISA has been the quarterback of America's civilian cyber defense, ensuring that both the public and private sectors could act from a common playbook. Reducing that capacity is like shutting down air traffic control in bad weather — planes can still fly, but they're relying on luck and local radar.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Apple Threatens to Withdraw App Tracking Transparency in Europe

    It is a little rich for Apple to be claiming victimhood in the face of “intense lobbying efforts” by advertising companies when it is the seventh highest spender on lobbying in the European Union. Admittedly, it spends about one-third as much as Meta in Germany, but that is not because Apple cannot afford to spend more. Apple’s argument is weak.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Immich ☛ Google flags Immich sites as dangerous

    At some point earlier this month, we realized that a bunch of sites on the immich.cloud domain had recently started showing up as "dangerous". At the same time, a few users started complaining about their own Immich deployments being flagged. We also noticed that all our own internal sites had the same warning, including our preview environments. It got old real fast to have to go through the tedious effort to "view this safe site" whenever we wanted to view anything.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • Court House News ☛ Running water can be a constitutional right, says First Circuit

    The result is that the case will go back to the original judge and the plaintiffs will have a chance to establish the other elements of their due-process claim, including that they had a protected property interest in the water service and that the executive director lacks qualified immunity.

  • TruthOut ☛ ICE Kidnapped My Neighbor in Broad Daylight. The Aftermath Left Me Reeling.

    For the last six weeks, Chicago and the surrounding suburbs have seen over 1,000 people taken by ICE in unmarked vans or disappeared in the middle of the night. In defiance, Chicago’s vibrant immigrant community and organizers expanded legal services and training, pushed to cancel harmful surveillance companies like Flock’s license plate reader technology, and formed coalitions to rapidly respond to ICE.

  • The Record ☛ Calling TeaOnHer’s content 'seemingly illegal,' lawmakers demand info from company

    In addition to the fact that TeaOnHer encourages anonymous users to post images and identifying information about women and minors, the lawmakers noted that there is no way for those named by the app’s users to remove the “harassing, abusive, defamatory and sexually explicit” comments made about them.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Jonathan Kamens ☛ Why websites shouldn’t indiscriminately block VPN users – Something better to do

    I was recently trying to renew the registration on my motorcycle at the Massachusetts RMV website, when I was stymied by the fact that when I got to the page where I was supposed to enter my credit-card information, the form fields were missing. After attempting to perform the renewal in three different browsers and with all of my extensions disabled and running into the same problem everywhere, I decided I had to escalate.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • The Register UK ☛ Sora users trick platform into creating racist celeb videos

      The so-called Cameo feature, added when Sora 2 launched last month, allows users to upload short clips of themselves that can then be inserted into Sora-generated videos. There's no official list of celebrities and public figures available in Sora, but users have compiled their own that include a number of dead people and historical figures whose families have been less than happy about their inclusion, apparently granted without permission.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Proposal to Prevent LaLiga Site-Blocking Hurting Innocent Sites Rejected in Spain

    A proposal calling for the Spanish government to protect innocent websites from pirate site overblocking has been rejected. The proposal before the Congressional Committee on Economy, Trade, and Digital Transformation, recognized that football league LaLiga needs to protect its rights, but said safeguards are necessary after the wrongful blocking of thousands of third-party websites.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Reddit Sues Perplexity and Three Data Scraping Companies Because They Crawled Google

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Scrape the web for OpenAI — with the Atlas browser!

    And then there’s all the paywalled data and the personal data and the corporate data. Think if they could train on all that juicy stuff!