Leftovers

• Brattleboro Reformer, Vermont ☛ 'If we don’t write it down, it disappears' Independent historian gathers Vermont veterans’ stories, securing them before they are lost to history

  What Fish is trying to save isn’t just military history. It’s a way of understanding the past through another's lived experience – and he worries that that particular form of history is quietly disappearing from the record.

  “If we don’t write it down, it disappears,” he said. “A lot of these stories only exist in one person’s memory. Once they’re gone, we’ve lost a whole way of seeing who we were.”

• Small Cypress ☛ a fishkeeping post (mostly)

  I've been keeping at least two or three fish tanks going for about six years, and found myself with some losses this spring that made me cool on the hobby for a bit. My goldfish passed - one from ich brought on by big temperature swings and one from predation. I am gutted and I won't be keeping them outdoors at all with the drastic temperature changes.

• Zach Manson ☛ nomenclature

  I wonder how many minds would be changed if you took existing ideas and gave them more effective names. Antitrust legislation is one of the most important things a government can do, but its name doesn't capture that at all. If you take defund the police on name alone, it sounds like a terrible idea. I suspect that slogan did more damage to the cause of police reform than good. Net neutrality is accurate at least but inspires so little passion.

  I suppose this is just marketing. It's awful how important marketing is when it comes to change. Pro-choice and pro-life activists seemed to learn that lesson decades ago.

• Sal ☛ So long, ball!

  As the ball bounced off the sidewalk and into traffic, he stopped, stood upright, gave a military salute, and said in a firm voice, “So long, ball!”

• Josh Lospinoso ☛ The Pew Does Not Argue Back

  On a basic-training chapel pew, proof, and the kind of comfort that arrives when the body is least free.

• Doc Searls ☛ Intelliday

  The human kind is a quality, like empathy, anger, or contentment. You can’t measure it, as if with a ruler or a dipstick. If you could, you’d get the same measure every time. IQ testing pretends to measure intelligence, but it doesn’t. (I speak as a former schoolkid whose known IQ scores had an 80-point range—and was at different times rewarded for being smart and punished for being dumb. Fact: I was both all along. So are we all.)

• Chloé Vulquin ☛ Convincing

  How do you convince someone of something that is true? If we had the answer to this question, world peace and many other good things should be inevitable. Unfortunately, you cannot.

  Let's start by talking about what I don't mean by this. I do not mean that you cannot know what is true. I do not mean that you're just bad at rthethoric. I do not mean that people are never convinced of anything by anyone. I do not mean that you cannot accurately communicate anything (this is true, information is not transferable, but it's not the crux of the issue here).

  What I mean is that a person exclusively becomes convinced of their own accord.

• Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Experiments with media (or, iterating towards a podcast, maybe?)

  It’s for this reason that I’ve been, semi-regularly, brushing up on my very rusty media skills (I actually did a stint at film school and worked in TV and radio in my early twenties) and trying my hand at video.

  I’ve finally gotten around to continuing those experiments but the break was useful in one regard:

  Time to think gives you time to think.

• Andre Franca ☛ Between Two Languages

  I’ve mostly written this blog in English because English is the [Internet]’s default setting.

  If you want reach, you write in the language that’s already everywhere. Writing in English gave me a bigger audience than I’d ever get if I stayed strictly in Portuguese. I’ve had readers from places I never expected, and that still feels cool.

  But here’s the catch: Portuguese is home

• Standards/Consortia

  • Nathan Grigg ☛ Misaligned Time Zones

    Today I drew a map that highlights the locations that are more than 7.5 degrees from the central longitude of their time zone. (US time zones are spaced every hour, which corresponds to 15 degrees of longitude.)

  • J B Crawford ☛ email encryption

    This form of email has a clearer heritage, to Ray Tomlinson, who came up with the core idea that addresses could identify both a user and a host, and that some kind of open protocol could be used to send messages to another host when necessary. Over time, and with many revisions, Tomlinson's design became SMTP and was joined by protocols like IMAP that built out the form of email we use today. This is a form of email that is in some ways decentralized (any user is free to choose a host) and in other ways centralized (each host assumed to be continuously online to store-and-forward messages for its users). Tomlinson's design was flexible enough that we have not had to totally get rid of it, but enough has changed about the modern Internet that we have had to take a new approach.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Mike Brock ☛ The Moon Does Not Prove Physicalism

    For centuries, the people invoking mind, soul, purpose, or God in explanations often were trying to stop the inquiry. The scientist learned to hear every metaphysical claim about interiority as an attempt to smuggle the bishop back into the laboratory. The suspicion was historically earned. It became indiscriminate.

    The result is a peculiar inversion. Physicalism presents itself as the absence of metaphysics, the view left over after every speculative addition has been shaved away by Occam’s razor. Consciousness becomes the speculative addition, despite being the one feature of reality each of us knows through direct acquaintance. The external description becomes reality itself. The internal description becomes a problem to be explained out of it.

    This is how a defensive institutional posture hardened into an ontology.

  • John D Cook ☛ Sum of low squares

    Let p be an odd prime number. Then half the numbers from 1 through p − 1 are squares and half are not. That is, for half of numbers 1 ≤ k < p, the equation

    x² = k mod p

    has a solution. The traditional name for these numbers is “quadratic residues” but we can just say “squares” if the context is clear. So, for example, the numbers 1, 2, and 4 are squares mod 7, and the numbers 3, 5, and 6 are not.

  • Computational Complexity ☛ Computational Complexity: Bipartite Perfect Matching in Deterministic NC

    Nutan Limaye and Thore Husfeldt guest post on the new deterministic parallel algorithm for bipartite perfect matching by Abhranil Chatterjee, Sumanta Ghosh, Rohit Gurjar, Roshan Raj and Thomas Thierauf.

    The post will try to explain three main things about the result. What is the result? Why is it important? And finally, how did the authors prove it?

    We will assume that the reader is an undergraduate student in CS (i.e., the reader knows basics of discrete mathematics, linear algebra, and algorithm design).

  • Scientific American ☛ Mathematicians still don’t know the fastest way to multiply numbers

    To understand the nature of that bottleneck, observe how the grade-school algorithm handles growth. When you multiply two two-digit numbers, you perform four single-digit multiplications. If you bump that up to a three-digit pair of numbers, you do nine single-digit multiplications. The workload scales with the square of the number of digits (n2, where n is the number of digits in the numbers being multiplied). When analyzing an algorithm like this, computer scientists don’t measure speed in seconds, because that depends on the hardware. Instead they count the computational steps. They also ignore minor bookkeeping details, such as the time it takes to carry a one when multiplying. When numbers get large enough, those lower-level operations cease to matter, entirely eclipsed by the more intensive operations involved. Computer scientists denote the number of steps using what’s called Big O notation: the grade-school algorithm, for example, takes O(n2) steps, which is read as “order n squared.” Broadly speaking, if the numbers are twice as long, the algorithm takes four times as much computational work to execute. If the numbers are a thousand times as long, it takes a million (1,000 squared) times as much work.

• Career/Education

  • Gregory Hammond ☛ Why I Would Choose a Different Higher Education If I Were Graduating from Secondary School Today

    Let’s say you had to select which higher education (depending on where you live in the world, sometimes known as college, university, or tertiary education) you would attend, as you’re about to complete secondary school (also known as high school or pre-university education). Looking back on your current life, would you choose a different college from the one you graduated from? I may have, as not only might my current life be different, but many things have changed since then. This is all hypothetical, of course, but what if I was graduating now and had to choose? Considering this scenario, here’s why I may have chosen a different tertiary education.

  • Marcin Juszkiewicz ☛ Half my life ago

    I studied “automation and robotics” at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Białystok University of Technology. And specialised in the “Information Systems”: [...]

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Memory chip boss admits RAM prices are 'abnormally high' — SK Group chairman considering building a semiconductor plant in the US to expand supply, calm ‘chipflation’

    This isn’t a problem at the moment as there is more than enough demand to go around for incumbent memory and storage chip manufacturers and new entrants. In fact, memory companies can use this as a defense against price-fixing lawsuits, with the massive AI demand and the higher margins it offers standing as a plausible reason why memory chip companies focused on HBM production and reduced DRAM output. But before the AI boom, the memory industry was actually suffering from one of the worst memory downturns to hit the industry for over a decade. So, if and when the memory shortage is over and the memory industry resumes its boom-and-bust cycle, more manufacturers jockeying to find customers in a tight market would make it that much harder for these companies to survive and thrive.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Zilog Z80 turns 50 as an open-source replacement heads to drop-in DIP40 silicon — iconic 8-bit CPU launched in July 1976 and was discontinued in 2024

    The Z80 powered many retro favorites like the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, MSX, Game Boy, Master System, Pac-Man arcade cabinet, and many more

  • Hackaday ☛ Remembering The Zilog Z80 As It Turns Fifty Years Old

    Perhaps the saddest thing about the Zilog Z80 is that this humble 8-bit microprocessor wasn’t allowed to live until its 50th birthday. This, fortunately, doesn’t prevent people like [David Oberhollenzer] from reminiscing on this influential processor and what it means to them personally.

    First released in July of 1976, this humble 8-bit miracle would go on to power not just a range of home computers, but also be found in everything from industrial controllers to arcade systems. Despite this success, the new owner of Zilog — Littelfuse — decided to put an end to this winning streak in 2024 for the stand-alone processor and its peripherals.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ The Eye of Pizza is No Longer Upon You

    So I bought the cheapest desktop video projector I could find ($30) just to see if I could aim that at the inside of the dome. Unsurprisingly, the answer is no. That projector needs to be about 2½ feet behind the dome to fill it and be in focus, which is less of an eyeball and more of an eye sausage.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • LabX Media Group ☛ A Pancreatic Cancer Vaccine Shows Promise in a Phase 1 Clinical Trial

    The researchers identified the six most common mutant KRAS (mKRAS) variations in PDAC tumors and incorporated them into a peptide-based vaccine. Previously, the team showed that the vaccine was safe and elicited mKRAS-specific T cells when administered to people with PDAC while they were receiving monoclonal antibody therapy or had undergone surgery and follow-up cancer treatment.5

  • Science Alert ☛ Modern Life May Be Pushing Human Minds Beyond Their Limits, Reflecting an Evolutionary Mismatch

    In a new paper published in Behavioral Sciences, social scientists from institutions in Singapore have examined previous studies and theories to put together an argument: Our rapid progress as a species has left our individual bodies and minds unable to keep up.

    The crux of the proposal is this: Humans evolved to fit small groups of familiar people and to respond to immediate, recognizable threats.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • SANS ☛ Scans for Hikvision Intelligent Security API

    We have been following issues with Hikvision cameras for a long, long time. Like many similar products, Hikvision cameras have a long history of vulnerabilities and are often targeted by internet-wide scans that our honeypot network detects.

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

    • LRT ☛ ‘Things could drift toward Black Mirror’: Lithuania’s AI pioneer on digital twins

      Artificial intelligence is no longer merely a science-fiction scenario – it is reshaping how we work, how we create, and how we understand human potential. Paulius Jurcys, an intellectual property law expert and AI researcher who has spent the past decade in Silicon Valley building and studying AI twins, shares his insights.

    • Futurism ☛ AI-Pilled Tech CEO Convinced He Has the Perfect Solution for Online Dating, Announces Harebrained App Idea

      Like many, many startup founders before him, McLeod asserts that Overtone is “not a dating app,” but something different — in this case, a “service.” That may be a distinction without a difference, but it signals a sloppified shift in the founder’s approach.

    • TechCrunch ☛ The founder of Hinge raised $18M to build a new AI dating service, Overtone

      It may seem odd for the guy who created Hinge to disparage algorithmic feeds and swiping, but the dating industry at large is evolving with the realization that users are dissatisfied with the status quo. A Forbes Health survey conducted in 2024 found that 78% of dating app users felt burnt out. The survey’s 1,000 respondents reported that they spent about 51 minutes per day on dating apps, but this time investment did not often yield fulfilling connections.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ AI memory shortage puts pressure on governments to act

      Prices for memory chips have skyrocketed in recent months as supply has failed to keep up with demand stemming from the AI boom.

    • Wired ☛ Prompt Injection Attacks Are Thwarting AI Hacking Agents

      Prompt injections, the malicious commands attackers embed into content to entice large language models to follow them, have been attackers’ go-to tool for turning AI platforms against their users. A well-phrased command sneaked into an email or calendar invitation is often all it takes to cause the LLM to exfiltrate sensitive data or follow other harmful actions.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ SD

      A one day task turned into a two day task because I'm not buying $7 SD cards for $45, out of principle.

    • D Griffin Jones ☛ Shaming Electrek On Their AI Bullshit

      But let’s double check those numbers. Without doing any math, the blue section has around 400 votes and the green section has around 800 votes. But the blue and green sections are roughly the same size; the green should be about twice as big. The yellow section has around 800 votes and the red section has around 700, so they should be about the same size, too, except the red section is about half the size. And just going off vibes, the purple looks too big to be 1.5%.

      How much critical thinking did it take to realize that it’s totally erroneous and shouldn’t be published, about fifteen seconds? (And in case you’re wondering, all the percentages add up to 98.3, not 100.)

    • OS News ☛ Follow the money, especially in open source

      Of the twelve platinum companies, six are “AI” companies or companies with massive investments in “AI”: Google, Huawei, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM/Red Hat. Then there’s Samsung Electronics, which is raking in stupendous amounts of money thanks to the “AI” bubble. Additionally, one of the gold members is Anthropic, another major “AI” company and makers of “Claude”, the sloppiest of slopcoding tools.

      Many of these companies are unimaginably deep in the red when it comes to “AI”, with very little indication they’re ever going to be able to recover any of it. The situation is particularly bad for Oracle and IBM/Red Hat. Oracle’s debt has been downgraded to one notch above junk status because of its “AI” spending, while IBM’s shares experienced the largest crash in its 115 year history only a few days ago. By the way, in the first half of 2025, “AI-related capital expenditures contributed 1.1% to [US] GDP growth, outpacing the U.S. consumer as an engine of expansion”.

    • Thomas Depierre ☛ Reviewing AI Code Is Not A Viable Argument

      I am a skeptic of the utility of LLM in software development. It is not because of IP laws problems (even if they are highly problematic), nor is it for ecological and ressource comsumptions reasons. It is not even for “they are all crap” reasons. My problem with LLM Coding Assistants is that I cannot see, in the face of the scientific evidence, how they can help someone write code better or faster.

      And the thing that irritate me is that it seems that none of the proponents of LLM Coding Assistants seems to ever address this problem and this evidence when they defend their tooling choices. Worse, it seems that they give fuel to my arguments everytime they write a rebuke of the skeptics. So let’s look at what I have a problem with, how empirical scientific research support that view, how proponents of LLM Coding Assistants could show this is not a problem and then how right now they are doing the actual opposite.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Independent UK ☛ Social media influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate expected in Miami court

      The Tates are being held in federal detention following their arrest on Saturday. In the coming weeks, a U.S. district judge will consider whether they meet the conditions for extradition.

    • New York Times ☛ Opinion | Social Media Hacked Our Attention. A.I. Scares Me More.

      Attention hacking addicts people, in part, by providing varying rewards almost randomly. It’s how casinos and social media keep people engaged: by manipulating consumers’ experience to make elusive gains seem close. In the brain, this intermittent reinforcement causes massive spikes of dopamine, the neurotransmitter associated with desire. Research suggests that about 15 percent of North Americans meet criteria for social media addiction, defined essentially as compulsive use that continues despite negative consequences.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Okta ☛ OpenSSL HollowByte: A DoS Hiding in 11 Bytes | Okta Security

      Every so often, a vulnerability reminds us how deeply our digital infrastructure relies on foundational libraries. Recently, the Okta Red Team discovered HollowByte, a Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability in OpenSSL. By sending a malicious payload of just 11 bytes, a remote, unauthenticated attacker can force a server to allocate disproportionate chunks of memory before any security handshake even begins.

      Here is the breakdown of how it works.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Top Meta Exec Describes Controversial Facial Recognition Feature in Detail After the Company Claimed It Didn’t Exist

      It’s safe to say that Meta executives were furious after Wired published its investigation. After all, the company has a long track record of data privacy violations. The revelation that its “pervert glasses,” as some have taken to calling Meta’s controversial smart glasses, could soon be using facial recognition tech — not unlike the eyewear being used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents — fueled an existing PR disaster.

    • Futurism ☛ In Light of Overwhelming Backlash, Flock Cancels Creepy Audio Surveillance Feature

      Those who cut down Flock surveillance devices are regarded as folk heroes, garnering huge defense campaigns aided by the rapid growth of the online anti-Flock community.

      Amidst immense pressure from the public, the company is starting to back down on its quest to create a law enforcement-led surveillance state. On Friday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that Flock was officially ending its “human distress detection” pilot program, an always-on audio surveillance tool that monitored public places for sounds of “screaming.”

    • Ludlow Institute ☛ Most of you won’t need this. A few of you might need it badly.

      The entire financial system is a surveillance hellscape. Before 1970 and the introduction of the Bank Secrecy Act, which had global repercussions, it was a given that you had the right to move money around without everything you do being tracked by the government. Today, you can’t use traditional financial rails without being surveilled. Which means you can’t support a cause you believe in, buy a book, see a doctor, help a family member in another country, travel somewhere, without your choices being scrutinized and controlled.

      Bank accounts globally get frozen all the time for political donations, and payment processors quietly drop entire industries (sex work, cannabis, firearms, precious metals, [cryptocurrency], adult content) because of quiet pressure (through programs like Chokepoint 2.0 in the U.S.).

      People are debanked with no explanation and no appeal, and the only way to find out you’ve been cut off is when a transaction fails. It happens to journalists, small business owners, nonprofits, and ordinary people whose only mistake was donating to the wrong cause or working in an industry some politician somewhere doesn’t like.

      So the traditional financial system is so thoroughly broken when it comes to privacy and autonomy. And this makes [cryptocurrency] very hard to ignore, despite how janky a technology it may be.

    • Mike Rockwell ☛ Remote Access Is Now Built Into Screens for Mac - Initial Charge

      This will be a handy change — less apps to maintain on some of my machines.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ 35th anniversary of restoration of Estonian independence to see extensive events

    Then on Restoration of Independence Day (Taasiseseisvumispäev) itself on Thursday, August 20, events start with the flag-raising ceremony in the Governor's Garden on Toompea. This will be followed by an ecumenical thanksgiving service at St. Mary's Cathedral (Toom kirik), the laying of wreaths at the August 20 memorial stone on Toompea, the presentation in the Riigikogu's White Hall of a commemorative postal stamp dedicated to the 35th anniversary plus a ceremonial Riigikogu sitting, and other events involving the August 20 Club and associates.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Russian drones spotted using screwed-on magnetic compasses as navigation aids — the on-board camera can occasionally tilt down to check bearings if satellite comms are lost

    GPS jamming is also a common occurrence in Ukrainian airspace. This means that drone operators could potentially get lost on their way to their targets. Because of this, many frontline Russian units have started crudely installing magnetic compasses on their drones. This navigation tool is typically installed just below the FPV camera, allowing the operator to glance down to confirm their bearings. When combined with other telemetry data, the drone pilot could locate their relative location even without GPS.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Against Oligarchy, Part I: Progressive Taxation

    America is becoming increasingly oligarchic.

    Today’s post is the first in a series on the economics of oligarchy in the United States, where wealth and power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small group at the top, and government policies have reinforced that concentration of wealth and power.

• Environment

  • Futurism ☛ Climate Activists Pelt Microsoft Data Center With Balloons Full of Acid

    “This acidic mixture attacks concrete, and the hydrogen peroxide causes steel to rust faster,” Extinction Rebellion said in a statement.

    What physical impact the balloons had on the data center itself is unknown, but it may be beside the point. Extinction Rebellion often uses nonviolent civil disobedience and direct action to draw attention to climate issues that would otherwise be ignored. Previous actions involved spattering the offices of fossil fuel insurers with foul smelling butyric acid, and using superglue and bicycle locks to barricade the entrance of Lloyd’s, a major insurance market in London.

  • Science Alert ☛ A Major Ocean Current Is On The Verge of Collapse. Scientists Say The Effects May Reach California

    "It is well known that the AMOC is a big player in the world's climate system, and that it is slowing down," says Mohima Mimi, a climate dynamics researcher at the University of California, Riverside, and the study's lead author.

    "What we didn't know is exactly how the AMOC might impact atmospheric moisture and storms outside the Atlantic region."

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Studying Earth's Flowering Plants Issue a Stark Warning to Humanity

    With this approach, the researchers discovered that 21.2 percent of angiosperm evolutionary history is at risk of extinction.

    Of the 335,497 known flowering plant species included in the analysis, 9,945 qualified as EDGE species – meaning that about 3 percent of all known plant species are both evolutionarily unique, and globally endangered with extinction.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • NL Times ☛ Helmet use is rising among Dutch cyclists, driven by older riders and e-bike users

      According to AT5, helmets are increasingly common among cyclists in Amsterdam. The trend is also visible nationwide, according to the Fietsersbond and VeiligheidNL.

    • Dan Q ☛ “You saved my life!” (or: how my kids briefly thought I was a superhero)

      Mike had been turning his phone on only in bursts in order to conserve battery for all of the essential calls he’d have to make (e.g. his bank, to extract some money without his cards, and a locksmith, to get him back into his car). His phone charger – an awkward USB-B-Micro one – hadn’t survived the fire.

      But conveniently… I happened to have such a cable in my bag. Plus a fully-charged battery pack. So I lent both to Mike, in the hope that it’d make it easier for him to do all of the necessary administration1.

    • Rolling Stone ☛ Congress Must Stop Enabling Trump's [Cryptocurrency] Corruption

      We come at this from different directions. Ben is an actor, author, and filmmaker who spent years investigating [cryptocurrency] fraud. Ezra co-founded Indivisible, a grassroots pro-democracy movement with thousands of local groups across the country. From different vantage points, we’ve reached the same conclusion: [Cryptocurrency] is no longer just a risky investment. It’s a dangerous political machine fueled by corruption.

      The [cryptocurrency] industry is reshaping American politics from the shadows, spending nearly $200 million already to influence the 2026 elections. There is an all-too-familiar playbook for buying influence in Washington: Interest groups funnel millions into primaries through super PACs, using outside spending and misleading attacks to defeat candidates and install their preferred policymakers. [Cryptocurrency] is deploying that playbook now, because it has billions of dollars riding on the regulatory decisions the federal government makes.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Live map of Britain's trains

      Signalbox plots every train moving across Britain in real time (or close to it), each choo choo represented by a dot creeping along the lines. Click one to see its origin, destination and the stops along the way. As of 6:05 p.m. Eastern Time, the Brighton-to-Havant express is running on time and has just left my old station.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Hindu ☛ Geo-tagging of State’s forest locations opens the doors for trespassers

      Forest department flags 23 Google Maps listings inside reserve forests in Kozhikode as misleading; officials say unauthorised map pins and uploaded photographs are encouraging illegal entry into protected areas; DFO seeks removal of the listings, warning of trespassing, public safety risks and human-wildlife conflict

  • Overpopulation

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-12 [Older] California's largest lake is turning to dust

• Finance

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-12 [Older] Are German companies leaving the country?

  • HT Digital Streams Ltd ☛ Samsung layoffs: Over 800 US workers affected by Texas headquarters move

    Samsung Electronics has reduced jobs across its US consumer electronics business, including its display and smartphone operations, with the majority of affected employees located in New Jersey and Texas, Reuters reported, citing company documents and sources.

    In a statement to Reuters on Sunday, the South Korean technology company said 739 positions at Samsung Electronics America (SEA) in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, were impacted as part of the company's plan to relocate its U.S. consumer electronics headquarters to Texas. SEA oversees Samsung's consumer electronics operations in the U.S. and does not include its semiconductor business. Samsung said many affected employees have been offered relocation packages, while others have been laid off.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-13 [Older] Hungary: Lawmakers pass law to oust Orban ally president

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Apple knocks Nvidia off its perch

    Apple was last valued at $4.88-trillion as its shares held steady, while Nvidia was roughly at $4.86-trillion, following a 3.5% decline.

  • Mike Brock ☛ In Defense of (Liberal) Conservatism

    That conversation requires a liberal conservatism: liberal in its commitment to constitutional government, equal citizenship, pluralism, and the rule of law; conservative in its respect for inherited institutions, accumulated social knowledge, and the moral claims of people who must live through whatever transformation politics proposes.

    The United States currently has no political movement adequate to that role.

  • University of Toronto ☛ Chris's Wiki :: blog/linux/Ubuntu2604BuildEssentialAndUutils

    In theory the Rust coreutils aim for 100% compatibility with GNU Coreutils and anything to the contrary is a bug. In practice, I found an incompatibility almost immediately when testing 26.04 pre-release, Ubuntu bug reports are useless, and I was pretty certain that other people on our systems would run into other issues, so I decided that we would sit out this round of Canonical making 26.04 LTS people mandatory beta-testers of their current passion project.

  • Farage pushes for public judgement over deepening financial scandal

    Other notable entrants include actor-turned-activist Lawrence Fox, known for his anti-woke positions, alongside various independents and minor party hopefuls. Among the more unusual is Australian-born Daniel Pocock, a software engineer and self-described expert in cybersecurity and cryptocurrencies, who has thrown his hat into the ring.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • JURIST ☛ International civil liberties coalition defends ICC amid US dismantling efforts

    The network reiterated that the ICC, created by the 2002 Rome Statute, is an independent and impartial judicial institution that holds perpetrators of atrocities such as genocide and crimes against humanity accountable. It also stressed that the court is the last resort in upholding peace and international rule of law, albeit with flaws such as its prolonged process, limited enforcement jurisdiction and selectivity. The network urged all states to express public support for the court, adopt measures to protect the court from US sanctions and carry out its mandate.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • APNIC ☛ IPv6 address planning: From ‘bit conservation’ to ‘elegant alignment’

    IPv6 address planning is no longer about saving bits. By designing nibble‑aligned, semantically clear structures, you gain readability, scalability, and long‑term operational stability. Elegant alignment, not compression, is the foundation of sustainable IPv6 design.

    IPv6 address planning is not fundamentally a resource allocation problem. It is a semantic structure design problem. The size of the IPv6 address space changes the optimisation goal entirely. What matters most is not how little space is used, but how clearly and consistently the space is structured.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • CopyrightLately ☛ Studios, Labels and Scholars Say the Fifth Circuit Botched Vetter | Copyright Lately

      The Supreme Court justices are on summer recess, but a stack of copyright briefs will be waiting for them when they get back. On Thursday, five separate amicus briefs landed in support of certiorari in BMG Rights Management v. Vetter, the Fifth Circuit headscratcher holding that a U.S. work carries a single copyright that “extends internationally.” BMG, joined by the major labels’ publishing arms, petitioned for cert in June, after buying out the defendant’s copyright interest in “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love),” the song at the center of the case known below as Vetter v. Resnik. They’re asking the Court to overturn a ruling that lets creators invoke American law to recapture rights not just here, but all over the globe. The amici turned out to explain in concrete terms what happens if that ruling stands.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ FIFA World Cup Triggers a Global Anti-Piracy Crackdown

      During the FIFA World Cup, law enforcement and private partners across multiple continents have seized or blocked well over a thousand pirate streaming domains, arrested suspects, and cut off advertising revenue. Taken together, "Operation Offsides" and "Operación Tarjeta Roja" are part of the broadest anti-piracy effort ever carried out during a sporting event.