Leftovers

• Wouter Groeneveld ☛ I Guess I'm Playing The Long Game Now

  The Long Game means leaving short bursts of dopamine behind. And yet I find myself buying fountain pens—the last purchase was three years ago—or scrolling through BoardGameGeek’s The Hotness list to see what else I can pick up after I sold a few ones just lying around on the shelf. I often try to escape into my laptop or book or whatever when things get heated with the kids. I notice I grab my smartphone during breakfast while I never did that before. The Long Game means noticing, admitting, and trying to change behaviour. I guess stage one is as good as any place to start.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Physicists Built a Spacetime Crystal – And Then Watched It Melt

    A spacetime crystal is one where the structure repeats not only in space but also in time. The oscillations of the atoms form a repeating, stable rhythm that cycles over and over.

    This state of matter is one that physicists are still trying to understand, but time crystals are tricky to build and trickier to keep stable enough to probe their properties.

  • Science Alert ☛ Earth's Greatest Catastrophes Seem to Follow a Mysterious 27-Million-Year Pulse

    The dataset includes marine mass extinctions, oceanic anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, terrestrial tetrapod extinctions, changes in seafloor spreading rates, and pulses of intraplate volcanism.

    Together, these records reveal a dominant periodicity of approximately 27.5 million years, alongside a weaker cycle of around 8.9 million years.

  • Wired ☛ It’s Becoming Clear Why Black Holes Never Run Out of Fuel

    The observations also showed that filaments—formed from condensed gas—flow directly into the edge of the disk. The gas travels along these filaments, accumulates in the disk, and is ultimately supplied to the black hole as "fuel." For the first time, this entire pathway has been directly visualized.

  • John D Cook ☛ Printing floating point numbers in binary

    It’s well known that you can convert the base 16 (hex) representation of an integer to the base 2 (binary) representation by simply converting each digit from hex to binary. For example, [...]

  • John D Cook ☛ Counting permutations with roots

    I wanted to say more about this, and look at implementing the same code in SymPy. I was curious how well SymPy would do because I’ve noticed that LLMs often generate SymPy code since it’s an open source CAS.

  • John D Cook ☛ Hiding data in permutations

    The latest issue of Paged Out! has an article by Stephen Hewitt “An off-line backup of your cryptographic key using playing cards.” The idea is to use a deck of 52 to store a 128-bit cryptographic key. To erase the key, shuffle the deck. Hewitt gives his algorithm for embedding a key, one that can be carried out manually but isn’t maximally efficient.

  • Computer History Museum ☛ History of John Backus's FP languages

    John Backus explored a sequence of applicative, functional and function-level languages starting before 1969 and continuing until he retired in 1991. The goal of this project is to preserve the surviving materials from this research and to put them into context. Comments, suggestions, and donations of additional materials are greatly appreciated.

• Career/Education

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Kids who own cellphones have poorer reading comprehension scores than those who don't, researchers find

    School cellphone bans might seem like a good way to improve learning for elementary school children, but new research published in Behavioral Sciences shows that simply owning a cellphone correlates with worse reading comprehension. Whether a child brings the phone to school made no difference in reading comprehension, the team of UCLA psychologists and researchers found.

  • Neil Selwyn ☛ Robots in the classroom (again)

    “Although the robot is a gimmick, this does raise important issues about handing potions of the school day over to AI. We are seeing schools now based around students being instructed for a few hours of day by AI tutors and personalised learning systems, so this part of story needs to be taken seriously”

  • CCC ☛ Electromagnetic Field 2026 - media.ccc.de

    Electromagnetic Field is a non-profit camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers. A temporary town of nearly three thousand like-minded people enjoying a long weekend of talks, performances, and workshops on everything from blacksmithing to biometrics, chiptunes to computer security, high altitude ballooning to lockpicking, origami to democracy, and online privacy to knitting.

• Hardware

  • Michael Green ☛ A Semi-Theory of Almost Everything

    Excuses aside, this one is denser than usual, and I think it matters. Roughly 40% of the Q2 semiconductor price move, and about sixty percent of the shift in the tape’s character, can be explained by a measurable change in how holders of levered products behaved, plus the arrival of one large price-insensitive vehicle. The plumbing changed. If it can happen in semiconductors, it can happen in other places where the same structures exist.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • TruthOut ☛ Musk Says He Got “Carried Away” With DOGE [sic] Cuts, Which Are Set to Kill Millions

    Research last year found that, by 2030, DOGE [sic] cuts could kill 14 million, including 4.5 million children under 5.

  • The New Lede ☛ Glyphosate, common pesticides damage human DNA at low doses

    Several common pesticides, including the controversial herbicide glyphosate, cause genetic damage to people’s cells at very low exposure levels, according to a new study. Such cellular changes, often referred to as “genotoxicity,” are linked to cancer.

    The findings suggest that current pesticide testing and regulation are not fully capturing how pesticides may harm people.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ DOGE [sic] May Have Given You Diarrhea

    The US is currently experiencing its largest ever recorded outbreak of cyclosporiasis. The Trump administration’s attacks on farmworkers and federal workers are largely to blame.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ It’s ok to take a break when you’re overwhelmed

    So I’m going to take a break, well all aside from the phone which I need to actually get around and pay for things ( I lost my bank cards!). To be fair I actually changed to a clear case and it’s more comfortable and not very heavy addition to the overall weight but I do regret selling the Air. It’s too close to iPhone launch to spend anything on a used model just in case the Air 2 does come in September and it has a decent zoom lens.

• Proprietary / SaaS

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

    • El País ☛ AI gets pinkwashed as female users are targeted

      While large AI companies are being besieged by a more conscious and critical perception of the risks and impact of their technologies, more and more corporations such as Meta, Google, Anthropic and Open AI are investing in what is being termed “Girlbossification of AI.” If the recent booing of tech CEOs during their speeches at graduations wasn’t evidence enough that not everyone wants or needs AI in their lives – a recent New York Times poll found that 47% of 18-to-29-year-olds consider AI to be a very bad thing – coupled with the rise of anti-data center legislative proposals and the growth of anti-AI movements around the world, the female user is now being schmoozed.

      In a clear example of pinkwashing that has been going on for months, companies have invested in communication campaigns involving businesswomen, fashion and beauty influencers, well-known actresses, and even viral challenges aimed at capturing the attention of their most precious target: educated, professional and socially mobile women.

    • Vox Media LLC ☛ Restaurants Are Going Bespoke as AI Slop Grows More Abundant | Eater

      The backlash to AI imagery is growing across a certain part of the culture. Sentiment along the lines of “I’d rather see a poster made with Sharpie on a scrap of paper than an AI event flyer,” or “I’m not going to your restaurant if the ad is the AI” is proliferating. “Frictionmaxxing,” a term that writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton coined to refer to a rejection of technologies of convenience in favor of slower and more analog processes, has escaped containment, coming to mean the general choice to choose pre-[Internet] ways of creation and problem-solving. In this sense, it can refer to the choice of the handcrafted over the AI-generated.

    • Michael Taggart ☛ Shiny, Sharp Objects

      But I don't want to talk about how much OpenAI sucks. I want to talk about our fascination with dangerous things.

    • Kelson Vibber ☛ AI Uses Em-Dashes Because Bloggers Do

      I recently added “Your LLM was trained on my blog” to the intro on my home page. I’m sort of being facetious, but it’s also true: my old site (hyperborea.org) has been in the Common Crawl data set for years, this blog has been online since 2002, and the major LLMs have used Common Crawl’s data in their training.

    • Homo Ludditus ☛ AI and Linux: a bit of ranting

      From the hundreds of URLs visited per week, here are a bunch of comments based on a very short selection of news from the last 3 weeks. I am unhappy with the hysteria around some LLMs, but also with LMDE and Ubuntu. Rants follow.

    • The New Stack ☛ Anthropic wants tests, not bans, as OpenAI and Google back open weights

      Anthropic does not want open-weight AI models banned. CEO Dario Amodei said so plainly today after a week of criticism. Instead, he proposes mandatory safety testing for every sufficiently capable model before release. The catch is that nobody has defined where “sufficiently capable” begins, and that determines whether tomorrow’s next open-weight models stay available.

    • Marek Chotoborski ☛ A Voice From Nowhere

      I thought about writing a complete commentary on the encyclical, but about midway through I figured that it might not actually be that good an idea—the document is so expansive and touches on so many subjects that it’s impossible to comment on everything coherently while keeping to the perspective proper to my own trade. There are, however, individual threads running through it that are very relevant to the field of programming and the everyday work of software engineers, which are worth exploring. While my work is not in the field of AI, I use these tools every day extensively, and there is one property of them that the Pope identified, which most of our field seems content to ignore.

  • Social Control Media

    • Tedium ☛ My Brain-Breaking Trick to Quit Using Facebook

      Recently, I made a realization: I have been unwillingly addicted to Facebook for a long time, and it’s not even because I like Facebook. Rather, it’s because I find it an extremely easy URL to type into a modern web browser’s omnibar. This sounds crazy, but the first two letters, f and a, are on the home row, and I don’t really rely on bookmarks, but my browser’s history function to type in URLs.

      This creates a sort of recency bias. If I type in the same URL a lot, it’s the one that pops up the most. And so, if I’m at a browser with no clear idea of what my intent for the next page I load up, I inevitably type in “fa,” which would suck me in.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Security Week ☛ Coca-Cola Confirms Data Breach After Fairlife Ransomware Attack

      The Anubis ransomware group listed Coca-Cola and Fairlife on its leak website on July 20, suggesting that it had encrypted files on compromised systems and claiming to have stolen 1 TB of confidential data.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Orchid ☛ What does GitHub’s security team even do?

    Right now, there are currently thousands of repositories on GitHub distributing malware. Any of you can find these repositories, and you don’t need any special knowledge to do so. All you have to do is use the standard search function on the GitHub website.

    These repositories have been around for two years. GitHub has billions of dollars, a security team, and artificial intelligence. Why haven’t they solved this problem in two years?

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Google Search lists public Claude chats, raising privacy concerns

      Google briefly indexed an unknown number of publicly shared Claude conversations over the weekend, allowing anyone to find them through simple search queries. The discovery raised fresh concerns about how AI chat-sharing tools handle sensitive information. Users reported finding conversations that included medical records, internal business documents, and personal details involving children.

    • Wired ☛ Private [sic] Claude Chats Exposed in Google and Bing Search Results

      Over the weekend, people were surprised to discover that some Anthropic Claude chats could be easily found via web search. The issue, which appears to have been first flagged by a redditor, exposed chats that included people asking for advice about what political party they should join, whether attorneys in Kansas are required to self-report when they believe they’ve committed an ethical violation, and erotic role play.

    • Bernd “beko” Kosmahl ☛ I’d not buy a LG monitor

      There is a video by Gamers Nexus making the rounds that makes me really angry. It reports about LG’s latest practise to add blatant spyware to a monitor. Or to be precise to the *software* application associated with that monitor. The icing is that Windows apparently automatically downloads this software by default and this thing starts – without consent – to display ads. It’s ToS also explicitly allows “wiretapping” and “eavesdropping” and it’s the user’s responsibility to obtain consent from anyone in the room.

      It seems to also affect the “somewhat” expensive UltraGear model line but apparently also older models.

      It also does only affect Windows PC users.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Atlantic ☛ The War That Shall Not Be Named

    Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the president can take military action but must inform Congress. Then, within 60 days, the president must end the conflict, obtain congressional authorization, or invoke a 30-day extension. In April, when the U.S. reached a very fragile cease-fire with Iran, the administration—aided by Republican leaders in Congress—claimed that the war was over, and thus that no congressional action was needed or justified.

    Yet the war was plainly not over. Sporadic fighting among Israel, Hezbollah, Iran, and the United States continued for weeks, producing some tortured semantic debates about the definition of cease-fire, until Trump finally declared the cease-fire dead earlier this month. But instead of admitting that this is a return to the original conflict, the White House now says it’s an entirely different clash—which means that Congress won’t have any role until early September, 60 days from July 10, the day the White House delivered formal notification of the conflict. Trump is purporting to follow the letter of the War Powers Resolution while mocking its spirit.

  • New York Times ☛ Merz Criticizes Terrorism Laws After Deadly Berlin Pride Attack

    On Sunday, the German authorities had also revealed that the suspect had tried to join the Islamic State terrorist group, and had previously been sentenced to prison for preparing a serious act of violence.

    The suspect was shot and killed by the police on Sunday.

  • Common Dreams ☛ You Sirs Are the Duplicitous Murderous Failures | Opinion

    The truth, says James Talarico: "We are closing schools and hospitals in this country so we can bomb schools and hospitals in other countries" - and working hard to hide it. The latest proof, again from the Times in a rare, welcome burst of journalism: The Pentagon's Casualty Analysis website just lowered the number of troop deaths from 18 to 14, with the four names just brought home scrubbed from the list. Garbled rationales ranged from deaths after Trump's April ceasefire mean no war/no deaths to "site errors due to a temporary data disruption (with) anomalies being resolved." Days later, they're still missing. Michael Swinton's widow Jamiah, asked if she had any details on the disappeared names, said nobody has reached out: "I kind of don’t have words for that.” We don't either. "They died serving our country," wrote Bill Kristol. "They should be honored, not erased." In sorrowful fact, we say they died for little besides a sick con man's lies. For that we are truly sorry. Remember who to blame.

  • Robert Reich ☛ How Wealth Inequality Spiraled Out of Control

    Many of you have asked for a video that sets out simply and clearly how wealth inequality in the United States spiraled out of control, why it’s a huge problem, and what we can (and must) do about it. So here goes: [...]

  • Richard Beck ☛ The Vietnam War as Neurotic Failure

    There are many tragedies associated with the Vietnam War. But here is one of the biggest. After the Tet Offensive in 1968, it was clear to the White House and Department of Defense that the war could not be won. And yet, the war continued for another seven years. During that time, another 21,000 US soldiers would lose their lives. Another 500,000 to 900,000 Vietnamese would lose theirs. Billions of dollars were also spent. All for a war we knew we could not win.

    Which raises a question: Why did the war continue for another seven years?

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • New Republic ☛ Trump Flips Out at Protester Calling Him “Pedophile Protector”

    Someone kept yelling “pedophile protector” while Trump was extolling the benefits of his tariffs on foreign automakers. Others in the crowd eventually tried to drown him out, and when the protester stopped, the crowd cheered before breaking into a “USA” chant.

• Environment

  • The New Lede ☛ In a "toxic terrain," journalism exposes Iowa's farm pollution problem

    Just as in any other big transition in public opinion and civic well-being, change of this magnitude requires an accumulation of preceding events, like the bullying and danger and insensitivity that can lead to a prison riot. Well, it’s been a long time coming, but a political and civic jail break is occurring now in Iowa on water quality and cancer.

    For decades it was common knowledge in academia and government that supersize farms and livestock operations are the largest water polluters in Iowa, and almost every other state. In 2015, for instance, the Des Moines-area regional drinking water utility filed a federal lawsuit to regulate nitrogen discharges from farms upstream of its Raccoon River treatment plant. High concentrations of nitrates, which form when nitrogen unites with oxygen, were contaminating the drinking water of 500,000 residents, the utility said.

  • Climate.us ☛ Climate.us named NCSE Friend of the Planet for 2026

    Climate.us has been built by former members of the team behind the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate.gov website, which was effectively shut down in 2025. Climate.us is an independent, nonprofit climate information website that meets popular demand for reliable climate information.

  • New York Times ☛ OpenAI Close to Landing $500 Billion Data Center With Backing From Nvidia

    OpenAI is close to leasing a $500 billion data center in southern Ohio that could be among the largest of the artificial intelligence boom [sic], according to three people familiar with the project.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Fire This Time

    And they just kind of hate the idea of scientists, they hate the idea of objective research of any kind. And so that feeds right into the climate denial.

  • [Old] Environmental Health Project ☛ The Dangers of Data Centers

    Data Centers are large facilities containing computer servers used for data storage, data analytics, generative AI, and streaming services. Data centers represent health risks for their neighbors. These risks are especially high from hyperscale data centers powered by fossil fuels, such as those proposed for some parts of Pennsylvania. Listed below are some of the top problems data centers impose on nearby communities.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Walrus ☛ The Gordie Howe Bridge Is What American Betrayal Looks Like

      Well, there might have been something more. Allegations of political interference cite the influence of the billionaire Moroun family, one of whom—Matthew Moroun—owns the aging Ambassador Bridge also linking the two cities. The Morouns have long opposed the Gordie Howe Bridge, which would rival their own and, presumably, reduce traffic and tolls. Moroun donated $1 million (US) to the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. political action committee last January and later met with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick right before the US administration blocked the opening.

      Despite the accusations, there has been no proven quid pro quo or untoward dealings involving the Morouns and the Trump administration. However, Mike Levin, the representative from California’s Forty-ninth Congressional District, summed up the situation bluntly: “My friends, it’s corruption in plain sight. A government should work for the people, not for whoever writes the biggest cheque. Open the bridge.”

    • Avi Loeb ☛ How to Propel Astronauts to the Speed of Light at 1g?

      In other words, an astronaut with a mass of 100 kilograms would need the energy equivalent of 4 gigaton of TNT to approach the speed of light. This amount of energy is comparable to the energy stored in the global nuclear weapon arsenal worldwide. However, nuclear fuel cannot propel a rocket to the speed of light, because the energy it releases per unit mass, E/M, is much lower than c². Conventional chemical propellants are far less effective than nuclear fuel

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Robert Birming ☛ Trying to actually be here

      Days like these always make me kind of dizzy. Not because of the sea, but because it's almost "too beautiful". It's impossible to take it all in. You want to preserve it, but you can't.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Is Having One of His All-Time Meltdowns

    Musk smugly denied that his USAID cuts have caused the deaths of any children, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And when the magazine’s editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes addressed how deeply unpopular he’s become due to the kind of polarizing rhetoric he pushes, he fumed against her at and the media class at large.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ The walls we rebuilt with cloud modernization

    FedRAMP certifies that a cloud is safe to use; it does not certify that two clouds can talk to each other. The impact-level stratification and the classified enclave architecture above them turned the federal cloud landscape into a marketplace of certified isolation.

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ Not seeking growth is a perfectly valid strategy

    The other day, I ran into a Mastodon discussion about open source software and how blaming your userbase isn't a great strategy for growth.

  • Idiomdrottning ☛ You might as well be walking on the sun

    When we talk about solving climate change (ration energy, leave the fossils in the ground, any DACCS and BioCCS should be funded directly instead of as an excuse to burn more fossils, fix market capitalism’s bugs or replace it outright, tax the rich, get money out of politics) what they hear is akin to as if we would’ve said “Oh, why do you need doors or windows? Just walk through the walls with ghost powers” or “Why do you need stairs? Just stride up the clouds”.

    That is how deep their programming goes.

  • Dr Molly Tov ☛ 3 seasons in one (portfolio, primary, and tomato)

    I live in Michigan, where our Democratic Senate primary is a hot mess garnering national attention/meddling right now. For the uninitiated, our choices are Abdul El-Sayed, a doctor running on a highly progressive platform (Medicare for all, money out of politics), or Haley Stevens, a current US Representative whose ad spending was covered almost entirely by AIPAC until last week.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • India Times ☛ Gen Z turns social media, Instagram into a new political public squares

      Just before that, late on Thursday night, PM Modi posted a video on Instagram talking about reforms to check paper leaks. The video crossed 300 million views within 24 hours, making a global record. His own profile gained 1.1 million new followers overnight, taking the total to 104 million followers. Modi followed it up with a second post on Friday night. The timing of these posts was between 11.30 PM and 12.00 AM, keeping in mind that the new generation scrolls through Instagram posts just before going to bed.

    • Northwestern University ☛ Is this Reddit’s moment for local news?

      “It was really just about providing tools to be more successful on the platform, and when they’re more successful on Reddit, we all win,” said Gabriel Sands, the news and lifestyle partnerships lead on Reddit’s media, business development team. “Users really like engaging with news content on the platform, and newsrooms and news organizations and media of all stripes are really in need of new audience sources right now as the landscape shifts, so it feels like a nice way for us to at least attempt to meet that moment and really provide some value to them.”

    • Press Gazette ☛ Journalist response platform plays 'whack-a-mole' against AI deluge of PR content

      US-based journalist response platform Qwoted has banned hundreds of PR agencies, executives and ‘experts’ who either appear not to exist, use AI to write or opine on areas outside their expertise.

      CEO of Qwoted Dan Simon said fake AI-generated content is booming and weeding it out is complicated.

      “Zooming out for a second, you’ve got real agencies representing fake experts with fake expertise. You’ve got real agencies with fake experts and real agencies with real experts with fake expertise, and fake agencies with fake experts with fake expertise.

      “AI has just poured petrol on the disinformation fire.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Lawmakers approve bill effectively stripping exiled Russians of key citizenship rights

    Those affected will be entered into a special register maintained by the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation.

    Individuals placed on the register will be barred from: [...]

  • The Barents Observer ☛ Prosecutors search libraries for 'forbidden' books

    According to the ruling against the Youth Library, prosecutors first discovered a book in the library’s online catalogue before conducting an onsite inspection to confirm that the single copy was indeed in the collection and available to readers. The 2000 edition had been published with financial support from an organisation later designated as "undesirable" in Russia. After the inspection, the book was confiscated, a library representative admitted the “violation,” and the court issued a warning instead of a fine. The title of the book and the organisation involved remain undisclosed in the ruling.

    In the other two cases—against the Central Library of Ukhta and the Usinsk Centralised Library System—the prosecutor’s office was also the initiating party.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Nation ☛ Trump Humiliated a Submissive Mainstream Media at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner

    To be sure, the event has always been tawdry and cringe-worthy, even under presidents much less brazenly criminal than Trump. It’s a backslapping affair where the media that is supposed to hold the government accountable spends an evening making bad jokes while reveling in its proximity to power. Like the Al Smith dinner in New York, the WHCD is supposed to humanize the political system by showing that seemingly adversarial figures can come together for a good laugh. But in reality, these rituals of comity are also rituals of elite impunity—the whole point is to create an inner-circle bond through social ties that override any larger commitment to principle.

    Last April, my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann made the case for getting rid of the WHCD altogether: [...]

  • CPJ ☛ Bangladesh charges journalists Farzana Rupa, Mozammel Babu with crimes against humanity

    “Charging journalists Farzana Rupa and Mozammel Babu with crimes against humanity for doing their work is simply unacceptable,” said Kunal Majumder, CPJ’s Asia-Pacific Program Coordinator. “Authorities must drop the charges and break the cycle of partisan political vendettas against the press.”

    If found guilty, Rupa and Babu could face the death penalty because the tribunal does not have sentencing guidelines for specific offenses.

  • CPJ ☛ Brazilian journalist is assaulted, threatened after alleged public funds embezzlement exposé

    Melo said in a phone interview with CPJ that he suspects the incident had political motive after the publication of a series on alleged embezzlement of public funds intended for an agricultural fair in the Juruá region. He and his partner at the radio station, Rogério Wenceslau, also reported in their program that a high-ranking state government official had threatened them with arrest following the publication.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ How India's Gen-Z protesters shifted the political debate

    Some 48 hours before Pradhan's resignation, senior Hindu nationalist BJP and government sources had said removing him was not under serious consideration, even as protests continued to grow in Delhi while solidarity demonstrations spread to cities across India.

    Earlier concessions, including the removal of 47 National Testing Agency officials, promises of fast-track courts and administrative reshuffles, failed to satisfy protesters.

    At the same time, the government faced growing concern that the confrontation would dominate the monsoon session of parliament and hand the opposition a powerful political issue.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ A powerful union, the billionaire tax and an alleged bargaining chip

    The terms Regan allegedly laid out raise the question of whether he intended for the billionaire tax to go on the ballot, or if it was designed as a leverage play to expand his union, which represents more than 120,000 workers and is among the largest healthcare unions in the nation.

    Regan, who has been elected to five consecutive terms as union president since 2011, has a record of launching ballot initiatives at the state and local level to use as leverage for union expansion and to thwart his political opponents.

  • 404 Media ☛ Wikimedia Will Not Voluntarily Recognize Union a Supermajority of Its Workers Want

    Last week, Wiki Workers United, which is organized through the Communication Workers Union and represents U.S. workers at the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, requested voluntary recognition of their union. Wiki Workers United said that it had secured a “supermajority of union-eligible workers who have signed union authorization cards.” A group of more than 1,100 Wikipedia editors have also signed a letter of support for the union.

  • Wired ☛ DHS Official Resigns, Citing ‘War on Immigrants’

    “I’m thrilled to end my relationship with the current administration,” Rosenblum said in a LinkedIn post over the weekend. “Between the war on immigrants, the war on feds, and the war on facts (not to mention the crazy war in Iran and the brazen corruption), I just need a change.”

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Don't bring sensitive data to a border crossing

    The DOJ is trying to prosecute Sam Tunick for allegedly using a duress passcode. It's a lesson in why your best protection is having nothing to protect.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Matt Birchler ☛ Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc.

    But owning a game on a disc today isn't really the same thing. It's still just a license, and Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo can either intentionally or, in this case, unintentionally prevent you from playing that game, even if you own the physical copy. This isn't even to mention the fact that when you pop the disc in your drive, you're not playing from the disc. It's installing it to your internal hard drive and is probably installing a bunch of updates that are required to make the game actually work at all.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Paramount CEO David Ellison says the Warner merger is still on track

    After Paramount agreed Friday to delay its proposed merger with Warner Bros. Discovery to battle a stiffer-than-anticipated antitrust challenge from California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta and 11 other state attorneys general, Ellison is resetting expectations. In a Monday memo to employees, Ellison wrote that he still believes his mammoth merger will be consummated in the coming months.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: How the EU can punish Google (despite Trump) (27 Jul 2026)

    With America and the EU on the same side of the tech fight, the world had a fighting chance. Tech knew this, which is why Big Tech backed Trump hard during the 2024 election and aggressively curried his favor after he won. From the tech barons who paid $1m each to sit behind Trump on the inaugural dais to the millions tech companies donated to Trump's Epstein Ballroom at the White House, tech has made it clear that it supports anything Trump wants to do, provided he shields Big Tech from any attempt to limit their ability to spy on and steal from Americans and the world.

    Even before he took office, Trump made it clear how he would reward tech's loyalty: weeks before the inauguration, Trump went to Davos and threatened the EU with reprisals if they enforced the DSA or DMA against his tech companies: [...]

  • Copyrights

    • CBC ☛ Katy Perry slams White House for using her music in violent TikTok video

      The nine-second video, posted Thursday on the White House account, used part of her song Firework as the soundtrack to a series of explosions — grainy footage of what appear to be recent U.S. strikes against Iran.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Copyright Scammers Weaponized Meta's Rights Manager with Backdating Exploit

      Scammers are allegedly exploiting a flaw in Facebook's 'Edit Post' feature to backdate stolen videos and hijack copyright claims through Meta's Rights Manager. This allows them to monetize content of other creators, while also hitting them with strikes. The problem is at the center of several Indian lawsuits that want the American tech giant to close this surprisingly simple loophole.