Leftovers

• Nick Moore ☛ ENOTTY: Not a typewriter

  Considering for the moment my own plethora of desktops, laptops, phones, tablets and so on, all of which are “computers” in some sense, most of what they do is run a web browser so I can watch bicycle videos and buy bicycle parts and plan bicycle trips and read conversations about bicycles. The browser is a staggeringly complex piece of work I cannot hope to replace even a fraction of, so all that’s out.

  The other thing I do is construct structured information. Documents, including this blog post. Programs, including the subject of this blog post.

• Nathan Dyer ☛ You Are Not the Library of Congress

  The thing I have to keep reminding myself is: I’m not the library of congress. It’s not my duty or calling to keep a copy of every single movie that is vaguely interesting. It’s not up to me to keep every book I read, or every song or album I download. If you only like three tracks from a Greatest Hits album, don’t keep the other seventeen around “just in case.”

  You are not the library of congress. Your collection is not the last vestige of a bygone media era.

• Kyle Reddoch ☛ Introducing The Defender’s Dispatch

  Cybersecurity news is not difficult to find. Deciding what deserves your attention—and what to do next—is the harder part.

  A vulnerability is disclosed. A vendor changes a policy. A new security tool appears. By the end of the week, you may have dozens of open tabs but no clear sense of what actually matters to your environment.

• Kevin Wammer ☛ A year of journaling on paper - overkill.wtf

  The very first journal entry I can find is from February 2016. Back then and for the next 9 years or so, I used Day One. In between, I tried some other systems, be it keeping plain text files on whatever computer I owned at the time or writing in paper journals with dedicated prompts. I kept returning to Day One, but always romanticized the paper journals kept by famous authors.

• Kelson Vibber ☛ Blaugust, or What the Heck: I'll Do Two Overlapping Blogging Challenges

  100 Days doesn’t have any set themes, and Blaugust’s themes are optional. And apparently it’s a fairly laid-back challenge, so if I miss a day I don’t need to drop out.

  So what the heck: I’ll aim for 31 posts this month and see how far I get.

• Dom Corriveau ☛ Rant about blogs and the IndieWeb

  Not only does this hold true, but it gets more true the more blogs I read. I’m subscribed to a few hundred blogs, most focused on either tech or from folks who enjoy tech. Every day my feed has dozens of posts from folks who are seriously nice people. But…

• Misty De Méo ☛ Searching for the Broken-down Chiptune Player of My Dreams

  Back then, if you wanted to listen to music from a video game, maybe you could track down an official soundtrack CD—or, if you were a mega nerd like me, you’d download ripped chiptunes and their special players. These files are basically cut-down versions of the original game data, containing the game’s music data and its original player; it’s intended to be paired with a special audio player which is essentially a cut-down emulator for the console which emulates the CPU and sound chip but not the rest of the hardware. Since they stripped out anything the game didn’t need to play the music, they were usually tiny. Entire soundtracks for 8-bit and 16-bit games could easily fit in under 50KB1, which made it easy for me to sample stuff on a whim even with a dialup internet connection.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Tedium ☛ Why Pricing Guns Stuck Around After The Barcode

    Today in Tedium: Determining how much something costs shouldn’t be difficult, but in an ecosystem where everything is driven by highly personalized data, concerns are rising that prices might not be on stable ground. Recently, some states and regulators have started to scrutinize e-paper price tags out of a concern that those tags will enable pricing that adapts to demand—or worse, to the customer. A major union, the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW), even announced plans to launch a campaign against electronic shelf labels, as they’re called. But what if I were to tell you that this concern is not in fact a new one, and it more or less played out like this 50 years ago, on a technology that most people take for granted today? That’s right, we’re talking about barcodes, along with its predecessor technology, the pricing gun. Today’s Tedium dives into the surprisingly long-running conflict between price tags and barcodes. — Ernie @ Tedium

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Science Alert ☛ Hell-World Venus May Have Once Had Oceans Across 90% of Its Hot, Dry Surface

    Now, a new Earth & Planetary Science Letters study argues the surface of Venus may still bear the geological scars of those long-lost seas.

    "While the interpretation of these features is not unambiguous," writes a team led by geologist Richard Ghail of the University of London in the UK, "there is a compelling case that Venus once supported oceans, and perhaps life, across most of its surface."

  • Digital Camera World ☛ Potatoes are beige and boring. But they are also the reason color photography exists

    Potato starch has microscopic round particles. The Lumière brothers found that adding dye to potato starch in separate batches of red, green, and violet and then mixing the solution together and painting over a sticky glass plate created a color filter. Charcoal powder was used to fill in any gaps and help create contrast. Light went through the tri-colored dyed potato starch coating on one side of the glass to hit the light-sensitive chemicals on the other side of the glass plate.

  • John D Cook ☛ Why polynomial coefficients?

    Second order linear differential equations with polynomial coefficients form their own area of study. This seems like a narrow class of equations, but it’s very important in applications.

  • John D Cook ☛ Counting rooted trees

    Combinatorial problems can be interesting for their own sake, but they are more interesting when there is a connection to a problem outside combinatorics, and the more unexpected the connection the better.

    Counting the number of unlabeled rooted trees [1] with n nodes is a pure mathematics problem. Designing numerical methods for solving differential equations is an applied mathematics problem. And yet the two are closely linked.

  • Joseph Lorenzo Hall ☛ Beyond Grains of Sand: From the Planck Length to the Edge of Infinity

    But, what if we truly want to understand how astoundingly small and unfathomably large things can get? How would we do that? Well, we have to map how numbers scale across domains. While we can start by counting things in the physical universe, that can't be our final destination—it's only a stepping stone in counting things. Once we run out of physical stuff to count, we have to shift from measuring tangible objects to calculating theoretical states. We transition into the math of probability and statistics. When those numbers get too immense to manage, we hand them over to the explosive growth of computer algorithms. And finally, when even the most powerful algorithms break down, we must turn to the formal axioms of set theory to structure infinity itself.

  • Groot Koerkamp ☛ NtHash revisited

    In general, NtHash (Mohamadi et al. 2016) is a rolling hash where for every incoming character, the bits of the hash are rotated 1 position, then a hash of the new character is xor’ed in, and the (rotated) hash of the outgoing character is xor’ed out.

    This is very simple and fast to compute, and since for DNA the alphabet is only size 4, the hash of each character can be computed using a SIMD-based lookup table via some shuffle instructions. This then also allows computing many hashes in parallel, as we do in simd-minimizers.

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] Muscle coordination can be mimicked by electric motors – it could lead to improved robots

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-29 [Older] What really happens to your data when you click ‘delete’?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-29 [Older] Where have all the wasps gone this summer?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-28 [Older] New theory on how six-tonne Stonehenge rock was transported from Scotland thousands of years ago – by a glacier

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-28 [Older] Updating Darwin: biologists are returning to an older theory to explain anomalies in evolution

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-27 [Older] The case for having an imperfect memory – a psychologist explains

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] Meet Likweli – the newly named monkey that hints at Congo’s hidden secrets

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] Nasa’s new space telescope will tackle some of the universe’s biggest mysteries

• Career/Education

  • Deseret Media ☛ Back to school: Will Utah's bell-to-bell school cellphone ban sharpen students' classroom focus?

    Utah kids will soon be back in class hauling backpacks stuffed with school supplies, textbooks and maybe a few snacks.

    One item they won't be carrying? Cellphones.

    A new law passed by the 2026 Utah Legislature will be in effect when K-12 students go back to school in the coming weeks. The state's default school cellphone policy now restricts cellphones in school from opening bell to closing bell.

  • Logikal Solutions ☛ DeVry Students May Finally Get Relief

    Those of us who know COBOL are either dead, in the gummer home, or very long in the tooth. The companies still using IBM mainframe technology have viciously incompetent management. They brought in Vendor Managment Systems and are now looking to pay dramatically below market rate. Adding insult to injury every posting wants 10 years of experience and they want someone that is under 25. If a person actually has all of those skills they have 30+ years on the platform and aren’t going to work for summer intern wages.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ My next experiment

    On Thursday, I left my role as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica, where I led IT, Security, and Engineering. In September, I will begin my John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. Which means that, during August, I will move with my family back to the San Francisco Bay Area and be based in the vicinity of the Stanford campus.

• Hardware

  • Terence Eden ☛ Gadget Review: HIKMICRO D02 Thermal Camera

    Works fine as a storage device on Linux, showing up as 0525:a4a5 "Netchip Technology, Inc. Linux-USB File-backed Storage Gadget". True to its word, it shows up as a standard disk.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • University of Michigan ☛ Strong link found between ultra-processed foods and addictive behavior

    One of the FAST Lab’s most prominent findings is that ultra-processed foods are associated with overeating, intense cravings and loss of control around food. In an email to The Michigan Daily, psychology professor Ashley Gearhardt, founder of FAST Lab, explained ultra-processed foods are engineered to elicit flavors that intensify feelings of reward. Conversely, whole foods — such as fruits, vegetables, beans and whole grains — hardly trigger the same responses.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Smarter fish farms could cut electricity use and CO₂ while keeping fish safe

    A joint research team from Saitama University and the University of the Ryukyus set out to develop a process-aware energy management framework for coordinating flexible equipment operation with renewable generation, battery storage and grid electricity in RAS. The team used experimental data from Malabar grouper (Epinephelus malabaricus), a commercially important aquaculture species, to construct a species-specific DO estimation model that accounts for the effects of fish body mass and feeding. This model linked aerator operation to a biologically meaningful operating constraint.

  • Daniel Miller ☛ You May Be Severely Injured and Anemic but Don’t You Dare Skip Gym Day.

    In this way, illness strips people not only of income but of social legitimacy. I didn’t just lose the ability to work consistently. I lost the cultural permission to feel worthy.

    …I sometimes think disabled people are forced into a more honest relationship with reality than the culture around us. We cannot endlessly pretend our bodies are machines. We cannot always override pain through discipline and positive thinking. We are confronted, over and over again, with the fact that human beings are fragile.

  • Adam Fortuna ☛ The Personal Reset | Adam Fortuna's Blog

    A personal reset, as I’ve dubbed it, is a time when you decide to make a notable change in your routine when you realize your current path isn’t taking you where you want it to. Resets come in all sizes – from upending your life and living in the woods, to making a few small tweaks that let you see the world from a new point of view.

  • SFGate ☛ Groundbreaking research unveils secret about California's avocados

    “This gives us a shortcut we’ve never had before,” Eric Focht, a staff research associate from UC Riverside and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “Instead of waiting years for a tree to flower, we can identify its flower type almost immediately using its DNA. That allows us to make much smarter breeding decisions.”

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Vikash Patel ☛ Designing a Usage-Based Billing Pipeline for SaaS

    A deep technical guide to designing a robust, provider-agnostic billing pipeline for usage-based SaaS. Covers subscription state machines, idempotent event processing, automated dunning logic, credit notes, and metered invoice generation with full SQL schemas, Mermaid diagrams, and Go snippets.

  • So-called 'FSFE'

    • FSFE ☛ 2026-07-24 [Older] Legal Corner: How Apple’s attack on interoperability failed [Ed: 'FSFE', bribed by Microsoft, takes only on Apple]

    • FSFE ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] The FSFE calls for Free Software as the model for digital public services

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

    • Futurism ☛ US Government Displays AI-Mangled Map of Africa That Gets Every Single Country Wrong

      How could such a horrifically inaccurate map be made? An analysis by Reuters found that it contained an AI watermark indicating it was generated with an OpenAI model, making this another likely case of an AI hallucination that went overlooked by people who have completely surrendered their brains to a piece of technology that offers to do their work for them. OpenAI, Reuters reported, said it was investigating the report.

    • Futurism ☛ A Prominent AI Investor Is Now Crumbling, in What Could Be a Sign of Things to Come

      As the dominoes fell, Aschenbrenner sent a letter to investors to quell their fears, highlighting how well it had performed until this point. Boldly, he also said that the mass tech sell off was a “particularly good time to add funds,” the FT reported.

      But when the assets kept tanking — and more money didn’t come in — Aschenbrenner started frantically calling investors trying to get them to sell assets or pour in fresh capital, according to the reporting. When it got even worse, his clients couldn’t reach him.

    • Vox ☛ Is that thirst trap influencer AI? Inside the world of very convincing deepfakes

      Derek isn’t the only AI thirst trap showing off defined abs for likes and money. He’s one of an increasing number of completely fake, AI-generated figures sinking their fangs into the real models, influencers, and porn stars who populate our feeds, sucking up their beautiful faces and bodies, and using them to profit, without a penny going to the real humans they fed from.

    • Nicolas Magand ☛ Just a tool

      I guess from an individual point of view, like a developer working on an app, A.I. is indeed just another tool. But this feels like a rather limited view of how the world works, doesn’t it? To me, it sounds like someone parking their car on the pavement and justifying it by saying “It will only take a minute!” If every driver in the city thinks the same, there won’t be any pavement left to walk on soon.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Why businesses lie about AI (01 Aug 2026)

      But the evidence for this "changing everything" thesis is thin on the ground. Despite a global mania that has reduced the real, pressing need for digital sovereignty to the imaginary need to create "sovereign AI," no one can really articulate the case for "sovereign AI." If Donald Trump ordered Big Tech to turn off all of your country's chatbots tomorrow, nothing would change. Every one of your country's ministries and corporations would chug on with nary a hitch. Households, too, though perhaps a few of the younger members of those families would have to do their own homework again.

      (Contrast this with what would transpire if Trump directed his tech giants to switch off your country's Office 365 access, or to brick your Android and iOS phones, or to killswitch your John Deere tractors. Your country would effectively cease to exist. If "digital sovereignty" means anything, it means doing something about this urgent fact): [...]

    • Antipope ☛ On the non-use of AI in my writing process

      This isn't a blog entry I wanted to write, but it's a necessary one: a statement about the use of generative large language models (colloquially "AI") in my work.

      I do not use LLMs in my work. I don't use them in my non-work life either, for that matter. I despise the grifters selling these toys as "tools" and trying to convince us to use them to generate plausible answer-shaped text strings in place of actual internet search for verifiable sources.

    • Bloomberg ☛ AI Circular Deals: How Microsoft, OpenAI and Nvidia Keep Paying Each Other

      The term typically refers to an arrangement in which one company invests in another firm that buys its products and services: By doing so, the businesses effectively bind their fortunes more tightly to one another. (A circular deal is different from a fraudulent “round-trip” transaction, a term regulators have used for sham trades with no economic substance that are designed to inflate reported results.)

    • Bert Hubert ☛ AI: Considerations for people who make decisions

      This article originated with these two presentations. The first, at the NPD, focused on the concrete challenges facing decision-makers. The second, at the AWTI, was about what is needed to build a trustworthy (European) AI infrastructure. And, for that matter, also touched on what that actually means. After these presentations I started writing, and eventually came up with this article.

      While writing, I discovered just how challenging the subject really is. There are passionate advocates of AI, and there are people who believe it is the devil incarnate. These camps are so polarized that it is impossible to write something that everyone will be happy with.

      It is, however, entirely possible to write an article that makes everyone angry about some part. So here goes.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • New York Times ☛ Scope of Hacks on U.S. Water Supply Widens as Evidence Points to Iran

      While there were no indications that any water supply had been altered or made unsafe to drink, state and local officials throughout the country were on high alert for potential problems in vulnerable computers that are commonly used to monitor and adjust water quality, including chemical-treatment levels and water pressure. Minnesota first publicly reported the attacks, and now Michigan says its systems have also been targeted.

    • Security Week ☛ Cyberattacks on Minnesota Water Systems Investigated as Officials Warn About Iranian Hackers

      The FBI, which is investigating, has not publicly identified a culprit and a spokesperson declined to say Thursday who the bureau thought might be responsible. The FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other agencies warned in an advisory last week that Iranian hackers have been targeting water and wastewater systems and the operational controls other critical infrastructure sectors.

    • The Verge ☛ Trump blames Tim Walz for water [breaches] even though it’s probably Iran

      As usual, the president offered no evidence of his off-the-cuff accusations.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • BoingBoing ☛ Spacecraft sent on rescue mission now spinning out of control

    In a blog post, NASA announced that "Katalyst's LINK servicing spacecraft experienced issues with attitude control, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications." Two of the craft's three reaction wheels, which are electric motors attached to flywheels, used to make small, precise movements without consuming fuel, were no longer functioning. While some craft have additional reaction wheels for redundancy, LINK has only three.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Lalit Maganti ☛ GitHub has alternatives, but no replacement

    What interests me is the disappointment in the response. Many people reacted as though one of the few plausible GitHub replacements had ruled them or their projects out. They wanted Codeberg to be a universal alternative, a better GitHub and the obvious place to go when leaving it.

    To me, that exposes a big gap in the open-source space. There are plenty of places to host a Git repository, but remarkably few places to host an open-source community. GitHub gives projects a shared pool of identities, habits and paths to discovery. None of the alternatives has reproduced that at a similar scale.

    I don’t think the answer has to be another centralized platform, or that every project should live in one place. But decentralization is not enough on its own. Whatever replaces GitHub still needs a shared social layer: identities contributors already have, conventions they understand and ways to discover projects across the network.

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] MikroTik RouterOS

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] Johnson Controls OpenBlue Employee

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] Toptech Systems RCU II+ and Multiload II+

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] Schneider Electric IGSS

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] Rockwell Automation CompactLogix 5380 ControlLogix 5580 / 1756-EN4TR Communications Module

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] NASA Core Flight System (cFS) Health & Safety (HS) Application

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] Mitsubishi Electric CC-Link IE TSN Communication Protocol

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] o6 Automation open62541

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] Watchfire Controller Software

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] MZ Automation GmbH libiec61850

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] MZ Automation lib60870

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-29 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-28 [Older] Siemens Desigo CC

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-28 [Older] Siemens Mendix Runtime

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-28 [Older] Siemens SIMATIC S7-PLCSIM Advanced

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-28 [Older] Siemens SIMATIC S7-1500 CPU 1518(F)-4 PN/DP MFP

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-28 [Older] MikroTik RouterOS and Cloud Hosted Router

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-28 [Older] igloohome Smart Lock Mobile Application

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-28 [Older] ABB KNX Update Tool

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-27 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] Johnson Controls C-CURE 9000 and Victor application server

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] Johnson Controls XAAP Android

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] Weintek cMT3092X

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] Panduit IntraVUE

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] Rockwell Automation ThinManager

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] MZ Automation libIEC61850

    • CISA ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] MZ Automation lib60870

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Dark Reading ☛ The Morning After We Pull a Root of Trust, Nobody Owns It

      That is the trap. We read four clean recoveries and think the issue is solved. It isn't. It just hasn't been tested at scale.

      Picture the scaled version. A regional bank's only CA is distrusted. It cannot process transactions or authenticate systems. Its team scrambles, but the CA is overwhelmed. Within hours, customers are locked out and regulators want answers. Competitors who issued from a second CA do not miss a beat.

      And the conditions that made the past events survivable are eroding. Two forces are changing the math.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Truthdig ☛ 2026-07-29 [Older] R. James Woolsey, Godfather of Post-9/11 National Security Capitalism

    • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ ICYMI: ShinyHunters Steals 297GB Of Data From Council of Europe

      Google is updating privacy settings for how some of its apps collect, save, and use your search data — including to train its AI models, according to an article from Lifehacker. Search Services History will include any media you upload, such as audio, video, and files used in your interactions. You can keep Google from saving your media via Search Services History while still allowing other data to inform your search results and recommendations. You can customize Search Services History specifically and turn Personalized Recommendations on or off from your Google Account under Data & privacy > Personalization settings.

    • Futurism ☛ Flock Surveillance Cameras Are Actually Horrible for Fighting Crime, FBI Data Shows

      Atlanta, Georgia has experienced far and away the largest influx of ALRPs in the country, with over 5,000 various Flock cameras now blanketing the city. Yet as bombshell data released by the FBI shows, the city’s massive web of surveillance has had virtually zero impact on the Atlanta Police Department’s ability to solve crime, with some clearance rates for offenses like homicide even experiencing a decline over the past few years as the cameras have proliferated.

      First reported by the Atlanta Community Press Collective, the FBI data is a damning refutation of Flock’s primary claim: that ALPRs are necessary to help officers keep the public safe.

      According to the ACPC, the rates at which the APD resolves crimes like homicide, robbery, miscellaneous larceny, and shoplifting have actually decreased between 2021 and 2025, when the city’s ALPR build-out hit its full stride.

    • TruthOut ☛ FISA Section 702 Isn’t the Only Way the Government Spies on Our Communications

      Section 702, which is considered a counterterrorism mechanism, grants government officials authorization to track foreigners abroad to obtain “intelligence information” in the interest of national security. But when tracking what it deems “intelligence information” about a foreigner, the government also collects ordinary information that has absolutely nothing to do with counterterrorism or security.

      Day-to-day communications from law-abiding U.S. citizens get caught up in this web of surveillance without their knowledge or consent, and without a warrant. This information is stored in government databases for years, if not indefinitely. Officials at the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other agencies can review this information for a wide variety of reasons, including criminal prosecution and immigration enforcement.

    • Ava ☛ we don't shame smart glasses wearers enough – ava's blog

      It's accidentally perfectly demonstrating the limitations in current popular privacy discourse and movement: The fact that devices or software may claim to keep the users private, but not people in general, especially not the people the users point these devices at.

      "Privacy, as it is commonly practiced and advertised, is for the person inflicting the damage onto their surroundings, not their surroundings."

• Defence/Aggression

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Autonomous vehicles that can transform war soon to boost US Army power

    The U.S. Army has selected Harbinger’s plug-in hybrid defense vehicle as the basis for American Rheinmetall’s autonomous unmanned ground vehicle (UGVs) contract.

    The vehicles will autonomously transport supplies to and from the forward line of troops, reducing risk to soldiers and increasing operational efficiency in contested environments.

  • CBC ☛ 2026-07-29 [Older] Security for Prince Harry's visits to Canada topped all internationally protected persons

  • NL Times ☛ 2026-07-26 [Older] Amsterdam mayor plans extra Pride security measures after 1 killed in Berlin

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] Spain will send troops to Ceuta to help with border security

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] Cheeto Mussolini’s Global Campaign Against ‘Radical Left Terrorism’ is Built on a National Security Memo Without Congressional Approval

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Gray Zone ☛ MI5 directors who plotted IRGC ‘terror’ ban exposed in leaked emails

    Leaked correspondence reviewed by The Grayzone reveals that when first proposed in 2023, the push to proscribe the Iranian military branch was coordinated among the former heads of British intelligence agency MI5. Those plotting the designation included the MI5’s current Director General Ken McCallum and previous Director General Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller – who was privately credited with the passage of Britain’s draconian National Security Act.

    The spymasters appeared to view Labour’s then-Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper as a key ally in constricting civil liberties and convincing government officials to formally designate the IRGC a terrorist entity.

• Environment

  • New Republic ☛ As Europe Burns, a Climate Cover-Up Continues

    The U.K. “has no future” if it cannot “restore the natural world on which we rely for our food, water, and clean air,” said Chris Hinchliff, who is among the members of Parliament pressing the government to release the full report, rather than a shorter, redacted version. Even that version, which was obtained by The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey, “paints a devastating picture of severe food shortages, price rises, migration, political destabilisation, and possible war, resulting from the collapse of ecosystems, fuelled by the human-induced climate crisis and over-exploitation,” Harvey wrote.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Alsterrunde ☛ The New Bus Departure Displays Nobody Asked For

      The first time I saw the new display, I was taken aback. There were so many things that made me wonder how it had been signed off. The most important quality of a departure board, for me, is readability, and this is where it falls down. As you can see in the photo above, glare from the sun makes it hard to read. And unlike the dot-matrix version, you can't read it from a distance; you really have to walk right up to it. If you get too close, you can't read it as well.

      The second issue is energy consumption. The old dot-matrix LED displays used very little power, but the new one looks like an ordinary screen, so I'd assume its energy use is far higher. Given that these displays run constantly, I can't help wondering how much they'll add to the electricity bill, a bill the taxpayer ultimately covers.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Clacton / Valence: French sister-city in dark about brother-in-law

    Clacton has a siter-city relationship with the beautiful city of Valence in France. Valence is approximately 100km south of Lyon on the main freeway, railway and Rhone river towards Marseille.

    If Clacton is your sister city, does that mean the MP who had to resign is your brother-in-law? The French term for brother-in-law is beau-frère which literally means "beautiful brother". I interviewed many people in France and published the video below to explore this extended family. The video was recorded in Valence and produced in Lyon, the birthplace of the cinema.

  • [Repeat] RFA ☛ Solomon Islands signs security agreement with US, reaffirms neutrality

    Commonly known as a shiprider agreement, the Agreement Concerning Counter Illicit Transnational Maritime Activity establishes a legal framework allowing Solomon Islands law enforcement officers to be embedded on U.S. Coast Guard vessels. The initiative forms part of Washington’s broader deployment designed to enhance regional stability and counter illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing across the Pacific.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Dell founder shows how a $100 billion empire started 42 years ago — CEO says ‘This one page changed my life’

    Dell went public four years after it was founded, but after a quarter of a century of being listed on the stock market, Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners decided to take the company private again in 2013 in a $24.9 billion deal as it struggled with the rise of smartphones and tablets. After five years without mandatory quarterly reports, Dell decided to go public again, and it currently has a market capitalization of around $261.92 billion.

  • Dark Reading ☛ CISA Issues New SBOM Guidance. Did They Get It Right?

    The document, published this week, was authored by the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and 16 other government entities spread across four continents. It supersedes the National Telecommunications and Information Administration's (NTIA) 2021 guidelines, which laid out what an SBOM had to contain as far as the US government was concerned. This updated version was first drafted in 2025, and was then informed by suggestions from 90 commenters, including major organizations like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create the resulting document.

    An SBOM is essentially an “ingredients list," detailing the building blocks and supply chains that make up a given piece of software. This could include proprietary or open source software components, APIs, utilities, and more. As a risk management tool, it aims to provide visibility into where vulnerabilities exist in a software stack and how to prioritize patching, among other things.

  • Robert Reich ☛ A Realist's Guide to the American System

    I’m devoting the next several Fridays to what I’m calling a “Realist’s Guide to the American System.” If you hadn’t noticed, almost everything’s going to hell.

    Why? Trump is horrendous, but he isn’t causing all the failures of that system. He’s a consequence of that system. Think of him as a boil on its backside — an infected pustule on the giant ass of the American system. The boil would have become infected eventually because of deeper flaws in how the system has evolved.

    [...]

    The concentration of wealth in America has created a political system in which the super-rich can buy Congress and the presidency, an education system in which they can buy admission to college for their children, a healthcare system in which they can buy care others can’t, and a justice system in which they can buy their way out of jail.

    Almost everyone else has been hurled into a dystopia of bureaucratic arbitrariness, corporate greed, and the legal and financial sinkholes that have become hallmarks of modern American life.

  • Robin Rendle ☛ Show me the work

    I can’t put into words how much I admire this. Although sure, a title might be nice. It might communicate what level you are, or help barter for more money and power. It might get you a better job. But I’d argue that those are the jobs you don’t want. Constantly vying for attention and glory is the best way for the work to suck.

  • Nick Heer ☛ OpenAI Finds Evidence It Failed to Monitor Other A.I. Agents

    Extraordinary — and the world is at the mercy of U.S. regulators who are so paralyzed by competition with China they are reluctant to do anything that would slow these companies down.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Trillionaire versus Lettuce

    This is almost enough to make you think that money isn't real and the stock market runs entirely on vibes. But that can't be right.

  • Andrew Kelley ☛ Don't Take the Black Pill (Text Adaptation)

    In this movie, there's an iconic moment where our hero, Ted "Theodore" Logan, is presented with two choices, the red pill or the blue pill.

    The question is essentially "Do you want to know an uncomfortable truth?"; the blue pill means "no" and the red pill means "yes". matrix scene with Morpheus offering Neo choice of pill; camera pointing at Morpheus's reflective sunglasses

    To the audience, the answer is obvious. If the main character chose blue, the credits would roll before anything happened. But the metaphor is so strong and the cinematography kicks so much ass that the scene influenced our culture and language to the point where people who haven't even heard of the film say the phrase "based and red-pilled".

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • India Times ☛ Alphabet rolls back AI image generation in Google Earth over policy violations

      The feature, powered by Google's Nano Banana 2 ‌AI model, ⁠had ⁠allowed users to generate photorealistic images grounded in Google Earth's satellite, aerial and 3D imagery by typing a text prompt for any location on the globe.

      The tool had come under criticism for its potential for misinformation as it allowed users to create fake scenarios on top of ⁠real imagery ‌of monuments and landmarks.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • New Republic ☛ Transcript: Trump Blurted Out Vile Plot to Censor ABC—and It Backfired

    As Trump’s sordid pressure on ABC comes back to bite him, a legal expert explains why the network is in a good position to withstand Trump-MAGA bullying—and how this case will likely play out.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ 2026-07-24 [Older] Cuban journalist threatened, interrogated by state security over newsletter

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] New York Times Fights 'Intimidation' as Explosive Subpoena Battle Erupts Over Security Leak

  • Press Gazette ☛ What I've learned: Newsguard co-founder Steven Brill on the fight for truth

    The former editor launched independent publisher rating and fact-checking service Newsguard in 2018 and has just launched what claims to be the world’s first chatbot for breaking news trained on some 12,000 reputable sources.

    He answered Press Gazette’s questions about what he has learned during his near 50-year career in news and publishing.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Tom’s Hardware’s 30th Anniversary — From Intel feuds and DIP switches to 30 years of unbiased testing

    It has now been 30 years since our founder and namesake, Dr. Thomas Pabst, wrote the first articles that came to define Tom’s Hardware, focusing on providing unbiased, fact-based reporting backed by comprehensive testing, a mission that we strive to continue today. To celebrate our 30th Anniversary, Tom’s Hardware is kicking off a series of articles that look back at the evolution of PC hardware and peripherals over the course of the last 30 years, with the first being a look at the evolution of the CPU. But before we dive into the history of CPUs and GPUs, let’s take a quick look back at the early history of Tom’s Hardware.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Futurism ☛ Columbia Economist Baffled as to Why the Masses Aren't Rising Up Against Elon Musk

    In an episode of his podcast Ones and Tooze, Columbia University economic historian Adam Tooze picked apart the increasingly expensive AI arms race and its consequences for humanity. Among Tooze’s observations: the AI boom is completely upending the long-standing social contract under capitalism, a shift embodied most dramatically by Musk.

    During the podcast, co-host Cameron Abadi asked what a “best case scenario” for AI might look like — where a human-level superintelligence emerges that can automate the world’s jobs. In response, Tooze pointed to a report from the Bank of International Settlements: under that scenario, labor’s share of income could collapse from an already paltry 54 percent to just 20 percent, meaning workers would be forced to fight over the remaining crumbs that drop from billionaires’ tables.

  • New Republic ☛ What Susan Collins Just Did on Trump and ICE Should Worry All Dems

    Collins’s effort to take credit for this is ridiculous. She voted for the aforementioned no-strings-attached $70 billion, which will supercharge ICE’s paramilitary operations in countless awful ways. She also voted against an amendment in early June that would have required bodycams. The commitment she’s secured from ICE is a joke in comparison to all she’s done to empower it.

  • Votebeat ☛ Even after New Jersey error, Trump’s claims on noncitizen voters don’t add up

    Sherrill’s 20-minute briefing raised as many questions as it provided answers. How did a software glitch at the state’s motor vehicles agency lead to adding people who said they weren’t citizens to the state’s voter rolls? Who discovered the problem back in 2024? Why didn’t state officials alert the public when they first learned about the mistake? And what did state officials do about the people who were improperly registered at the time?

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Court orders discovery in Blumenthal’s case against US govt, recognizes Fourth Amendment violations

    On July 29, The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal had his day in court. Represented by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in Blumenthal v. Mullin, a federal judge took an important step toward justice in a serious constitutional fight over whether the government can access a journalist’s private electronic devices.

    U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema raised significant concerns about the government’s seizure and attempted forensic search of journalist Max Blumenthal’s two cell phones. Rather than dismissing the case as moot because the government returned the devices after ADC filed its motion, the Court ordered limited discovery to establish what federal officials did with the phones, who handled them, and whether they obtained or retained any information.

  • [Old] Luke Davis ☛ don't let Web nostalgia obscure a positive Web future

    what we should be doing is taking inspiration from what made those times happier and forge a better future with what we have now. living in the present, carving out our own little spaces on the Web, making them accessible to everyone, not using tables for layouts (seriously, try grid and flexbox).

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Salon ☛ "Diarra From Detroit" shows what a media merger could cost TV

    But limbo is better than canceled, which is more likely to happen if the proposed merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery goes through.

  • Patents

    • Software Patents

      • PCLinuxOS Magazine ☛ The MP4 Patent Has Expired!

        The world’s most widely used video codec, MPEG-4, saw its patents expire on July 19, 2026, in Brazil—the last country where those patents were still valid.

        Is this cause for celebration? Undoubtedly, but let’s not get too carried away—we need to make a few distinctions here. It’s great news, but it’s not quite what you, dear reader, are thinking. So that we can understand what happened and what might still happen, we need to look at the history of MP4 and what it is.

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • NL Times ☛ OnlyFans model reports ex-Bunschoten councilor for sharing nude photos without consent

        The woman said she sold the photos exclusively to Koelewijn through OnlyFans. She later found the same images circulating in a Telegram chat group.

        Distributing sexually explicit images without the depicted person’s permission is a criminal offense under Dutch law. The woman filed the report with police on July 19. Police opened an investigation two days later.

  • Copyrights

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] German lawsuit tests copyright limits for AI music training

    • Glyn Moody ☛ 2026-07-22 [Older] Why the spread of powerful local AI models makes copyright enforcement even harder

    • Torrent Freak ☛ World Cup Piracy Crackdown Shows Limits of Domain Seizures, MPA Pushes Site Blocking

      Operation Offsides seized more than 1,000 pirate streaming domains during the FIFA World Cup. While the enforcement efforts were broadly praised, domain seizures are no silver bullet. In an op-ed, leaders of the MPA and the IPR Center suggest that more is needed to tackle piracy effectively, supporting a renewed push for U.S. site blocking legislation that comes with an Iranian twist.

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-07-24 [Older] [Guest Book Review] Creative Value Chains – Copyright and Beyond for a Better Value Distribution

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] [Guest post]Long walk to copyright reform #12: The Constitutional Court clarifies the constitutional anatomy of South Africa's copyright exceptions

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-07-23 [Older] USM Haller II – Copyright protection for a furniture system? Maybe!