Leftovers

• Makoism ☛ Are We Having Fun Yet?

  As I approach 55, I've realized I've forgotten what it's like to see the world with the eyes of childlike curiosity. While I plan to delve deeper into curiosity itself in a future post, I wanted to focus on one small yet vital aspect of it that helped me this week: having some pure, silly fun.

• Kev Quirk ☛ Archive or Delete?

  When it comes to email, I’m extremely anal. I’m a zero inbox kinda guy - my inbox is a place for emails to temporarily live before I deal with them. Once they’re dealt with, they either get archived or deleted.

• Tom's Hardware ☛ 37 years ago this week, the Morris worm infected 10% of the Internet within 24 hours — worm slithered out and sparked a new era in cybersecurity

  This week in 1988, Cornell graduate student Robert Tappan Morris unleashed his eponymous worm upon the Internet. The wave of infections grew to 10% of the entire Internet within 24 hours, causing astronomically expensive damage for the time. However, the pioneering Morris worm malware wasn’t made with malice, says an FBI retrospective on the “programming error.” It was designed to gauge the size of the Internet, resulting in a classic case of unintended consequences.

• Science

  • Scoop News Group ☛ If you are reading this online, you can thank universities

    That moment was only possible thanks to years of collaboration and consistent federal funding. It is one example of how the partnership between government and higher education has served as an indispensable engine of American prosperity. There are many others: the polio vaccine that saved countless children from a lifetime of disability and pain, the breakthrough that made FM radio possible, the theoretical groundwork that created artificial intelligence and more.

    Universities are the only institutions able to pursue the bold, ambitious research that leads to national progress — and that pursuit of knowledge provides the foundation for our most transformative developments. These advancements affect the lives of virtually every American and expand our entire economy. Without universities, you would not have access to the smartphone or the browser that you are using to read this article. Tens of millions of Americans would not be employed in today’s $4.9 trillion digital economy. Millions who have received medical treatments that originated in university labs might not be alive at all.

  • SICP ☛ When did people favor composition over inheritance? | Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers

    The phrase “favor composition over inheritance” has become one of those thought-terminating cliches in software design, and I always like to take a deeper look at those to understand where they come from and what ideas we’re missing if we just take the phrase at face value without engaging with the discussion that led to it.

    This is one of those aphorisms with a definite origin story (compare with Aphorism Considered Harmful for an example where the parts have clear origins but the whole does not): it’s the second object-oriented design principle in the Design Patterns book from the “Gang of Four” Gamma, Helm, Johnson, and Vlissides. Well, sort of: [...]

• Career/Education

  • The Indiana Capital Chronicle ☛ 3,000 children repeating third grade under new Indiana literacy requirement

    Data released Wednesday by the Indiana Department of Education showed 3.6% of the 84,000 children who took the statewide IREAD exam were retained in third grade under the first enforcement of a requirement approved by the Legislature in 2024.

    Those 3,040 retained students are more than seven times the 412 children held back in third grade two years ago.

  • Zimbabwe ☛ All Set for the TechnoMag Annual Tech Convergence Fora (Press Release)

    The stage is set for the 2nd edition of the TechnoMag’s Tech Convergence Fora (TCF), a pivotal ICT consultative stakeholder forum dedicated to finding lasting solutions, addressing sector-wide challenges, and embracing emerging technological opportunities.

• Hardware

  • GamingOnLinux ☛ NVIDIA adding lots of titles to GeForce NOW during November | GamingOnLinux

    NVIDIA have revealed a whole lot is coming to their cloud gaming service GeForce NOW during November 2025, so here's everything you need to know.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Alabama commission weighs security concerns, law enforcement needs around drones

    ALEA also uses drones for storm damage assessments, pre-raid planning and hostage negotiation. A significant portion of the agency’s fleet consists of drones made by Da-Jiang Innovations, a company based in Shenzhen, China.

    Companies in China have cornered about 92% of the state and local first-responder market, according to the Association for Uncrewed Vehicle Systems International, a trade association for the industry.

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ The 1994 IBM PC Invoice

    In 1994, my late father-in-law bought a new computer. That then brand new sparkling piece of hardware now is my 31 year old 80486 retro PC. When he gifted it to me in 2020, he also handed over the original invoice, as if the warranty was still valid. Also, who saves a twenty something year old piece of paper that becomes obsolete after two years? I’m glad that he did, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to write this.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Dave Farquhar discusses the Compaq Portable

    I can’t recommend The Silicon Underground blog highly enough if you’re interested in retrocomputers. Dave Farquhar writes well-researched articles on all manner of topics; I find myself learning something new even for hardware and software I previously though I understood.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Can Visiting an Art Gallery Lower Your Stress Levels and Improve Your Health?

    The gallery group appeared to benefit from viewing the artworks. After the session, their heart rate variability patterns were more dynamic, and their cortisol levels fell by an average of 22 percent. Pro-inflammatory cytokines—proteins linked to pain, fever and chronic diseases—also dropped.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Americans Are Being Crushed by Health Care Premiums

    Millions of Americans with Affordable Care Act plans are facing devastating health care costs after Republicans failed to renew pandemic-era extended insurance tax credits. Meanwhile, major insurers are raking in extravagant profits.

  • New Yorker ☛ The Shutdown of U.S.A.I.D. Has Already Killed Hundreds of Thousands

    I spent my last days at U.S.A.I.D. in meetings with our civil- and foreign-service leaders, thanking them. Their work with partner countries had helped to contain twenty-one outbreaks of deadly disease, sustain Ukraine’s health system after Russia’s invasion, combat H.I.V., tuberculosis, and polio, and reduce maternal and child deaths worldwide. On a budget of just twenty-four dollars per American—out of the fifteen thousand dollars in taxes paid per person last year—they had saved lives at an almost unimaginable scale. An independent, peer-reviewed analysis in The Lancet estimated that U.S.A.I.D. assistance had saved ninety-two million lives over two decades.

  • Vox ☛ Brick, Month Offline, and the many ways to quit your smartphone addiction

    The local movement is going national. There’s now a website and an option to join a cohort from anywhere in the United States. For $100, you get the Dumbphone 1, which is really just a TCL flip phone; a new phone number with a 404 area code; and a curriculum of sorts to guide you through the month. There are also weekly dial-in radio programs that take the place of the in-person meetings. It all smacks of the same nostalgia that led to the resurgence of CDs and the return of compact digital cameras. The idea of a piece of technology that does one thing and does not take over our entire attention span is certainly appealing.

• Proprietary

  • The Register UK ☛ Cisco warns of 'new attack variant' battering firewalls

    The new attacks cause unpatched firewalls to continually reload, leading to denial-of-service conditions, and are the latest in a series of strikes against vulnerable devices that have been ongoing since May.

  • The Register UK ☛ Gootloader malware back for the attack, serves up ransomware

    Gootloader JavaScript malware, commonly used to deliver ransomware, is back in action after a period of reduced activity.

  • Dark Reading ☛ Nikkei Suffers Breach Via Slack Compromise

    Nikkei, based in Tokyo, owns several newspapers, television stations, and media outlets, including the Financial Times. In its breach disclosure, the company said an "unauthorized external login" occurred in its Slack workspace.

  • Niels Provos ☛ Ear Training App

    The app works well on both desktop and mobile. I’m not sure yet whether I’ll extend it further, but it does what I need for now. If you try it out and find bugs or have feature requests, please reach out.

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Will the AI bubble burst as investors grow wary of returns?

      "The vast bet on AI infrastructure assumes surging usage, yet multiple US surveys show adoption has actually declined since the summer," Carl-Benedikt Frey, professor of AI & work at the UK's University of Oxford, told DW. "Unless new, durable use cases emerge quickly, something will give — and the bubble could burst."

      The US Census Bureau, which surveys 1.2 million US companies every fortnight, found that AI-tool usage at firms with more than 250 employees dropped from nearly 14% in June to under 12% in August.

    • Futurism ☛ Professors Aghast as Class Caught Cheating "Sincerely" Apologizes in the Worst Possible Way

      It’s the latest stupefying example of how AI has irreversibly transformed education, and undoubtedly for the worse. It’s not just the tech’s effortless automation that’s so alarming, robbing students of the challenge of actually having to use their brain to think through a problem; its very existence has fostered a climate of distrust, where the relationship between pupil and professor is clouded by suspicion and resentment. The professor must constantly be suspicious of a student using AI to cheat. And the student resents being subjected to this scrutiny, sometimes unfairly. Many have been wrongly accused of using AI — accusations that themselves are sometimes made with AI tools.

    • The Register UK ☛ Agents of misfortune: The world isn't ready for AI agents

      Software agents and human action are not interchangeable. In the context of online interaction, there are technical differences between the way agentic systems and people browse the web that translate into cost differences. Software may consume computing and network resources at a different rate than human-operated browsing, and data exchanged during that interaction may have different value. And third parties involved in this process want to know whether they are serving ads or collecting analytics data from machines or people.

    • Dan McQuillan ☛ Not the digital transformation you planned for: AI accelerationism versus decomputing

      Massive institutional and financial buy-in is failing to conceal AI's character as an already-broken technology trying to fix a broken system. While AI's imaginaries are far-right-friendly and accelerationist, the material consequences include a re-centring of high energy consumption as a sign of progress.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Oxford pretends AI benchmarks are science, not marketing

      Chatbot vendors routinely make up a new benchmark, then brag how well their hot new chatbot does on it. Like that time OpenAI’s o3 model trounced the FrontierMath benchmark, and it’s just a coincidence that OpenAI paid for the benchmark and got access to the questions ahead of time.

      Every new model will be trained hard against all the benchmarks. There is no such thing as real world performance — there’s only benchmark numbers.

    • Devansh Batham ☛ On AI Slop vs OSS Security

      A typical AI slop report will reference function names that don't exist in the codebase. The AI has seen similar function names in its training data and invents plausible sounding variations. It will describe memory operations that would indeed be problematic if they existed as described, but which bear no relationship to how the code actually works.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ California backs down on AI laws so more tech leaders don't flee the state

      Assembly Bill 1064 would have barred companion chatbot operators from making these AI systems available to minors unless the chatbots weren’t “foreseeably capable” of certain conduct, including encouraging a child to engage in self-harm. Newsom said he supported the goal, but feared it would unintentionally bar minors from using AI tools and learning how to use technology safely.

    • Kevin Beaumont ☛ CyberSlop — meet the new threat actor, MIT and Safe Security

      Cybersecurity vendors peddling nonsense isn’t new, but lately we have a new dimension — Generative AI. This has allowed vendors — and educators — to peddle cyberslop for profit.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI gets 45% of news wrong — but readers still trust it

      Chatbots fail most with current news stories that are moving fast. They’re also really prone to making up quotes. Anything in quotes probably isn’t the words the person actually said.

      7% of news consumers ask a chatbot for their news, and that’s 15% of readers under 25. And just over a third — though they don’t give the actual percentage number — say they trust AI summaries, and about half of those under 35. People pick convenience first.

  • Social Control Media

    • Atlantic Council ☛ Gen Z protests have spread to seven countries. What do they all have in common?

      For starters, six of the seven countries score well above their respective regional averages in the political rights component of the Freedom Index, indicating that these countries protect freedom of association, expression, and access to information [sic] better than their neighbors. The only exception is Peru, which only recently saw its political rights score dip below the Latin America and the Caribbean regional average.

    • PC World ☛ You can finally play Fortnite on Snapdragon laptops

      PC gaming has long been pretty rough on Arm-based machines and blame has been thrown in every which direction for the state of things, with Arm saying it’s the responsibility of developers. This milestone could end up being a crucial step towards a better PC gaming experience on Arm as a whole, though it is still just one step.

    • France24 ☛ Google review blackmail targets small businesses across Europe

      Small businesses worldwide are being targeted by scammers using fake Google Maps reviews to extort money. The fraudsters post one-star reviews – ever-more convincing thanks to AI – then demand payment to take them down. FRANCE 24 investigated one scheme targeting businesses in France and Spain.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Nevada Current ☛ State says no ransom paid in cyber attack

      About 90% percent of the data has been recovered, while the rest “is not required to restore essential services state systems and is being reviewed on a risk-basis,” the report says.

      Although the cyber attack wasn’t detected until August, the “threat actor” had infiltrated state systems three months earlier, “escalating their access” and ultimately causing “a system outage that resulted in multiple virtual machines going offline,” according to the report issued by the Governor’s Technology Office.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Futurism ☛ Authorities Baffled as They Genuinely Can't Figure Out Arrested Man's Actual Identity

      Initially, investigators at the Queens district attorney’s office charged him as Carl Avinger. But in March, they got a call from a man who had seen the case in the news saying he was the real Carl Avinger, and that the man they arrested had stolen his identity.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ EFF Teams Up With AV Comparatives to Test Android Stalkerware Detection by Major Antivirus Apps

      EFF has, for many years, raised the alarm about the proliferation of stalkerware—commercially-available apps designed to be installed covertly on another person’s device and exfiltrate data from that device without their knowledge. In particular, we have urged the makers of anti-virus products for Android phones to improve their detection of stalkerware and call it out explicitly to users when it is found. In 2020 and 2021, AV Comparatives ran tests to see how well the most popular anti-virus products detected stalkerware from many different vendors. The results were mixed, with some high-scoring companies and others that had alarmingly low detection rates. Since malware detection is an endless game of cat and mouse between anti-virus companies and malware developers, we felt that the time was right to take a more up-to-date snapshot of how well the anti-virus companies are performing. We’ve teamed up with the researchers at AV Comparatives to test the most popular anti-virus products for Android to see how well they detect the most popular stalkerware products in 2025.

    • Sinclair Inc ☛ Nevada's Rosen accuses US senator of stalking her staff to collect car info

      "Would it surprise you that I got the VIN numbers of every one of my Democrat colleagues' vehicles and found that none of them bought any of the additional safety technologies on their cars?" Moreno asked.

    • Washington Examiner ☛ Rosen accuses Moreno of tracking her team's VINs in fiery hearing

      He said that Democrats were hypocritical for mandating additional driver assistance technologies when they didn’t have such technologies for their cars.

    • Wired ☛ Zohran Mamdani Just Inherited the NYPD Surveillance State

      One area where Mamdani is guaranteed to clash with Tisch is on the NYPD’s massive technical surveillance apparatus and intelligence-gathering methods, which have metastasized since 9/11 to levels that rival the capabilities of a midsize country. More than one observer has characterized the NYPD as operating more like a US intelligence agency—at one point, the department’s Intelligence Division was run by a CIA veteran, and at least one CIA analyst was embedded at NYPD—than a police department.

    • Android Police ☛ YouTube age verification AI is flagging adults as children (again)

      YouTube is unleashing a second wave of age-gating restrictions, and it is seriously angering some adult users on the platform.

      For those unaware, the streaming giant's AI-powered age-detection system launched in the US earlier this summer, but it wasn't until September that the system started flagging users en masse. The fact that YouTube wants to prevent young users from accessing adult material on the platform isn't really the problem here — rather, YouTube should be commended for the effort. The problem is that the platform is, by mistake or not, flagging adult users as underaged ones.

    • PC World ☛ 'Memories will win': Qualcomm partnership unveils superpowered AI photo search

      Memories.ai develops two pieces of technology: an encoder and the search infrastructure. Memories isn’t actually powering the image or video that you’d pull out or show your friends or family. Instead, it’s capturing a version of the image or video that’soptimized for the information it contains. That data is then passed to the search infrastructure, so that a query like “my group of friends eating dinner in Korea” would return the proper information.

    • Doc Searls ☛ Who’s your agent?

      Okay, but is it yours? Or is it a suction cup on a corporate tentacle? For some answers, here are Comet Data Privacy & Security FAQ’s. Sure. it says lots of the right stuff. But it's a service, not something that is fully yours.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Company bricks $300 vacuum when owner blocks it from spying

      An engineer named Harishankar N. got curious about his iLife A11 smart vacuum and discovered it was secretly mapping his home and sending that data to China. The device had been using Google Cartographer to build a detailed 3D map of his home and dutifully transmitting every architectural detail to its manufacturers. When he tried to stop the spying, the company remotely bricked his $300 device as punishment.

  • Confidentiality

    • Vikash Patel ☛ Understanding Private-Public Key Encryption

      In today’s digital world, where secure communication, authentication, and data integrity are non-negotiable, private-public key encryption (also called asymmetric cryptography) plays a foundational role. From HTTPS in your browser to SSH logins, cryptocurrency wallets, and email encryption, this elegant cryptographic system enables trust without prior shared secrets.

      In this blog, we’ll dive into: [...]

    • Troy Hunt ☛ Troy Hunt: 2 Billion Email Addresses Were Exposed, and We Indexed Them All in Have I Been Pwned

      I hate hyperbolic news headlines about data breaches, but for the "2 Billion Email Addresses" headline to be hyperbolic, it'd need to be exaggerated or overstated - and it isn't. It's rounded up from the more precise number of 1,957,476,021 unique email addresses, but other than that, it's exactly what it sounds like. Oh - and 1.3 billion unique passwords, 625 million of which we'd never seen before either. It's the most extensive corpus of data we've ever processed, by a significant margin.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Kyiv Independent ☛ NATO has reversed Russia’s edge in ammunition production, Rutte says

    NATO has now surpassed Russia in ammunition production after a period when Moscow outpaced the entire alliance’s output, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in Bucharest on Nov. 6.

  • The Independent UK ☛ Congressional Budget Office [breached] by suspected foreign entity: report

    “The Congressional Budget Office has identified the security incident, has taken immediate action to contain it, and has implemented additional monitoring and new security controls to further protect the agency’s systems going forward,” CBO spokeswoman Caitlin Emma told The Washington Post. “The incident is being investigated and work for the Congress continues. Like other government agencies and private sector entities, CBO occasionally faces threats to its network and continually monitors to address those threats.”

    The breach could expose sensitive government data and communications with House and Senate offices, and security concerns have stopped some legislators’ offices from continuing to communicate with the CBO, the Post reports.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Further | To the Long Hopeful Query, Is He Dead Yet? Yes. | Opinion

    Variously dubbed Darth Vader, the Prince of Darkness and "one of the most evil people to exist in modern history," Dick Cheney, the lying, blood-stained architect of America's calamitous War on Terror, brutal torture program and an Imperial Presidency that today still afflicts us has died "after a lifetime of people wishing he had died sooner" - and in a prison cell. The consensus on a war criminal who faced no punishment and expressed no remorse: "No hell is hot enough or eternal enough."

  • ABC ☛ Prime minister confident social media ban will work and will empower parents

    Tech companies are responsible for enforcement of the age limit, but Mr Albanese has also emphasised the benefit of the laws "empowering" parents to speak to their younger children about social media access.

    Australia's social media ban — which will capture Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Snapchat, TikTok, X, Reddit, Kick and YouTube for children under 16 — takes effect from December 10.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ As Neoliberalism Crumbles, It Becomes More Destructive

    Economist Branko Milanovic is one of the sharpest critics of global inequality. He spoke to Jacobin about how the decline of neoliberal globalization is harshening its most destructive tendencies.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • American Oversight ☛ DHS Admits It Provided “Erroneous” Information on Texts of Noem and DHS Brass, Hasn’t Confirmed It Followed Law

    Thursday, following a court filing in American Oversight’s lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over the agency’s initial claim that it failed to preserve the text messages of Secretary Kristi Noem and other top agency officials, we revealed the government has admitted its assertion that text messages were no longer preserved was “erroneous” — though the government has yet to provide evidence that the records we requested have been preserved as required by law.

  • Wired ☛ Mark Zuckerberg Opened an Illegal School at His Palo Alto Compound. His Neighbors Revolted

    WIRED obtained 1,665 pages of documents about the neighborhood dispute—including 311 records, legal filings, construction plans, and emails—through a public record request filed to the Palo Alto Department of Planning and Development Services. (Mentions of “Zuckerberg” or “the Zuckerbergs” appear to have been redacted. However, neighbors and separate public records confirm that the property in question belongs to the family. The names of the neighbors who were in touch with the city were also redacted.)

• Environment

  • Energy Mix Productions Inc ☛ Fossil Fuel Companies Say They Support the Energy Transition. New Numbers Suggest Otherwise.

    But a new study in the academic journal Nature Sustainability appears to bolster Galey’s side of the argument, by demonstrating exactly how little fossil fuel companies are investing in renewable energy. The study’s authors analyzed data from Global Energy Monitor, an open source database that tracks oil, gas, coal, and renewable energy use worldwide, to figure out just how involved major fossil fuel companies are in the deployment of renewables.

    The researchers expected measures of fossil fuel producers’ investment in renewable energy to be low—but not this low: Of the 250 largest oil and gas companies, only 20% were operating any renewable energy projects at all. Overall, fossil fuel producers own only 1.42% of global renewable energy projects, and those projects are responsible for but 0.1% of their total energy production.

  • Alabama Reflector ☛ Here are airports hit by the FAA pullback on air traffic; 3,300 flights daily to be canceled

    A 10% reduction at the listed airports would mean 3,300 canceled flights per day, according to Airports Council International-North America, the trade group for airports.

  • The Nation ☛ The Media Is Complicit in the Climate Confusion

    Now new research is highlighting the role the media plays in perpetuating this gap. Yale’s most recent climate opinion poll shows that while more than two-thirds of Americans want stronger climate policy, less than a third of them say they see coverage of the issue in the media at least once a week. That’s unfortunate, according to Max Boykoff, who runs the Media and Climate Change Observatory at University of Colorado, Boulder, because inconsistent coverage of the issue can lead to gaps in the public’s understanding of it. “Climate journalism is prone to an events-based model of reporting that often decontextualizes the climate crisis,” he said. “Extreme heat, floods, and storms tend to be reported as unique events as opposed to part of an unfolding and long-term crisis, which prevents a fuller understanding of the issue.”

  • The Nation ☛ Winning a Fossil Fuel Divestment Pledge Is Hard. Keeping It Is Harder.

    Nearly a decade after promising to withdraw millions in fossil fuel investments, the University of Massachusetts has stalled on its clean energy transition. What happened?

  • Deseret Media ☛ Fish species illegally introduced at Utah reservoir within Colorado River drainage

    "Due to several endangered fish in the Colorado River, we partner with other agencies to ensure that our sportfish stocking does not interfere with the recovery of native fish. The stocking of sportfish in any drainages in the Colorado River Basin is therefore highly regulated," said Trina Hedrick, the division's sportfish coordinator, in a statement. "This illegal introduction is very problematic."

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Why Google is planning a powerful AI data centre on this tiny Indian Ocean island

      Google is in advanced talks to lease land near the island’s airport to construct the data hub, including a deal with a local mining company to secure its energy needs, Christmas Island Shire officials told Reuters and council meeting records show. Google declined to comment for this story. Australia’s department of defence had no comment.

    • India Times ☛ Google to test building AI data centres in space

      Google plans to launch AI data centers into space by 2027. These solar-powered satellites will use proprietary AI chips. The project aims to leverage constant sunlight and vacuum cooling for efficiency. This initiative pushes Google's deeptech research boundaries. Other companies like SpaceX are also exploring similar space-based computing.

    • PC World ☛ Google wants to build AI data centers in space using satellites

      In the blog post, Google mentions that there are several major challenges with the project, including that the satellites in the network will need to move in a much tighter formation than existing satellite networks, and that the Tensor chips will also need to cope with cosmic radiation while in orbit around the Earth.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Revelator ☛ 14 Incredible New Books to Inspire Your Friends and Family in the Year Ahead

• Finance

  • The Register UK ☛ Boffins: cloud computing's on-demand biz model is failing us

    The researchers argue that while businesses can plough income back into future cloud resources on an ongoing basis, scientific projects can be finite, depending on the grand situation. Meanwhile, institutions which are home to scientific projects are unlikely to have a strategy for getting better deals out of cloud providers.

  • FAIR ☛ ‘Trump Clearly Has No Idea What He’s Doing When It Comes to the Economy’: CounterSpin interview with Dean Baker on Trumponomics

    Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Dean Baker about Donald Trump’s economic nonsense for the October 31, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

  • FAIR ☛ Conde Nast, Paramount Cut Jobs—and Political Dissent

    Two major media brands announced layoffs and consolidation. Paramount, now under the control of the Ellison family, laid off 1,000 employees across its companies, including CBS News (Deadline, 10/27/25; Independent, 10/30/25). Condé Nast announced that Teen Vogue’s website would be phased out and incorporated into its parent publication Vogue (New York Times, 11/3/25), leading to staff terminations.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ The Big Short Guy Just Bet $1 Billion That the AI Bubble Pops

    Burry similarly made a long-term $1 billion bet from 2005 onwards against the US mortgage market, anticipating its collapse. His fund rose a whopping 489 percent when the market did subsequently fall apart in 2008.

  • CNN ☛ Michael Burry of ‘The Big Short’ is back with cryptic messages — and two massive bets

    Burry’s fund, Scion Asset Management, disclosed on Monday that it bought puts — bets that share prices will fall — on two stars of the AI wave: Nvidia (NVDA) and Palantir (PLTR). Scion bought roughly $187.6 million in puts on Nvidia and $912 million in puts on Palantir, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

  • The Register UK ☛ Senators want companies to report AI layoffs amid job cuts

    The act would also require employers to report on a quarterly basis how many people they hired related to AI and automation, how many jobs they decided not to fill thanks to AI, and numbers on retraining due to artificial intelligence. The end goal, said Warner, is to help Congress understand how the labor market is changing and how to prepare for the future.

  • New York Times ☛ Would Elon Musk Work Harder for $1 Trillion Than $1 Billion?

    Of course, financial incentives are enormously powerful. But is their ability to motivate infinite? Would Mr. Musk not work as hard if he were offered, say, $100 billion or $1 billion? What about $1?

    The assumption that human beings are most forcefully motivated by money is a fundamental axiom of economics that is baked into most policy and business decisions. It anchors arguments for ever-rising executive compensation, lower capital gains taxes, work requirements for Medicaid recipients and so much more.

  • Wired ☛ Tesla Shareholders Approve Elon Musk’s $1 Trillion Pay Package

    On Thursday, Tesla shareholders approved an unprecedented $1 trillion pay package for CEO Elon Musk. The full compensation plan will go into effect by 2035—assuming Musk and the company successfully hit ambitious financial and production targets. If that happens, Musk will also get control of some 25 percent of the business, up from the 12 percent he controls currently. More than 75 percent of Tesla shareholders approved the move in a preliminary vote.

  • The Verge ☛ Tesla shareholders approve Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package

    Tesla shareholders voted Thursday to approve Elon Musk’s staggering new pay package, in a move aimed at retaining the controversial CEO’s leadership during a time of great upheaval for the automaker. Over 75 percent of shares voted in favor of the proposal.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Twelve Citizens and the Social Contract

    They didn’t. Because law is not self-justifying; it breathes through the consent of the governed. And that consent is being withdrawn.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Mailing lists vs Discourse forums: open source communities or commodities?

    The free software movement and our principles came of age in the era of mailing lists and NNTP newsgroups.

    Both of these technologies have been attacked from various angles over the years. NNTP has mostly been abandoned. Mailing lists continue to exist but they are increasingly subject to both the fake discussion syndrome and the pressure from certain quarters to use a web-based platform like Discourse.

    Some of the more prominent corporate-controlled open source projects have already turned off their mailing lists and migrated to Discourse, including the Fedora Project and the GNOME Project. Notice these projects have similar corporate controllers so it doesn't appear to be a coincidence that they both abandoned mailing lists.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: The Complexity Argument for Capitalism

    Now I'm not an economist and there are many arguments for and against socialism and capitalism, especially in their purest forms. I want to focus on the complexity of the economy. Let's start by considering rent control.

  • India Times ☛ SoftBank-backed Metropolis raises $1.6 billion to expand beyond AI-powered parking lots

    The Los Angeles-based company also secured a $1.1 billion syndicated term loan led by J.P. Morgan, backed by cash flow from its parking operations.

  • Rebecca Williams ☛ Mayor-Elect Mamdani Can Build a Tech Agenda for New York and a Model for the Country

    The article proposes a four-pillar framework for municipal technology policy: (1) building a Digital Sanctuary City to protect residents from federal surveillance and data-sharing; (2) protecting workers from algorithmic exploitation and automation; (3) ensuring fair pricing and banning data-driven price discrimination; and (4) investing in public digital infrastructure, such as city-owned broadband and community Wi-Fi.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Arkansas Advocate ☛ Benton public schools hide books from students after parent's complaint, citing two Arkansas laws

    All Arkansas schools are required to have library content challenge policies in place, and Act 372 of 2023 put the final say on the availability of challenged books in the hands of school boards. District correspondence does not indicate that the complaint reached the school board before Mountain View Principal Chris Johnson informed two district superintendents in an Oct. 7 email that the challenged book would be removed from the school library.

  • American Library Association ☛ “Faith for Libraries” Campaign Will Combat Book Censorship and Defend Religious Freedom

    The American Library Association and the Unite Against Book Bans initiative, together with Interfaith Alliance, a national leader in defending civil rights and multi-faith democracy, today is launching a new campaign with to combat book censorship and defend the freedom to read. “Faith for Libraries: Diverse Faith Communities Supporting Libraries and Librarians” formalizes and expands the groups’ ongoing work to defend libraries and librarians from censorship, emphasizing that faith communities have a critical role to play in this struggle.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Robert Reich ☛ What's the "news" under Trump?

    Only actions should be news — not threatened actions, not possible actions, not proposed actions that are mere bubbles on a stream of consciousness — but concrete actions.

    Those who report on such actions should let us know exactly who is behind them, because often it’s not Trump.

  • Techdirt ☛ Larry Ellison’s CBS Acquisition Leads To Mass Layoffs As Bari Weiss Enjoys $10k A Day Security Detail

    It’s a silly, hollow game. With streaming growth saturated and executives all out of original ideas, the only way to goose quarterly earnings and generate new tax breaks is “growth for growth’s sake” consolidation. Such consolidation creates the illusion that these are savvy deal makers creating innovative new things, but as we’ve seen repeatedly this sort of media consolidation is mindlessly corrosive.

  • Press Gazette ☛ Journalists going solo on Substack at risk from [crackers]

    Hackers using phishing tactics mock up messages so they appear to be from legitimate sources, tricking marks into handing over log-in details or other sensitive information.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • ANF News ☛ “Jin Jiyan Azadî” exhibition opens in Nienburg

    The vernissage was accompanied by a four-piece Kurdish music group, which performed pieces in Arabic and Kurdish and contributed songs that seemed familiar to many of the Kurdish guests. Songs were sung about hope and peace, but also about the reality of war and displacement from one's own homeland.

  • US News And World Report ☛ Unions Sue Over Trump Administration's Political 'Loyalty' Hiring Plan

    The plan unveiled in May by OPM, the main human resources agency for the federal government, fleshed out an executive order the Republican president signed in January aimed at "restoring merit" to the center of the hiring process.

    The hiring plan mandated that applicants for federal civil service jobs respond to four open-ended essay questions. While most of the questions related to job performance, the unions said one "instead elicits the political views of applicants and political agreement with the current president."

  • Federal News Network ☛ Unions sue Trump administration over ‘loyalty question’ added to federal job applications

    The unions claim the inclusion of a “loyalty question” on federal job applications runs counter to the nonpartisan nature of the civil service hiring process, because it allows the “Trump Administration to weed out those who do not voice sufficient support for President Trump and reward those who do.”

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Condé Nast abruptly fires 4 staffers after HR confrontation

    Condé Nast abruptly fired four staffers who were among a group of more than a dozen employees who confronted the company’s head of human resources on Wednesday, an unsubtle message to its employee union that the publisher was taking a harder line in its dealings with employees.

  • Nick Heer ☛ FBI Tries to Unmask Owner of Archive.today

    Sketchy as it may seem, Archive.today has become as legitimized as the Internet Archive. I have found links to pages archived using the site in government documents, high-profile reports, and other unexpected places treating it as a high-grade permalink. The existence of a subpoena does not mean the FBI is going after Archive.today or its operator, but its existence now feels a little more precarious.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ Most FCC Functions Still Paused During Government Shutdown

    The Network Outage Reporting System, Disaster Information Reporting System, and Electronic Comment Filing System, along with certain other systems, remain accessible. So too, are the Electronic Comment Filing System and the Integrated Spectrum Auction System, but with no user support except for what’s necessary for spectrum auction activities.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world

  A central fact of enshittification is that the growth of quality-destroying, pocket-picking monopolists wasn't an accident, nor was it inevitable. Rather, named individuals, in living memory, advocated for and created pro-enshittificatory policies, ushering in the enshittocene.

  The greatest enshittifiers of all are the neoliberal economists who advocated for the idea that monopolies are good, because (in their perfect economic models), the only way for a company to secure a monopoly is to be so amazing that we all voluntarily start buying its products and services, and the instant a monopoly starts to abuse its market power, new companies will enter the market and poach us all from the bloated incumbent.

• Patents

  • Software Patents

    • Techdirt ☛ USPTO To Re-Examine Recently Approved Nintendo Patent

      Well, this is actually pretty fascinating. We’ve been discussing the somewhat bizzare patent lawsuit Nintendo is waging against PocketPair in Japan for some time now. PocketPair is the company behind the hit game Palworld, which has obviously drawn inspiration from the Pokémon franchise, without doing any direct copying. Powering this attack were several held or applied-for patents in Japan that cover some pretty general gameplay elements, most, if not all, of which have plenty of prior art in previous games and/or game mods. Most recently, two things happened on opposite sides of the ocean. In September, the USPTO approved a couple of new, but related patents in a manner that had at least one patent attorney calling it an “embarrassing failure.” Separately, in Japan, a patent that Nintendo applied for, which sits in between two approved patents that are being wielded in the Palworld lawsuit, was rejected for being unoriginal and for which prior art exists. Given how interrelated that patent is with the other approved patents, the same logic would apply to the approved patents, bringing into question whether all of these patents should just be invalidated.

• Trademarks

  • Right of Publicity

    • India Times ☛ Denmark eyes new law to protect citizens from AI deepfakes

      Denmark plans a new law granting citizens copyright over their own likeness to curb deepfakes and misuse of personal images. Sparked by rising AI-generated abuse cases, the bill aims to protect identities, tackle misinformation, and hold tech firms accountable for removing manipulated content without stifling satire or creativity.

    • US News And World Report ☛ Denmark Eyes New Law to Protect Citizens From AI Deepfakes

      If enacted, Danish citizens would get the copyright over their own likeness. In theory, they then would be able to demand that online platforms take down content shared without their permission. The law would still allow for parodies and satire, though it’s unclear how that will be determined.

• Copyrights

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Cloudflare Tells U.S. Govt That Foreign Site Blocking Efforts Are Digital Trade Barriers

    In a submission for the 2026 National Trade Estimate Report, Cloudflare warns the U.S. government that site blocking efforts cause widespread disruption to legitimate services. The complaint points to Italy's automated Piracy Shield system, which reportedly blocked "tens of thousands" of legitimate sites. Meanwhile, overbroad IP address blocks in Spain and new automated blocking proposals in France are serious concerns that harm U.S. business interests, Cloudflare reports.