Leftovers

• Peter Hofmann ☛ Old Software "Collection"

  These are memories from a world of personal computing that no longer exists.

  Probably not very interesting as a blog post, but I want to keep track of this someplace. Might expand later, in case more stuff gets added.

  It's not exactly my goal to collect this stuff, hence the quotation marks around the word "collection", it's more like it has "accumulated" here. Some of these are my original boxes/disks from back then and I just haven't thrown them out, others were procured later because I couldn't resist. This list focuses on operating systems and office products.

  The year numbers correspond to the copyright dates on my particular disks, which isn't necessarily the exact release date.

  These days, I think the only sane course of action is to use Free Software.

• Paul Krugman ☛ An Encouraging Encounter With Real Americans

  And that was good, because I got to listen to other people who were really level-headed, interesting, pretty well informed about a bunch of stuff. Oh, and just to say that this was New Jersey, so it was a very diverse group of people — a random selection of people from New Jersey, which meant that it was multi-racial and multi-ethnic. The clerk had some trouble with pronouncing everybody’s name, which was okay — I mean everybody was very forgiving of that.

  So it was very much America as I see it — a country of lots of people who look very different, who sound different (except a fair number of people did have New Jersey accents.)

• Gabe Venberg ☛ Moving to Germany | Gabe Venberg

  Most of my homelab had to stay in the US. Between our German apartment having atrocious upload speed, the increased price of electricity here, and the recent RAM and HDD price increases, I am not able to justify building a new server and hosting it in my apartment. Thankfully a friend of mine in the US offered to let me co-locate in his basement, for which I am extremely grateful.

• New Yorker ☛ What Scientists Learned by Eavesdropping on Thousands of People

  Matthias Mehl, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona, who helped conduct the study, recently set out to replicate his findings with a larger data set: audio from more than two thousand people between the ages of ten and ninety-four, recorded between 2005 and 2019. Once again, Mehl concluded that men and women were equally talkative. But, strangely, when he and a co-author further analyzed the results, they found that participants had spoken an estimated twelve thousand seven hundred words a day—twenty per cent less than in the earlier study. “We thought we must have made a mistake,” Mehl said. Each year, he went on, the number of words spoken daily seemed to decline by about three hundred and thirty-eight. That translates into around a hundred and twenty thousand words a year—about the length of “Sense and Sensibility.” And Mehl noticed that the decline was even steeper for people under twenty-five, who lost an average of four hundred and fifty-one daily words a year. “This is many, many minutes of conversations,” Mehl told me.

• Ruben Schade ☛ Aramex as your Australian carrier? Beware

  I now actively reach out to vendors and specifically mention that I won’t be buying from them again if they use Aramax for their shipping. It’s nothing personal against them, but it’s just not worth my anxiety. I’m usually told in response that they’re “cheaper”, to which I certainly can’t argue.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Junited 2026 was wonderful : Juha-Matti Santala

  We have a wonderful community of bloggers who participate and this was the first year I took part, sharing 30 posts from across the Internet. All together, 59 people were listed to participate this year.

• Robert Birming ☛ Junited 2026 in numbers

  About 1,000 links were shared. That's around 17 links per blogger. R.L. Dane shared the most, and the most shared link was I want my friends to have blogs too.

  A few topics came up again and again across different sites, most notably the "buy me a coffee" button debate, sparking replies, counter-replies, and counter-counter-replies across half a dozen different blogs.

• Hugo van Kemenade ☛ Fixing the dictionary with Python 3.14

  However, the OED’s first citation had a markup bug: [...]

• Artyom Bologov ☛ Wiki, Wittgenstein, and Wits

  But what Wittgenstein meant by speech was not the everyday speech—but rather logical utterances. So, if one cannot speak logically—one must not speak.

  This is a radical position. Forcing all language to be logical is restrictive and kinda… futile? But it’s good that Wittgenstein picked his fight.

• Alex Magill ☛ Bringing things to life

  This post is about how we often talk about digital projects in terms of features rather than goals.

• Jim Grey ☛ Should film photographers keep their negatives? - Down the Road

  I often wonder, what am I keeping all these negatives for?

  For most of photography’s history, the negative was the photograph. Every print originated from it. Every future use depended on it. Preserving negatives was crucial because the negative was the master object.

• James G ☛ 75 reasons to start a personal website

  I love having a personal website. Here, I share reflections, stories, thoughts, ideas, and more. Because I have a website, I always have the idea in the back of my mind that there is a place for my writing. I can write a story and share it with friends, and even the world. What I write might not be perfect, but it is mine. This is my home for my creative works.

• Austin White ☛ Captain Kangaroo

  A very long time ago I was on Captain Kangaroo, a morning children’s show that was televised from 1955 to 1984. My best friend’s stepfather, Bill Thomas, was a musician who wrote and filmed these videos that appeared on the show. It was like MTV before MTV. My sister and father and grand mother were also featured in other songs.

• Andy Bell ☛ Proxy and Reflect

  In this specific instance, I’m here to teach you about using the Proxy constructor and Reflect object. These are features of the language worth having in your toolbox, naturally — but just as importantly they allow us to graze up against some of JavaScript’s innermost workings, and in doing so, better learn the shape of the mechanisms that power the language. That’s the kind of know-how that makes a senior developer.

  Now, the keen-eyed among you may notice that this article is shaped conspicuously like an excerpted lesson from said course — and yet, nowhere on the lesson listing page does it appear. “Whatever could that mean,” you might ask.

  Well, stay tuned.

• Standards/Consortia

  • RTL-SDR ☛ Adding HD Radio Support to FM DX Webservers with an RTL-SDR

    Thank you to Ivan (NO2CW) for submitting news about how he added HD Radio decoding capability to his FM DX Webserver receiver. The FM DX Webserver is a community of worldwide FM broadcast-band online receivers that mostly use SDRs based on the TEF6686 chip, with a few also using RTL-SDR receivers. HD Radio (aka nrsc5) is a proprietary digital audio standard used by FM broadcasters in North America. It's often observed by SDR users in a waterfall as the two rectangles flanking both sides of a broadcast FM signal. Ivan writes: [...]

  • Hackaday ☛ This DIY Time Server Is More Accurate Than You Need

    With NTP, you can get within 10 milliseconds or so of your upstream time source — but PTP is accurate down to nanoseconds. Unless you’re performing some kind of scientific research, running a robotic assembly line, or perhaps doing high-speed financial trading, there’s no reason for this level of accuracy. In fact, PTP is such a niche technology that until the release of the ESP32-P4, [Cristiano] couldn’t even find an affordable enough chip that supported it.

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ The Certification Ends Where the Code Begins

    I recently built the FIPS 140-3 Corpus, a dataset that pulls together the public record of FIPS validations. It combines CMVP certificate records, Security Policies, implementation details, operational environments, firmware versions, algorithm claims, and lifecycle data into something you can actually query and analyze rather than read one certificate at a time.

    I built it because I have spent enough years around certification programs to know that the interesting information is rarely in any single document. It emerges when you look at the record as a system. Once you do, a pattern shows up that I think deserves more attention than it gets. The public evidence tells you a great deal about what was evaluated and almost nothing about whether the code that shipped actually behaves the way the evaluation assumed.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ See Artifacts That Archaeologists Discovered in This 1,600-Year-Old Byzantine Christian Town Buried in an Oasis in Egypt

    The mud-brick village boasts streets, towers and a large church. Researchers unearthed everyday objects like grain grinders, an oven and some 200 ostraca—ancient receipts and notes written on broken pottery

  • Eli Bendersky ☛ Dot product: Component vs. Geometric definition - Eli Bendersky's website

    The goal of this post is to answer a simple question: why are the following two definitions of the vector dot product in Euclidean space [1] equivalent for vectors

  • The Independent UK ☛ A NASA satellite just woke up from hibernation in deep space. Here is what it can tell us

    New Horizons typically hibernates during long cruise periods, during which it continues to collect and store information. This hibernation period lasted for 321 days, ending on June 23.

    Fortunately, it appears that New Horizons woke up in good health, the space agency said. The spacecraft had been reporting its status to Earth, but did not relay information from its sensors and instruments.

  • CBC ☛ Disbanding of federal weather radar research group will hamper tornado-warning ability, experts say

    The issue is not the new radars, said the U of M's John Hanesiak, but instead outdated software and algorithms forecasters are left with to interpret what the radars are saying.

    And with the loss of the dedicated team, Hanesiak said needed improvements to the software and algorithms likely won’t be implemented.

  • Truthdig ☛ The Plan to Make Climate Science Harder to Erase

    “I couldn’t stand the thought of it all being thrown away,” Lindsey said of the website, which had been used by teachers, community leaders and policymakers. It had also given researchers in the government important insight into what everyday Americans needed to know about climate science and how to answer their questions effectively. Members of the former climate.gov team met periodically to discuss what could be done to preserve the work. By the end of last summer, they’d decided to create an independent version of the site. It launched late last month with a new nongovernmental domain: climate.us.

    The intent behind climate.us isn’t just to save what was on the climate.gov website when it died, but to also continue to update it with new visuals, explainers, features and Q&As, making climate science relevant to people with resources that are vetted by scientists. “We just try to constantly take the pulse of what scientists say is valuable and important and needs to be talked about and explained,” Lindsey said.

  • Hackaday ☛ Mechanosynthesis Of Atomic Carbon Structures Using Inverted-Mode STM

    This is demonstrated in a recent (pre-publication) study by [Megan Cowie] et al. using inverted-mode STM. One could say that in a sense what we’re trying to accomplish is somewhat akin to what biological cells do in their ribosome, where compounds are synthesized into a protein string using a template. The difference here being that rather than merely trying to create a 2D structure that then folds into a desired shape, we would like to build 3D structures directly.

  • Avi Loeb ☛ Social-Media UAP Influencers Misunderstand How Science Works!

    Once again, this sentiment reflects a misunderstanding of the way science is done. When faced with anomalies, theoretical physicists are encouraged to come up with potential interpretations, even if some of these interpretations appear highly speculative or turn out to be wrong later. Theoretical models are risky before they are validated by data. The mainstream of physics theorized that dark matter is made of weakly-interacting supersymmetric particles, but these particles were never found in their natural parameters space by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

  • Maury ☛ The Tadpole galaxy:

    This galaxy has a massive (and rather bright) tidal tail, but I can't see an obvious companion galaxy. The general consensus is that there's a second galaxy behind it... although a nearby elliptical has a suspiciously similar redshift: [...]

• Career/Education

  • NPR ☛ No [Internet], no screen time? FCC weighs cutting subsidy that lowers school [Internet] bills

    E-Rate has had a notable impact since its founding. It was created by Congress in 1996, when only 14% of schools and libraries could access the [Internet]. That number is now near 100%. The FCC has overseen the program through both Democratic and Republican administrations, so when the agency announced a full review of the program in late June, some were confused.

  • Thorsten Ball ☛ Ownership

    That means, when you say that you’re owning something, the expectation is that you…

  • Lou Plummer ☛ I Know Everything About You

    Show me you see the people around you, and I'm in your corner for life. Don't, and I already know how that story ends.

  • Joel Chrono ☛ RE: Screens ≠ Books

    First, e-ink screens do not need a backlight to function! I am unable to explain how the technology actually works, but it’s pretty much just a panel that prints information on itself and displays it in the same way a sheet of paper would. Think of it like an improved version of a calculator or a cheap digital watch display, they don’t really have a light—other than an LED in the corner that you can turn on for a second to see the time—that’s why the battery lasts so long!

  • DJ Adams ☛ Computing memories

    I agree strongly with this. It summarises much of how I feel about using computers, and reminds me of the TEDx talk I gave back in 2012 titled Our Computational Future, on how we should not be raising generations of users, but generations of creators and builders.

    Here's something else from the post: [...]

  • Joel Chrono ☛ Why are you always happy?

    I kind of wanted to reply in a playful manner, give them carrilla, point out how they’d be happier too if they stopped complaining about everything and actually did something they were passionate about, besides drinking or partying when they are all five years older than me!

    Again, carrilla is not something serious, they’d get it, I obviously lack knowledge about their lives and ignore a lot of things, but we would laugh which is what matters.

  • Alex Alejandre ☛ Interview With Mitchell Hashimoto

    In interviews, everyone comes from a different angle. Many people want to know how the software engineering to business founder mindset transition went. Then others are interested in product stuff, the work I did at Hashicorp or Ghostty now. What’s different here is there’s no known agenda coming into it; neither of us have anything to sell.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Wither/Whither the ACM

    ACM hasn't served as a true professional society for a long time. Unlike in other fields, ACM doesn't hold annual meetings for the whole community, and shares the spotlight with IEEE-CS, USENIX, AAAI, CRA and others. CRA takes the lead in research and organizes the CS department chairs meetings. ACM has focused on journals, conferences through its SIGS and awards.

• Hardware

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Army develops new technique for rifling cannon bores

    The Army has developed a new technique for cutting rifled grooves inside 155mm howitzer barrels that officials say could extend cannon life, improve performance and reduce manufacturing costs.

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Remembering Apple IIs by their keyboards

    Then two things happened. On one episode, Adrian did a repairathon of various machines, and demonstrated an Apple IIe Platinum. I nearly leaped out of my chair, because this was one of the exact machines I used. It was an Apple IIe, but with a “wider” keyboard. I now know it was “wider” on account of having a numeric keypad. I may have started researching how to acquire one almost immediately! This also taught me how much rarer these units are online, at least compared to Commodore gear.

  • Hackaday ☛ A Brief History Of The Crazy Old 7-Segment Display

    The direct parent of modern segmented digit displays appeared in the early 1900s (filed 1908; granted in 1910). Technically, this was an 8-segment display because it had a bar dedicated to forming a proper four, with the top-left part slanted. But removing that one segment is just an optimization. It may or may not have been the first, but by 1910, seven-segment displays were in use and not just curiosities on a workbench or dreams in a patent application.

    Even for lit-up displays, the first implementations weren’t LEDs. Early displays used incandescent lamps or neon-filled tubes. By the 1930s and 1940s, segmented neon or incandescent indicators were appearing in industrial equipment and counters, instead of the common columns of ten neon bulbs, pointers, or rotating wheels.

    Then, too, there were different approaches. Nixie tubes used individual character forms that lit up. Decatrons could count with ten different glowing points, each representing a digit.

  • Herman Õunapuu ☛ The 'free' server build | ./techtipsy

    I moved over storage from my other builds. The OS lives on a 128 GB NVMe SSD, which is also bootable. The booting aspect is worth highlighting because when this motherboard was new, NVMe SSD-s in this form factor weren’t super common yet and booting from PCIe devices was not common. I also carried over two Samsung 870 QVO 4 TB SSD-s, and the two 18 TB white label Seagate drives.

  • University of Toronto ☛ BMCs and a surprising USB network device on your server

    Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that you're installing a server with two network ports and during the (Linux) installation, a third network device shows up with a funny name like 'enp1s0f4u1u2c2', which is a USB Ethernet device (despite you not having any such thing plugged in to the server's USB ports). To your further surprise, your server installer can even lease a DHCP IP on this interface, say "169.254.3.1". Congratulations, your server has a BMC, and this BMC probably speaks Redfish, which is sort of the modern, cloud influenced version of IPMI.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • David Oks ☛ Why American ambulance rides are so expensive

    What Whitten had received was a “surprise bill”—a charge that lands on a patient when they’re treated, without knowledge or consent, by a provider outside their insurer’s network. The insurer pays what they consider reasonable; the provider bills the patient for the difference; and the patient, despite having insurance that’s meant to pay for treatment, is left holding the balance. This is a terrible situation to be in.

    It’s also the default way that ambulance billing in the United States works. Each year, roughly three million privately insured Americans take an emergency ambulance ride; about half of them get an out-of-network bill for it, a rate unmatched anywhere else in medicine. And the uninsured have it worse still: with no insurer to absorb any of the charge, they face the full, undiscounted bill on their own.

  • Derek Thompson ☛ Is This the End of Booze?

    This article is my best attempt to summarize my understanding of the vast and flawed literature on alcohol and health.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Apple Inc ☛ About support for encrypted Mac OS Extended disks in macOS 28 or later

    In macOS 28 and later, the Mac OS Extended file system format will be supported only for volumes (disks and other storage devices) that aren't encrypted. For future macOS compatibility, either decrypt or reformat any encrypted Mac OS Extended volumes.

  • OS News ☛ You paid me, a long-time Linux user, to use Windows 11 exclusively for a month: here’s how it went – OSnews

    The rules for the Windows 11 incentive are simple: use stock Windows 11 for a month for my computing tasks (with the exception of gaming – converting my Linux gaming PC to Windows just to play the same games seemed silly). I wasn’t allowed to use any debloating tools, but as an EU citizen, I do have the ability to remove a ton of Windows stuff thanks to the success of the Digital Markets Act. I also tried to stick to Microsoft’s own applications as much as possible, for that true “ecosystem experience”, and wasn’t allowed to hack my way into a normal local user account. I was all-in.

    So what was it like?

    [...]

    I gave it an honest-to-god try. I put in the time, work, and even some money. I was strict, didn’t allow myself to do any non-gaming tasks on Linux, and truly used Windows 11 exclusively for a month. Whenever I experienced a short stretch of time where I felt “perhaps this isn’t so bad?”, one (or multiple) of the problems and issues described above would snap me out of it. For someone used to desktop Linux, where respect for the user, consistency, customisability, and performance are still held in high regard, Windows 11 feels like an endless string of punches in the face.

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

    • Science News ☛ AI tools meant to vet science are surprisingly easy to fool

      “We are being swamped with more papers than we have the capacity to review, so we do need some solutions, and automation can help for some parts of it,” says Baumann, of Stanford University. But thorough experiments and evaluation are needed before such tools enter the peer review process, he says. Otherwise, AI tools might inadvertently perpetuate the biases they’re known to carry and reduce the variety of opinions weighing in on new science.

    • Sergio Visinoni ☛ How exactly is doing more AI going to make it better?

      As I reread both articles over and over, I noticed what made them ultimately unconvincing to me. While I do agree with some of the statements here and there, I now understand why I disagree with the key conclusions.

      Today's article is an attempt at articulating my views and further contributing to the discussion.

    • Mandy Brown ☛ Hungrier than before

      Is this not precisely what it’s like to read or watch or listen to slop? What you read isn’t really writing or drawing or art—it isn’t the creation of a mind reaching for the world—but illusion. And it’s not only AI, of course. A good deal of commercial content is more or less the same, books and movies and music created by marketing teams with quantified audience strategies but no fucking soul to speak of. AI accelerates that production process, makes it slicker and smoother, makes the illusion seem more real. Makes ever more of it, at greater and greater scale, until you come to believe there is nothing else out there. But it remains a deception. You think you’ve had your full but all the while you’re starving.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Google Translate is now Gemini — and you can prompt-inject it

      Google says the chatbot translator is more accurate, but that’s not true. What the chatbot does do is to make the translation read more smoothly. It’s often more wrong! But it sure reads well if you don’t know it’s wrong.

      There’s one other hazard with all chatbots — prompt injections. And guess what? Now you can prompt-inject Google Translate!

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

      A cybersecurity startup dangling millions of dollars to acquire zero-day security vulnerabilities in popular software is run by a pair of far-right conspiracy theorists and convicted felons whose most recent ventures included fake intelligence companies and a now-defunct AI-based lobbying platform they operated under assumed names.

    • FSF ☛ How the FSF sysadmins block botnets with reaction

      We used fail2ban with ipset for a while but ran into limits of its architecture with Python and SQLite. We rolled our own solutions as a quick patch several times with BASH, awk, Perl, etc. to find the address matching the pattern and add the rule to ipset without an additional intermediary database. The custom scripts worked for a moment, but it became difficult to manage when we had to run several little scripts as more patterns appeared. Not all of the patterns should be banned on first appearance either so we needed a solution like fail2ban. We looked for fail2ban alternatives written recently. We found several, but many of them were written as one-off showcases rather than well-maintained solutions that would last. We eventually found a promising project on Framasoft's forge Framagit called reaction written by ppom.

      It took us a bit of time to understand how to configure reaction. Unlike fail2ban, reaction does not come with a working configuration and you must build your own configuration with what is relevant to your needs from example documentation. There was not an example for using ipset so we had to build one. Overall, this approach is very good because we now have a configuration that has everything we need and very little that we do not need.

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Set up OpenClaw on your Raspberry Pi

      OpenClaw is currently one of the biggest buzzwords in tech. It’s a digital agent software that runs on your computer and taps into a large language model (LLM) to operate autonomously.

    • Wired ☛ This Former DeepMind Exec Thinks the AI Arms Race Could End in Disaster

      That’s Verity Harding’s conceit. Between 2016 and 2020, Harding spent her days briefing politicians across the globe, from Barack Obama to Emmanuel Macron, on advances in AI. As the head of global public policy at Google DeepMind, Harding was responsible for mapping out ethical conundrums and potential risks. Back then, she told WIRED in a recent interview, AI research “was rooted in international cooperation.” But somewhere along the way, the industry began to be shaped instead by rivalries—between individual labs like Anthropic and OpenAI and between two global superpowers: the US and China. The AI arms race became the metaphor du jour.

    • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Steve Jobs, AI, and the Problem of Analysis Without Ownership

      There is an old Steve Jobs clip from a 1992 MIT Sloan talk that feels newly relevant in the age of AI. In the talk, available here as Steve Jobs MIT 1992 Lecture, Jobs is asked about consultants. His answer is not that consultants are unintelligent or useless. His criticism is more subtle. He says consultants often get to see a lot, analyze a lot, and recommend a lot, but they do not stay with the work long enough to own the consequences.

      They do not spend years living with the product, the team, the tradeoffs, the mistakes, the customers, the budgets, the bugs, or the recovery. They may see the fruit, as Jobs put it, but they “never really taste it.”

      That distinction matters.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ The Language of AI Could Change How Humans Speak

      There’s a risk to this. The increased use of large language models means we humans will encounter much more AI-generated text. We humans, in turn, will begin to adopt the linguistic patterns and behaviors of these models. This will affect not just how we communicate with one another, but also how we think about ourselves and what goes on around us. Our sense of the world may become distorted in ways we have barely begun to comprehend.

    • Rui Carmo ☛ AI as a weapon of mass cognitive destruction

      The immediacy is a bigger dopamine hit than you’d expect. Type a prompt, get six paragraphs and two tables in seconds, and it feels efficient. The sender reckons they’ve saved twenty minutes, and from where they sit, they have: what took twenty minutes now takes two.

      Except the time didn’t vanish, it shifted and multiplied. Every recipient now has to wade through the padding, work out which sentence actually matters, and mentally rebuild the one-liner that should have been sent in the first place. Sender spends two minutes; ten people downstream lose fifteen each–if they read the whole thing at all.

    • Martin Fowler ☛ Experiences with local models for coding

      This is the second memo where I describe my recent experiences on running small models locally on my developer machine for agentic coding. In the first memo, I covered the many factors that can influence the viability of that setup — hardware, model choice, runtime, harness. Here I focus on the concrete experiences, the tasks I gave the models, what happened, and my final conclusions.

    • Farid Zakaria ☛ Who does Anubis actually stop?

      Uh oh. Looks like they have adopted Anubis, which is an HTTP proxy that requires proof-of-work before allowing access to the resource.

      Did this really do anything?

      Unfortunately, no.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ As social networks fill up with AI slop, trusted relationships and communities will win.

      Specifically, long-form content on LinkedIn was 41% likely to be AI-generated, which shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s browsed LinkedIn lately. Medium was 31% likely and X was 29% likely. Open social web platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon don’t seem to have been a part of the dataset, but I think it would be foolish to assume they’re immune.

    • Futurism ☛ The Logo for Donald Trump International Airport Appears to Be AI Slop

      Look past its gaudiness, though, and you’ll notice some things that’re a little off in the finer details. The talons are horribly deformed and shaped differently from each other. The entire legs are uneven, too, and the base of them are represented as a strange conglomeration of blobs, which are also inconsistent. In fact, the whole thing is slightly asymmetrical. The wings have an uneven number of feathers. The two olive branches — another error in itself, because the eagle is supposed to be clutching a bundle of arrows in its right-side talon — have differing numbers of leaves. And the shield only has eleven stripes, as opposed to the thirteen that the actual Great Seal is supposed to feature.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Apple sues OpenAI over alleged theft of trade secrets — claims company mentored incoming employees on bringing confidential information

      The suit, filed in the Northern District of California, names OpenAI technical staff member Chang Liu, chief hardware officer Tang Tan, OpenAI, and io Products as defendants. The last of that group is notable because it was founded by Tan in collaboration with former Apple design head Jony Ive, Evans Hankey (Ive's successor at Apple), and former Apple designer Scott Cannon. Notably, the complaint seems to attempt to avoid naming the founders, though Ive's name is cited in a URL.

    • Security Week ☛ 'HalluSquatting' Turns AI Hallucinations Into Botnet Delivery Mechanism

      HalluSquatting, on the other hand, has been described as a form of untargeted promptware that relies on a technique named adversarial hallucination squatting, in which threat actors can exploit AI applications at scale without a direct channel.

      In a HalluSquatting attack, the attacker pre-registers the fake repository or package names that LLMs commonly invent when asked to fetch popular, trending resources.

    • 404 Media ☛ LinkedIn and X Are Flooded With AI Spam, Browsing Data Suggests

      A shocking amount of the content that users encounter on popular social media websites is likely AI generated, according to data from a company that detects AI writing. As much as 41 percent of longform written content seen by users on LinkedIn is likely to be fully AI-generated and roughly a third of longer posts on X are AI-generated; roughly one-in-ten longer Reddit and Substack posts are AI, according to the data.

    • 404 Media ☛ AI Fiction Is Easy to Detect Because It's Stupid and Bad, Research Finds

      “Narrators explicitly explain the story’s theme 77% of the time, versus 52% for humans: a grieving character’s arc will typically end with the narrator stating the lesson learned. AI dialogue serves philosophical debate more often (59% vs. 34%), and references to other works tend to be vague allusions (72% vs. 50%) rather than specific, named references. The pattern is one of over-determination: AI spells out meaning rather than trusting the reader to infer,” the study said.

    • Robert Reich ☛ Who's Gonna Buy All the AI Stuff?

      But when I ask them who’s going to buy all the wondrous AI products and services — especially after AI destroys millions of jobs and decimates the American middle class —they have no answer.

    • Michael Geist ☛ Why Being Locked Out of Frontier AI is The Sovereignty Threat Canada Missed

      For months, questions about digital sovereignty have dominated the Canadian digital policy landscape, with many concerned about domestic control over both computing infrastructure and the data that fuels the digital economy. The debate reflected mounting unease over the risks of relying on non-Canadian companies for what have become essential services, and fears that Canadian privacy safeguards could be overridden by foreign courts or governments. My Globe and Mail op-ed notes that these remain real concerns, but the past few weeks have revealed an overlooked threat that similarly speaks to a loss of control. While Canadians have been worried about others controlling our infrastructure or using our data, we have lost sight of the risks of Canada being locked out of the most capable artificial-intelligence models, with consequences that could leave the country in the second tier of AI.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: “Rights for robots” and the AI slavery fantasy (10 Jul 2026)

      AI dangles the possibility of a world without ego-shattering confrontations between bosses who tell themselves they're in charge, and the workers who know how to do things and insist on telling bosses that their ideas are dangerous, illegal and/or unworkable: [...]

    • The Walrus ☛ Canada Has a New Law to Stop Deepfake Nudes. Will It Work?

      According to a report from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, “over 90 percent of deepfakes available online are non-consensual pornographic clips of women.” As of October 2022, there were over 57 million Google search results for “deepfake porn” globally. A 2024 report from the United Nations shined an especially harsh light on Canadians’ use of generative AI. A survey of law enforcement across Canada, the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Nigeria found that Canada is seeing the widest range and highest volume of AI-generated CSAM.

    • Futurism ☛ Coinbase AI Sends Mass "Breaking News" Alert That's Completely Hallucinated

      Crypto marketplace Coinbase is under fire after sending out an AI-generated breaking news alert that Norway’s national men’s soccer team had clinched a spot in the quarter finals of the ongoing FIFA World Cup by beating Brazil 3-2 — before the game even started.

      While Norway did eventually beat Brazil — with a final score of 2-1, contrary to what Coinbase’s AI claimed — the glaring error didn’t sit well with netizens, particularly considering Coinbase had struck a partnership with prediction markets app Kalshi. A hallucinated [sic] news alert could’ve caused bettors to lose out, a panic triggered by an entirely made-up World Cup match outcome.

    • Futurism ☛ New Jersey Poised to Ban Self-Driving Tesla Robotaxis

      Relying entirely on cameras that can be blinded by the Sun, fog, or heavy rain is part of Musk’s major bet on AI. He has argued that adding extra sensors may end up being less safe thanks to what he called “sensor contention” in a tweet last year.

    • The Verge ☛ The robotaxi law that could ban Tesla

      A bill expected to come up for a vote later this year would require companies seeking to operate fully autonomous vehicles in New Jersey to use cameras plus two other sensing technologies, most commonly lidar and radar. If enacted, New Jersey would be the first state to codify such a hardware mandate into law, moving ahead of a nearly identical proposal currently pending action in neighboring New York. The measure would also effectively prevent Tesla’s camera-only Robotaxi system from operating in New Jersey unless the company changed its hardware.

  • Social Control Media

    • Matthias Zöchling ☛ Farewell Twitter

      Next week would have been be my fifteenth Twitter anniversary, but that ain’t gonna happen, and it’s anyhow not a thing.

      For two reasons: Someone renamed Twitter, but more importantly, I deactivated my account 30 days ago, meaning the grace period is over and the account is gone. No big deal, I replaced it with Mastodon in 2022 and after an unnecessary course correction I stopped tweeting in 2024. But the account still existed.

    • Akseli Lahtinen ☛ Leaving lobste.rs rant

      I had been tired of the site for a while. When I joined lobste.rs it was pretty much hacker news but good: people were reasonable and found joy in crafting stuff with computer, instead of trying to make profit at all means possible which is just tiresome to read about.

      Well, time seems to have catched up on lobste.rs too since the joy of crafting is gone. Many are instead dickswinging about some new thing they generated which will be unmaintained in couple weeks, or just trying to do what hacker news do: make profit at all means possible.

    • Sightline Media Group ☛ Army orders mass shutdown of official social media accounts

      The U.S. Army is consolidating its official social media presence, drastically slashing the number of allowable accounts and ordering commanders to remove newly-unauthorized accounts within 30 days, the service announced in a late-June memorandum.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ EU finds that Meta breached bloc’s rules with its social network interfaces

      The European Commission has taken issue with the two social networks’ content recommendation features. In particular, officials pointed to feed personalization settings that make users more likely to continue browsing. They also raised concerns about Meta’s infinite scroll and video autoplay features.

      The EU’s findings are the product of a probe that kicked off shortly after the DSA went into effect. The investigation placed particular emphasis on the impact of Meta’s interface design choices on minors.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • SQ Magazine ☛ Accenture Confirms Data Breach After Hacker Sale Listing

      Accenture confirmed a security breach on July 8, 2026, after a threat actor calling itself “888” claimed to have stolen roughly 35 GB of source code and other data and listed it for sale on a cybercrime forum.

    • Security Week ☛ Accenture Confirms Data Breach After [Cracker] Claims Source Code Theft

      According to the [cracker], the information, including Azure access keys and tokens, configuration files, RSA and SSH keys, and source code, was exfiltrated from Accenture earlier this month.

      The threat actor, who was trying to sell the allegedly stolen data, posted as proof-of-possession a screenshot depicting a private Azure DevOps repository apparently hosted on an accenture.com domain.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Security Week ☛ Critical Vulnerability Exposes GitHub Agentic Workflows to Prompt Injection

    “To exploit this vulnerability, the attacker needed no coding skills, access, or credentials. All that was needed was to open an issue in a public repository belonging to an organization that uses GitHub’s Agentic Workflow setup and wait,” Noma explains.

• Security

  • Devices/Embedded

    • Wired ☛ What Happens if China Hacks the US Water Supply? I Went to a Secret War Game to Find Out

      Burst water mains. Evacuated hospitals. In a closed-door simulation, insurers played out their response to a mass disruption by China’s Volt Typhoon hackers—and found a nightmare scenario.

• Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

  • Feld ☛ Email Passwords Keep Getting Stolen

    A recent headline tells us that millions of email passwords were recently stolen from six ISPs. Security wonks like to exclaim that this is a failure by the admins at those companies, but the reality is more nuanced than that. I think their inability to escape storing plaintext passwords is directly a result of failures by standards bodies and the fact that email is so old of a technology that it has survived multiple paradigm shifts in internet security practices. Let's take a brief and likely innaccurate trip through time to see how we got to where we are today.

  • PC World ☛ I argued with a security expert about guest Wi-Fi... and won

    You don’t have control over other people’s devices. A friend could show up at your place with a compromised phone or laptop, for example. Meanwhile, smart products can have glaring holes in their security—vulnerabilities that hackers would use to spy on you, insert themselves into your browsing sessions, and/or compromise your devices.

    Placing them on a guest network separates their traffic from your home network’s. So long as the two streams never mix, any guest (or “guest”) devices can’t see what you’re up to. Beyond the security benefits, this approach also protects your privacy. (Though not fully for smart devices that record and report your usage habits, or take photos and videos of your home’s interior—they’ll still have an [Internet] connection.)

  • Bitdefender ☛ Invited to a "job interview" with Netflix or OpenAI? Beware! Your Google password could be at risk

    Will Thomas, a threat intelligence researcher Team Cymru, identified malicious domains that spoof household names including Adidas, Adobe, American Airlines, Aquent, Booking.com, Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, FIFA, Levis, Louis Vuitton, ManpowerGroup, Marriott, McKinsey & Company, Netflix, Omnicom Group, OpenAI, PepsiCo, Red Bull, Sephora, and United Airlines.

    What makes the campaign more dangerous is its attention to detail. Rather than using a generic "Dear Job Candidate" email, the attackers appear to have done their homework (most likely via via LinkedIn) addressing recipients by name and targeting people who work in the relevant field.

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • TruthOut ☛ AI Is Turbocharging Bosses’ Efforts to Spy on Their Workers

    In March, The Lever reported that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had hired the infamous software company Palantir to implement its controversial return-to-office directive, warning that the contract could bring surveillance technology — commonly referred to as “Bossware” — to the federal workforce.

    Days later, those suspicions were confirmed. A published disclosure reveals that the company will “design, configure, deploy, and manage a secure, user-friendly tool to track USDA employees’ return to the office.”

  • SQ Magazine ☛ AI and Mental Health: Recent Statistics and Research Findings

    This article looks at both perspectives through an evidence-based psychological lens: what good and bad AI can bring to mental health.

  • The Register UK ☛ MEPs fail to prevent Chat Control snoopfest revival

    Opponents won the count but missed the 360-seat threshold needed to stop the interim CSAM-scanning rule

  • Patrick Breyer ☛ EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0 – Breyer: “Our children lose out”

    Today, the European Parliament allowed the suspicionless mass scanning of private communications (“Chat Control 1.0”) to pass, a measure it had rejected twice in March. Although a majority of voting Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) actually opposed the regulation (314 against, 276 in favor, 17 abstentions), the motion to reject it failed to secure the required absolute majority of 361 votes. As a result, mass scanning is now permitted again until 2028.

  • Engadget ☛ Flock Cameras Track More Than Your License Plate, And They're Spreading Fast

    Although Flock cameras are often referred to as license plate readers, that's reductive. Reading license plates is their primary task, but they can be used to track just about anyone or anything. Even without a license plate, law enforcement officers can search for things such as, hypothetically, "green sedan with American flag bumper sticker," or, "pickup truck with paint scratches on left side and dirt bike in truck bed." Reducing Flock ALPRs to license plate readers is a bit like calling your own eyes "Engadget article readers" simply because that's what you're using them for at this particular moment. The company also offers AI surveillance cameras which do track individuals.

    The issues with Flock Safety cameras are well documented: Flock has been plagued by security vulnerabilities, rampant misuse by law enforcement officers and AI malfunctions which land innocent people in trouble with the law. And once Flock cameras take root in a city, weeding them out can be nearly impossible. There are now over 100,000 ALPRs installed nationwide, with the vast majority coming from Flock.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ AI surveillance is being supercharged – and it will chill social progress

    These systems will combine powerful AI, public and private surveillance via real-time facial recognition technology and digital tracking, mass databases and highly personalized enforcement. If deployed at scale, they will have profound chilling effects not just on personal freedoms, but democracy and social progress itself.

  • Citizen Lab ☛ AI Surveillance Is Being Supercharged–And It Will Chill Social Progress

    In an op-ed for The Guardian, senior research fellow Jon Penney and co-author Bruce Schneier argue that widely deploying AI surveillance could be corrosive to democracy and social progress itself.

  • The Verge ☛ Meta is reportedly working on smart glasses that would be recording all the time

    Should these glasses or the “super sensing” features be released, they would raise significant privacy concerns. Meta is already facing a lot of scrutiny over its reported work on facial recognition features, pushback following reports of users filming women while wearing the glasses, and grappling with modders who offer paid services to remove the LED recording indicators. The company announced Tuesday that it’s rolling out an update that will disable the camera if the glasses detect that the LED has been tampered with.

  • Matt Langford ☛ Posting Fewer Photos of My Kids' Faces

    Not whether I should share anything at all. I’m not there, and honestly, I don’t know that I ever will be. I like sharing little pieces of our life. Family trips, ball games, birthdays, random Saturday adventures, the normal stuff that makes up a life. I also like having a blog that feels like it belongs to an actual person with an actual family, not a sanitized content machine.

    But I have decided to change the way I share those photos.

  • PC Mag ☛ A Hacker's Arrest Reveals Microsoft Can Track Users Via a Windows Device ID

    Stokes allegedly hacked an unnamed luxury jewelry retailer in May 2025 while using a VPN. The 39-page criminal complaint shows the FBI used Microsoft records to discover that his IP address was associated with a Microsoft device identifier known as Global Device ID (GDID).

    “According to a Microsoft representative, a Global Device Identifier in the Windows ecosystem is a persistent, device-level identifier designed to uniquely identify an installation of a Windows operating system on a device, either a physical device (e.g., a mobile phone or laptop) or virtual machine, across certain Microsoft services and scenarios," the complaint explains.

  • USDOJ ☛ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. PETER STOKES; also known as “Bouquet,” “Spencer,” and “Jordan”; CASE NUMBER: 25 CR 812; UNDER SEAL [PDF]

    25. According to Microsoft records, the ngrok account was set up through Global Device Identifier g:6755467234350028 (“the GDID”). According to a Microsoft representative, a Global Device Identifier in the Windows ecosystem is a persistent, device-level identifier designed to uniquely identify an installation of a Windows operating system on a device, either a physical device (e.g., a mobile phone or laptop) or virtual machine, across certain Microsoft services and scenarios. A GDID is a globally unique identifier tied to the installation of Windows on a device. A GDID remains consistent across Windows operating system updates on a device, but a reinstall of Windows, either on the same device or on a different device, will be tied to a new unique GDID.

• Confidentiality

  • Wired ☛ OnlyFans Models Are Accidentally Making Hacked Government Websites Disappear

    Adult content creator Laura Lux says she has been publishing pictures of herself online for almost two decades. She primarily posts on OnlyFans these days, but she previously used Patreon and at one point hosted her own subscription website. No matter the platform though, people have always tried to steal her content and “leak” it online. “It’s an endless battle,” says Lux, who uses her creator name for privacy reasons.

  • Techdirt ☛ An Indian Billionaire Was Targeted By Trump. Then He Poured Money Into A Startup Secretly Backed by Donald Trump Jr.

    America First Refining’s unexpected breakthrough came after it forged a previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr., who secretly acquired a stake in the startup, according to records and seven people familiar with the company. The new details reveal the role the president’s son has played in a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Indonesia’s Army Is on the March Against Democratic Rights

    An acid attack on the Indonesian human rights activist Andrie Yunus fits into a wider pattern of creeping authoritarianism under President Prabowo Subianto. Democratic gains since the fall of the Suharto dictatorship are being systematically eroded.

  • NPR ☛ Do you know where your birth certificate is? Journalist warns of new voting barriers

    "The Voting Rights Act of 1965, the most important civil rights law of the 1960s, has no teeth left. And that's just the beginning of what they've done in terms of weakening democracy," journalist Ari Berman says.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Chat Control 1.0 sneaks through the EU Parliament, letting companies scan user data without warrants — legal tactic used to force a majority-required re-vote on eve of Parliament break

    The scanning is not mandatory, but big tech firms will have a legal mechanism to rifle through user data. EU firms have historically refrained from doing so, presenting privacy and data sovereignty as selling points, but the legal door is nevertheless now officially open.

  • The Record ☛ Europe revives law allowing big tech to scan for CSAM

    Now that the ruling has given firms like Google, Microsoft and Meta clear direction and legal cover to continue the CSAM scans until 2028, critics say privacy in Europe is under siege.

    Use of the procedural move to require an absolute majority vote on the eve of summer recess is all the more disturbing, critics say, because Parliament rejected the same measure three months ago under normal circumstances.

    The “highly politicised procedural efforts” were fueled by Metsola and are an unprecedented tactic, according to a blog post from Rand Hammoud of Europe’s Center for Democracy and Technology. The post criticized lawmakers for “overstepping Parliament’s own mandate and previous vote.”

  • Wired ☛ A Majority of European Lawmakers Voted Against Letting Big Tech Read Our Messages. They’re Going to Anyway

    The ruling reinstates permissions for firms including Meta, Google, and Microsoft to scan private text, email, and social media messages through a bill nicknamed “Chat Control” by critics. End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp and Signal, remain exempt.

    “It will mean that private companies may deny your right to have confidential digital conversations,” Simeon de Brouwer, policy adviser at the Brussels-based advocacy group European Digital Rights, tells WIRED. “They could, if they want to, read every message you write, every email you send, every picture you share.”

  • PC World ☛ Why you should never sell old electronics without checking them first

    Anyone selling old smartphones, SSDs or printers often unwittingly reveals passwords, photos and sensitive documents. We’ll show you which devices pose the greatest risk and how to delete your old digital data securely.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ AI Surveillance and Social Progress

    China has been developing its surveillance infrastructure for years. The country has over 600 million surveillance cameras, increasingly powered by AI and facial recognition to enforce legal and social rules. Take the case of Lao Duan, a Chinese citizen blacklisted by the system after he lost his job and was unable to repay a series of loans. When he visited Beijing, the city’s AI surveillance system identified him by his face at a major intersection and displayed his face, name and citizen ID number on a large electronic billboard nearby with a message that he was an untrustworthy person. Similar systems are now being deployed across China and integrated with its infamous online monitoring, censorship and social credit systems.

    AI surveillance is now being experimented with in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. According to a new report, the US Department of Homeland Security is rapidly increasing its use of AI-based surveillance, including facial recognition and the monitoring of social media accounts, to keep tabs on immigrants, dissidents, journalists, legal observers and protesters. While the systems are ostensibly used to maintain security and public safety, the real aim is often social control. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle—a powerful tech giant that works closely with the Trump administration—has said: “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting.” The chilling effects are the point.

  • Matthew Brunelle ☛ Thundermail, Tuta, and remembering Lavabit

    Lavabit was a small operation, but a darling of the privacy community. I remember emailing with Pete, the one other employee aside from Ladar, for support issues. When the FBI requested they turn over their SSL private keys Ladar decided to shut the service down and protect the users instead of comply. The closure of Lavabit disheartened me and I went back to gmail.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ Meta’s new AI creep glasses will record 24-7 without a light

    Meta’s AI glasses have all sorts of alleged use cases. The real use case is the market of creeps and weirdos who film people out and about without their consent. And Meta knows for a fact this is the market: [...]

  • El Constitucional ☛ The European Parliament takes a decisive step towards the digital euro to gain sovereignty against the United States

    The digital euro would have two modalities. The online version would operate through a system of accounts and would allow digital payments similar to current ones, although with direct backing from the central bank. The offline version would work without an internet connection, through local storage on a device, with a logic closer to cash. If the user loses the device with offline money, they would also lose that balance, as happens with a physical wallet.

    Basic services would be free for citizens. Opening an account, maintaining funds, managing them, and having at least one payment instrument would have no cost. Providers could charge for additional services, but Parliament wants to limit commissions and avoid practices such as penalties for inactivity or mandatory packages.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ EU lawmakers pave way for 'digital euro' negotiations

    EU officials have said that the digital euro would protect people's privacy, by safeguarding the identity of those who use it.

    The digital euro would also have an offline mode that would be as confidential as using cash.

  • Privacy International ☛ Humanless Resources? Uncovering AI recruitment software

    Privacy International trialled two AI recruitment platforms in February to investigate the impact of algorithms being embedded into the recruitment process, and what the transparency and fairness implications may be for candidates. Our findings raise serious questions about the reliability of AI tools for assisting recruitment decision-making, and about the fairness of recruitment processes where consequential decisions are delegated to black box systems.

  • Futurism ☛ Waymo Takes Revenge, Dropping Drunk Teens Directly Into Squad of Cops

    The teens caused quite a stir. An video show heavily armed police officers and even a K9 unit searching the Waymo vehicle. After all, even toy guns “pose real dangers, especially to an untrained eye,” per the update — an unfortunate reality for a country massively struggling with gun control.

  • The Drive ☛ How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked Me for Days Over ‘Stolen’ Plates and Sent Police After Me

    Again, I tried to explain that I had no idea why a license plate on a press car would be flagged like this. “Can you get Range Rover on the phone?” Officer Ganshyn asked. A tall order on a Sunday. As I started dialing, he added that the plate was reported stolen by a Jaguar Land Rover dealership in Los Angeles.

    After a few tries, I managed to get someone at JLR on the phone and handed the call off to the officer, who spoke with them for about 10 minutes. He hung up and came back over with an explanation that clarified everything in an instant, but somehow made it worse.

    The New Jersey plates that were allegedly stolen from the LA dealer were 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. But when the police report was created and the plate was entered into Flock’s system, it was just recorded as 34 DTM. Just the five large characters, no little number in the middle. And Flock’s AI tech wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town. It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.

  • Futurism ☛ Flock Cameras Screw Up, Swarm Innocent Man With Armed Police

    Flock surveillance cameras are blanketing the country, and to no one’s surprise, innocent people are being caught in their dragnet.

    At our sister publication The Drive, automotive journalist Joel Feder reports how he was suddenly swarmed by armed cops while test driving a Range Rover with his wife in Minnesota. The police used four squad cars to box him in in a coordinated maneuver; when he demanded an explanation, the officers said that they had been tracking him for days using Flock’s AI-integrated cameras, which had tagged his car as stolen — erroneously, as it turned out.

    It was a startling example of how far reaching the controversial surveillance system had already become, never mind how flawed its conclusions can be.

  • NPR ☛ Waymo called the cops on teen riders, raising privacy concerns

    The 15-year-olds were allegedly drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns from the car, according to the police. They said Waymo's systems detected behavior that then triggered a safety response, after which the company disabled the vehicle and contacted police.

Defence/Aggression

• Task And Purpose ☛ Two new Marine units will prepare grunts for drone warfare

  The Marine Corps is standing up two new organizations focused on drone warfare at its major training bases on the East and West coasts. Based at Marine training hubs at Twentynine Palms, California, and Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, the two units will develop and test drone tactics, technology, and training for Marines headed to real-world deployments.

• Robert Reich ☛ Seriously, Where Does Trump's Power Come From?

  Trump’s power comes from his willingness to violate all the norms, rules, and laws about how American presidents are supposed to act — to do anything that helps him accumulate more wealth, power, and glory, and wreak vengeance on anyone who has tried to get in the way.

  The NATO presidents and prime ministers treated Trump with extraordinary deference because they’re afraid of what he might do if he doesn’t get what he wants.

• Votebeat ☛ Trump fires Election Assistance Commission members, leaving agency unable to act

  The firings leave the four-member commission with no commissioners, meaning it cannot take official action until new members are installed. They also come days after the Supreme Court granted the president power to fire leaders of independent agencies, weakening a legal framework that for decades had insulated bipartisan federal commissions from direct White House control.

• Dark Reading ☛ More Countries Jump on the Social Media 'Ban Wagon'

  Age restrictions on accounts may be more of a stopgap because industry compliance is already falling short. Tech giants are struggling to follow the laws without affecting users.

• Marcy Wheeler ☛ Harmeet Dhillon Doxes the 100 People She Hired to Undermine Democracy

  Even as evidence mounts that her team completely fabricated their case against Georgia Fort, in an effort to claim her office is not full of people who do such a thing, Harmeet just bragged about all the 100 people she hired at Civil Rights to replace the people who actually tried to defend civil rights before she removed them for that reason.

• The Independent UK ☛ Cap private political donations to restore trust in British democracy, think tank says

  Among them is the cap on donations, which the IPPR says will challenge the threat of big money in politics and reassure ordinary voters that their views also carry weight.

  It suggests a £100,000 cap, to be lowered gradually to £10,000, alongside an outright ban on non-UK taxpayers donating to political parties. The IPPR says this would curb the influence of the super-wealthy over the nation’s politics.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• TruthOut ☛ 40 Epstein-Tied Billionaires Have Injected $1.6B Into US Elections, Report Finds

  Americans for Tax Fairness Action Fund reveals in a new report Thursday that 40 billionaires and billionaire families with ties to Epstein have injected over $1.57 billion into U.S. elections since 2010.

  According to the group’s analysis, 84 percent of this spending, or over $1.3 billion, went toward Republicans or conservative causes.

• Salon ☛ "Where's Mitch McConnell?" mystery exposes media failures

  Kentucky’s 84-year-old senior senator is one of the chief architects of the MAGA Republican Party, and he is almost solely responsible for the makeup of the current Supreme Court. He has been absent without leave since June 14, apparently in a “D.C. area hospital” receiving “excellent care.” But for what, we have no idea, and few seem to care. McConnell is an inveterate political fly catcher who has survived in the back alleys and fetid filth of Washington’s political swamp.

• Meduza ☛ Hackers published private messages they attribute to journalist and media executive Ksenia Sobchak, pointing to supposed ‘agreements’ between her media empire and Russian officials

  If the hackers are to be believed, Ksenia Sobchak and Andriy Yermak, then Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, exchanged messages and spoke by phone in March 2022, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine. Yermak called Sobchak smart and said they had many mutual acquaintances. She shared details of how her newsroom was coping after the war began: [...]

• The Atlantic ☛ The Trump Administration Is Punching Holes in the Public Record

  Since last year, the Trump administration has been dramatically reducing the amount of federal data available to Americans.

Environment

• TruthOut ☛ Western Europe Just Had Its Hottest June on Record. Climate Change Is to Blame.

  Temperatures this June were, on average, 1.78°C above the 1991-2020 average for June. In western Europe specifically, the temperature was 3°C higher than the averages seen during those years.

  The heat was accompanied by dryness, which contributed to wildfires in southwestern Europe.

• Wired ☛ Microsoft Reports a Massive 25 Percent Jump in Emissions

  Microsoft’s greenhouse gas pollution increased by roughly 25 percent last year, the company says in its new sustainability report released Thursday.

  The report follows similar ones released by Google and Amazon last week. Together, they show a troubling trend of rising tech company emissions, driven by the global race to build out power-hungry data centers.

• The Revelator ☛ We Didn’t Just Fail to Stop Ebola. We Caused It.

  The driver of zoonotic outbreaks isn’t bad luck. It’s habitat destruction, wildlife trade, and decades of ignoring science.

• Futurism ☛ The Pollution Being Churned Out by AI Data Centers Is So Severe That It's Almost Incomprehensible

  The rate of growth of this “shadow grid” of custom power plants, some of which are big enough to fuel entire cities, is so enormous that the only global entity installing more gigawatts of gas plants than Texas is China, according to environmental group Global Energy Monitor.

  On a national scale, scientists are still racing to wrap their heads around the environmental footprint of our new AI obsession. Cornell researchers found that at the current rate of AI growth, the burgeoning industry could represent 24 to 44 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, the equivalent of adding five to ten million cars to US roadways.

• Wired ☛ Data Centers Are Quietly Taking Over Texas. The Pollution Could Be Catastrophic

  With some 300 data centers already in operation and 200 more in development, Texas could surpass Virginia as the nation’s leading data center market by 2030. Amidst the frenzy to capitalize on the AI boom, a regulatory loophole has allowed dozens of data centers like Stargate to quietly construct massive power sources that emit harmful pollutants with little to no public notice, a Floodlight investigation has found.

  Typically, before you can build a major source of new emissions, you have to get a major air permit, which includes extensive environmental reviews and engagement with the local community. But in Texas, regulators have allowed some data centers like Stargate to avoid that process by first obtaining so-called minor air permits—the kind more commonly associated with dry cleaners and autobody shops and rubber-stamped with minimal review.

• Common Dreams ☛ First Wrongful Death Climate Case Against Big Oil Wins Major Rulings, Moves Toward Trial

  The first-ever U.S. lawsuit seeking to hold Big Oil companies accountable for the death of a family member in a climate disaster will proceed toward discovery and trial after a Washington State court rejected the companies’ joint motions to dismiss and strike the case. The court found that the claims in this first-of-its-kind case are not blocked by federal law because they are “not about regulating emissions,” as the oil companies argued.

• PC Mag ☛ FCC Approves Reflect Orbital's Space Mirror Satellite That Astronomers Hate

  The FCC says the most controversial aspect of Reflect Orbital's Earendil-1 satellite, the giant mirror, falls out of its authority since the regulator mainly focuses on radio spectrum.

• Paul Krugman ☛ The Heat Is On

  These disasters represent the leading edge of serious damage — social, human, and economic — from a warming planet.

  Projections of future climate change are often expressed in terms of averages: By 2050 average global temperatures are expected to be above pre-industrial levels by around 2.5° C — 4 ½ degrees Fahrenheit, while sea levels will be 10 incheshigher.

• The Nation ☛ France’s Heat Shock

  Between June 17 and 30, France was exposed to its most dramatic heat wave in recorded history. Peak temperatures hugged 40°C (104°F) in Paris over several consecutive, grueling days. The country’s highest recorded temperature remains the 46°C (114.8°F) notched up during the 2019 heat wave in the southern town of Véragues, near Montpellier. But June 2026 now counts as thehottest on average. Summer has only just started, and the immediate human toll is already grim. On July 3, public-health authorities announced that the week of June 22 saw an increase of over 2,000 heat-related deaths.

• The New Lede ☛ Scientists say 4th of July heatwave was “virtually impossible” without fossil fuels

  In New Jersey, officials said at least 29 people died from heat-related illnesses. The Fourth of July heatwave comes after weeks of record-breaking heat in Europe, which caused over 2,000 excess deaths in France alone.

  Now, a group of scientists say such temperatures would have been unheard of in a pre-industrial world, before the advent of fossil fuels.

• Digital First Media ☛ Peak of heat reaches Mid-Atlantic as many records fall across East

  Here are some of the most notable temperature records set on Thursday: [...]

• Seattle Times ☛ Without climate change, U.S. heat wave called ‘virtually impossible’

  Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from the burning of oil, gas and coal have trapped more of the sun’s heat at Earth’s surface, raising temperatures worldwide for more than a century. Summer hot spells are nothing new, but because of the excess heat around the planet caused by global warming, they can produce higher temperatures today than they once did.

• World Weather Attribution ☛ Fossil Fuels Are Heating America’s 250th Birthday – World Weather Attribution

  A widespread heat wave is forecast to affect much of the central and eastern United States over the Fourth of July weekend, driven by a strong “heat dome”, a high pressure system sitting over the US, bringing moisture and warm air from the Gulf of Mexico (Al Jazeera, 2026). Daytime high temperatures are expected to be over 100°F (32–38°C+), with heat index values reaching 105–115°F (41–46°C) in some areas because of high humidity (CBS News, 2026). While the heat index, which combines temperature and humidity, is commonly used in US weather forecasts, another measure for humid heat extremes especially designed to measure the impact of humid heat during physical activity is the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT, see box below). A heat index of 105°F is roughly equivalent to 28-30°C WBGT. Above 28°C physical activities such as playing football become extremely dangerous for even healthy and young people (WWA World Cup Report, 2026).

  The greatest impacts are expected from the Midwest through the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, with many major cities, including Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York, under heat alerts (Guardian, 2026). High overnight temperatures will provide little relief, while high humidity is increasing the risk of heat-related illness, especially during outdoor holiday events (Weatherchannel, 2026).

• New York Times ☛ To Reduce Electrical Grid Strain Amid Heat Wave, Data Centers Are Ordered to Use Backup Power

  Orders to use such generators are most likely to come in 13 Mid-Atlantic States, which share a strained grid and are home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world. That region has also been subject to this week’s heat wave. The area’s primary grid manager, PJM, runs a system that stretches from Chicago to Virginia Beach and covers most of Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey. PJM expects that demand for electricity on its system will hit its highest level on Thursday, exceeding a previous record set two decades ago.

• Energy/Transportation

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Trousers on fire from lithium

    Anyway, that’s all bad enough, but the idea that I’m living in a flat above dozens of other flats, and below dozens more, and all of them likely have dozens of lithium-ion batteries… it’s more than a bit scary. We’re told to avoid taking excessive numbers of batteries on aircraft given their explosive potential, and yet we all now stock our houses with the stuff. Phones, tablets, cameras, toys, appliances, electric toothbrushes, remote controls, unmentionables. It’s the stuff of nightmares.

  • Yle ☛ Electric aircraft makes historic flight from Sweden to Finland

    According to the Oulu University of Applied Sciences, this tour marks the first time that a fully certified electric aircraft has crossed areas of open sea.

  • Vintage Everyday ☛ 1963 Studebaker Avanti R2: A Bold American Design Icon

    The 1963 Studebaker Avanti R2 was one of the most daring and innovative American cars of its era. Designed by Raymond Loewy’s team, the Avanti stunned the automotive world with its sleek, aerodynamic fiberglass body, sharply raked windshield, and futuristic styling that looked years ahead of its time.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ 25-year sodium-ion home battery debuts ahead of planned US rollout

    UNIGRID has delivered the first units of its sodium-ion residential energy storage system, marking the commercial debut of its lithium-free home battery technology. The initial Na+Casa systems have been installed in homes across Europe, while U.S. residential installations are expected by the end of 2026 after the technology meets additional North American compliance requirements.

  • Futurism ☛ You'll Never Guess Which Country Is Causing the Most Global Warming

    Though the US also added some renewable energy — solar capacity alone grew by over 28 percent compared to the previous year — that doesn’t automatically mean dirty, non-renewable energy shrank. As Rapier observes, much of North America’s emissions growth was led specifically by the rising coal-based emissions in the US, which grew by 13 percent.

    “Many people assume that if solar and wind are growing quickly, fossil fuels must be shrinking,” Rapier writes. “That is not what the data show. In a growing energy system, both can happen at once. Renewables can rise sharply, while fossil fuel use also rises.”

• Wildlife/Nature

  • James G ☛ Nature

    The fresh smell of Nature in the air permeates the air on the quiet country path. I hear a calm rustle in the leaves. A bird is quietly walking through the grass, in search of food. Families are out together, enjoying the summer day; conversation and birdsong fills the middle distance.

  • James G ☛ Gardens

Finance

• Yorick Peterse ☛ Funding open-source software without compromising it

  Funding open-source software is a challenge, especially for projects without a large existing community. While various approaches exist, they all come with their own drawbacks. For example, asking for donations is by far the most commonly used approach but also the least effective: you can ask (or pretty much beg) for donations for years and maybe you'll receive $10 per month. Heartbleed is probably the most well-known vulnerability that highlights the problem of important but chronically under-funded open-source software projects.

• Leon Mika ☛ More Kvetching About Stripe's Documentation

  I’ve been struggling with Stripe’s documentation for a while, and it just occurred to me what the issue is: it’s not clear enough on the basic concepts of its working.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The North Lines IN ☛ School Libraries Audit triggered after detection of Separatist-praising books

  According to the circular, the screening exercise aims to identify any material that may violate religious sentiments, contain inappropriate content for students, content against prevailing laws with the potential to harm national interest, or adversely affect educational values and established norms. It also directs schools to ensure that all library material conforms to the objectives and vision of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.

• Futurism ☛ Trump Suddenly Opens Dozens of Gas Stations Selling Suspiciously Cheap Fuel, and Experts Are Already Warning of Impending Disaster

  “Stations selling at this price, it’s not sustainable,” De Haan explained. “Generally, when losses happen, somebody’s got to pay for it.”

  De Haan raises an obvious question: who is paying for it? If the stations are losing money on every gallon, somebody has to make up the difference somewhere — whether out of Trump’s pocket, that of a friendly donor, or the taxpayer’s. And if it’s a private company taking the hit, how long until they stop subsidizing Pennsylvania drivers? Will consumers in Ohio ever get to experience a $3.47 gallon at a Freedom Fuel-branded station?

• The Verge ☛ If Microsoft sold off Xbox, who would even buy it?

  Despite the cuts, Microsoft still has a lot under the Xbox umbrella. It operates a hardware business that sells (increasingly expensive) Xbox Series X / S consoles, and one of the first things Sharma did was tease Xbox’s next-generation console, codenamed Project Helix. It still operates a massive roster of game developers: Halo Studios (which works on Halo), Bethesda Game Studios (Fallout, The Elder Scrolls), Mojang Studios (Minecraft), Call of Duty studios like Infinity Ward and Treyarch, The Coalition (Gears of War), Playground Games (Forza Horizon, Fable), Blizzard Entertainment (Overwatch, Warcraft), King (Candy Crush), and Rare (Sea of Thieves). (Kotaku has a great list of the current state of Xbox’s studios, if you want a refresher.)

• Wired ☛ Peter Thiel’s Husband Sued a Flight Attendant Who Says He Assaulted Her on a Private Jet

  (Like the other claims in this story attributed to Bojar and Danzeisen, these were made in court filings.)

• Bruce Schneier ☛ Cybersecurity and the Gap Between Skill and Ability

  Internet risks are nothing new, and cyberattacks—both large and small—have been a significant issue since long before the current crop of generative AI models.

  What’s been changing over the decades, and what AI is changing even faster, is the gap between skill and ability. For most of human history, the two terms were synonymous—but computers have decoupled them. As the gap between the two expands, humans empowered with these AI tools can do more: more writing, more research, more analysis and also more damage than ever before. These models can, with little detailed direction, autonomously hack into networks, steal data, deploy ransomware and destroy systems. And to the extent there is a solution, it’s going to involve harnessing AI for the defense.

• Rui Carmo ☛ Rewriting Bun in Rust

  It also doesn’t surprise me in the least that Jarred caught Claude blatantly lying about implementation details–stubbing out functions to fake compilation, then papering over them with verbose comments. I’ve never had that issue with Codex, but I’ve had it several times with Anthropic models, and that is why, ironically, I don’t trust them for coding.

• Robert Reich ☛ Is SpaceX Crashing?

  But, what about all the Americans who didn’t even know they were buying into SpaceX, but whose savings are in index funds linked to SpaceX and the Nasdaq-100? They’ve been taken for a ride.

  On May 1, the Nasdaq 100 implemented a new “fast entry” rule that included companies among the top 40 most highly valued in the U.S. — which put SpaceX on board automatically.

• Ken Klippenstein ☛ Mitch McConnell Nears Dead-Line

  Under Kentucky law, if McConnell is declared dead before that date, there's a special election to fill out his term. After that date, the seat sits empty until whoever wins November's already-scheduled race is sworn in on January 3.

  In a political system run by the sage leaders that people like McConnell imagine themselves to be, he would have stepped down so voters could have an orderly election and decide for themselves. Instead, we have a mad dash for partisan power.

• Karl Bode ☛ The AI Hype Reckoning Is Upon Us

  There's what modern software is actually capable of, and then there's the gargantuan pile of "AI" hype, fraud, and bullshit our biggest tech companies (and their lazy enablers in the tech press) have shoveled down the public's throat for the better part of the last five years.

• Hamilton Nolan ☛ We Already Have Everything We Need to Regulate AI

  Perhaps the best example of this somewhat confused approach to AI oversight is Bernie Sanders’ proposal for the federal government to take a 50% stake in the biggest AI companies, and use the proceeds to create a sovereign wealth fund. I have written before about why this is not the best idea. I apologize for returning to the same topic again, but, shockingly, my last piece did not cause Bernie to drop his plan and rally to my side. It feels worth one more stab at clarity on this issue. If progressives genuinely want to get ahead of the dangerous consequences of unchecked AI—and I know that they do—it’s important for all of us to know that everything we need to do so is right there waiting for us.

  In my lifetime, we have already witnessed the full arc of a powerful new industry growing up and taking over the world with insufficient regulation. That would be the tech industry. The failure of the US government and of organized labor to get ahead of the tech industry’s wild growth has produced: A crisis of economic inequality; an outright oligarchy with centibillionaire tech executives at the top of pyramid; a near-total absence of labor unions in the world’s richest industry; and massive psychological and societal damage as a result of unregulated social media and algorithms assaulting the overmatched human attention span. Collectively, it is safe to say that the way that the tech industry’s growth has played out this century is not something we want to repeat.

• Pivot to AI ☛ Quantum computing doesn’t need to exist to make venture capital deals

  Quantum computing doesn’t exist as a tech. It’s not in any way a product. It’s still just physics experiments. But that doesn’t stop the flow of cash for a moment: [...]

• Air Force Times ☛ Air Force major restricted to DC base, under investigation after uniformed protest

  As Air Force Maj. Jason Watson ascended the Capitol steps last week wearing his military uniform and armed with one protest sign, he knew the risks and was prepared for the consequences, no matter how severe.

• Salon ☛ Taylor Swift's wedding proves AOC right: There are no good billionaires

  Swift’s Madison Square Garden wedding may be just the latest — and most outrageous — example of this change, but it’s as good an explanation as any for why her music has grown colder as she’s become richer. Flying around the world on a private jet, living behind a phalanx of security and saying Kelce is “putting his life on the line” as a well compensated football player are all signs that Swift has lost touch with humanity. This would be hard for any artist, but it’s disastrous for someone whose work is generally interpreted as autobiographical.

• Truthdig ☛ How Woody Guthrie Keeps Resonating With New Generations

  “Not that he’s ever disappeared,” said Mitchell, the author of several books about American politics and history since the Great Depression, including on socialist Upton Sinclair’s 1934 race for California governor. “Woody has been embraced by new generations, certainly at the No Kings protests and anti-ICE protests. He’s sort of everywhere.”

• Fabio Akita ☛ The Bun in Rust Response Andrew Kelly Should Have Written

  What I liked most about Jarred’s post was the level of detail. He did not sell the idiotic fantasy of writing a prompt like “rewrite Bun in Rust” and waiting for a miracle. Quite the opposite. What he described was procedure: PORTING.md, lifetime analysis, LIFETIMES.tsv, a trial run with three files, dynamic workflows, adversarial reviewers, process correction when the agents started doing stupid things with git stash, then compiler errors becoming a work queue, then smoke tests, then the whole suite, then multi-platform CI. No irresponsible vibe coding. Engineering using AI as a multiplier.

• Andrew Kelley ☛ My Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite

  We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's codebase. Hacks on top of hacks. Abuse of assertions. Most of all, recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt. Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs. Now, it's not our business to police what our users do, but you may have noticed people screaming in our faces about memory safety constantly. You can imagine how we might want to put some social distance between ourselves and a project whose irresponsible software engineering practices invite the exact kind of criticism that people are eager to level.

• Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

  • The Verge ☛ No, Flock isn’t threatening people for debating surveillance

    But Flock denies that it sent the letter, with chief strategy officer Rahul Sidhu citing it as an example of a mass disinformation campaign against Flock. “Flock never sent this letter, these people made it up (with a forged signature) to try to manipulate people,” Sidhu says. “We are pro-democracy. People SHOULD have discussions and lectures like this.”

    In a statement to The Verge, Flock’s chief legal officer, Dan Haley, says that Flock is aware of “at least two forged” letters and that “these letters did not come from me or from anyone at Flock.” Here is Haley’s full statement: [...]

Censorship/Free Speech

• Rolling Stone ☛ Comic Escapes $27 Million Lawsuit Over ‘Lion King’ Chant Joke

  “We have always believed this was a frivolous lawsuit in violation of our client’s First Amendment rights,” Sullivan tells Rolling Stone. He says the dismissal came after his side filed a motion for sanctions against Morake. Jonasi will now seek attorneys’ fees under California’s anti-SLAPP statute, which is designed to deter lawsuits aimed at silencing public speech, he says.

• Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Why Research Libraries Oppose the OMB Revisions to the Uniform Guidance

  ARL submitted its public comment on the proposed regulation on July 7, urging the withdrawal of revisions to two particular sections. Our commenting strategy included a focus on the provisions for which research libraries have the strongest standing. In the first half of this post, I’ll delve into some specific issues we weighed. In the second half, I’ll touch on a wider set of issues that we did not address in our comment to OMB but that concern research libraries because they relate to our values and our commitment to scholars and scholarship. That’s why ARL signed on to the community letter by the American Council on Education, knowing that a challenge of this magnitude will not be turned back solely by organizations defending their narrowly defined interests. That’s why we’re speaking out about the real costs of research dissemination, even as library concerns about how value is created and captured in scholarly communication aren’t going away. Meeting the moment we’re in means balancing the needs to block, bridge, and build our way toward more equitable futures.

• Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Where Do We Go From Here? How Scientific Societies are Thinking about the Proposed OMB Funding Rule

  Over a three-week period in June, I spoke with eight leaders of scientific societies to understand how their organizations are navigating this disruption and what these changes could mean for the future of STM societies and organizations. These leaders — CEOs and Executive Directors, publishers, and an Editor-in-Chief / physician-scientist — were uniformly thoughtful in their wide-ranging responses. They covered the deeply devastating ramifications of the proposed rule, whether the proposal reflects the ignorance or malfeasance of the current administration, and what the near-term future could look like if the changes are implemented.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Post-political (09 Jul 2026)

  Obviously there's the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza.

  "Leftist extremism" is moving some zines around:

  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jun/24/prairieland-texas-ice-protests-zines

  Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people in gulags, and the earth's richest man slaughtering the world's poorest children for the lulz: [...]

• Techdirt ☛ ABC’s The View Wimps Out, Shies Away From Politics After Trump Threats

  It’s a shame that ABC, which had previously started to show some a signs of life in its battle with the thin-skinned U.S. president, suddenly doesn’t really want to talk about why The View rejected requests to host NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or the democratic socialist candidates he supported for Congress, Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez: [...]

• Techdirt ☛ Four Years After Dobbs, Anti-Abortion Lawmakers Keep Coming For Online Speech

  This is an effort by anti-abortion government officials to mold the information ecosystem, restrict what people can read, and cut off the ways people communicate with one another. We’ve watched this build for years, and the encouraging news is that many of these efforts have failed. The worrying news is that they keep coming. And if they’re allowed to succeed, this could have repercussions for freedom of expression online beyond reproductive rights.

• TruthOut ☛ Trump Praises Erdoğan at NATO Summit Amid Turkey’s Crackdown on Civil Society

  Repression from the Turkish state has not been addressed during the summit; instead, “something that we’ve been hearing throughout the summit is that Turkey has this indispensable place in NATO,” says Michaelson.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Ben Werdmuller ☛ Communities will build trust and loyalty for local public media. Chicago Public Media is taking a big leap forward.

  But this is the first time we’ve seen a single social platform rolled out by a public media company at this scale. Chicago Public Media was gifted the underlying chicago.com domain and will be rolling it out to neighborhoods and suburbs throughout the area. It sounds like each community will be highlighted (perhaps with its own feed), with an attached hub that covers the entire region.

• CPJ ☛ Multiple journalists detained or arrested in Turkey ahead of NATO summit

  The 2022 disinformation law dictates that anyone found guilty of publicly spreading false information in order to cause concern, fear, or panic will face a sentence of one to three years in prison. While supporters of the legislation at the time it was introduced offered reassurances that the law would not be used against journalists, it has since become one of the most frequently used laws against the media.

  The detentions and arrests include: [...]

• Jacobin Magazine ☛ Israel Is Deliberately Targeting Lebanon’s Journalists

  According to a special report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), 2025 was the deadliest year on record for journalists, largely thanks to Israel’s track record in Palestine and Lebanon: [...]

• CPJ ☛ Journalist Syed Farhad Ali Shah detained without charge over Kashmir protest coverage

  “The detention of Syed Farhad Ali Shah under a broad and vaguely worded preventive detention law is an attempt to silence journalists covering matters of public interest,” said CPJ’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Representative Waliullah Rahmani. “Reporting on protests and political developments is not a crime, and detaining journalists without charge or due process sends a chilling message to the press ahead of regional elections in Kashmir.”

• Richard J Tofel ☛ How to Run CBS News and CNN Under Common Ownership

  It is very likely that CBS and CNN will soon be under the common ownership of Larry and David Ellison’s Paramount. Given the inept way the Ellisons (David’s management, father Larry’s money) have run CBS News since they acquired it 11 months ago, that’s probably bad news for both organizations, a subject on which many words have been written. This week, rather than add to that spillage, I want to talk about how such an association ought to be managed. I think there’s a lot that can be learned about news brands and news positioning from such a thought experiment.

Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

• The Atlantic ☛ What’s Behind the Latest National Guard Surge in D.C.

  The precise tasks involved in keeping D.C. “safe and beautiful” have so far been ill-defined; troops have spent time directing traffic, clearing out homeless encampments, raking leaves, and mulching flower beds. Their presence has had mixed results on crime in the city. In May, the Niskanen Center released data showing that the deployment seemed to have decreased opportunistic property crime, such as theft, by 24 percent—a notable downturn. The data also showed that the deployment had had no measurable effect on violent crime, which had already been declining when the National Guard arrived. (The Guardsmen whom Trump deployed to D.C. are not authorized to make arrests, but they can detain individuals.) The advantage of the National Guard is its flexibility, Richard Hahn, one of the study’s co-authors, told me. D.C. police have been “struggling to hire police officers for 10 years,” he said, but with the Guard, “you can command these soldiers to go to the city and police it.”

• Memphis Flyer ☛ Task Force Shoots, Kills Another Man; Pearson Calls for Investigation

  State Rep. Justin Pearson (D-Memphis) called for an investigation into every Memphis shooting by the Memphis Safe Task Force personnel who “who treat our city like enemy territory.”

  The call comes after task force members shot and killed two suspects in Memphis so far this week.

• Vox ☛ ICE arrested a nun on her way to church. Does MAGA care?

  She didn’t make it — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped, arrested, and handcuffed the 56-year-old. They took her to a detention facility an hour away, reportedly confiscated her rosary, and declined to bring her the medication she takes. She called her diocese for help — and as news spread, both Republican and Democratic members of Congress appealed directly to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for details. Hours later, she was released — without explanation.

• Los Angeles Times ☛ Feds greenlight controversial Cadiz water project in California

  Environmental advocates and leaders of Native tribes criticized the decision by the Bureau of Land Management, saying it threatens natural springs and wildlife habitat in the desert.

  [...]

  Chairman Timothy Williams of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe said the company’s plan “to pump and sell 25 times more groundwater each year than the aquifer can replenish would desecrate our traditional territories.”

  “Pumping more groundwater than is sustainably replenished is not only negligent, but dangerous to the American Desert Southwest,” he said in the joint statement with other opponents of the project.

• Techdirt ☛ Fifth Circuit Says Gov’t Can Violate Migrants’ Due Process Rights… But Only For 90 Days

  But not the Fifth Circuit. The appellate circuit hosting most of Trump’s favorite detention centers ruled in February that those rights simply don’t apply to whoever this administration is seeking to get rid of. According to this decision, the government was well within its rights to detain migrants indefinitely without giving them access to their due process rights.

• Omicron Limited ☛ Indigenous peoples in the Amazon face massive cultural and ecological loss due to climate change

  Commenting on the significance of the database, study leader Cámara Leret says, "For the first time, we synthesized information dispersed across 700 references spanning more than 500 years, revealing that Amazonian peoples use at least one-third of the region's known plant species." In absolute terms, this amounts to 5,796 plant species. The study is published in the journal Nature.

• Truthdig ☛ When the Media Turned Away, ICE Got Worse

  ICE has quietly doubled its immigrant arrest quota. It’s now arresting 2,000 people per day.

  But you’re not hearing about it because the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, has decided to quietly spread Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents around the country instead of targeting one Democratic-controlled city at a time.

  Rather than fueling media spectacles, lawsuits and community backlash, ICE is now going about its ruthless business in more hushed tones.

• Robert Reich ☛ ICE is now even WORSE

  ICE has quietly doubled its immigrant arrest quota. It’s now arresting 2,000 people per day.

  But you’re not hearing about it because the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, has decided to quietly spread ICE agents around the country instead of targeting one Democratic-controlled city at a time.

• Marcy Wheeler ☛ Harmeet Dhillon's Team Appears To Have Already Started Framing People

  Her attorneys laid out three more claims that — Fort’s attorneys claim — are false in the indictment: [...]

• BoingBoing ☛ ICE buys the cages, private prison company keeps the keys

  CoreCivic has said the California City contract alone is worth about $130 million a year once fully activated. The company has not disclosed the annual value of the Otay Mesa operating contract in the sale announcement, but it says it expects to keep running both facilities even after collecting $1.5 billion from DHS for the buildings.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Inside Towers ☛ Navajo Nation Approves $244.6M Broadband Investment

  Approved unanimously on July 2, the funding includes $76 million for the first year and $169.1 million in future financing. Around 80 percent will support a Nation-owned, open-access network of towers and fiber infrastructure that private providers can lease, while 15 percent will serve as the local match required to unlock federal BEAD funding.

  Backed by provisional BEAD awards from Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, the $373 million initiative is expected to connect approximately 31,000 unserved and underserved homes using fiber, fixed wireless and satellite technologies.

• Inside Towers ☛ South Carolina Shrinks BEAD Program by 50 Percent

  The State of South Carolina announced it has reduced the scope of its BEAD broadband program after completing hundreds of projects with existing state and federal funding. The South Carolina Broadband Office said eight of the original 16 BEAD projects will now be funded with non-BEAD resources, while agreements have been signed for four of the remaining eight projects.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Andrea Contino ☛ Bye bye discs - Andrea Contino - Go With The Flow

  Now a whole series of questions arise that I think all of us gamers should loudly demand answers to: How can we have an experience similar to lending a game to a friend? Can we revisit refund policies, given that the current ones for digital are already unsustainable? Is it possible to encourage policies for the resale of digital codes through third-party merchants that can still be redeemed on the PlayStation Store?

• 404 Media ☛ Farmers Finally Get a John Deere Right to Repair Agreement That Doesn’t Screw Them Over

  This $99 million payout was roughly $79 million after legal fees and to be divided among more than 200,000 farmers; this means each farmer will receive roughly $395, or “less than the cost of a single authorized dealer service call for a typical 500-acre farm,” according to an analysis by Willie Cade, a longtime farm right to repair advocate.

  “Bottom line is that farmers are getting $0.79 per acre for the eight years of Deere abuse,” Cade told me. “Bad settlement. The settlement is insufficient … the money is a small fraction of what the class could recover at trial, the claims process depends on labor-hour data only Deere holds, and the repair "fixes" are riddled with loopholes that leave Deere's monopoly intact.”

• Kev Quirk ☛ A Rant About Modern Cars

  I finally got into my bloody Peugeot account and tried to enable to Connect features so I can do things like control air-con from the app, only to find that it costs £90 (~$120) per year!

  This isn't a piece of hardware that I'm paying for. It's literally £90/year for a switch to be flipped in some software. Utter. Fucking. Robbery.

• Daniel Jalkut ☛ Multinational Apple Accounts

  Around the world, there are businesses whose services are available, intentionally or not, only to locals. These services often offer corresponding apps that you will be encouraged to install but, if you’re using your primary Apple Account, will appear as “Not available in this region.”

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• Lee Peterson ☛ If the App Store is going to recommend apps Apple needs to monitor the store better

  I go into the App Store app very little these days but I did today and was reminded about how much more Apple needs to do to monitor the apps it recommends.

• Engadget ☛ Google Loses Final Appeal Over $4.7 Billion EU Android Antitrust Fine

  The original fine of €4.34 billion (later reduced to $4.13 billion) "takes into account the duration and gravity of the infringement," the EU Commission wrote at the time. It added that the fine was calculated based on Google's revenue from search advertising on Android in the European Economic Area. It also ordered to "bring its illegal conduct to an end... within 90 days of the decision."

  The Court of Justice said that the General Court that made the original decision "did not err in law when assessing the anticompetitive effects of the pre-installation conditions laid down by the Android agreements," adding that it correctly ruled with regard to the illegality of its Android agreements as well. It said that the reasoning behind the amount of the fine was also sound.

• Patents

  • El País ☛ Mexico will press the US to remove tariffs on autos and steel during the USMCA review

    The Mexican government told the Senate that it has already submitted to Washington a list of 13 trade concerns ranging from sectoral tariffs to trade barriers imposed by the United States at the state level. “Mexico has emphasized that these measures represent significant obstacles to bilateral trade and require immediate attention to maintain balance in the trade relationship between the two countries,” the document said. By contrast, the U.S. government expressed concern about its growing trade deficit with Mexico, the setting of new rules of origin and economic security measures, and the loss of manufacturing jobs.

• Copyrights

  • AdWeek ☛ Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search

    Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.

  • 404 Media ☛ Patreon Blocks Crawlers From Stealing Creators' Work for AI Training

    AI-generated works are permitted on Patreon, as long as they comply with the platform's terms of use. In 2024, 404 Media reported that many creators of nonconsensual sexual images and videos monetized their content on Patreon. Last year, Patreon updated its content guidelines for AI content to state: “AI-generated depictions of people that are illustrated/animated are permitted; AI-generated hyperrealistic depictions of people are permitted only if the people are real and have documented their explicit consent.”

  • Techdirt ☛ ESA Lobbying Against ‘Stop Killing Games’: Hosting Private Minecraft Servers Is Illegal Piracy

    As we mentioned previously, the Stop Killing Games movement has come to America and there is currently an effort to get some legislation based on the movement’s goals on the books in California. The movement hit a snag recently when the written version of the bill failed to make it out of committee on a vote of 4 in favor, 3 against, and 4 abstaining. It’s the abstaining votes that were the problem, resulting in not enough yes votes to move forward. But, importantly, the committee also left the door open to reconsider the bill at a later time.

  • Internet Archive ☛ Vanishing Culture Episode #2: The Stories Hidden in Cookbooks with Katie Livingston

    Why preserve a cookbook? In the second episode of our special six-part series on Vanishing Culture, host Vida Vojić speaks with Katie Livingston, a doctoral researcher at Stanford University who studies domestic culture and women’s literature. Through the lens of family cookbooks, recipe collections, and food traditions, Katie explores why everyday cultural artifacts deserve preservation and what they can teach us about history, identity, and community.

  • Walled Culture ☛ Cinema as a community experience opens the door for low-cost films funded by fans

    This system is already working well for books, music and graphical art. But a common criticism of the approach is that it could never work for films, which therefore require copyright protection for them to be made. In support of that claim, people often point to the extremely large budgets of many films, often running to hundreds of millions of dollars. Clearly, the argument goes, such sums could never be amassed through the donations of true fans.

    One issue with that argument is the widespread practice of “Hollywood accounting”, which Wikipedia explains as: [...]

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate Site Blocking Is Legally Impossible in Bulgaria, Supreme Court Ruled

    Bulgaria's highest court has ruled that civil site blocking is legally impossible under current national law. Bulgaria failed to properly transpose the EU directives that authorize blocking injunctions. The decision is a major setback for rightsholders, including the association of music producers, which has asked the European Commission to intervene.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ 'Tonga' Suspends Popular Pirate Site Domains Following Indian Court Order

    For years, Tonga's .to domain names have been a popular choice for pirate sites, but that may very well change. Following a restructuring of the domain name operation, the Government of the Kingdom of Tonga appears to have suspended several domains, including the popular German streaming portals S.to and BS.to. The action was taken in response to an Indian High Court order that was originally issued last December.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Poet's copyright lawsuit against Taylor Swift tossed again

    A federal judge in Florida dismissed with prejudice a copyright lawsuit brought against Taylor Swift by self-published poet Kimberly Marasco, ruling (not for the first time!) that the material Marasco claimed Swift stole is not protected by copyright at all.