Leftovers

• Hackaday ☛ HRV Gets Home Automation Upgrades

  In our modern semi-dystopia, it seems like most companies add automation features to their products to lock them down and get consumers to buy even more proprietary, locked-down components. The few things that are still user-upgradable are getting fewer and farther between, but there are still a few things that can be modified and improved to our own liking like this control panel for a heat recovery ventilator (HRV).

• Task And Purpose ☛ Marines fired artillery over freeway without warning during rehearsal

  California Highway Patrol did not receive word that Marines would fire artillery rounds over Interstate 5 the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 17, according to reporting by the Los Angeles Times. A spokesperson for California Highway Patrol told the Times that although I Marine Expeditionary Force told them that Friday that there would be live-fire over the freeway the next day, it did not specify the rehearsal would also include live ammunition as well. The rehearsal took place in the afternoon, with Marines firing 30 155mm rounds while commuters traveled down the coast on the freeway and adjacent Amtrak train route.

• Manuel Moreale ☛ IndieWeb Carnival: On Ego

  If there’s one lesson I try to carry with me, it's that extremes are bad. And the goal should be to keep the pendulum swings to a minimum, and spend as much time as possible at the centre, where things are balanced. And you might think I’m saying this to you, but I’m actually talking to myself. Because the ego is still there, the inner dialogue continues, and the personal struggles will persist.

• Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0155 The front door and the elephant

  Of course the true crime is that filename. Every time I opened it I knew it was bad. So, improve it. Stick the ID in there: this is exactly what it's for.

  When the filename is 33.14 Customer data from store migration.xlsx, I can use that recent list all I like. Because every time I open the file I'm reinforcing where it is.

  This is exactly what be a better human time is for. Tidy up. Poke stress in the eye.

• Johnny Decimal ☛ 22.00.0154 Mitsu-bishi 9852

  Given that you can buy a pencil literally anywhere, I might not have needed to bring that many with me.

• Jeff Bridgforth ☛ Celebrating 20 years

  This week, my site is twenty years old! I do not know the exact date it launched but I do know it happened this week in 2005.

• Henrique Dias ☛ The Internet Phone Book

  When I got the e-mail notifying me it was back in stock, I did not hesitate and ordered it. It’s the first edition of the book, and I thought it’d also make a very nice table book, a way of initiating conversations and let others know a bit more of this personal web that exists.

• Science

  • Rahul Gopinath ☛ Learning Regular Languages with RPNI Algorithm

    Regular Positive and Negative Inference, RPNI for short, is a classical algorithm that allows us to determine the input specification from a set of positive and negative samples. It was introducd by Oncia and Garcia in 1992 1. The core idea of RPNI is to construct a Prefix Tree Acceptor (PTA, also called a Trie), then iteratively try and merge each state pair, and checking the resulting DFA against negative samples to verify that the resulting DFA is not overgenaralizing. Because the new DFA is produced by merging states within the DFA, it will continue to accept all existing positive samples. The negative samples provide the defense against overgeneralization. If any negative samples are accepted, the merging of the state pair is rejected. Continuing in this fashion, RPNI will compute the DFA that can accept all positive samples, and reject all negative samples.

  • Science Alert ☛ Experiment Reveals What Is Truly Burrowing Beneath Mars's Dunes Each Spring

    "It felt like I was watching the sandworms in the film Dune.”

  • Science Alert ☛ Can Organ Transplants Really Confer Eternal Youth? Here's The Science.

    The quest for immortality.

  • Science Alert ☛ Bats in The US Can Glow Ghostly Green, And Scientists Have No Idea Why

    Trick or treat?

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Want You to Stop Pouring Coffee Down Drains – Here's What to Do Instead

    Why is it such a problem?

  • Science Alert ☛ 'Off Switch' Discovery Could Help Clear Our Brains of a Common Parasite

    One in three of us have it.

  • Science Alert ☛ Drug Combination Boosted Lifespan of Mice by 73%, But Only For One Sex

    What's going on?

  • Science Alert ☛ Turning Point in Heart Health Occurs at 1 Key Age (It's Younger Than You'd Think)

    It's never too late.

  • Science Alert ☛ Southern Ocean Is Building a 'Burp' That Could Reignite Global Warming

    The ocean's hidden payback.

  • Science Alert ☛ DNA Finally Reveals What Really Killed Napoleon's Forces

    It's not what we thought.

• Career/Education

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Book of Making 2026 on sale now!

    It’s been over a year since we incorporated HackSpace magazine into Raspberry Pi Official Magazine. Each month, we continue to help you indulge your desire to make semi-useful things out of home electronics, microcontrollers, 3D printers, and the like. If you feel the need to indulge that desire to excess, look no further than the Book of Making 2026, on sale today.

  • Wired ☛ Are Kids Still Looking for Careers in Tech?

    WIRED talked to five high school seniors from across the country about their interest in STEM—and how they’re making sense of the future.

    These comments have been edited for length and clarity.

  • Mike Brock ☛ On My Writing Style

    This matters because I’m not just trying to inform you. I’m trying to build your capacity to think through complexity yourself. In a world where algorithmic manipulation and sophisticated propaganda are designed to fragment your coherent understanding of reality, I’m offering you cognitive technology—methods for constructing and maintaining frameworks that can resist designed confusion.

    That requires showing the actual work of thinking. How to hold multiple considerations in tension. How to test ideas against experience. How to notice when something doesn’t cohere with everything else you know. How to integrate reason and emotion, facts and values, analysis and intuition into frameworks robust enough to withstand epistemic assault.

    You cannot learn this from conclusions alone. You have to see the process.

• Hardware

  • CNX Software ☛ Review of Nextion 4.3-inch Edge Series HMI touch display

    Today, we’ll review the Nextion 4.3-inch Edge Series HMI touch display. The company has recently launched the new Edge Series HMI touch displays for IoT applications that require better user interaction. It also supports video and audio playback, and everything can be configured relatively easily by the user using Nextion Editor software, version 1.68.1 or higher.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Nexperia's China parent Wingtech declares cash-flow risk despite massive 280% profit surge - car production shutdowns loom as Dutch state tightens grip

    Wingtech, the Chinese parent company of Dutch chipmaker Nexperia, has warned investors of a potential cash flow squeeze if it fails to regain operational control of its European subsidiary.

  • Hackaday ☛ Examining The First Mechanical Calculator

    Blaise Pascal is known for a number of things, but we remember him best for the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator. [Chris Staecker] got a chance to take a close look at one, which is quite a feat since there were only about 20 made, and today we only know where nine of them wound up.

  • Hackaday ☛ VFETs Are (Almost) Solid State Tubes

    We always enjoy videos from [w2aew]. His recent entry looks at vertical or VFETs, which are, as he puts it, a JFET that thinks it is a triode. He clearly explains how the transistor works as a conductor unless you bias the gate to form a depletion zone.

  • Hackaday ☛ Record-Breaking Robots At Guinness World Records

    If you ever wanted to win a bar bet about a world record, you probably know about the Guinness book for World Records. Did you know, though, that there are some robots in that book? Guinness pointed some out in a recent post.

  • Science Alert ☛ Quantum Teleportation Was Achieved Over The Internet For The First Time

    "Nobody thought it was possible.”

  • Hackaday ☛ A 3D Printed 16mm Movie Camera

    The basic principles of a motion picture film camera should be well understood by most readers — after all, it’s been well over a hundred years since the Lumière brothers wowed 19th century Paris with their first films. But making one yourself is another matter entirely, as they are surprisingly complex and high-precision devices. This hasn’t stopped [Henry Kidman] from giving it a go though, and what makes his camera more remarkable is that it’s 3D printed.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Supercon 2025 Badge Is Built To Be Customized

    For anyone who’s joined us for previous years, you’ll know that badge hacking and modification are core to the Hackaday Supercon experience. While you’re of course free to leave the badge completely stock, we encourage attendees to tear it apart, learn how it works, and (hopefully) rebuild it into something unique. There are even prizes for the best hacks.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Straits Times ☛ Predators ‘slip through the cracks’ in Australian childcare centres

    Analysts say regulations have failed to keep up with the expansion of the childcare sector.

  • Kev Quirk ☛ Smartphones are not the enemy

    Just writing that last paragraph (in the office, on my lunch break) I’ve heard 4 different phones beep.

    Turn. Notifications. Off.

  • Buttondown LLC ☛ I'm taking a break

    So I'm taking off from Computer Things for the rest of the year. There might be some announcements and/or one or two short newsletters in the meantime but I won't be attempting a weekly cadence until 2026.

  • Allen Downey ☛ Cancer Survival Rates Are Misleading - Probably Overthinking It

    In fact, none of these inferences are correct.

    Let’s take them one at a time.

  • [Old] ABC ☛ When and how can choirs sing again without becoming 'super spreaders'?

    Someone vocalising an 'aah' sound followed by 10 seconds of normal breathing emits around 60 per cent more aerosols than 30 seconds of repeated coughing, research from 2009 found.

    It's also the way your mouth moves when you sing that makes it such an effective way to transfer the virus.

• Proprietary

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Microsoft's decision to axe backdoored Windows 10 is driving Fashion Company Apple PC sales growth — users buy Macs instead of Hey Hi (AI) PCs despite Microsoft’s push for Copilot+ PCs

    Counterpoint Research data shows a massive jump in Mac sales in the same quarter that support for Abusive Monopolist Microsoft backdoored Windows 10 ended.

  • Hackaday ☛ Spreadsheets Apple ][ Style

    It is hard to remember a time when no one had a spreadsheet. Sure, you had big paper ledgers if you were an accountant. But most people just scribbled their math on note paper or, maybe, an engineering pad. [Christopher Drum] wanted to look at what the state of the art in 1978 spreadsheet technology could do. So he ran VisiCalc.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Australia sues Abusive Monopolist Microsoft over ‘misleading’ Hey Hi (AI) offer

    The commission is seeking penalties, injunctions, consumer redress, and costs.

  • Futurism ☛ Meta Tells Employees Their Jobs Are Being Automated

    "We don't need as many roles in some areas as we once did."

  • CRN ☛ Amazon Looks To Lay Off 30,000 Workers, Almost 10 Percent Of Corporate Jobs: Reports

    Amazon Web Services parent Amazon.com is reportedly looking to cut as many as 30,000 corporate jobs, covering almost 10 percent of its 350,000 corporate employees, with emails to affected employees set to go out Tuesday.

    The cuts should hit every business within Amazon, including human resources, devices and services and operations, according to CNBC and Reuters reports Monday. The layoffs go beyond the 27,000 jobs Amazon cut back in 2022, regarded at the time as one of the Seattle-based cloud and artificial intelligence products vendor’s biggest layoff events in its history. Amazon also let go of 18,000 employees in 2023.

  • Seattle Times ☛ Amazon may lay off 30,000 corporate employees this week, Reuters reports

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Attackers bypass patch in deprecated Windows Server update tool

    Attackers are actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in Windows Server Update Services, bypassing a patch Microsoft issued earlier this month that failed to mitigate the issue affecting software versions dating back to 2012.

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Australia Sues Microsoft Over Misleading AI Offer

    The software giant is accused of making "false or misleading" statements to around 2.7 million Australians who subscribe by auto-renewal to Microsoft 365 plans, which include a suite of online Office services.

  • IT Wire ☛ Microsoft in court for allegedly misleading millions of Australians over Microsoft 365 subscriptions

    The ACCC alleges this information provided to subscribers was false or misleading because there was an undisclosed third option, the Microsoft 365 Personal or Family Classic plans, which allowed subscribers to retain the features of their existing plan, without Copilot, at the previous lower price.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ When you put your brand's mascot on the enemy's platform

    For those not as clued into the gaming space, this is similar in scale to when Sega first released a Sonic game for Nintendo, or if Nintendo ever released Mario Kart for PlayStation. Xbox is Halo, Halo is Xbox, they're impossible to separate in the long history of gaming, and yet the world has changed enough that Microsoft thinks its best move is to give Halo to everyone.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Futurism ☛ Guillermo del Toro on Using AI: “I’d Rather Die”

      "I am not interested, nor will I ever be interested."

    • [Old] Open Journal Systems ☛ Special Issue “Celebrating 60 Years of ELIZA? Critical Pasts and Futures of AI”

      Unlike the large language models of today, ELIZA could not generate long texts. It was a chat program that allowed users to interact with it, using text input. Its DOCTOR script simulated a psychotherapy scenario in which the program asked questions and users typed their responses. Then, ELIZA searched the answers for certain keywords and asked follow-up questions based on preconfigured building blocks. It also reformulated the answers into new questions or simply asked users to share more information.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ OpenAI’s new Atlas browser but I still don’t know what it’s for

      My impression is that it is little more than cynicism masquerading as software.

    • Pete Brown ☛ Step 2: ??? - Exploding Comma

      A lot of these claims are cynical rhetoric to keep the hype (and investment) flowing. But it seems like there are a bunch of people whom actually believe this stuff.

    • Doc Searls ☛ On em dashes and elipses

      What I am sure about is that em dashes are part of my style, and I'm not going to stop using them.

    • Alexandru Nedelcu ☛ 'AI' Sucks the Joy Out of Programming

      I now think that AI/LLMs suck the joy out of programming. I’ve used spicy auto-complete, as well as agents running in my IDE, in my CLI, or on GitHub’s server-side. I’ve been experimenting enough with LLM/AI-driven programming to have an opinion on it. And it kind of sucks.

    • Rlang ☛ Double Descent Explained

      I couldn’t find an equally good post with R code, and there seems to be a lot of misinformation about double descent online, so I thought I would write my own post. Instead of porting the Shtoff example, I also decided to create something slightly simpler. How simple can a model be but still exhibit the double descent phenomenon? To answer that, I need to explain what double descent is.

  • Social Control Media

    • El País ☛ Jennifer Aniston, star of ‘The Morning Show’: ‘Phones are these almighty algorithms that are just feeding people and dividing and dividing’

      Aniston replies firmly: “We really do.” She’s also concerned about phones, social media, and internet searches... “Phones are these almighty algorithms that are just feeding people and dividing and dividing, and you get taken up on a tangent, and you just don’t know what to believe. It’s quite a time.”

    • The Register UK ☛ X assures passkey reset is nothing to worry about

      "Security keys enrolled as a 2FA method are currently tied to the twitter.com domain. Re-enrolling your security key will associate them with x.com, allowing us to retire the Twitter domain."

      Physical security key currently tied to the twitter.com domain won't work when users attempt to authenticate from the x.com domain, so they must be re-enrolled in preparation for what sounds like a sunsetting of the Twitter domain.

    • Barry Hess ☛ Log Out Process for Various Social Networks

      What follows is the logout process for each of the major social networks and social media platforms. I’m sharing the process to log out via browser on your PC. Is this trivial? Yes, but I find it interesting how some networks make it not-so-obvious how to find the logout button. Would it be more helpful to show screenshots of the mobile browser/app logout process? Probably, but I’m not re-installing all of those apps!

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Sweden’s power grid operator confirms data breach claimed by ransomware gang

      State-owned Svenska kraftnät, which operates the country’s electricity transmission system, said the incident affected a “limited external file transfer solution” and did not disrupt Sweden’s power supply.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Private Flood Insurers Are Capitalizing on the Shutdown

    With the US government shutdown effectively paralyzing the National Flood Insurance Program, private firms such as Neptune Insurance Holdings are seizing the opportunity to push for the near-total privatization of flood insurance.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • TechSpot ☛ Wi-Fi can accurately identify people, even if they aren't carrying a phone or computer

      According to a recent study (PDF) from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, any Wi-Fi router that supports Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) or newer can be used to observe people within range. The findings raise serious privacy concerns.

      The researchers introduced a new identity-inference attack called BFId, which exploits beamforming – a technique standardized with Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac). The attack is possible with commercially available hardware and tracks people rather than the devices they carry, bypassing software-based security measures.

    • India Times ☛ Microsoft Teams turns snitch, will tell your boss if you’re in office or not

      Microsoft’s Teams platform will soon track employees’ office presence using Wi-Fi signals, automatically updating work location status. The move, rolling out globally in December, has sparked privacy concerns and online backlash, as staff fear constant surveillance. The policy supports Microsoft’s push to increase in-office work and real-time collaboration.

    • EFF ☛ Joint Statement on the UN Cybercrime Convention: EFF and Global Partners Urge Governments Not to Sign

      The Convention obligates states to establish broad electronic surveillance powers to investigate and cooperate on a wide range of crimes—including those unrelated to information and communication systems—without adequate human rights safeguards. It requires governments to collect, obtain, preserve, and share electronic evidence with foreign authorities for any “serious crime”—defined as an offense punishable under domestic law by at least four years’ imprisonment (or a higher penalty).

    • Techdirt ☛ Are Web Browsers With Integrated Chatbots A Paradigm Shift – Or Just Privacy And Security Disasters Waiting To Happen?

      Browser memories are potentially a privacy nightmare, since they can hold all kinds of sensitive information about users — and their browsing habits. OpenAI is clearly aware of this, hence the numerous options to control exactly what is remembered. The problem is that many users can’t be bothered making privacy-preserving tweaks to how they browse. Browser memories could certainly make online activities easier and more efficient, which is likely to encourage people to turn them on without much thought for possible consequences later on. The same is true of the other important optional feature of Atlas: agent mode.

    • The Register UK ☛ One week to opt out or be fodder for LinkedIn AI training

      If you thought living in Europe, Canada, or Hong Kong meant you were protected from having LinkedIn scrape your posts to train its AI, think again. You have a week to opt out before the Microsoft subsidiary assumes you're fine with it.

    • 404 Media ☛ Con Edison Refuses to Say How ICE Gets Its Customers’ Data

      Court records show Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a part of ICE, and the FBI obtained Con Edison user data. The utility provider refuses to say whether law enforcement needs a warrant to access its data.

  • Confidentiality

    • Wired ☛ Hundreds of People With ‘Top Secret’ Clearance Exposed by House Democrats’ Website

      The sensitive personal details of more than 450 people holding “top secret” US government security clearances were left exposed online, new research seen by WIRED shows. The people’s details were included in a database of more than 7,000 individuals who have applied for jobs over the last two years with Democrats in the United States House of Representatives.

    • [Old] Niel Madden ☛ A few comments on ‘age’

      Update: I’ve updated the section on Cryptographic Doom at the end of the article after clarifications from the age author. That specific criticism was based on my misreading of the age spec.

      Age is a new tool for encrypting files, intended to be a more modern successor to PGP/GPG for file encryption. This is a welcome development, as PGP has definitely been showing its age recently. On the face of it, age looks like a good replacement using modern algorithms. But I have a few concerns about its design.

    • [Old] Niel Madden ☛ Public key authenticated encryption and why you want it (Part I)

      If you read or watch any recent tutorial on symmetric (or “secret key”) cryptography, one lesson should be clear: in 2018 if you want to encrypt something you’d better use authenticated encryption. This not only hides the content of a message, but also ensures that the message was sent by one of the parties that has access to the shared secret key and that it hasn’t been tampered with. It turns out that without these additional guarantees (integrity and authenticity), the contents of a message often does not remain secret for long either.

    • [Old] Niel Madden ☛ Public key authenticated encryption and why you want it (Part II)

      In some cases, we may want to explicitly identify the sender of all messages. Perhaps we want to be able to hold them accountable for their actions, or be able to prove to a 3rd party (such as a judge or jury) who said what. In other cases, we may prefer that this not be possible – we want to know who we are talking to at the time, but would prefer that nobody be able to prove who said what afterwards. Digital signatures are often used in the first case, while the Signal messenger takes the latter approach. It is therefore important to remember that in PKAE there is not a single trust model or single definition of authentication in play, but rather a spectrum of possibilities. In all cases, we are trying to answer the basic question should I trust this message?

    • [Old] Niel Madden ☛ Public key authenticated encryption and why you want it (Part III)

      In Part I, we saw that authenticated encryption is usually the security goal you want in both the symmetric and public key settings. In Part II, we then looked at some ways of achieving public key authenticated encryption (PKAE), and discovered that it is not straightforward to build from separate signing and encryption methods, but it is relatively simple for Diffie-Hellman. In this final part, we will look at how existing standards approach the problem and how they could be improved.

• Defence/Aggression

  • France24 ☛ Easier to ‘break into museums than a jewellery shop’: Louvre heist highlights security gaps

    Suspects have been arrested over the brazen jewellery heist at the Louvre, just as one of them was about to fly out of France, the Paris prosecutor said on Sunday. On 19 October, four hooded thieves stole eight precious pieces worth an estimated $102 million from the museum’s collection, exposing security lapses at the world’s most-visited museum. Struggling to manage an ever-growing influx of tourists, the Louvre faces unique challenges. “All of these elements together have made it maybe much easier for thieves to break into museums than it would be to break into a jewellery shop,” FRANCE 24’s Philip Turle said in an analysis.

  • France24 ☛ Four killed as Cameroon security forces clash with opposition protesters

    Four people were killed on Sunday in clashes between security forces and opposition protesters in Cameroon’s largest city, Douala, the regional governor said. Supporters of opposition candidate Issa Tchiroma defied a protest ban in several cities ahead of Monday’s expected announcement of presidential election results.

  • The Strategist ☛ Inside the minds of power: psychological analysis in security

    Whether we realise it or not, many actors in international relations already apply psychology—however imperfectly—when trying to predict how other actors will behave.

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ “Putin is the biggest child kidnapper in the world”

    One of the war crimes for which the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, the Presidential Commissioner for Children’s Rights, is the forced deportation of Ukrainian children. How many such cases has your organization documented? How many children have been successfully returned so far?

  • Deccan Chronicle ☛ Meta and TikTok to Obey Australia Under-16 Social Media Ban

    Australia will from December 10 force social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok to remove users under the age of 16.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ ICE detains British Muslim political commentator Sami Hamdi at San Francisco airport

    Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, announced on social media that Hamdi’s visa had been revoked, that he was being held by Immigration and Customs Enforcement until he could be removed. In her post, she also made unsubstantiated claims that Hamdi supported terrorism.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Data journalists start news site to track extremist movements

    The publication is an outgrowth, Lee said, of the de-emphasis of reporting on the far right at many American news organizations. Publications that had previously dedicated resources to writing about extremist political movements, like BuzzFeed News, Vice, The Daily Beast, and others, have since cut back or (in BuzzFeed’s case) stopped doing news altogether. Lee hopes that Decoherence Media can replace some of that reporting.

  • The Register UK ☛ Signal's Meredith Whitaker decries dependence on AWS

    Whittaker said that the concentration of power among cloud hyperscalers (AWS, Google, and Microsoft) is less widely understood than she expected, which bodes poorly for efforts to craft realistic strategies to change this dynamic.

  • Micah F Lee ☛ Practical Defenses Against Technofascism

    I gave the Saturday morning keynote at BSidesPDX! I spoke honestly and frankly about the terrifying reality that Americans are facing under Trump's fascist regime, alongside practical advice for communities to defend themselves.

    Watch my talk below. Of if you prefer reading articles over watching video, I've added a copy of my whole talk below the video, mildly edited, and with added links to my sources.

  • The Straits Times ☛ With Convicted Felon’s Asia trip, speculation mounts of a meeting with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un

    A senior White House official said there were no current plans for the two leaders to meet.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Ahead of Convicted Felon-Xi meeting, China says H-6K bombers flew near Taiwan

    A group of Chinese H-6K bombers recently flew near Taiwan to practice “confrontation drills”.

  • NYPost ☛ US Navy Sea Hawk helicopter, F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet go down in separate South China Sea incidents

    Two US Navy aircraft from USS Nimitz crashed in the South China Sea; all five crew rescued safely.

  • The Strategist ☛ For air-and-missile defence, Israel offers the economic solutions

    An Israeli solution may offer the best value-for-money for the integrated air-and-missile defence (IAMD) capability that Australia urgently needs.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ A big dam disaster Russian authorities urge evacuation after Ukrainian strike on Belgorod dam sparks flood risk — Meduza

• Environment

  • DeSmog ☛ Look Out for These 8 Big Ag Greenwashing Terms at COP30

    But advocates for ambitious food system transformation will have their work cut out in Belém, where they will run up against entrenched opposition led by Brazilian agribusiness, which has been preparing its lines of attack throughout 2025.

    The agriculture sector is under pressure to clean up. It produces a cocktail of harmful and potent climate-heating emissions — from the nitrous oxide emitted by fertilizers, to the rising volumes of methane released from the digestive tracts of the world’s 3.5 billion cows, sheep, and goats.

  • France24 ☛ Valencia flood anniversary: Protesters demand regional leader’s resignation

    Tens of thousands of people took to the streets of Spain's eastern city of Valencia on Saturday to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people, and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional leader Carlos Mazon to resign over what they say was the slow response to one of Europe's deadliest natural disasters in decades.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Futurism ☛ Chinese Company Launches Wind-Powered Data Center at the Bottom of the Sea

      Captain Nemo is that you?

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Hong Kong collects black boxes after deadly plane crash

      The black box flight recorders from an aircraft involved in a crash that killed two people at Hong Kong airport earlier this week have been recovered, authorities said Saturday. The Boeing cargo plane veered off the runway during landing early Monday morning, then hit a security patrol car and skidded into the sea.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Forget planes. Meet the man who will only travel by train

      "What got me hooked were school trips by train to the south of France and to Russia,” he recalls. "There was scenery, there were people, it had a reality that air travel doesn't have."

      Later, to earn money during his studies, he worked for a travel agency, issuing train tickets. "I was doing what I loved. I knew all the connections since I had taken them myself,” he remembers.

      He went on to manage stations in London and work for the UK transport department.

      And then one day in 2001, he went into a press store at London's Marylebone station and bought a magazine about how to set up websites using html. "Probably the best £2.95 ($3.96) I have ever spent in my life," he recalls.

    • The Walrus ☛ A Ghost Fleet of Tankers Is Keeping Russia’s War Machine Afloat. The West Can’t Stop It

      What the ships carry is Russian crude oil bound for overseas buyers, especially China and India. Their purpose: to bankroll Russian president Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. They are war enablers, sanction evaders, flouters of maritime law, an environmental disaster waiting to happen. They comprise, it is estimated, one-fifth of the world’s tankers. When Moscow feels this lifeline is threatened, it takes military steps to defend it. Actions have included fighter jets and naval escorts.

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ White elephant? Hardly – Snowy 2.0 will last 150 years and work with batteries to push out gas

      It will have five times more storage than all of Australia’s other pumped hydro and grid batteries combined, its capital cost is five times lower than batteries per unit of energy storage, and its lifetime is ten times longer than batteries. Our calculations show Snowy 2.0 will cost about one cent per day per Australian over its 150-year lifetime, assuming the final cost is between $15 billion and $18 billion.

    • Thomas Rigby ☛ Rover P6 3500 V8 Police Car

      I don't really like cars.

      They are a tool, in my eyes. A means to get a specific job done not something to be fawned over or evangelised about. I didn't even learn to drive until I was in my forties.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ Cemeteries: How the Dead Protect the Wild

    • YLE ☛ Finland's Saimaa ringed seal populations continue to grow

      It said that Saimaa ringed seal populations continue to grow rapidly in the Puruvesi and Suur-Saimaa lakes in Eastern Finland.

• Finance

  • Pro Publica ☛ Phoenix Mail Room for Homeless People Loses Funding

    Carl Steiner walked to the window of a small gray building near downtown Phoenix and gave a worker his name. He stepped away with a box and a cellphone bill.

    The box is what Steiner had come for: It contained black and red Reebok sneakers to use in his new warehouse job.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Senators Propose Sweeping Changes to Generic Drug Oversight

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Straits Times ☛ German foreign minister to meet India's Goyal, Nato's Rutte after postponing China trip

    India's Goyal is in Brussels for trade policy talks.

  • The Straits Times ☛ India and China resume direct flights as ties improve

    The neighbours remain strategic rivals competing for regional influence.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Dying breed: Chongqing’s iconic porters struggle for relevance as economy shifts

    "Bang bang jun" are being phased out, but they were once a common sight in China’s largest and most mountainous city.

  • FAIR ☛ ‘These Changes Are Reducing Our Power to Effect Positive Change for Families’: CounterSpin interview with Cara Brumfield on erasing federal data

    Janine Jackson interviewed the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Cara Brumfield about erasing federal data for the October 17, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

  • NDTV ☛ Amazon To Lay Off 30,000 Corporate Employees In Largest Job Cut Since 2022: Report

    The figure represents a small percentage of Amazon's 1.55 million total employees, but nearly 10% of its roughly 350,000 corporate employees. This would mark Amazon's largest job cut since late 2022, when it started to eliminate around 27,000 positions.

  • Mint Press News ☛ Hi-Tech Holocaust: How Microsoft Aids The Gaza Genocide

    MintPress has detailed the deep collaboration between the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and Amazon, Google, TikTok, Apple, Palantir, and Oracle, but Microsoft’s relationship with the government and armed forces of Israel is potentially the closest, leading then-CEO Steve Ballmer to state that “Microsoft is as much an Israeli company as an American company.” MintPress explores the decades-long partnership between Microsoft and Israel, and the employees trying to break that marriage from the inside.

  • The Register UK ☛ Python Foundation rejects $1.5M grant with no-DEI strings

    The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has walked away from a $1.5 million government grant and you can blame the Trump administration's war on woke for effectively weakening some open source security.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Charter to Cut 1,200 Jobs

    The cuts are primarily in corporate and back-office functions both at the company’s Stamford, CT, headquarters and around the country. No sales or service employees will be affected, the source said.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Eugene Debs and All Of Us

    Ever since the enlightenment, people disillusioned with religion are always bemoaning the fact that there does not seem to be anything quite adequate to replace its cultural role. Well, why not Debs? Why not replace it with the collective veneration of Eugene V. Debs, the famed American union leader, socialist, and rabble rouser? It could work. The man was a prolific writer, and turned a phrase at least as well as the guys who wrote the Bible. Debs was born and raised in Terre Haute, and his home there is now a museum. (He is the town’s second-biggest claim to fame, after the fact that it was where Larry Bird played his college ball.) For the past 60 years, the Debs Foundation has put on an annual banquet to honor some individual of the left who carries on the great man’s legacy. This year, the honoree was Bernie Sanders. The stakes felt a little higher. The moment felt more urgent. If ever there was a time to bring back all-American prairie socialism, it is now.

  • Daily Kos ☛ Watch the ad driving Trump mad

    The ad accurately portrays Reagan as being against tariffs, which are a tax on imports and are eventually shouldered by consumers in the form of higher prices.

  • [Old] Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum ☛ Radio Address to the Nation on Free and Fair Trade | Ronald Reagan

    Now, that message of free trade is one I conveyed to Canada's leaders a few weeks ago, and it was warmly received there. Indeed, throughout the world there's a growing realization that the way to prosperity for all nations is rejecting protectionist legislation and promoting fair and free competition. Now, there are sound historical reasons for this. For those of us who lived through the Great Depression, the memory of the suffering it caused is deep and searing. And today many economic analysts and historians argue that high tariff legislation passed back in that period called the Smoot-Hawley tariff greatly deepened the depression and prevented economic recovery.

    You see, at first, when someone says, ``Let's impose tariffs on foreign imports,'' it looks like they're doing the patriotic thing by protecting American products and jobs. And sometimes for a short while it works -- but only for a short time. What eventually occurs is: First, homegrown industries start relying on government protection in the form of high tariffs. They stop competing and stop making the innovative management and technological changes they need to succeed in world markets. And then, while all this is going on, something even worse occurs. High tariffs inevitably lead to retaliation by foreign countries and the triggering of fierce trade wars. The result is more and more tariffs, higher and higher trade barriers, and less and less competition. So, soon, because of the prices made artificially high by tariffs that subsidize inefficiency and poor management, people stop buying. Then the worst happens: Markets shrink and collapse; businesses and industries shut down; and millions of people lose their jobs.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Straits Times ☛ Japan grapples with deepfake pornography, with laws yet to catch up

      To create elaborate images using generative AI, users need only provide written instructions.

    • Wired ☛ Chatbots Are Pushing Sanctioned Russian Propaganda

      Researchers from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) claim that Russian propaganda has targeted and exploited data voids—where searches for real-time data provide few results from legitimate sources—to promote false and misleading information. Almost one-fifth of responses to questions about Russia’s war in Ukraine, across the four chatbots they tested, cited Russian state-attributed sources, the ISD research claims.

    • Wired ☛ Elon Musk's Grokipedia Pushes Far-Right Talking Points

      When we finally got access to it, WIRED found that the online encyclopedia contained lengthy entries generated by AI. While many of the pages WIRED saw on launch day appeared fairly similar to Wikipedia in terms of tone and content, a number of notable Grokipedia entries denounced the mainstream media, highlighted conservative viewpoints, and sometimes perpetuated historical inaccuracies.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Semafor Inc ☛ CPB hits back against NPR in court

    In August, CPB, which has long served as the vessel for distributing federal funding to NPR and PBS, said it is shutting down following the Trump administration and congressional Republicans’ decision to claw back federal funding for public media. CPB announced plans to grant some of its remaining funds to Public Media Infrastructure, a new consortium of public radio stations that includes New York Public Radio, PRX, and the Minnesota-based American Public Media.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Shake Shack wants you to shit yourself to death

    But beyond surveillance and price-gouging, app-based ordering offers corporations another way to screw you: they can force you into binding arbitration. Under binding arbitration, you "voluntarily" waive your right to have your grievances heard by a judge. Instead, the corporation hires a fake judge, called an "arbitrator," who hears your case and then a rebuttal from the company that signs their paycheck and decides who is guilty. It will not surprise you to learn that arbitrators overwhelmingly find in favor of their employers and even when they rule in favor of a wronged customer, the penalties they impose on their bosses add up to little more than a wrist-slap: [...]

    This binding arbitration bullshit was illegal until the 2010s, when Antonin Scalia authored a string of binding arbitration decisions for the Supreme Court, opening the hellmouth for the mass imposition of arbitration on anyone that a business could stick an "I agree" button in front of: [...]

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ California Gets Bipartisan on Copper Theft

    Amid a statewide surge in copper wire theft and vandalism targeting public infrastructure, California Governor Gavin Newsom last week signed AB 476 into law. The legislation, passed with unanimous bipartisan support, is designed to strengthen enforcement tools, protect California’s critical infrastructure, and hold scrap metal dealers accountable. Inside Towers recently reported on thieves breaking into a heavily fortified AT&T (NYSE: T) underground vault in Los Angeles, cutting 32 copper cables, disrupting phone, [Internet], and even 911 service for thousands of residents.

    “Copper theft does not just cost money – it undermines neighborhood safety and public trust,” said Assemblymember González, who sponsored the bill. “This commonsense legislation gives law enforcement and cities additional tools to track illegal transactions, stop thieves, and hold bad actors accountable. In California, we are turning the lights back on.”

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • PC World ☛ Did PCs win the console war? The next Xbox will run Windows, report claims

    Nevertheless, Windows Central’s sources seem to believe that you might able to tap that full-fledged Windows if you so choose. “Similarly, the Xbox Full Screen Experience will allow you to exit out to full Windows if you want to, and run competing stores like Steam, Epic Games Store, Microsoft’s own Battle.net, the Riot Client, and indeed anything else you want,” the site said. “Indeed, you could run Adobe CC or Microsoft Office on the next Xbox, if you so choose.”

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Futurism ☛ Bernie Sanders Calls for Breakup of OpenAI

  Whether OpenAI is an anti-competitive monopoly in need of breaking up remains a point of contention. Plenty of alternatives to its AI models exist, including Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV Man Settles Lawsuit For $44.5m Yet Couldn't Pay His Attorney

    A lawsuit filed last November by DISH and Sling TV targeted Richard Moy and CLVPN LLC. It was alleged that Moy illegally gained access to the companies' servers and redistributed their TV content to 450,000 users. To mitigate customer concerns that his pirate IPTV service might be unlawful, Moy allegedly claimed law enforcement affiliation. Unable to pay his attorney in August, Moy has just agreed to settle the lawsuit for a "conservative" $44.5 million.

  • News AU ☛ Labor mulls copyright protections amid AI data-feeding frenzy

    Labor has ruled out a text and data mining carve out ahead of talks with representatives of Australian creatives in Canberra as it mulls ways to force tech titans to pay for the content they feed their data ravenous artificial intelligence models.

    From artists to journalists, the question of how to get a bite of the unknown billions of dollars AI models generate for their big tech backers has long weighed on the minds of those that create content for a living.