Leftovers

• Los Angeles Times ☛ AFI names ‘Blazing Saddles’ funniest movie for Mel Brooks’ 100th birthday

  In honor of the comedy legend’s centennial, AFI announced Sunday that it was reorganizing its “100 Years ... 100 Laughs” list, moving Brooks’ gleefully offensive 1970s western satire “Blazing Saddles” from No. 6 to No. 1 and bumping “Some Like It Hot” into the runner-up slot. AFI said the move came after Brooks had “long kvetched” that his film was funnier than Billy Wilder’s 1959 classic.

• Los Angeles Times ☛ Mel Brooks at 100: 8 movie scenes that capture his genius

  Every Brooks fan has a favorite scene, and there’s a good chance yours isn’t on this list. That’s OK. We weren’t trying to settle the argument. These aren’t necessarily Brooks’ funniest scenes or his most famous — he didn’t even direct them all. Instead, we’ve highlighted eight moments that show his different sides, whether it’s his fearlessness, his showmanship or the warmth that so often ran beneath the anarchy. No handful of moments could tell the whole story. But these are a good place to start.

• Paweł Grzybek ☛ Fuck|Thank you

  Some of the tech giants for the past few years have tried hard to kill the most important tool of the web, links. AI companies have stolen content from the web without ever asking for permission just to wrap it into the soulless chats that keep on forgetting to credit the original authors. They rarely mention where the source of the information comes from. You know, a link.

  Let’s forget the privacy violations for a sec, Google until recently, was a useful search engine that helped you find the links to the things you’re after. This contract is also broken now, and the new Google interface from now on is here to give you some mashup of general knowledge about the stuff you’re interested in. No links.

• Nathan Upchurch ☛ Getting Old

  It’s been a while since my last update; I wanted to finish refreshing the style of my website before writing anything. The update took quite some time. At first, I implemented a design with big full-width header images on blog posts, and it looked pretty good. But, for some reason, after putting in all of the effort to accomplish my design I found that I lacked any motivation to keep going. I eventually realized that I just wasn’t keen on the design. There was nothing wrong with it per se; I think it was just too loud. After some more time in Inkscape, I settled on the current look and worked feverishly to complete it. It’s not terribly different: just a little tidier, more green, with some type tweaks.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ The Terrifying 2011-Era Case Of Max Planck’s Retracted Papers

    In the world of scientific publishing there are many reasons why a paper can be retracted, but generally there is an obvious and clearly communicated reason for doing so. Thus when [Yves Gingras] – a historian of physics – and [Mahdi Khelfaoui] – a colleague – noticed recently that two 1940s papers by [Max Planck] had been quite recently retracted, this resulted in an eyebrow-raising double-take, before naturally publishing their investigation’s findings on arXiv.

  • John D Cook ☛ Derivative equals inverse

    Here’s kind of a strange problem with an interesting solution: find a function f such that the derivative of f equals the inverse of f for all positive x.

    f ′(x) = f−1(x)

  • Chips and Cheese ☛ TOP500 at ISC’26: We have a New Number 1

    The new number one Supercomputer on the TOP500 list is the LineShine Supercomputer in Shenzhen, China. This is the first Chinese submission to the TOP500 in 9 years and they came in swinging with a massive CPU-only system.

    Starting with the specifications of the CPU that powers the LineShine system, the LX2.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • USMC ☛ USMC awards $20 million contract for first autonomous ground vehicles

    The contract was awarded this month to Overland AI, a Seattle-based company whose autonomy stack already powers military vehicles including General Dynamics’ Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport (S-MET); the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps; Textron’s Ripsaw M5; and used by DARPA, among others

  • C4ISRNET ☛ USMC awards $20 million contract for first autonomous ground vehicles

    Few details are available yet as to the model and capabilities of the systems Overland plans to provide to the Marine Corps. Announcements included images of the Overland-made ULTRA, which weighs 2,500 pounds and has a payload of about 1,000 pounds, but Boots would not confirm details.

  • Fabian Sanglard ☛ My favorite keyboards

    When I started using computers, we had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum at home and a nano-reseau of Thomson MO5s at elementary school. I distinctly remember how unpleasant it was to type with them. These must have been the worst keyboards I ever used[1]. Ever since, I have paid close attention to the keyboards I use. Here is the list of my all-time favorites.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ Clack! Analog Attitude for the Digital Age – Vol. 1 – Summer 2026

    It’s so jam-packed with typewriter-y and analog goodness that the editor didn’t have the space to include a table of contents, so for those who need one, I’ve typewritten one which I’m including below.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • David Pogue ☛ 10 Bugs that Apple Has 3 Months to Fix

    But the second-place news was also pretty big: Instead of cramming in new features, Apple says its main focus has been fixing its current software (26.5.2).

    I can’t endorse that mission highly enough. We really don’t need more features, more redesigns; most of us would rather have what we’ve got, but working smoothly.

  • So-Called 'Artificial Intelligence' ('AI') / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

    • Pew Reseach Center ☛ Americans' Views on AI Chatbots, Smart Devices and AI's Impact | Pew Research Center

      More Americans are using chatbots, and some are adopting AI summaries and smart speakers. But views about AI and how fast it’s advancing tilt negative – even for younger adults

    • Harvard University ☛ AI has lots of people digging out their iPods

      The angst doesn’t stop there. Americans spend more than four hours each day on their phones, and a lot of them don’t like it. The internet teems with tips and tricks to help people distance themselves from their devices (put your phone in grayscale; charge it in another room) or even ditch their smartphones altogether. About 169,000 people visit a Reddit community dedicated to digital minimalism each week.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron sued over alleged DRAM price fixing amid record memory costs — lawsuit claims coordinated HBM shift was cover to curtail DDR3 and DDR4 production

      Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron were sued on June 25th in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where 17 plaintiffs accuse the three memory makers of illegally coordinating to restrict DRAM supply and inflate prices that the complaint says have risen roughly 700% over four years. The class action, filed as Garciaguirre v. Samsung Electronics and assigned to Judge Noel Wise, invokes Section 1 of the Sherman Act and targets companies that together hold around 90% of the global DRAM market. Samsung and SK hynix have pleaded guilty to criminal DRAM price fixing once before, with the latter paying a $185 million fine in April 2005.

    • CNBC ☛ Memory crunch shaking Apple and Microsoft existential for small guys

      But smaller electronics manufacturers don't have that luxury, and are faced with potential doom as they figure out how to get necessary components and deal with crippling costs.

    • Nick Heer ☛ The Marketplace of Ideas Is Rigged When It Comes to Artificial Intelligence

      There is, therefore, no way to opt out of this technological push when buying something new. That makes sense if you think of the family of artificial intelligence technologies as a feature, not a product. But it does mean we all end up paying for this explosive market regardless of whether we think any of this is a prudent, sensible, or ethical technology.

    • The Verge ☛ Why is Apple asking me to pay more for Big Tech’s AI obsession?

      But this isn’t some fluke, or temporary supply chain problem. Companies are choosing data center clients over ordinary buyers because “the same chip earns far more inside an AI server than inside a consumer device,” according to Srikanth Jagabathula, professor of technology, operations, and statistics at the NYU Stern School of Business. Regardless of whether people are clamoring for more AI, and more AI data centers, or not.

    • Niels Provos ☛ Escape QEMU: Watching IronCurtain and an Open-Weight Model Break Out

      This work is exploitation, not discovery. The bug was already in hand, and the open question was where to point it to prove impact. The EDU primitive reads and writes host memory relative to the device’s DMA buffer, so turning memory corruption into code execution meant finding a function pointer the write could reach and the program would later call. The workflow spent its first several rounds on the obvious answer, a pointer in a neighboring object, and rejected two candidates in turn. Each time it built a harness, ran it, and confirmed that the corrupting write landed in an isolated region with no reachable dereference. Neither dead-end was argued away on paper. Each was killed by an executed harness that failed to produce a usable hijack.

    • Benjamin Hollon ☛ stop asking writers about "AI"

      There are questions every person I meet asks, and I’m getting sick of answering. Worse, the newest of these questions has been severely harming my motivation to write for several years.

      I didn’t want to talk about this, but I’m beginning to think I need to. Hopefully, if I get this off my chest, I’ll be able to move on to writing about things I love.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ A right-wing media chain tried to replace 47 newspapers with AI. They all died.

      A right-wing media chain bought local papers, replaced their journalists with AI, and died. Now their communities are left to plug the gaps.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Ford rehires hundreds of "graybeard" engineers after AI shortcomings

      But Ford issued 152 recalls in 2025, a single-year record, and has logged dozens so far in 2026, more than any other automaker.

      The trough of disillusionment beckons. An MIT study recently found that about 95% of corporate generative-AI pilots produced no measurable profit. S&P Global Market Intelligence found that the share of companies scrapping most of their AI initiatives rose to 42% in 2025 from 17% a year earlier.

    • Pertama Partners ☛ AI Project Failure Rate 2026: 80% Fail | Pertama Partners

      Why 80% of AI projects fail and how to avoid becoming a statistic. In-depth analysis of failure patterns, case studies, and proven prevention strategies.

  • Social Control Media

    • Wired ☛ Meta Contractors Posed as Teens to Prompt Rival Chatbots About Suicide, Sex, and Drugs

      The prompts were often designed to push the chatbots toward responses their safety systems were supposed to refuse, according to instructions describing the project. A single round of testing completed in August 2025 saw more than 45,000 prompts run through the rival chatbots. The companies behind the chatbots weren’t aware of the testing.

    • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ Silenced - by Carole Cadwalladr

      Wynn Williams was inside the company, operating at its highest echelons, when Cambridge Analytica harvested 87 million people’s personal data, when Facebook first discovered it had done so, and when the first article was written about it (by the Guardian’s Harry Davies).

      She was there when I began reporting on it. And when Facebook lied to me in its responses to my press inquiries. That’s not hyperbole. One of the many investigations that the Cambridge Analytica scandal triggered was undertaken by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It fined Facebook $100m for misleading shareholders and among the aggravating behaviour it noted was its lies to journalists - that included me.

      There is nothing about Cambridge Analytica in the book, an omission I find curious. The fallout from the scandal continues to this day. There are still ongoing lawsuits, Zuckerberg has been deposed multiple times to answer questions on what the executives knew when and exactly if and how they deliberately misled shareholders. These are multi-million dollar questions still and I do wonder if my particular presence next to Wynn Williams posed a particular threat to the company and may have contributed to what happened next.

      Ravi explained that Facebook was threatening Sarah with punitive damages if she spoke at the event. It was suing her under the terms of an NDA that she signed as part of a severance deal. That enabled it to take her to an arbitration court - a private tribunal - where an arbitrator had granted it a temporary order that banned her from promoting the book and making “disparaging, critical, or otherwise detrimental comments” about the company.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Cyble Inc ☛ ATM Jackpotting Malware Attackers Get 78-Month Prison Terms

      Once activated, the malware enabled attackers to send commands directly to the ATM’s cash dispensing module, allowing unauthorized withdrawals of currency. Investigators said the malware was also designed to erase traces of its presence, making it more difficult for financial institutions to detect the compromise.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • EFF ☛ Victory! Supreme Court Says Constitution Protects People’s Location Data

      The case involved geofence warrants, a form of dragnet surveillance police have used to vacuum up location data from electronic devices of people who happen to be in the vicinity of a crime. EFF had joined the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Virginia, and the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law in filing an amicus brief in the case.

    • EFF ☛ EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

      The Illinois legislature recently passed House Bill 5511, which imposes a sweeping, device-level age-gating framework across nearly all internet-enabled hardware, operating systems, and online services. This well-intentioned but deeply flawed piece of legislation will harm young people who rely on the internet to access essential information and find community. That’s why we’re urging the Illinois governor to veto the measure.

    • Android Authority ☛ Netflix is changing how households log into shared accounts, and you probably won't like it

      Over the last few weeks, Netflix has been asking users to assign individual emails to individual user profiles in the same account. For some context, Netflix lets you have up to five different user profiles in the same account so that each user can have different recommendations.

    • PC World ☛ Netflix is forcing users to link profiles to separate email addresses

      It’s still unclear when the new email requirement for profiles will be rolled out more widely. Some users report that Netflix customer service doesn’t seem to be aware of this feature yet, and there hasn’t been an official announcement yet (though it seems to be only a matter of time).

    • Panagiotis Vryonis ☛ What's wrong with EU age verification?

      Isn't it the family's job to set the limits?

      Yes and no.

      When children are very young, parents can set strict boundaries. But as kids move into their teens, parents also have an obligation to loosen them. Teenagers need spaces where they can act independently, make decisions, and talk to others — where they can learn to navigate the world without a parent looking over their shoulder.

      The question is whether we can build online spaces where that gradual freedom is possible.

    • NPR ☛ Supreme Court restricts use of geofence warrants

      A "geofence warrant" entails drawing a virtual fence around a geographic area where a crime was committed. The government can then seek a warrant to require a tech company to search its data to identify any of its users who were within the geofence at the time of the crime.

  • Confidentiality

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Factoring RSA Keys with Many Zeros

      Interesting research on a new class of weak RSA keys: keys with lots of zeros. It turns out that these keys are out in the wild.

    • Six Colors ☛ My credit card number? Sure! It’s 4242 4242 4242 4242 – Six Colors

      As with all decisions around privacy, consider how at risk you and your data are, including voice as data. In most cases, ensuring a baseline level of encryption can be enough. Even when the app or server can “see” your unscrambled information, the transport between your device and the server and another person’s device is encrypted. Someone would have to break into the server to sniff data. If stored on the server, the baseline state would be encrypted at rest; however, the server operator would manage those encryption keys.

    • Vitalik Buterin ☛ Obfuscation: building the final boss of cryptography (Part I)

      The most powerful primitive that has been conceived in cryptography is obfuscation. Obfuscation lets you convert a program \(P\) into an "encrypted program" \(Obf(P)\) such that you can run \(Obf(P)\) on cleartext inputs and get the same cleartext outputs that \(P\) gives you, but the internal workings of \(P\) are hidden. The precise formalism typically used, indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), says that if you are given obfuscations of two different programs that have the same functionality, you can't tell which is which. Effectively, it's hiding the code, not the data.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Comfort Democracies and the Control States

    Democracies won the 20th century on the battlefield as well as in the marketplace and the war of ideas, resulting in a world order made in their own image. But they did not prepare for or predict the resurgence of autocracies, nor the way that the postcolonial states—and the supranational institutions they now controlled—would, after many decades, reject the liberal democratic world order. The autocracies are surging, and democracies ebbing. It is impossible to define exactly what causes one state to fall and another to rise, but Ibn Khaldun identified asabiyya, the cohesion essential for a society to thrive: “Many nations suffered a physical defeat, but that’s never marked their end. Yet when a nation becomes the victim of psychological defeat, that marks the end.”

  • The Atlantic ☛ What Vance accidentally got right about Watergate

    Vance is correct about how Watergate would’ve landed today, but the lesson is not what he claims. Since 1974, Americans have become pessimistic about their leaders, deeply polarized in their partisanship, and distrustful of the media—all of which means that Watergate very well might pass quickly in today’s environment. The best evidence is that the Trump administration weathers scandals on the Watergate level routinely. As Representative Jim McGovern, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote of Vance’s remark, “‘We do a Watergate twice a day’ is a crazy way to confess your own corruption.”

  • Techdirt ☛ VC Bros Claimed They Backed Trump To Protect AI. Trump Is Shutting Down AI. It Was Always About Access & Power

    The real complaint was never about policy. It was always about embracing the fascism of it all, in which they (Marc & Ben, not the wider tech industry) would get to write the rules in a way that helped them personally, even if it fucked over actual innovation. Indeed, they seemed tickled that after they had dinner with Donald Trump, he rewrote part of his campaign policy platform. These total political novices were so overwhelmed that they could get one side to listen at all that they figured it was obviously the side to back. They seem positively giddy that Trump was willing to make changes to his platform based on their conversations.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Insurrection Payout Fund Is Dead. Long Live The Federal Tort Claims Act!

    But that doesn’t mean they won’t get paid. Lawyers seeking payouts for convicted insurrectionists are seeing if they can slip in the side door to pick up a paycheck, using a federal law that almost never secures wins for plaintiffs.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Is GPS reliance making troops less observant? Yearlong study aims to find out.

    “If you’re fostering a scenario in which people are overrelying on things, they might not be able to use their own cognition when the time comes for them to do so, and so we want to identify ... the specific design features that help out with that,” Ball said. “We also want to identify — more long-term — individual differences. If I’m someone who has really low cognitive ability, I might always be relying on that external [guidance] source, and that’s going to be really good for me, but I’m going to suffer really bad whenever that goes down.”

  • CS Monitor ☛ In Texas, a planned Muslim community stirs opposition

    These conservative activists are protesting a real estate project – a 400-acre planned community with more than 1,000 homes, a mosque, a faith-based K-12 school, and commercial spaces – being developed by the mosque in this suburb north of Dallas.

  • The Nation ☛ For Larry Ellison, Buying Trump Is the Bargain of the Century

    The billionaire has gotten media dominance and cozy government deals for what amounts to chicken feed.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ After the Founders Declared Independence, Printers Quickly Translated the Text for German-Speaking Americans

    Melchior Steiner and Charles Jacob Sigismund Thiel, who together ran a Philadelphia-based German-language printing firm called Steiner and Cist, were the men for the job. The duo had previously produced a German run of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, or Gesunde Vernunft, and frequently translated government documents into German.

    On July 5, an announcement was made in the German newspaper Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote that the Declaration of Independence had been signed and was being printed. On July 8, the first German broadside was published. It differed from the original in its typeface: a gothic font was easier, at the time, for German readers.

    “It’s not a pretty document, but it has a powerful presence,” philosophy professor Daniel DeNicola of Gettysburg College said in an article published by the institution, which owns one of just two surviving German-language Declarations of Independence.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The End of Independent Agencies

    Unfortunately, we now have a president and a Supreme Court, three of whose members he appointed, who are in their pockets.

    Hence, today’s Supreme Court ruling that a president can utterly disregard the will of Congress and install his own hacks in all independent regulatory agencies (with the odd exception of the Federal Reserve Board).

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Court Sides With Dictatorship — and Chaos

    Of course, the president has some role. Typically, the president can choose the agency’s head subject to congressional approval, but the president can’t just go and fire officials that he doesn’t like for whatever reason or for no reason, because the agencies that operate the U.S. government and basically run our society are supposed to be professional. They’re supposed to be following their legal mandate. They’re not supposed to be personal tools of a dictator in the White House.

    Well, the court just scrapped that. Now, lawyers, people who are legal experts, can do a better job of explaining just what went down. But what I think is important to understand is not only does this give essentially dictatorial powers to the occupant of the White House, but it also makes it extremely difficult for the economy to function. It makes it extremely difficult for society to function.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • The Next Move ☛ Europe’s Opportunity

      In 1949, the alliance was established as a bloc of democratic European nations under American protection with one purpose and to fight one war. Not a war in Afghanistan or Libya. This alliance was meant to fight a war to defend the continent from a Russian attack.

      Well, Russia has begun its westward aggression. In 2014—expanding that attack in 2022.

      Where are the Americans, the supposed guarantors of European security?

      Under the Obama administration, they did nothing—actually, worse than nothing, by continuing negotiations with Russia on climate change, the Iran nuclear program, and the Middle East, while largely ignoring Putin’s blatant violation of the international order on European soil. Under the Biden administration, they dragged their feet, providing assistance to Ukraine too little, too late. They lectured Kyiv about “escalation” as Russia dragged Ukraine into an ever more gruesome war.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Trump Administration Just Can’t Quit Signal

    The State Department last week released records from the exchange, found on the phones of Rubio and Needham, in response to Freedom of Information Act litigation by Democracy Forward, which has filed more than 400 legal actions against the Trump administration since last January. The new release, which we reviewed, includes 13 Signal chats from the first six months of 2025 that have not been previously reported. The new records are screenshots of Signal groups that mostly lack context about when they were formed and what was discussed. The identities of nearly all of the group members are visible, revealing even broader use of Signal by top Trump-administration officials than was previously known. The names of the groups are also telling, including one called “Iran/Ukraine Planning” and another labeled “State USAID.”

  • [Repeat] Digital Music News ☛ Live Nation Responds to $35M Whistleblower Lawsuit

    Though Live Nation is hoping to have the case dismissed, the live events giant is alternatively trying to move the matter into private/confidential arbitration. The company argues that its employment contract is confidential and therefore the dispute should be moved out of the public court docket and into a private tribunal.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ ICE Agents Confess Agency's Greatest Sins

    The guard’s quote, and the anecdotes and details in the paragraph above, weren’t revealed to Rolling Stone, or 60 Minutes, or The New York Times. Instead, we know them because both a guard and an inmate detained at Alligator Alcatraz spoke to independent journalist Karl Loftus, who for the past six months has been publishing unfiltered, raw interviews with the people at the heart of Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown: ICE Agents, private prison guards, Homeland Security Investigators, and other cops. Members of these groups are often incredibly reluctant to talk to the mainstream press, but Loftus’ position as a neutral party, who is already plugged into the world of cops and military veterans, has given him a unique window into the lives and opinions of the other side of the war on immigration. What they’ve revealed has been shocking, frustrating, and also deeply humanizing to the many officials who have been tasked with enforcing a policy agenda that they did not set, and often disagree with.

• Environment

  • Wired ☛ The Anti-Data-Center Movement Is Reshaping Michigan Politics

    Lawrence’s campaign sees data centers as a potent topic to rally voters to his side in the Democratic primary in Michigan’s 7th district, to be held in August. Internal polling conducted by Data for Progress of likely Democratic primary voters in the district shared with WIRED shows that more than 40 percent of respondents were “much more likely” to vote for a candidate who opposed data centers. The message resonated even more with respondents under 45: Almost 80 percent of younger voters said they’d be much more likely or more likely to support an anti-data-center candidate. (The 7th district includes the college county of Ingham.)

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Wired ☛ Truckloads of Tesla Batteries Keep Getting Stolen Before They Even Leave the Factory

      “It’s an epidemic right now,” says Storey County Sheriff’s Detective Sam Hatley, who has been investigating the Tesla cases.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Court House News ☛ Judge denies acquittal for ex-Google engineer convicted of stealing trade secrets

    In Monday’s ruling, U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria concluded a rational juror could have found beyond a reasonable doubt that Ding intended to take the trade secret information, writing in a nine-page ruling that the government provided “overwhelming evidence” at trial Ding planned to benefit himself and the company he was forming in China when he uploaded Google trade secrets between spring 2022 and spring 2023.

  • International Business Times ☛ Has Trump Found a New Ivanka? Glamorous Aide Natalie Harp's Role and 'Human Printer' Image Raises Eyebrows

    The book portrays Harp as far more than an executive assistant, describing her as the gatekeeper of much of the information reaching the President and noting that she carries a portable printer to produce favourable news stories, social media posts and briefing materials wherever he goes. That unusual responsibility has earned her the now-viral nickname 'the human printer' and fuelled online debate over how much influence she really holds.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Humbling of the Once Almighty Dollar

    Instead, what I am talking about is the loss of a non-military tool of coercion — the power to punish that the dominant role of the dollar in international financial transactions gave the United States. That power is now greatly diminished because Trump’s Iran war demonstrated to other nations that they can bypass the dollar-centered world payments system — largely thanks to China.

    Let me provide context by talking about the dollar’s global role.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ 450 Years in Prison for Saying “Anti-Fascist"

    Under cross-examination, Shideler acknowledged he had authored an article on combating far-left extremism whose subtitle, a defense lawyer pointed out, was “A Roadmap for the Trump Administration.” It ran in The American Mind, a publication of the conservative Claremont Institute. He conceded his work isn’t peer-reviewed and rests on “open source research” — material one can “find on the internet” — which, he agreed, carries “both false information and true information.”

    Somehow, some way, Shideler ended up being the Justice Department’s expert witness to explain “Antifa” and the grave threat it poses.

  • Karl Bode ☛ Midterm Media Bedwetting Over 'Socialism' Has Truly Begun

    To be clear, the U.S. political discourse has been so polluted by decades of corporate and right wing propaganda and substandard education, that I don't think even well-intentioned Americans operate with any coherent, grounded understanding of political reality or policy a good 80 percent of the time.

    So when you mention "socialism," most Americans have been well conditioned to immediately think of AK-47 wielding revolutionaries and bread lines, not public libraries, fire departments, community-owned broadband networks, or regulators holding companies accountable for Listeria-riddled arugula.

  • Jason Becker ☛ We live in a world that is less safe and less free

    The view of an ascendant right-wing can be summarized as "might makes right". Morality these days is winning, and winning is morality. The prosperity gospel equates wealth with not just morality, but favor from God directly. We extend this everywhere-- having the ability to use more force makes you right. Having the power to build systemic assurances you maintain power makes you right. Winning by whatever rules exist and rewriting the rules in your favor is fine because winning itself implies morality.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ MAGA Morality

    Civic virtue flourish only when we participate in the practice of maintaining our communities. They provide goods internal to the practice and only with them can we achieve the growth and betterment of our society at every level.

  • Sigma Star gmbh ☛ Integrity on Embedded Linux Devices under the Cyber Resilience Act

    So how does an embedded Linux device actually satisfy this requirement? The CRA’s integrity requirement is as broad as it sounds. It covers not just (personal and non-personal) data, but also commands, programs, and configuration, and applies whether the device stores, transmits, or actively processes those assets.

    There is no single technical control that protects all of these assets in all states. Depending on the product and its threat model, integrity may require controls for the boot chain, software updates, stored data, application binaries, configuration, commands, and communication with other systems.

  • David ☛ Tech Morality is Hard

    That is the million-dollar question. For me, I want to be as sure as I can that my tech stack is not exploiting people; is fair to the community; delivers and lives by standards I can identify with.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • [Old] RNZ ☛ Lid-lifting Kiwi author forced to sit in silence at writers' festival

    Wu called the lawsuit a "machine reaction, not a personal vendetta", BBC reported.

    He accused Meta of "maximising the punishment" as a warning to any other would-be Meta whistleblowers and described the action as "censorship".

  • [Old] BBC ☛ Facebook whistle-blower can't promote book at Hay Festival

    New Zealand-born Sarah Wynn-Williams was introduced as "an author in a hostage situation" at the Hay Festival, Powys, on Sunday.

    She is under threat of further legal by Meta if she does anything to promote her book, Careless People, explained investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ DC resident who played Darth Vader’s ‘Imperial March’ at troops receives settlement

    It had been several weeks since President Donald Trump had declared a “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital and deployed federal troops. On three separate occasions O’Hara had taken to playing “The Imperial March” as a Star Wars-inspired peaceful protest, recorded and uploaded to O’Hara’s social media accounts.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ CBS Ratings Continue Nosedive Under Bari Weiss

    CBS News ratings had already hit their lowest point in a quarter century back in March. And it’s now spread across the CBS News ecosystem, from CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes to CBS Mornings: [...]

  • Truthdig ☛ Truthdig Wins 13 Southern California Journalism Awards - Truthdig

    Corey Atad won awards for Columnist on Entertainment/Media and Entertainment Commentary, Film/TV. As the judges said of Atad’s work, “Each piece was thoroughly researched, well-written and covered starkly diverse subcultures within the film industry. These were written by someone who obviously loves movies, but can analyze the germane genre with assurance and unbiasedness.” In recognizing his second first-place award, the judges added simply: “Much to say. Said it well.”

  • CPJ ☛ More than a dozen South African journalists targeted as anti-migrant deadline looms

    Anti-migrant sentiment is rising, with protest groups mobilizing support by blaming undocumented foreigners for high unemployment, strained public services, and crime, ahead of local elections on November 4. Scores of people have been killed in earlier waves of xenophobic violence in South Africa.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ How often are dogs shot by the police?

    Police rarely track dog shootings, but the Department of Justice and animal advocacy groups have estimated that officers shoot and kill approximately 10,000 pet dogs every year — or about 25 to 30 dogs per day. According to the Animal Legal Defense Fund, shooting a dog is one of the most common reasons officers discharge their firearms in the line of duty.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Deal for Native American Tribes’ Rights to Colorado River Water Stalled by Four States

    Those four states, known collectively as the Upper Basin, are at a stalemate with the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada over new rules governing how they share the Colorado River, a key water source for nearly 40 million people. Congress and the White House, under both Democratic and Republican leadership, have declined to approve the settlement until all parties reach an agreement.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Verge ☛ T-Mobile is booting customers from its oldest plans

    Earlier today, T-Mobile started notifying customers that it will be retiring many legacy plans and moving subscribers onto one of its current rate plans. This move includes plans that date back to the 3G era, and it’s going about as well as you’d expect.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Spoils System Returns

    The president of the United States can now fire the head of the Federal Trade Commission for failing to bring a politically motivated antitrust case. He can fire the chair of the National Labor Relations Board for ruling against a donor. He can fire commissioners at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Merit Systems Protection Board, and roughly two dozen other multi-member agencies whose entire structural reason for existing was that their judgments would not turn on whether the current resident of the White House liked the outcome. He can do it tomorrow. He can do it without giving a reason. He can replace them with whoever he wants, provided the Senate confirms — and that is the Senate that confirmed Tulsi Gabbard despite being aware she was controlled by a cult.

  • [Old] CNET ☛ Gates, Buffett a bit bearish

    Gates shed some light on his own hard-nosed business philosophy. "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software," he said. "Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."