Leftovers

• Medievalists.net ☛ Early Medieval Norse Cross Returns to Isle of Man Chapel

  The cross was also laser-scanned in 2018 as part of a Manx National Heritage project to produce three-dimensional digital records of all 210 known Manx crosses. A 3D scan of Osruth’s Cross can be viewed through the iMuseum website, while the original is now back on public display.

• Locus Magazine ☛ Ursula K. Le Guin’s Home Recognized as National Historic Landmark, to host Writers’ Residency

  During the 58 years she spent in the distinctive Queen Anne-style home until her death in 2018, Le Guin wrote many of the novels that have since been canonized among the most celebrated classics of speculative fiction, including A Wizard of Earthsea, The Dispossessed, and The Left Hand of Darkness. Among other accolades, her work would earn her five Hugo awards, a National Book Award, and finalist status for the 1997 Pulitzer Prize.

• The Portland Tribune ☛ Historic Portland home where Ursula K. Le Guin wrote her greatest works gains national recognition | The Portland Tribune

  Located in Northwest Portland’s Willamette Heights neighborhood, the home served as both Le Guin’s family residence and creative sanctuary from 1960 until her death in 2018. Within its walls, she produced many of the novels that transformed science fiction and fantasy into vehicles for exploring gender, politics, identity and culture.

• Gray Local Media ☛ Le Guin’s Portland home added to National Register of Historic Places

  Le Guin (1929–2018) is considered one of the most influential American writers of the 20th and early 21st centuries, known for science fiction and fantasy that explored themes of gender, identity, power and community. The house at 3321 NW Thurman St. was her primary residence and writing space for nearly six decades, from 1960 until her death in 2018.

• Diomidis Spinellis ☛ blog dds: 2026-08-03 — Blockchain technology in 500 simple words

  At its heart, the blockchain is a secure distributed ledger. A way in which through clever use of cryptography, participants agree (reach consensus) on the content and order of the entries stored on it. At its heart, a blockchain is a secure distributed ledger: a way for mutually untrusted participants to agree, through clever cryptographic techniques and a consensus protocol, on the content and order of a shared sequence of transactions. For example, the transactions could record that Alice transferred five beads to Bob, and that Bob subsequently transferred three of those beads to Carol. From these transactions, one can determine that Bob owns (at least) two beads and Carol owns (at least) three.

• Avi Loeb ☛ My First Pitch for the Astros: “Houston, We Have No Problem!”

  The pitch was my first shot, with no earlier training. I did my best to reach the catcher over the base without a bounce. Gravity was included in my calculated throw. Gladly, the Astros mascot named `Orbit’ — who looks like a green alien, guided me towards the pitcher’s mound; otherwise, I would have gone by mistake to pitch from second base — which is twice as far from the catcher.

• Library of Short Stories ☛ There Will Come Soft Rains

  “Today is August 4, 2026,” said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, “in the city of Allendale, California.” It repeated the date three times for memory’s sake. “Today is Mr. Featherstone’s birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita’s marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills.”

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Digital Camera World ☛ This single 3200-megapixel photo contains more than half a million galaxies and 50,000+ stars. Vera Rubin scientists say this is just the beginning

    The latest image from the world's largest camera captures an overwhelming number of galaxies on a 3200MP car-sized camera

  • Nick Moore ☛ Smooth Move: Taming Trajectories with Polynomials

    This article is all about movement. Of a vehicle, or a robot, or something like a 3D printer.

    A 3D printer is really just a specialized robot with a hot glue gun which it can move in multiple directions while squirting out molten plastic.

  • John D Cook ☛ Metallic alchemy: making one metallic ratio from another

    The metallic ratios M(n) can be defined several ways. The most interesting definition is the number whose continued fraction representation contains all ns. A more prosaic but more convenient definition is the larger number that equals its reciprocal plus n, which can be found using the quadratic formula.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ If you can’t be bothered writing it, I can’t be bothered reading it.

    And then quality went out of favour, and ‘impact’ came in. Show us your ‘impact’ they said. My first book in 2014 was quoted in the Federal parliament. Recently both my books were cited in a submission to the NSW parliament. Which is fucking IMPACT, right? Well, actually it just means I said exactly what the Shadow Minister Kim Carr needed. It didn’t actually change anything. Still. ‘Impact’ was really only meant to be performative, because uni bosses saw them as metrics, not real things.

    How stupid – disconnected from any reality – are the metrics under the logic of managerialism? But we all internalised them. And when academics do it, how can we be surprised when students do, too?

• Career/Education

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Cat training program helps children with developmental disabilities—and cats too

    "People often underestimate what cats can contribute to human–animal interventions," said Monique Udell, a professor at Oregon State University who studies human–animal interactions. "This study shows that cats can be active participants rather than passive companions. When children and their cats work together through training, it can strengthen their bond while supporting positive outcomes for both the child and the cat."

  • Science News ☛ Is AI making us dumber? Maybe not. But our skills are at risk

    The truth may lie somewhere in the middle, says Trent Cash, a behavioral scientist at University of Waterloo in Canada. A person’s learned skills, such as how to work through math problems or detect polyps while performing a colonoscopy, may indeed atrophy if taken over by AI, he and his colleagues argue July 9 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. “The evidence is extremely clear that if we offload a specific skill to AI,” he says, “we’re probably not going to retain that skill particularly well.”

• Hardware

  • PC World ☛ I’ve used multiple monitors for 20 years. Here's what actually matters

    I’ve been using multiple monitors with desktops and laptops for — oh god — twenty years now. Adding another screen or two is one of the easiest ways to expand a PC’s functionality. And I’ve learned a few things in that time. If I do say so myself, I’ve got a pretty kick-ass triple-screen setup that makes both my work and leisure time much better. I’m here to share my tips on how to make your multi-monitor setup really shine.

  • Lzon ☛ Why I'm skipping the Steam Frame

    I think my goal with sharing my experience in this post is to offer advice for others who are excited for the Steam Frame, or any other consumer product. Hype is fun, and to a degree it’s part of the experience of acquiring a new and exciting product. As I said earlier I waited over 6 months for the Steam Deck and actively participated in the community at that time. I’ll say now, decisively, that it was not worth the wait. I love my Steam Deck now but it’s ultimately just a tech toy, and did not warrant that degree of obsession. My life now would not be any worse if I skipped it, or bought something else.

  • Antonio Santos ☛ Finding My Way Back to Photography

    So after a lot of deliberation, I landed on selling my RF 24-105mm and buying an RF 100-400mm f/5.6-8. I will eventually need to buy an ultra wide lens, like an 16mm or 24mm prime, but in the meantime, I want to focus on bird and wildlife photography. I’ve already gone out a few days and enjoyed it very much, although it’s been brief.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ America Getting Lesson in Consequences of Trump's War on Public Health as Rare Disease Outbreaks Ravage the Country

    The formerly-eradicated measles is back, with over 2,300 American infected in 2026 alone, the highest number since 1992, Vox reported. Flesh-eating screwworms are ravaging livestock, as staffing cuts and mandatory budget reviews at the US Department of Agriculture slowed government containment efforts. Even the nightmarish botulism toxin has made it into the headlines, entering the food supply via contaminated infant formula after the Trump administration disbanded the National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods — coincidentally right as the group was about to release a report on infant formula.

  • Techdirt ☛ RFK Jr. Just Embarrassed Himself Publicly On CNN

    Now, one thing that was cut off from my transcription of the COVID response portion of the interview was this. Pay close attention to who Kennedy indicates we should listen to in crafting public policy, because on this I believe he’s right: [...]

  • Truthdig ☛ New York City Nurses Say AI Is Replacing Them

    “We just can’t believe that a machine can replace all the decades of … clinical judgment and knowledge that we have,” Shuler told Prism.

    Job automation through AI is bound to impact nurses in other parts of the country too. Joe-Ann Fergus, the executive director of the Massachusetts Nurses Association, said her union, which is engaged in a fierce contract battle with the largest hospital network in the state, is pushing back against an AI future in which hospitals deprioritize workforce development. A future in which hospitals de-skill their workers, she said, could be disastrous for patients and hospitals alike.

  • Fortune ☛ Palantir and other tech startups are stocking offices with tobacco products to increase productivity

    Now, as companies stock their fridges with these pouches—usually the size of a piece of gum that remains tucked between one’s gums and cheek—they’re seeing an increased byproduct of the new office treat: If you can’t get them hooked on the work, get them hooked on the office perks.

    The pouches are available for free in Palantir’s offices for employees and guests over the age of 21, a Palantir spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal. Palantir, which did not respond to requests for comment, pays to stock the products.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • Robin D Otis ☛ Robin's Yahoo

    Interested in how old my Yahoo account is, I requested a download of my data. Then I followed the instructions on this image on imgur, which was linked from a Reddit post.

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

    • India Times ☛ EU enforces mandatory labelling of AI-generated content

      Under the new rules, companies operating AI systems, such as chatbots, must inform users that they are interacting with artificial intelligence. Text, images and other content generated using AI must also carry clear labels, which may include watermarks or other markers to facilitate identification.

      The rules also require operators to notify individuals when emotion recognition or biometric categorisation systems are used. Companies that fail to comply may face substantial financial penalties.

    • India Times ☛ Palantir lifts annual revenue forecast on steady demand for AI-powered data analytics

      Denver-based Palantir has increasingly been marketing military-grade AI tools to businesses through its artificial intelligence platform that helps companies integrate and develop the technology.

    • Futurism ☛ Tech Bro Boasts He Used AI to Secretly Monitor Toddlers' Conversations, Categorize Them In Giant Database

      Charriere, seeing that his child was about to have a very formative experience, decided he would record “everything” the two tykes said to each other in their “nonsensical toddler dialect” by “sneaking a mic in there.”

    • Futurism ☛ Boomers on Facebook Are Leaving Comments That Make It Clear That They Have No Idea That AI-Generated Thirst Traps Aren't Real

      The thirst trap accounts highlight the unfortunate reality of what social media has turned into in the age of generative AI. Thanks to the proliferation of easy-to-use video generating tools, platforms like Facebook and Instagram are being flooded with basement-tier content designed to play on users’ most basic instincts.

      Worse yet, a massive subsection of users appear to be unaware that it’s all fake, a phenomenon we first encountered years ago.

    • Futurism ☛ Business World Stunned That a Restaurant Chain Is Doing Well Without Mindlessly Embracing AI

      The ethos: any tech being deployed should be improving food service and atmosphere. Sound like a dig at AI, anyone?

      Caldwell’s overhauls have been pretty mundane compared to the almost sci-fi sounding rhetoric coming out of the tech industry, which promises businesses that embracing its AI tools will magically optimize operations, supercharge productivity, and woo customers. He did stuff like buying thousands of new iPads to replace locations’ aging tablets, overhauled the chain’s WiFi network, bought a new laptop for every location’s manager, and implemented a new payment system.

      He also ditched the company’s impractical experiments with using robot servers that began before he joined in 2024.

    • Digital Music News ☛ A Billboard Charting Hit is Probably AI Generated; Rapper Denies

      After Medasin posted his breakdown of the song, Fenix shared a video of him going through a Pro Tools project with different aspects of the song isolated in stems, apparently to try to prove that he’d handcrafted the song. But Medasin—and numerous others—responded by noting that he could have easily just dropped the AI song into a stem splitter to achieve the same effect. Shortly afterward, Fenix deleted the video.

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ How our tiny computers learnt to count sheep (and spot hi-vis jackets)

      The latest episode of the Raspberry Pi Podcast is here, with Ken Okolo and Software Engineering Manager Naushir Patuck exploring the rise of artificial intelligence and how Raspberry Pi is making an impact in edge AI. Naush explains how the growth in AI capability and adoption is being driven by the convergence of big data, deep learning, and increased computational power. He also describes how running AI processing locally, rather than shipping it off to the cloud, can save money, protect privacy, and make sure you keep full control of your data.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ AI companies are now racing to the bottom — crashing token prices and competitive models push companies to cut costs

      Now, the big AI developers can't just compete by throwing more parameters and training data at the problem. Now they're having to really compete on price, and to do it, OpenAI has massively reduced the price of its models. Not its most powerful and capable — the faster version of that is actually becoming more expensive — but models in its frontier range are now the cheapest they've ever been, and the timeline for this transition of intelligence and pricing is wild.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Senators warn Trump’s AI interventions could drive users to Chinese models

      “The Administration’s ad hoc and unpredictable approach undermines U.S. competitiveness, heightening market incentives to adopt open weight models from vendors based in the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” wrote Sens. Kristen Gillibrand of New York, Adam Schiff of California, Mark Warner of Virginia, Chris Coons of Delaware and Mark Kelly of Arizona.

    • Threat Source ☛ “Keep going, bro. You’ve got this!” A data-driven look at how adversaries are weaponizing AI

      Actor usage of AI is exploding. By analyzing artifacts left behind, Talos has created a detailed analysis of how we are seeing adversaries leverage the technology to include development, force multiplication, and vulnerability research.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ More on the OpenAI Agent's Attack on Hugging Face

      Hypothetical: Imagine that this wasn’t an OpenAI model. Imagine that it was a Chinese model from a Chinese company. This would be an international crisis.

      Question: Why aren’t we bringing OpenAI up on charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? How is this different from the Morris Worm? That was also an experiment that escaped the lab.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ The OpenAI Hack Shows the Genie Is Out of the Bottle

      What this means is that all attempts at control—limiting models to a select group of users, export controls on models and chips, blocking models from answering certain types of queries, mandating kill switches on AI systems, or pausing AI research—are all futile. Most only apply nationally, not globally. Most don’t affect models that users run locally and not in the cloud. And all ignore the incredible pace of AI development worldwide.

      Even worse, U.S. companies limit access to their most sophisticated models, fearing being banned by the government if they do not do so. When Hugging Face was attacked, it was not able to use the frontier models from either OpenAI or Anthropic to help analyze the attack and formulate defenses. Both were blocked, because both of those companies limit their models’ cybersecurity capabilities. Some U.S. companies have special access to these capabilities, but Hugging Face is an American company with French origins, and as such is probably excluded. Instead, Hugging Face turned to the GLM-5.2 model from the Chinese company Z.ai.

    • Andreas ☛ Are we becoming too paranoid about AI slop? - 82MHz

      I don't know. I don't like slop either, and I steer clear of channels, profiles, accounts etc. that consistently spit it out into the world, and I'm also not going to repost anything that I think falls into this category. And I reserve the right to make fun of companies that try to position themselves as a better alternative to all the modern nonsense, then happily use AI generated images and videos all over their marketing material.

      But... I also don't want to live in a world where I have to double and triple check every single damn thing I come across before I share it or quote it or even just be amused by it, and where, should I fail to do so, someone will come along and yell at me because I *gasp* shared slop!! That doesn't sound like fun to me.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Dualism (03 Aug 2026)

      "I mistook a chatbot for a human" and "I took a human for a human" arrive at near-identical places, but they are subtly and importantly different. The erroneous assumption that my phone's autocomplete is actually a person who understands me well enough to finish my sentences works fine, but the instant I turn to it for understanding, it will fail very badly. Autocomplete's predictions are always grounded in who you used to be, which means autocomplete knows very little about who you are now, and absolutely nothing about who you will become: [...]

    • JFrog Ltd ☛ SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

      Over the past few days, a newly created GitHub repo (programmervuln/cveadvisory-) published a batch of SQLite vulnerability advisories (as part of other 50+ CVEs which we believe are also LLM slop except from one). NVD quickly flagged these as critical, and CISA's ADP agreed. But when JFrog security researchers dug in to verify, the claims fell apart:

      1. The cited code didn't even exist in those versions or referenced unrelated logic.
      2. When testing the PoC payloads they didn’t work (not triggering any crash).
      3. None of these CVEs are listed on SQLite’s official advisory page (which is a gold standard for tracking actual vulnerabilities).
      4. All advisories in this repo seem AI generated when testing them with Gptzero

  • Social Control Media

    • The Walrus ☛ Chinese Spies Are Recruiting Canadians on LinkedIn

      The Five Eyes warning fundamentally alters our understanding of modern espionage targets. Historically, counterintelligence efforts prioritized the protection of top military and scientific officials. The new alert explicitly identifies a completely different demographic: individuals in positions of peripheral access. These professionals often lack direct security clearances but possess aggregate knowledge of domestic policy debates, regional security assessments, and defence procurement strategies. Their unclassified insights, when compiled and analyzed, provide Chinese military intelligence with critical tactical advantages.

    • International Business Times ☛ Ohio Dad Posed as Daughter on TikTok To Shoot Her Alleged Rapist but Now Faces a Higher Bond Than the Suspect

      An Ohio father who posed as his 11-year-old daughter on TikTok to lure and shoot the man accused of raping her is now being held on a $100,000 (£74,300) bond, higher than the one set for the alleged predator.

    • The Verge ☛ Now you can securely link multiple phones to one Signal account

      The update is rolling out now with Signal version 8.20 on Android and version 8.22 for iPhone / iPad.

    • The Next Move ☛ The Ceuta Border Crisis: A Strategic Blind Spot

      The spark for this exodus is disputed. There was a rumor—amplified across WhatsApp and social media—that Spain’s border was effectively open. This was based on a recent Spanish Supreme Court ruling that hopeful migrants interpreted as preventing their forced return if they crossed the border by sea. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez laid the blame on traffickers who deliberately spread misleading information about that ruling.

      Yet the scale of the crisis has led many observers to suspect orchestration rather than spontaneity. Some migrants reported being waved forward by Moroccan border guards, fueling speculation that the episode echoes a 2021 incident, when Morocco loosened its border controls to pressure Spain over aid money and the disputed Western Sahara territory. (Some expanded this theory to include—without evidence—Israel: Human Rights Watch’s Ken Roth, for example, suggested a conspiracy between Rabat and Jerusalem to stop Israel-critical Spain from closing the Atlantic to Israeli shipping.)

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Iran Cyberattacks Against Minnesota Water Systems

      Attribution is preliminary, and so far it seems no real damage.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Ars Technica ☛ Attitude control issues leave Swift rescue mission spinning in orbit

    The Link satellite developed by Katalyst Space Technologies “experienced issues with attitude control” over the weekend, NASA said, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communications.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Torrent Freak ☛ European Space Agency Website Exploited to Advertise Shady IPTV Services

      The European Space Agency's Cosmos portal is dedicated to space exploration. While the organization scans stars and galaxies far away, its own infrastructure is quietly hosting hundreds of PDFs promoting shady IPTV services, ranking them in Google right beside official Gaia mission updates. The SEO 'hack' is reminiscent of an exploit that previously hit the European Commission's Eurostat website.

    • Bitdefender ☛ Fake IRS letters target cryptocurrency holders

      Do you hold cryptocurrency? Have you received a letter telling you that you must register with a so-called "Digital Asset Compliance Portal"?

      If so, it's time to hit the brakes, because it sounds like someone is trying to scam you.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Futurism ☛ Flock Employee Quits In Disgust, Saying the Company Is Silencing Protestors

      Flock’s stance, he says, turned out to be a lie. Multiple outlets reported that ICE as well as Customs and Border Protection could tap into Flock’s cameras, and Flock eventually admitted to giving these agencies access to its surveillance network as part of a pilot program.

      “That was what I was sold and lied to about,” Paz told 404. “I didn’t know that there were these mechanisms inside the company that were essentially fighting to get this pilot to happen.”

    • EDRI ☛ The “Chat Control 1.0” saga

      Roberta Metsola surprised everyone by suggesting to the European Council to ignore the position of the Parliament she represents. The EU governments swiftly agreed to push the text again, forcing the Parliament through a rarely-used procedure: a third vote, this time for a “second reading” of the file.

      The bad news is that the European Parliament failed to stop the return of the temporary derogation.

      The good news is that they still managed to send a clear signal that mass surveillance would not be accepted in the CSA Regulation, sometimes known as “Chat Control 2.0”, the permanent framework which is being negotiated in parallel and which has the potential to be much more dangerous for our right to private and secure communications online.

    • Allbritton Journalism Institute ☛ Rand Paul’s Fauci Diary Dump Exposed Peoples’ Medical Histories

      Paul published over 1,600 pages of Fauci’s diaries last week ahead of Fauci’s appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, after obtaining the documents from the Department of Health and Human Services. The initial document dump was unredacted. Days later, those files were removed and replaced with partial redactions to some, but not all, of the personal medical information.

    • Netzpolitik ☛ Interview about resistance: „Palantir is really toxic“ - netzpolitik.org

      Business for Palantir is not going well now in Europe: The Swiss army has decided against it, the French domestic intelligence agency no longer wants it, London’s mayor has blocked a million-dollar police deal and all across the United Kingdom, political pressure is mounting around a million-dollar contract with the British health system.

      The company, founded by libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel in 2003, is also facing criticism in its home market. In the United States, where it is headquartered, Palantir provides software not only to military and intelligence, but also to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE uses their surveillance tools to hunt down unwanted groups or individuals.

      Protest by civil society is being organized against the cooperation with ICE and against other unethical business practices. We speak to the two activists Jeff and Kay from the US campaign „Purge Palantir“.

    • Nick Heer ☛ F.T.: Apple Filed a Legal Complaint in the U.K. Over Revised iCloud Backdoor Demand

      As a reminder, this is different from the order made in February last year that would have demanded Apple create a backdoor to encrypted iCloud data globally. The current order reportedly applies just in the U.K., so this is effectively a domestic issue there. But because the orders and hearings are so secretive — the Home Office did not even want their existence shown on the calendar — few external parties know exactly what those demands are. Britons have to trust their government’s intentions, and the rest of the world has to assume it does not apply to their data.

    • Futurism ☛ Wild Footage Shows Man Blocking Flock Camera With Comically Gigantic Protest Sign

      Though the video caption claims Gunn was arrested over the incident, no report with his name appears in the Pinellas County Clerk of the Circuit Court’s case record database.

      Of course, any discussion of Flock overreach has to include the police officers themselves. While Flock may be a front-runner for most hated tech company of the 2020s, its dragnet would be impossible if it weren’t for a massive coalition of police departments and private landowners fueling the company’s rise.

  • Confidentiality

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Some Claude Chats Are Searchable on Google

      What seems to be the issue is a user setting about data sharing. Anthropic’s position is that it’s not their problem: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • India Times ☛ TikTok settling three teen social media lawsuits ahead of trial

    TikTok has agreed to settle three lawsuits concerning addictive platform designs. Young plaintiffs alleged social media platforms harmed their mental health and well-being. These cases are part of thousands consolidated in California state court. Claims against Meta, Google's YouTube, and Snap's Snapchat will continue. Attorneys are using these bellwether trials to gauge jury sentiment.

  • US Navy Times ☛ US used ‘virtually all’ long-range precision missiles during Iran war, sources say

    The missiles are principally the Army’s surface-to-surface weapons, known as Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) and Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM). The U.S. has used “virtually all” of these weapons, according to two of the sources.

    The degree to which the military is running out of ATACMS and Precision Strike Missiles has not been previously reported.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ Army may add counter-drone laser weapons to base defenses

    The Army first unveiled the Enduring High Energy Laser in a July 2024 special notice, according to Laser Wars. The weapon, which would be the culmination of decades of research and development, is based on lessons from past unsuccessful efforts, such as one directed energy system that was designed to be mounted on a Stryker armored vehicle, which the Government Accountability Office later described as “not mature enough” for use.

  • Salon ☛ FCC commissioners face ethics complaints for taking luxury gifts from Paramount

    “The federal gift regulations and the gratuities statute exist to ensure that government decisions are made on the merits, free from the influence of private benefits,” the Democracy Defenders Fund said in its complaint. “The public must have confidence that the FCC’s merger review process is not compromised by self-dealing or the appearance of impropriety.”

  • Vox ☛ Midterms, Actually: How Michigan’s Uncommitted movement shaped a Senate race

    Which brings us to Michigan, where the whole thing started. It’s easy to forget now, but the Uncommitted movement was born in the Michigan primary — and the general-election bill came due there, too. Kamala Harris got 36 percent of the vote in Dearborn, a city Joe Biden had carried with nearly 69 percent in 2020. She lost the state by about 80,000 votes. The voters the party told to fall in line didn’t, and Michigan is where that refusal was most legible.

  • Votebeat ☛ When to expect results in Michigan’s 2026 primary election

    Michigan counts its ballots as fast or faster than a lot of other swing states. And the state has done a lot in recent years to count even faster — for instance, by allowing people to vote early in person and letting election officials process absentee ballots before Election Day.

  • Yle ☛ Minister Rantanen on Ceuta border crisis: Spain has the support of EU countries

    Last week, an estimated 60,000 migrants poured into the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco within a very short period of time.

• Environment

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Europe’s rivers are running dry, and the knock-on effects are disastrous

    Farther east in Romania, the Danube recorded its lowest water levels since 1996. A river’s flow is measured in cubic metres per second, and at Baziaș, where the river enters the country, it stood at 1,700m³/s, against a July average of 4,700m³/s. Ferry services were suspended, as were grain barges.

  • The Tyee ☛ Deep-Sea Mining Would Devastate Ocean Life, DFO Scientist Warns

    Life in the deep sea is silent and slow-moving and adapts on geological time scales, she said. Sponges form living reefs 10,000 years old, sharks can live to 600 years old and rockfish can live more than 200 years.

    Therefore, deep-sea creatures will never adapt to or outrun the effects of deep-sea mining, she said, adding that “there are lineages in the deep sea that have survived all of Earth’s mass extinctions, except potentially what we’re about to do.”

  • Futurism ☛ SpaceX Vows to Keep Poisoning Nearby Towns With Its Fume-Belching Data Center For Another Year

    The “Colossus” data center campus, comprising two separate data centers, has come under fire from locals and activist groups. The Southern Environmental Law Center, on behalf of the NAACP, sued xAI — which is now known as SpaceXAI, after being rolled into Musk’s rocket company prior to its initial public offering — for operating the turbines without a permit and spewing harmful pollutants.

    At the time, the lawsuit estimated that the gas turbines could emit more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitric oxides every year. It also claimed that the turbines release hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde, a known carcinogen linked to lung and nasal cancer that can also inflame airways.

  • [Old] Politico LLC ☛ 'How come I can’t breathe?': Musk's data company draws a backlash in Memphis

    The company has no Clean Air Act permits.

    In just 11 months since the company arrived in Memphis, xAI has become one of Shelby County’s largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides, according to calculations by environmental groups whose data has been reviewed by POLITICO’s E&E News. The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.

  • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ New data center rules on tap for Tucson; South Tucson to honor Pico de Gallo | The Tucson Agenda

    The big change in the proposed city ordinance is that large-scale data centers would no longer be allowed in any current zoning designation as stand-alone projects. They would have to be part of a Planned Area Development or Planned Community Development. Those require heightened zoning scrutiny, with neighborhood meetings and zoning examiner review.

    Data centers would have to comply with city rules governing noise and large water users. They would have to be located at least a half-mile from a residential development and at least 1,000 feet from commercial development.

  • Western Water ☛ Data center water fight heads to Imperial County court

    Its developer wants Colorado River water from the Imperial Irrigation District after a recycled water deal collapsed.

  • TruthOut ☛ Eric Adams Booed While Lobbying for Data Center in Small Wisconsin Town

    A minute later, he asserts, “data centers are going to be here,” which generates even more passionate yelling from the residents. One person is heard saying, “put it in your backyard! You live next door to it!” His talk ends as he hands the reins over to another man to conduct a presentation, and one person simply yells “shut up!”

    Hell Gate reported that residents are incensed by Adams’s attempts to meddle in their town. South Wood County Neighbors for Responsible Development say that they have obtained evidence that city officials have been trying to push forth the project without a formal agreement, with Adams’s involvement.

  • Hell Gate NYC ☛ Eric Adams Is Selling Data Centers in Wisconsin Now

    On Sunday, Hell Gate spoke to local residents opposed to the data center in Wisconsin Rapids, who revealed that over the past few months, they've been mystified by the appearance of the former mayor of New York City in central Wisconsin.

    "Our whole town does not want him here at all," Kaitlyn Federwitz, of the community group South Wood County Neighbors for Responsible Development, told us.

  • Wired ☛ How Data Centers Broke American Politics

    When people ask what I’m doing in Georgia, I give them something easy. People hate data centers, I say, so I’m trying to figure out if they hate AI too. That’s all true. But the topic has also consumed me. In all my years of reporting on energy and the environment, I have never seen anything like the type of vitriol leveled at data centers, or the near-religious fury that has built up around their construction, or the way this resistance seems to be uniting people from the complete opposite ends of the political spectrum.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Biggest Cost of Trump

    Yet the biggest cost is the cost of doing nothing about three worsening crises that threaten the very survival of America and the world: climate change, AI, and widening inequality.

    Almost all Americans — indeed, most human beings — are now subject to the escalating costs of climate change. How much more evidence do we need?

  • Astro ☛ Eco-friendly docs | Starlight

    Estimates for the climate impact of the web industry range from between 2% and 4% of global carbon emissions, roughly equivalent to the emissions of the airline industry. There are many complex factors in calculating the ecological impact of a website, but this guide includes a few tips for reducing the environmental footprint of your docs site.

    The good news is, choosing Starlight is a great start. According to the Website Carbon Calculator, this site is cleaner than 98% of web pages tested, producing 0.01g of CO₂ per page visit.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Record low Danube levels push countries to brink of energy emergency

      The Danube’s record low levels have pushed Hungary’s only nuclear power plant, the Soviet-built, four-reactor plant at Paks, to the brink of powering down entirely for the first time in its 44 years in service.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Texas slams on the brakes for 1,800 data centers, power grid requirements are five times higher than peak record demand — 474 gigawatts of power requests are now subject to new moratorium

      Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) just announced a moratorium on all data center approvals through the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) until the agencies have completed an audit of data centers seeking approval to connect to Texas’s electric grid. According to The Texas Tribune, the governor wants to ensure that data center applicants provide the following: tax break information, power use and generation, water use and cooling operations, community impact reduction measures, and facility ownership. Applicants that haven’t submitted these details will not be allowed to connect to the grid.

    • Inside Towers ☛ FCC Adds Power Inverters to Covered List Under National Security

      The telecommunication industry uses power inverters to convert direct current energy into alternating current for cell towers, data centers, and remote communication shelters. The Commission power inverter definition includes devices that contain “components that enable remote communication, control, sensing, data collection, or monitoring through WiFi, cellular, Bluetooth, or other similar connections.”

    • Hackaday ☛ Road Trains Roam The Backroads Of Australia

      Trains and the railways they run on are a great way to move lots of stuff, or lots of people, a long way. Steel wheels on steel rail can shift great loads at good speeds and railways remain a backbone of logistics for this very reason. The only problem is that they require a great deal of initial investment to build and plenty of maintenance to keep them functional over time.

      These concerns can make a railway a difficult proposition when it comes to getting large amounts of goods in and out of remote areas. It’s a problem that Australia faces, with settlements far off the beaten track that are nevertheless in need of high-throughput freight connections. And if you can’t go rail, you go road… in a big way.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Tim Bray ☛ Upside Down

      But anyhow, I got some amusing photographs at a local garden that are, um, reflective, wanted to blog them, picked the obvious title, then the paragraph above came out. Don’t forgive me. Weird times, bad craziness, etc.

    • Chuck Grimmett ☛ Ghost Pipes being pollinated – Chuck Grimmett

      Ghost Pipes popped up after the recent rains. This is my first time seeing one being pollinated!

  • Overpopulation

    • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ Federal plan makes steep Colorado River water cuts to Arizona, California & Nevada

      The document, published by the federal Bureau of Reclamation, outlines a 10-year management approach that could adjust to changing hydrological conditions that affect the river’s flow, with operations updatable every two years. The agency proposed cuts in water allotments originally suggested by Arizona, California and Nevada, which make up the river’s Lower Basin. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the region’s Upper Basin, could make voluntary conservation measures.

      Interim guidelines and drought contingency plans agreed upon by the basin states in 2007 and 2019 are set to expire in 2027 and negotiations for a new agreement due this year have stalled, with the states missing repeated deadlines to come to a consensus.

    • Pro Publica ☛ Greg Abbott Blasted Corpus Christi for Its Water Crisis. A River Authority He Has Power Over Is Falling Apart.

      Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded with fury after Corpus Christi officials announced in March that this Gulf Coast region of more than 500,000 people could face unprecedented restrictions as its water supply dried up.

• Finance

  • India Times ☛ AI data-centre race builds $1 trillion lease burden for Big Tech

    The total is nearly four times the roughly $285 billion of lease liabilities already recognised on the companies' balance ​sheets, according to company filings compiled by Reuters.

    The gap reflects accounting treatment. Signed leases generally are not recorded as liabilities until a facility is available for use. Until then, companies disclose the future payments ​in notes to their financial statements.

  • Naty S ☛ Costs: Price of a Personal Site on the Smallweb

    Items listed below include the how I create content for BurgeonLab, my main site, and two of my other sites which are relatively inactive as of Q3 2026.

  • PayPal Reportedly Attracting Takeover Interest After Stock Slump

    The company has fielded meetings with banks amid unsolicited interest from suitors, Bloomberg News reported, citing people familiar with the matter. At least one large rival is looking at the whole company, while some other suitors are only interested in certain PayPal assets, the report said.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • EFF ☛ Tomorrow’s U.S. Senate Vote: Four Internet Bills, One Wrong Direction

    The Senate Commerce Committee will vote this week on several censorious and privacy invasive bills: KOSA, the SCREEN Act, Youth AI Privacy Act, and CHATBOT Act. While we appreciate that the Committee is taking the time to look at these bills separately, it’s still impossible to ignore the message Congress is sending to the world: Age-gate the internet and block young people from speaking and accessing lawful speech online. Or else.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Supporting AI education for 150,000 learners in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia [Ed: "to train 5000 educators" = Microsofters/GAFAM and slop scammers take over RasPi?]

    We’re pleased to share that we are expanding our Experience AI programme to Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to train 5000 educators who can reach 150,000 students by 2028, thanks to generous funding of $1.2 million from Google.org.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Red Hat leads open-source project to automate AI governance [Ed: Red Hat sponsored site promoting slop for Red Hat]

    Short for AI Safety and Governance Orchestration, asago is intended to connect the work that is now often divided among compliance teams, data scientists and infrastructure administrators. The project aims to automate the process of interpreting policies, assessing risks, recommending safeguards and producing deployment configurations while preserving an audit trail linking each control to the policy requirement behind it.

  • Silicon Angle ☛ OpenAI publicly pushes back against Apple lawsuit after new filing

    The lawsuit accuses former Apple engineer Chang Liu of failing to return a company laptop before leaving for OpenAI. Furthermore, Apple claims that Liu downloaded dozens of internal files with sensitive product information. The complaint alleges that he accessed the files using a “rare, previously unknown authentication bug.”

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ US mulling ban on key Chinese networking tech in data center component crackdown — White House wants to impose restrictions in 2026, China says it will respond if necessary

    "Transceivers definitely ⁠pose a risk," AI policy expert Divyansh Kaushik of advisory firm Beacon Global Strategies told the publication. "As the data center buildout scales up, you want to make sure the ​data center supply chain is secure from the get-go.” The administration fears that these components could be used to steal data, install malware, or disrupt data center operations in the U.S.

  • New York Times ☛ Trump White House Readies AI Framework to Review Security Risks

    The decision to exclude open-source models could also be a boon for companies that are trying to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI, which are widely considered leaders in developing next-generation A.I. Some companies, like Meta, have used open-source software to create products to directly compete with the two leading start-ups.

  • The Verge ☛ EA is now a private company

    Electronic Arts has officially become a private company. Last September, EA announced that an investor group led by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners would be taking the company private in a $55 billion deal, and on Tuesday, EA said the deal successfully closed. The PIF will reportedly own 93.4 percent of the new company.

  • Sean Monahan ☛ pygmalion mode

    There seems to be the desire to harken back to this, to remind people of the San Francisco of Pacific Heights rather than SoMa. That’s why everyone is going pygmalion mode. Like Eliza Doolittle in George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play, Pygmalion, they hope a more refined affect will convince people Silicon Valley is up to the task of guiding us through whatever the AI boom might bring: economic catastrophe, the singularity, the apocalypse…

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Oligarchs are Doubling Down on Republicans

    Now, a year and a half later, the oligarchs’ victory celebrations look premature. Newly elected presidents usually experience a few months of positive net approval, but Trump’s “honeymoon” barely lasted a month. He is now plumbing new depths of public disapproval: [...]

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Will Francesca Hong and Abdul El-Sayed Get Elected?

    The “electability” argument is always a claim about what your neighbors will tolerate, made by someone who has never met them, delivered with the confidence of arithmetic. As a campaign staffer once told me, the horse race’s main function is propaganda to induce voters to feel like voting a certain way is prudent or responsible.

    This is all about telling people who they can or cannot vote for. Sometimes it’s barely even concealed. Third Way, the centrist think tank, said in a strategy memo this year that Democrats “cannot run candidates who are far outside the mainstream of their district.”

    It’s the very definition of mainstream that is at stake here.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Against Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

    The most popular national elected official in America is Bernie Sanders. Yet when he ran for president, he could not defeat his less liked, more institutional opponents. During those campaigns, from people that I knew to have strong progressive values, I heard time and again the explanation that Bernie simply could not win, and that therefore supporting him would be an indulgent fantasy, a waste of time and money and a vote. On the opposite side, a candidate who was objectively much more extreme and whose success was much more far-fetched by the standards of conventional wisdom inspired a cult of personality, and won. Twice. After watching this for a full decade, many Democratic voters and many Democratic strategists steeped in the religion of triangulation and centrism have still failed to update their beliefs about what is and is not possible. This is a shame. It is a shame that has caused great human suffering within America and around the world. And it is made more shameful by the fact that it could be different if more good people just had the courage to vote for their own values.

    Fortunately, the future is a renewable resource. There will be at least one more election. We get another chance. The aperture of possibility is widened. There is organizing, and there are candidates, and the kind of world that you want to see is there, on the menu, somewhere. There is no reward for those who volunteer to forgo their right to try to make their vision of the world come true in full. The prize for asking for less is less. Understanding that, alone, could change so much.

  • Perl Hacks ☛ The Future Isn’t Evenly Distributed - Perl Hacks

    Software developers often talk about “legacy software” as though it’s automatically a problem.

    Sometimes it is. But very often, legacy software is simply software that solved a problem so well nobody felt the need to replace it.

    Think about the economics.

    Suppose you’d phoned this company every year for the last twenty years and offered to modernise their website for £2,000.

    Why would they have said yes? The website worked. The contact form worked. Customers could get in touch. There were no new features they needed.

    From the business’s perspective, spending thousands of pounds to replace something that wasn’t causing a problem would have been irrational.

    From my perspective, the website looked like a museum exhibit. From theirs, it looked like a website.

    That’s the difference between software engineers and users. We see technology. They see outcomes.

  • The TEMU-fication of Software, Digital Goods & Services

    A hypothesis on the not-so-distant future of software, books, music, and movies, in which most of what we consume gets cheaper, more abundant, and noticeably worse, while the human-made variant moves into a luxury segment of its own.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Tyee ☛ Alberta’s Propaganda Push to Sell the Public on Data Centres

      Consider the slick propaganda section that’s appeared on the Government of Alberta’s official website, which bizarrely tries to pass off water- and energy-gobbling hyperscale data centres as “digital refineries.”

      The site’s first goal is obviously to get voters on side with the massive Sturgeon County data centre planned by Meta Platforms Inc. a few kilometres northeast of Edmonton.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Putin signs law restricting the rights of Kremlin critics living abroad who are prosecuted in absentia

    The law applies to people who left Russia and were convicted in absentia under any article of the Criminal Code, or under “political” statutes of the Administrative Offenses Code.

  • Futurism ☛ The Number of Regular People Being Arrested for Protesting Data Centers Is Astounding

    Unlike in other moments of political unrest in recent memory, it’s hard to pigeonhole these anti-data center activists demographically. They range from landowning farmers to physics teachers, zoomers to boomers, rural townspeople to suburban parents.

    Despite their differences, the arrestees all have one thing in common: they each felt the actions of democratically elected officials are failing to reflect the wishes of their constituents, instead deferring to massive tech corporations.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Antifa Terrorism Threat Trump Describes Does Not Exist

    As I and others have written before, antifa is not a group. It is a movement and an ideology, a loose commitment to opposing fascism. In its most organized form, it amounts to scattered local collectives like Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon.

    There is no membership roll, no command hierarchy and no funding structure. There is no leader of antifa – the Trump administration has not named one – and there is no record of deadly attacks attributed to a U.S.-based organization called antifa.

  • Tech Policy Press ☛ A Roadmap for Confronting the Chilling Effects of Censorship, Surveillance and New Technology

    Across the world, despots and and wannabe dictators are deploying new tools, both legal and technological, to stifle dissent and oppress. Today’s guest is Jonathon W. Penney, the author of Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age, a book from Cambridge University Press that explores the weaponization of surveillance, censorship, and technologies of control and offers a roadmap for the reforms necessary to push back.

  • The Nation ☛ The Chilling Trump Order Threatening All Americans

    At the protest, one man (not Estrada) shot and wounded a police officer. He says he fired defensively, and that the officer was about to shoot an unarmed protester. Whatever the case, Estrada was not being tried in connection with the shooting. He wasn’t in court for arson, or assault, or any other serious offense. In fact, he hadn’t even attended the protest. His crime? Moving a box of his own zines and political literature from the home he shared with his wife, who had been arrested after attending the protest.

  • PBS ☛ D.C. will pay $50,000 to man detained while protesting guard patrol with 'Star Wars' song, record says

    O'Hara said in a statement that he is satisfied with the settlement but conflicted that taxpayers are footing the bill.

    "Those who actually violated my constitutional rights should be the ones paying the price, like taking the money from their pensions. That's what real accountability looks like," he said. "This settlement is a reminder that our freedoms are worth fighting for, especially when the powerful would rather we suffer in silence."

  • NPR ☛ She protested ICE raids. Then agents showed up at her door

    Before 2025, most of the recent cases using the conspiracy-to-impede statute stemmed from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and involved far-right groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Those cases were either dismissed when Trump took office or when Trump pardoned those who were convicted.

    The rise in conspiracy charges has caused some legal experts to worry that the federal government is stretching the bounds of the law to sweep up political activists who oppose the Trump administration's deportation agenda.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Local SE ☛ Top Sweden Democrat compares left-wing journalist to pro-Nazi traitor

    One of the most senior figures in the far-right Sweden Democrats has compared the political editor of Sweden's leading left-wing newspaper to Vidkun Quisling, who headed Norway's puppet government during its occupation by Nazi Germany.

  • Techdirt ☛ EBay And Former Execs Agree To Pay $56 Million For Trying To ‘Crush’ A Journalist

    For much of Techdirt’s nearly three decades in existence we’ve covered attacks on the media by the rich and powerful. And sometimes we’ve been on the receiving end of such attacks ourselves. But I have never seen or heard of anything quite as extreme as what happened to Ina and David Steiner, proprietors of the website eCommerceBytes. As we and many others chronicled, the story that came out sounded impossible.

    But now it’s finally concluded, with eBay and three of its former top execs agreeing to pay the Steiners nearly $49 million, plus another $7 million in charitable commitments — about $56 million total, for the horrors they put them through in response to (barely) critical reporting.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Futurism ☛ Cops Mistype Username, Send Innocent Man to Prison for 18 Months

    The man, Brandon Klayme of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, was eventually acquitted of all charges on July 23 by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeals. But it was a small recompense for a catastrophic chain of incompetence that led him to being wrongly smeared as a child sex offender, completely upending his life.

  • PHR ☛ Statement on the Death of Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, 53rd Known Death in ICE Custody

    Mr. Lopez-Cornejo’s death is a terrible reminder of the lethality of the United States’ rapidly expanding immigration detention system and should not be treated as an isolated tragedy. Every person deprived of their liberty under international and domestic law remains entitled to dignity, health care, and respect for their life. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security must be held accountable for protecting the people in their custody. Congress must use its oversight and funding authority to ensure that they do so.

  • NPR ☛ A veteran was detained by the National Guard in her front yard. Now she's suing

    King's attorneys say that they believe she was approached by the guard because she has been a vocal critic of their deployment in the city for months, hanging large signs outside her house with messages like "Occupation: Troops Out" and "National Guard Stop Being So Embarrassing."

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Internet Archive ☛ Internet Archive to New York: Don’t Kill the Good Bots in the Fight Against Bad Bots | Internet Archive Blogs

    News publishers have a real problem: AI companies are sending aggressive, anonymous bots to scrape websites at a scale that strains servers and drives up infrastructure costs. It’s happening not just to publishers, but also to Wikipedia, libraries and to the Internet Archive itself. We all have a stake in finding workable solutions.

    But not all bots are bad. Long before AI, automated tools, which many people colloquially call “bots,” such as web crawlers have helped preserve the web, support research, improve security, and power investigative journalism. Libraries use them to archive disappearing websites. Researchers use them to study the web and test security. Journalists use them to uncover how powerful companies and institutions operate online. These are some of the good bots that power the online infrastructure that helps keep us safe and hold the powerful accountable.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Nick Heer ☛ Sony Gives Its Disc-Loving Customers a Giant Middle Finger

    In pure market forces terms, Sony is arguably listening to the overwhelming majority of its customers by moving to a digital-only distribution strategy. Most people will not notice, at least in the short-term, that they can only acquire new games through downloading them and agreeing to some onerous digital rights restrictions. None of that matters until Sony has more licensing disagreements or shuts off some servers. But then it will matter.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Paramount's David Ellison says critics don't get his politics

    More than 5,000 entertainment industry workers, including such high-profile stars as Jane Fonda, Ben Stiller, Bryan Cranston and Mark Ruffalo, signed an open letter early this year, calling on Bonta to try to block the merger. The group alleged the transaction would weaken Hollywood with “fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences.”

    Ellison’s roughly 730-word essay does not mention Trump by name nor ties between the president and his father, tech billionaire Larry Ellison. Trump has endorsed the deal and bestowed praise on David Ellison, who contends the deal will make Hollywood stronger.

  • Digital Music News ☛ Live Nation/Ticketmaster Acquires RED UTS In Uruguay Push

    The move marks another notch in Live Nation Entertainment’s broader Latin America strategy, where the company is pairing ticketing expansion with venue development. Live Nation recently announced plans for a 21,000 capacity venue in São Paulo. The company describes the developmetn as Brazil’s first purpose-built, world-class indoor arena. Construction is expected to begin later this year, with an opening targeted for 2028.

  • The Verge ☛ Telegram CEO says an extortionist planted CSAM in a chat to get it pulled from the App Store

    Durov adds, “Extortionists have found a way to manipulate Apple into overreacting.” Apple didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.

  • SQ Magazine ☛ Apple Briefly Bans Telegram in Stunning App Store Move

    This incident marks the second major removal of Telegram from Apple’s digital storefront. In 2018, Apple temporarily pulled the app over inappropriate content, leading Telegram founder Pavel Durov to implement enhanced moderation safeguards before securing reinstatement.

    The quick removal highlights ongoing tensions between operating system gatekeepers and encrypted messaging platforms serving over one billion monthly active users. Telegram stated that it maintains a zero-tolerance policy, disclosing that it blocked nearly 338,000 groups and channels involved in illicit distribution during 2026.