Leftovers

• Jakub Steiner ☛ Jakub Steiner: Things That Last

  One of the great annual trips we do with a bunch of friends is a train trip to Jakuszyce, a tiny stop in neighbouring Poland, and ride along the contour line through one of the most beautiful places in the Jizera Mountains. There's only one proper climb from Smedava to Knajpa, the rest is fast. A joyride. Catching up on our lives on the train and a joyride home is the best combo.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Social Control Media

    • Robin Berjon ☛ The Retweeting Class

      And the answer is: because none of them are interested in accomplishing anything of substance, their aims revolve entirely around being acceptable to one another. Their truth — which they are pursuing competently, even intelligently, as agents — is not about change but about propriety. Ideas, for them, are evaluated based on whether they are proper or not and people in that group succeed based on their ability to reheat one harmless, socially-acceptable idea after another. To reiterate: it's not that they're wrong, it's that the truth that emerges from their purpose is largely detached from any consequence that would be considered meaningful to the rest of us.

    • The Nation ☛ Can Social Media Influencers Save Public Schools?

      In late March, Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) unveiled an initiative to recruit and pay high school students to post positive accounts of their time at DPSCD institutions. To get this job, eligible teens had to create a 60-second reel explaining why they would be a great fit for the role. Then applicants attended social-media etiquette and content-creation classes. Those selected receive $250 a month to serve as student influencers. Some of the resulting videos are more polished, featuring interviews with teachers, while others are pure teenage energy, full of teenage slang and YouTube-like intros.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Security Week ☛ Kodak Admits Data Breach After ShinyHunters Hack Claims

      “Kodak recently discovered that an unauthorized third party illegally gained access to a limited amount of company data,” said a spokesperson for Kodak.

• Security

  • Security Week ☛ 3 Recently Patched Fortinet FortiSandbox Vulnerabilities in Hacker Crosshairs

    SOCRadar has detected 30,000 compromised Fortinet firewalls that expose networks to hacking. 

  • Security Week ☛ Oracle’s Second Monthly Security Updates Deliver 245 Patches

    Oracle has released its June 2026 Critical Security Patch Update to fix vulnerabilities in Communications, EBS, Enterprise Manager and other products.

  • Security Week ☛ Rockwell Automation Patches Vulnerabilities in ICS Controllers and Software

    The industrial automation giant has fixed security holes in Logix, CompactLogix, Flex, RSLinx, and FactoryTalk products.

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • The Straits Times ☛ Cambodia scam centre leader extradited to China

      China’s Ministry of Public Security published a video showing a man in handcuffs.

    • Rebecca Williams ☛ Classification, Deservedness, & Gatekeeping

      Security engineers use the surprisingly poetic phrase "something you know, something you have, something you are" to describe ways identity is authenticated online. But if we zoom out to what digital ID systems actually do from a sociotechnical perspective, a more accurate description might be "something they classify, something they deem deserving, something they gatekeep."

      Your ID isn't for you; it's for the bouncer and the system that put the bouncer in place. Put another way, the shadow of an ID is the permission and exclusion it represents.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Record ☛ Bulgaria allowed surveillance tech firm to sell products to repressive regimes, report says

      The nonprofit Human Rights Watch obtained export licensing records covering 2018 through 2023, which show the Bulgarian government allowed the surveillance firm Circles to peddle the tech to law enforcement and intelligence agencies in El Salvador, the United Arab Emirates, Serbia, Azerbaijan, Guatemala, Bahrain, Jordan, Malaysia, Morocco and Panama.

      Many of those countries have long records for crushing dissent and some have used spyware to snoop on dissidents and journalists in the past.

    • Michael Geist ☛ One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Bill C-36 Modernizes Canada's Privacy Law, Then Delays It to 2030

      Canada’s private sector privacy law is more than 25 years old and there is broad consensus that a modernization is long overdue. Bill C-36, tabled on Monday, is the government’s third attempt at updating the law, following the failed efforts with Bill C-11 in 2020 and Bill C-27 in 2022. My first post on the new bill focused on what I think remains both the most important development and the biggest mistake: the decision to push the Privacy Commissioner of Canada out of private-sector privacy and to place the file with an overloaded digital safety commission. For years, privacy critics have argued that, given the absence of order-making powers or serious penalties, Canada’s biggest shortcoming has been weak enforcement. Yet just as the government adds much-needed new rights and penalties to the privacy law framework, it undermines enforcement once again by introducing a new regulator that will take years to establish. The consequence is that, rather than updating the law for 2027, it is updating it for 2030 or later.

    • EDRI ☛ Cookies and consent: why ePrivacy matters for our browsing life

      And yet, hidden behind these seemingly harmless pop-ups lies one of the most important conversations about the future of our digital lives.

      That conversation is about ePrivacy. It sounds very technical but, in reality, it affects almost everyone who uses the internet.

      While the GDPR governs the processing of personal data, ePrivacy focuses on the confidentiality of our digital communications and the technologies that interact with our devices. It shapes the rules around cookies, online tracking, digital identifiers, and the countless mechanisms that observe, remember, and analyse our behaviour online.

      In theory, these rules exist to empower people. In practice, the experience often feels very different.

    • Techdirt ☛ Surveillance Is Good Because I Want Drivers I Don’t Like To Be Punished: Cleveland Columnist

      Bro, I hear you. I share the road (and see it not equally shared) with assholes. I do wish vengeance upon them. But I also would rather keep my rights than give them up in exchange for traffic enforcement that subjectively pleases me.

    • EFF ☛ Canada Is Forging Ahead with Its Dangerous Surveillance Bill

      As we’ve discussed before, Bill C-22 is dangerous on multiple levels. It pushes for requirements for metadata retention, expands information sharing with foreign governments, and establishes a mechanism that allows Canada’s Ministry of Public Safety to demand that companies create backdoors, effectively breaking encryption. That mechanism was a key facet of Part 2 in Bill C-22, and the government prevented it from being independently debated.

      In a deep analysis of the bill, Citizen Lab and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association detail every one of flaws of this proposal, concluding that most elements are unsalvageable.

  • Confidentiality

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ AMD silently removes memory encryption from consumer Ryzen CPUs, leaving users unaware that they may be vulnerable — security feature vanishes after newer AGESA firmware, AMD engineers go radio silent when pressed about the change

      As the exhaustive inquiry, which involved conversations with AMD engineers, board vendors, and other CPU users, was coming to a head, an AMD engineer abruptly cut discussions short, stating, "My apologies, but I don't have any more information to share on this topic." As of this report, AMD has neither officially acknowledged nor explained the disappearance of the security feature.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Strategist ☛ Pressure Points: China’s expanding presence in the Pacific and Indian oceans

    China’s security footprint was once confined to its immediate neighbourhood.

  • The Straits Times ☛ Taiwan hopes new US arms sale package can be approved soon, president says

    Lai said the US security commitment to Taiwan has not changed.

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Surrenders To Iran On Virtually Every Point

    Now that Trump has signed the surrender agreement at Versailles (the traditional place to sign a total surrender agreement), the scorecard looks like this: no eliminated missile program, no eliminated nuclear program, no regime change. Also: no actual deal.

    What Trump signed is a one-page memorandum of understanding with a 60-day time limit. After that, another deal needs to happen — one that may or may not actually get signed. The thing being called a historic peace agreement is, in legal terms, a note on the back of a napkin that expires in two months.

    With that established: here’s what he gave away to get it.

  • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Michigan Democrats Allege ‘Dark Money’ Group Violated TV Ad Rules

    In a complaint to the Federal Election Commission, filed Thursday, the Michigan Democratic Party accuses the Senate Opportunity Fund of failing to publicly disclose its donors — something the Democrats argue it must do by law because the group is overtly urging voters to go to Rogers’ campaign website, RogersForSenate.com.

  • Yle ☛ Finnish spy agency warns of hidden security threats from data centres

    But if a foreign company simply leases a plot of land and builds a new data centre on it, it may fall completely off the radar of security authorities.

    "We don't currently have any legislation that requires notification of such data centre projects," says Kivimäki.

    The same blind spot applies to situations where a foreign entity simply rents space in a ready-made data centre.

  • Democracy for the Arab World Now ☛ Autocracy Is Not a Relic of the Past. It Is Increasingly a Governing Model of the Present.

    The post-Cold War era’s political mythology once rested upon an assumption that liberal democracy, having outlived fascism and communism, possessed an almost teleological inevitability. Three decades later, that assumption increasingly appears to be inaccurate. Autocracy survived the democratic century by adapting, diversifying and in many cases, acquiring renewed institutional sophistication and foreign backing rather than relying solely on coercion.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Meduza ☛ In photos: Moscow hit by the biggest attack since the start of the full-scale war — airports close, an oil refinery burns, and black smoke rises over the city

      Moscow came under its largest drone attack since the start of the full-scale war overnight, with nearly 200 Ukrainian drones shot down on approach to the capital, according to Mayor Sergey Sobyanin. Fires broke out at an oil refinery in the city’s southeast for the second consecutive day, while debris struck a shopping complex and damaged residential and commercial buildings in the surrounding region. All four of Moscow’s airports were temporarily closed, delaying dozens of flights.

    • The Record ☛ EU grants Ukraine access to cybersecurity reserve for major attacks

      The European Commission announced Monday that member states had approved Ukraine's participation in the EU Cybersecurity Reserve, a pool of private cybersecurity companies that can be rapidly deployed to help governments and critical infrastructure operators respond to large-scale cyber incidents.

      The reserve, managed by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), was established to provide incident response, technical expertise, and recovery support to participating countries experiencing a cyberattack that exceeds their own capabilities.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Ukraine Joins EU Cybersecurity Reserve For Cyber Support

      The EU Cybersecurity Reserve was established under the Cyber Solidarity Act to help participating countries respond to significant cybersecurity incidents. Through the reserve, nations can request specialized assistance when their own incident response resources are overwhelmed.

      According to the European Commission, Ukraine will now be able to officially seek emergency European support if a cyberattack surpasses the capacity of its domestic response teams. This would allow cybersecurity experts from across the European Union to assist in incident containment and recovery efforts.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Wired ☛ How the Peter Thiel-Linked Dialog Club Secretly Ranks Its Members

    Leaked files show the invite-only network grades members by their money and fame, shaping who’s in, who’s out, and who pays.

  • The Nation ☛ The Banality of Peter Thiel’s Evil

    Until now, that is. On Tuesday, Wired magazine published a trove of leaked Dialog documents and information about the group’s membership. The leak includes the schedule for the group’s pending August retreat outside Dublin, Ireland. The subject matter gives the lie to the notion that Thiel’s vanity project is brokering any meaningful dialogue, in the sense of a probing exchange of opposing views. Instead, it seems closer to a list of trending topics on Truth Social: Session titles include “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness,” “Bring Back Nuclear,” “Navigating WWIII,” “Battlefield Technologies,” and, somewhat randomly, “How’s Your Sex Life?” “Other talks include ‘Build-a-Cult,’ moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com,” write Wired correspondents Dell Cameron and Yulia Almazova, “and ‘Build-a-Party,’ run by a former White House national security official.”

  • Court House News ☛ Berkeley professor seeks expedited release of ICE data

    University of California, Berkeley law professor David Hausman sued ICE in April after the agency failed to respond to multiple Freedom of Information Act requests seeking spreadsheets containing data on detainees, enforcement actions and other immigration records.

    At a hearing Thursday on Hausman’s request for a preliminary injunction compelling ICE to release the records, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín said he is likely to succeed on the merits of his case and has shown harm. But she questioned whether the need for records that are years old justified emergency relief.

  • Molly White ☛ Issue 106 – A tremendous birthday present

    Crypto.com paid out the fight bonuses in its CRO [cryptocurrency] token. The Trump family’s own World Liberty Financial earned some free marketing from Dana White when he announced they would be a “presenting sponsor” of the event, and would be providing an additional $250,000 bonus to winners of “Fight of the Night”, denominated in their USD1 stablecoin.4 The president throwing a for-profit UFC event on the lawn of the White House was dubious enough, but using it to then promote his family’s [cryptocurrency] projects — from which he personally substantially profits — is brazen even for Trump.

• Environment

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Greenland sees wildfires earlier in the year

    "It is rare for such fires to occur as early as June, and it is reasonable to think that overall climate change, particularly the warming of the Arctic, as well as the current El Niño effect, are to blame," Karl Brix Zinglersen, head of the Department of Environment and Minerals at the institute, told AFP.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ Battery Tester Gets An App Upgrade

      A reverse-engineering effort targeted at the EBC-A20 served as the basis for the work. The battery tester is ultimately controlled by a simple serial interface, running at 9600 bps, 8 bits, with odd parity. Armed with a relatively complete understanding of the commands used to control the device, [Kazhuu] was able to whip up a simple web app to control the device instead, using WebUSB to access the device over a USB-to-serial converter, though a desktop version for Linux and Windows is also available. If you’ve got one of these battery testers sitting on your bench, using the app is as simple as pointing your browser here with the device plugged in via USB. Then you can run basic load tests on battery cells and graph the results right on your computer without having to deal with the proprietary software.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump pays $765 million to kill offshore wind projects, some in California

      The latest move leaves only three offshore wind leases intact off the coast of California — one off Morro Bay and two off the coast of Humboldt Bay. Last year, the Trump administration also terminated nearly half a billion dollars local officials were planning to use for the offshore wind effort in Humboldt.

• Finance

  • No One's Happy ☛ Data Brokers Part 2: Surveillance Pricing — No One's Happy

    Older dynamic pricing prices the situation: the off-season room, the matinee that costs less than the same film at night, each a function of conditions, so that the price, however it moves, remains a statement about the world. Surveillance pricing prices the person. Its argument is not the hour or the weather or the remaining inventory but you, the individual, resolved to the absolute most a model believes you will surrender before you walk away. The moment this becomes the method, the price ceases to describe the good at all and becomes instead a measurement of your urgency, your alternatives, and your capacity to absorb a figure.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Hype and Glory

    In that same year SpaceX lost $4 billion on $19 billion in revenue. Robin Wigglesworth, editor of the Financial Times blog Alphaville, memorably described Elon Musk’s company as a

    "very successful but fairly small satellite launch company, bolted onto a stagnant money-losing social media company [X, formerly Twitter] and a money-incinerating AI company [xAI, operator of the widely despised model Grok], and then sprinkled with a lot of hype about humankind going interplanetary."

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Accenture shells out $4.18B on three companies in big industrial cybersecurity push

    The acquisitions are not Accenture’s first move in OT security. The company acquired Cimation in 2015 and Revolutionary Security in 2020, along with several other OT-focused firms.

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Israeli foreign agent took over The Charlie Kirk Show days after his killing

    On September 6, 2025, an arch-Zionist centi-millionaire named Robert Shillman denounced Kirk from the dais at a private gala in Los Angeles, expressing regret for showering his fortune on TPUSA now that its founder had turned against Israel. As The Grayzone revealed, Shillman had just withdrawn a $2 million donation to TPUSA as punishment for Kirk’s heresy.

    Four days later, Kirk was shot through the neck by a sniper in front of thousands of attendees of his so-called American Comeback Tour.

  • The Pragmatic Engineer ☛ Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

    For two decades, Meta had a unique, high-performance engineering org; right up until around April of this year. For the first 20 years of the company’s existence, it had a “move-fast-and-break-things” culture, and in the early 2020s this shifted to a “move-fast-with-stable-infra” one. Engineers I know at the company were empowered to do good work, focus on impact, and to balance business interests with solid engineering.

    But in the past few weeks, all that has changed, as if the leadership has been following detailed blueprints on how to demolish a proven, successful engineering culture in the most ruthlessly efficient way possible.

  • Logikal Solutions ☛ You Aren't More Productive Using Indians

    A firm I know and respect found a candidate that had been working at some client sites they do business with. All of those sites mandate a background check. Technical recruiter I know submitted him to the client. Dude did three interviews and got an offer. Because this is a legitimate firm, not an Indian consulting firm, they actually paid for a formal background check. This dude was a convicted felon. Client site loved him and said they could overlook a DUI. It was not a DUI. Don’t know exactly what it was, but recruiter told me “he was a really bad dude.”

    You MBAs who think you are saving money with a vendor management system better think again. How many of you have not only corporate policies, but federal and/or state regulations baring you from using convicted felons? Best look up what the criminal penalties are for yourself when this inconvenient truth surfaces.

  • Michael Färber ☛ jaq manual

    jaq is an interpreter for the jq programming language. It is designed to be usable as a drop-in replacement for the jq program, which is the reference interpreter for the jq language written in C.

    Written in Rust, jaq focuses on correctness, high performance, and simplicity. In addition, jaq adds some functionality not present in jq: [...]

  • Futurism ☛ Wall Street Terrified That SpaceX Investors Will Dump Their Stocks

    With the mountains of cash that the IPO has already generated, the temptation to sell is formidable. It made Musk into the world’s first trillionaire and catapulted SpaceX into one of the most valuable companies in the world, briefly edging out Amazon’s vast empire. Major backers like Andreessen Horowitz now own stakes north of $10 billion. If they sell early, it’ll guarantee massive profits.

  • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Open Source vs the Invisible Hand

    If you handed an economics undergraduate a description of how open source libraries are produced, without saying what it was, and asked them to predict the outcome, they would tell you it doesn’t add up. Non-excludable goods with no price, no contracts, no liability, a median producer headcount of one, and near-total free riding by consumers: there is no model in the textbook under which that arrangement produces anything stable.

  • CCC ☛ Social consequences of AI - media.ccc.de

    This talk is more impressionistic than scientific. It will attempt to trace the milestones of this rapid development, weigh possible scenarios and their societal consequences, and, based on extrapolation of sources from scientific, private-sector, and political actors, explore where this journey might take us in the coming years.

    Humanity more or less unexpectedly stumbled into a future that no one would have considered remotely realistic before: Models that learn language structures have evolved into thinking machines.

  • CCC ☛ The Tech Oligarchy’s Attack on Humanity – Analysis and Call to Action - media.ccc.de

    The rise of a transnational oligarchy centred in the US is one of the most striking political features of the post-socialist digital age in which we have been living since the 1990s. So-called ‘Big Tech’ has played a key role in this, in alliance with (other) anti-democratic and openly reactionary forces. In this talk, I will present an analysis of this development and propose concrete steps to combat it.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ AI answers are a new vector for election disinformation

      For years, people have used social media to seed disinformation in order to swing elections. Now, the answers our search engines and expert systems produce have become more vulnerable.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ More people get their news from social media than anywhere else - globally. The platforms we use matter.

      For the first time, social media is the primary platform for news globally.

      News is how we learn about the world and make informed democratic decisions. That means that, more than ever before, we need to care about who owns these networks, who dictates how they function, and which narratives they promote.

      X, of course, was purchased by Elon Musk specifically because he wanted to suppress what he called the “woke mind virus”. It’s a propaganda play, which anyone can see if they load a feed on the platform: shocking white supremacist rhetoric is central.

    • uni Oxford ☛ Overview and key findings of the 2026 Digital News Report | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

      A central theme this year is this growing ‘platformisation’ of news consumption. For the first time, social media and video networks are, on average across the markets covered, more popular than both TV and owned news websites and apps as sources of news. Growing numbers are also experimenting with AI chatbots as a new means of access. When online, people increasingly like to watch rather than read the news, often drawing on a wider range of sources and voices. Some of the new contributors are credible, innovative, and making a positive contribution to the range of news choices. This report explores in detail the rise of creators and other emerging news producers, the role they play in this changing environment, and what audiences value about their content.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Verge ☛ Amazon employees say they’re facing termination for backing data center limits

    On June 10th — one week after the hearing, and one day after the City Council passed a milestone moratorium on data centers — Patrick Schloesser, Darius Irani, and Liesl Wigand were each called into an impromptu meeting with Amazon’s “Employee Relations.” HR representatives told the employees that the company was investigating them and said there could be disciplinary action, up to and including termination. On Thursday, the three filed a legal complaint requesting that the Seattle Office for Civil Rights investigate the matter, alleging that Amazon engaged in prohibited employment discrimination.

  • RFERL ☛ 74 Lashes For A Song: Iranian Female Artist Sentenced For Virtual Concert

    Iranian authorities have sentenced singer Parastoo Ahmadi to a punishment of 74 lashes for performing in a YouTube video that has racked up 2.9 million views over the last two years. Ahmadi sang the well-known patriotic song From The Blood Of The Youth to an empty theater space in 2024 with the help of eight musicians and crew. They have also been sentenced to flogging, a travel ban, and a prohibition on any "artistic activities" for the next two years. Ahmadi was accused of "offending public decency" after she performed without a hijab, the head covering mandated by Iranian morality police.

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Dissident Russian Artist's Shooting in Poland Likely 'Political Murder' – PM Tusk

    "All indications are that this is a political murder," Tusk said of the murder of Semyon Skrepetsky, whose real name is Robert Kuzovkov.

  • Techdirt ☛ Wyden And Cruz Team Up On A Bill To Stop Government Jawboning. It’s… Actually Pretty Good?

    That’s what coercion looks like. And despite what MAGA folks (including Ted Cruz) insist, none of that was present in the Biden admin requests regarding social media. There were certainly a few instances that appeared to get pretty close to the line, but even the very conservative MAGA-pilled Supreme Court repeatedly pointed out that there was “no evidence” they could find of the administration crossing that line against the plaintiffs in Murthy, and thus they had no standing to sue.

    Of course, if you look at the level of jawboning happening now in the Trump administration, it’s quite incredible and way beyond even what they (falsely) accused Biden of doing. Almost every day we see yet another story of someone in the Trump admin threatening intermediaries to suppress speech.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ These 6 foreign journalists have been denied entry by Israel

    “Not only does Israel continue to prevent foreign journalists from independently entering Gaza, it is now openly denying them entry to Israel and the West Bank based on their past reporting, public statements and opinions,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Citing a journalist’s coverage or commentary as grounds for exclusion raises serious concerns and threatens the fundamental principle of press freedom.”

    In the absence of public data, it remains unclear how many foreign journalists Israel has prevented from entering, or deported, and whether the latest cases signal an increase in such actions. However, the following first hand accounts of journalists reveal a worrying truth: journalists’ reporting has become a central focus of border screenings and visa reviews in Israel.

  • CPJ ☛ Mozambique’s Estacio Valoi faces ‘clear intimidation’ over environmental reporting

    On June 16, three National Criminal Investigation Service (SERNIC) agents went to Valoi’s home in Pemba, the capital of Cabo Delgado, served him with a judicial order, and confiscated his phones, computers, and tablets, the journalist told CPJ. The May 25 search warrant issued by Pemba City Judicial Court, reviewed by CPJ, did not detail why Valoi’s personal and work equipment was being seized.

  • The Nation ☛ Why Aren’t Newsrooms Covering This AI Speech?

    If such stealing is allowed to continue, he continued, we risk a “future where a crucial wellspring of a healthy society and a stable democracy—the truth, understanding and accountability provided by original journalism—continues to dry up…. The news industry’s only path to counteracting [Big Tech’s machinations]…is by working together” to protect the industry’s property rights, including through lawsuits. (The Times, he noted, has spent $20 million on such lawsuits.)

    In sum, the publisher of one of the world’s most influential newspapers has accused some of the richest, most powerful companies on Earth of being criminals, of building their vast fortunes on a foundation of lies and theft at grand scale. And he urged the rest of the media to join the Times in fighting back, not only for the sake of their own commercial survival but for the survival of a free press and the democracy it nourishes.

  • The Dissenter ☛ When The FBI Comes Knocking

    MS NOW reported that FBI agents assigned to the matter were afraid of the “professional risk” to their careers if they searched for Fitzpatrick’s name in FBI databases and examined her social media. "They know they are not supposed to do this," an unnamed source asserted. "But if they don't go forward, they could lose their jobs. You're damned if you do and damned if you don’t."

    This particular leak investigation did not involve any classified information, however, an insider threats unit in Huntsville, Alabama was tasked with retaliating against Fitzpatrick because Patel was exposed and embarrassed by media coverage.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Inside Towers ☛ AT&T Offers Reward for Copper Theft Tips

    Copper theft is a growing threat in Eastern Kentucky, and AT&T is responding with stronger action. AT&T is now offering a $10,000 reward for tips that lead to the arrest and conviction of copper theft suspects in Kentucky. “This new reward sends a clear message: copper theft is a serious crime and stopping it will take all of us to work together,” says AT&T Kentucky President Carlos Sanchez in the announcement.

  • The Nation ☛ We Can Still Realize FDR’s Vision

    FDR began with an extended review of the war effort, with an emphasis on what still needed to be done to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Then, however, he looked ahead to the postwar moment. Well aware that most Americans remained anxious about the possible return of the Depression, he declared: “It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people…is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.”

  • Futurism ☛ Cop Accused of Using AI to Fake Evidence

    The yet-unnamed officer has not been arrested, but has been suspended from duty pending the outcome of the investigation, which is reportedly being undertaken by Derbyshire police and the Crown Prosecution Service.

  • BBC ☛ Derbyshire Police officer accused of using AI to 'create evidence'

    Police have launched a criminal investigation into an officer accused of using artificial intelligence (AI) systems to "create evidential material in a number of cases".

    The Derbyshire Police officer has been removed from front-line duties, pending the outcome of the investigation, the force said.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ The First Offer Accepted: First-Action Allowances and the Track 1 Premium

      New USPTO data on 8 million first actions: the allowance-share collapse, the climb in pendency, and Track 1's first-action allowance edge.

    • JUVE ☛ After 120 years Plasseraud opens door to investor [Ed: Slop in patents]

      Plasseraud is not the first patent monopoly firm to respond to current challenges with an expansion strategy. Upcoming investments in AI-powered tools, as well as the expansion of existing offices and teams, require capital. IP network Rouse is carrying out its expansion with the support of MML Capital.

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • Scoop News Group ☛ Congress tees up No FAKES Act, aiming at AI-generated deepfakes

        While living, creators would be able to essentially license their likeness and image to others, over 10-year contracts for adults and 5 years for minors.

        It would also permit individuals to sue anyone who uses their AI-generated image without permission, and pay up to $750,000 for violations. Blackburn submitted letters of support for the bill from more than 40 groups, including the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the American Medical Association, Creative Artists Agency, the Broadcasters’ Associations and the Human Artistry Campaign.

  • Copyrights

    • Public Domain Review ☛ The Art of Kite Flying (1430–1929)

      69 images of kite flying from across 5 centuries and some 10 countries.

    • Public Domain Review ☛ Louis Pope Gratacap, A Curator in Lost Worlds

      Arguably the first work of fiction to feature a *Tyrannosaurus rex*, Louis Pope Gratacap’s *The New Northland* (1915) is at once kaleidoscopic, mischievous, fascinating — and exhausting. Richard Fallon explores this “lost world” novel, finding a work as interested in cutting-edge science as it was in paying dues to its generic precursors.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Major Publishers Sue 'WeLib', a Pirate Site Built on Anna's Archive Code

      Less than a month after a New York court issued a default judgment against shadow library Anna's Archive, thirteen major publishers have sued WeLib. The publishers characterize WeLib as a young but popular pirate site that was largely copied from Anna's Archive. The site is allegedly used by tech companies for AI training purposes, but that allegation raises more questions than it answers.

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Attribution, Provenance, Reference, Citation, and AI for Research Applications – Understanding the Differences

      Despite this long history, our understanding of how content is connected to other content in a vast network of interconnected research outputs is being challenged by technological developments. Fundamentally understanding what AI tools are doing when they are linking back to sources is critical to evaluating them for research purposes. In a larger context, the extent that some AI tools have the potential to break the chain of research and how they then put things back together will be important to their adoption and people’s understanding of their trustworthiness. Failure to embed provenance and connecting future claims to their source could risk undermining the integrity of the scholarly record and even diminish the author’s motivation to share their results..

      Let’s start with some definitions that are the most relevant to this discussion: [...]

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ A porn firm now has Meta in its sights — and it could win

      Whether or not Strike 3 has a legitimate claim for copyright infringement, it doesn’t deserve your sympathy. The firm was flayed in 2018 by federal Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Washington, D.C., for engaging in what he labeled a “high-tech shakedown ... smacking of extortion.” Lamberth called Strike 3 a “copyright troll” and threw out its lawsuit against an unidentified internet user for having treated his court “not as a citadel of justice, but as an ATM.”

      When I wrote about this scheme in 2023, I counted more than 12,440 lawsuits that the Los Angeles-based firm had filed in federal courts coast-to-coast. The latest count, according to a Lexis search a defense lawyer ran for me, is more than 21,000. The vast majority were settled and closed within a few months of their filing, an indication that they were never meant to go to trial.

    • Techdirt ☛ Congress Just Rushed Through A Disastrous Copyright Office Overhaul

      H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office, and not in a good way. The bill removes the Library of Congress’ current supervisory role over the Copyright Office, transfers several powers directly to the Register of Copyrights, and makes the Register a presidential appointee, confirmed by the Senate.

      These changes would make an office that’s already hugely influential in copyright and tech policy much more political. EFF first explained why that’s a terrible idea when it came up nearly a decade ago. This bill, like the older one, weakens the few public-interest checks and balances that do exist. We hope the Senate promptly rejects this bill.