Leftovers

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The US Beats Europe — in Wasteful Health Care Spending

    People sometimes point to individual consumption to argue that the US is better off than Western Europe. But this comparison neglects how much more unequal the US is and how much more money we burn in our irrational private health care system.

  • But she's a girl... ☛ The waiting room

    Walking in to the room was an overwhelming experience. The triage nurses in the lobby of the Accident and Emergency unit took a few brief details then asked us to check in using the iPads on the wall just around the corner. As we turned the corner, it hit us that the waiting room was absolutely full. All the seats were taken, and people leaned against the walls and in the passageways, so that they had to shift every time someone went past. It was around 23:30 on a Tuesday. At this point, we had no idea that we would still be here nine hours later.

• Proprietary / SaaS

  • GO Media ☛ Id Software Dev Says Xbox Doesn’t ‘Understand Art’ And That After Layoffs It Is ‘Impossible’ To Make Big Games Like Doom: The Dark Ages

    Chris Hays, id Software’s lead services programmer, has been at the company for over 15 years. And he’s one of the devs who remains at the studio behind Doom following Xbox’s massive layoffs in July. While Xbox and studio leadership claim that id can ship a game like Doom (2016) again with fewer people, Hays disagrees, and claims Microsoft doesn’t “understand art” or video games.

    In a recent interview with the Well Played podcast, Hays openly talked about the status of id Software following the recent layoffs. And the studio veteran who has worked on games like Doom Eternal and Doom: The Dark Ages didn’t hold back about how he feels regarding Xbox, the layoffs, and Game Pass.

  • Mark Phillips ☛ Is Apple's privacy line bullshit?

    Today I find iPadOS 26 is even worse than I thought, with UI glitches and poor handling of the simplest of things taken for granted for years (I’ve found rotation from landscape to portrait messes up the screen paint of Messages, for example).

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

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Hollywood Is Losing Not Just Jobs but Entire Lineages

      Runaway production isn’t just costing Hollywood jobs. It’s severing the intergenerational chains along which film crafts are passed down, replacing an industry town’s living inheritance with a dislocated workforce that must always start from scratch.

    • Wired ☛ Why Normal People Aren’t Using AI Agents

      “I just have not heard a single person outside of the tech community talk about an agent that they use,” Miller says. “As excited and optimistic as we as an industry may be about the frontier and recursive self-improvement, it's worth pausing and just saying, ‘Huh, what?’”

    • Stephen Smith ☛ International Competition in the AI Space

      In the meantime, people are scared as scientists used AI to create 16 new viruses from scratch, not found in nature. What could go wrong? Sure, these are being used to manufacture drugs and cure diseases, but what unforeseen interactions could happen if these escape into the wild? What will happen if they escape and start to rapidly mutate? What happens when Russia starts to do this?

    • Ian Duncan ☛ Getting Freaky in the Age of AI

      At the relatively benign end of the spectrum, you have Aladdin. Aladdin gets cosmic power, but he uses the Genie strategically— to handle the mundane, to test small ideas, and to eliminate friction— while reserving his own human agency for the actual problem-solving. He gets more or less what he asks for, without malice.

      In the middle, you have the classic Monkey’s Paw. You get what you asked for, but not what you intended. You wish for a million dollars, your relative dies in a horrible accident, and you get the life insurance payout. The wish is literal, but the intent is lost.

      And then, at the darkest end of the spectrum, you have deals with devils, or movies like Curry Barker’s 2025 horror film Obsession. In the film, a guy buys a supernatural novelty toy and wishes that the girl he likes would love him more than anyone in the world. The toy grants the wish, but it does so in a way that feels seemingly, intentionally malicious. He gets his wish, but she becomes a psychotic, homicidal stalker who feeds him his dead cat. The wish fulfills the letter of the law in the most punishing, horrifying way possible.

    • Bitdefender ☛ Apple's bug bounty program is drowning in so much AI slop, it is in danger of missing serious exploits

      Unlike traditional spam, AI-generated bug reports include code which may be syntactically correct, references to genuine API calls, and plausible-sounding technical explanations of what is occurring.

      All of that could take an Apple engineer hours of time, configuring test environments, attempting to replicate flaws, only to ultimately verify that a flaw may not actually exist.

    • Ars Technica ☛ Google Earth risked ruin with retracted AI tool for making fake satellite pics

      That possibility deeply alarmed researchers, who often use Google Earth to help verify images and videos of locations at a time when AI-generated misinformation and disinformation have become rampant online. They showed how the new feature could simplify the process of creating false scenarios overlaid on Google Earth’s photorealistic imagery.

    • Alcides Fonseca ☛ A new model for source control

      Despite these two limitations, git already provides the solution for agents: git is distributed and you can have a master repo for your company, one semi-master repo for your team, one repo for yourself, and many different repos for each of your agents. You can push changes from any repo to another, you do not have to go through the centralized Github/Gitlab/Gitea instance!

    • Pivot to AI ☛ The AI doomsday cult recruits social media influencers

      All this is not just one lone weirdo running tryouts for her cult in some way that’s nothing to do with the rest of the subculture. The event was held at Lighthaven and it was funded by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the AI doomsday home base of Eliezer Yudkowsky, the guy who started all the AI doomsday stories that the AI bubble companies now use as marketing. Yudkowsky also coined the term “effective altruism”. As the effective altruism movement goes, neither Aella nor her event are fringe in the slightest.

    • Rlang ☛ The GIS Research Assistant Job Has Transformed

      You see, my student enthusiastically launched his spatial analysis project with a heap of vibe coding in R. I quickly realized he understood very little of what his coding agent had done, and there was no way we could be sure the results were accurate.

      Even in my 30 minute success story told above there were AI mistakes I had to check and fix. A big one was a silly duplicate correction for fraction -> percentage that Claude made. So it had overestimated everything by a factor of 100.

    • 1Password ☛ Off-by-1 Labs Research: AI-generated vulnerability patches require human review | 1Password

      We studied what happens when Large Language Models (LLMs) generate vulnerability patches for recently disclosed, complex vulnerabilities. Our data shows that LLMs produce Fix-Like Artifacts with Embedded Defects (FLAWED) 53.9% of the time when complex patches are required.

  • Social Control Media

    • Salon ☛ The end of looking away from violence on social media

      The twin forces of cellphone footage and instantaneous social posting have long cultivated what is now understood to be a society-wide problem: the separation between the reality unfurling mere feet in front of us and the filter provided by electronic screens and lenses.

    • New York Times ☛ Meta Ordered to Pay $567 Million Fine by New Mexico Judge

      The ruling, issued late Thursday, was in addition to $375 million that Meta was ordered to pay in the same case in March, when a jury found that the company misled users about the safety of its platforms and enabled the sexual exploitation of young people.

    • Nick Heer ☛ Marketers Are Hoping Brand Mentions on Reddit Will Influence Chatbots

      Sato interviewed Mike Moschella, director of analytics at marketing firm DKC, about the wisdom of the crowds at Reddit and Wikipedia: [...]

    • Numeric Citizen ☛ Any lessons from EchoFeed's closure? — Numeric Citizen Blog

      What can I learn from the demise of EchoFeed? Earlier this year, when I heard about this service, I looked into it to see if it could be useful. It wasn’t, thanks to Micro.blog’s ability to cross-post to Bluesky, Mastodon and more. Plus, at first it looked like an experiment more than anything else. I didn’t know EchoFeed’s long-term goals. I was on the breaks.

    • Nick Heer ☛ EchoFeed is Shutting Down

      But the reasons Knight gives for shutting it down are completely understandable. Trying to manage this kind of service with, say, hundreds of normal users would probably be challenging; with lots of abusive users, too, it sounds like a nightmare.

    • Matthew Brunelle ☛ YouTube's New Programs to Encourage Binge Watching

      The "in conjunction with YouTube" part is what set off the red flag for me. YouTube does this kind of special relationship with big channels all the time, but they are tight lipped about the process. Getting to see behind the curtain is important because it helps us understand how YouTube tries to suck viewers in and how to defend against it.

    • Ava ☛ seeing the person behind the piece

      And when this type of person reads my posts, it feels like they do so with tunnel vision, with completely disregarding anything that doesn’t fit into how they see themselves and their own situation. They just wanna plunder my posts for parts that fit enough, so they can plaster it across their feeds as something that represents them, and are mad when there is something in there that is too different from their experience, something they wouldn’t co-sign… and therefore just ignore it or dismiss it, or accuse me of lying.

    • ABC ☛ Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content

      An ABC NEWS Verify investigation has found Facebook's parent company, Meta, is directly paying several controversial content creators including a white nationalist with Neo-Nazi links and a prominent anti-vaxxer.

    • NPR ☛ Court orders Instagram and Facebook's Meta to pay $567M to address kids' mental health online

      The new penalty is in addition to the $375 million in civil penalties that jurors ordered against Meta in March after determining the company knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. In the second phase, prosecutors asked the judge to impose fundamental changes at Meta aimed at reining in addictive features, improving age verification and preventing child sexual exploitation through default privacy settings and closer oversight.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Vox ☛ [Crackers] just broke into America’s tap water. How scared should you be?

      At least a dozen states have been affected by the attack, which briefly led to a flurry of small-town service disruptions, boil-water notices, and local flooding. Water wells, dams, sewers, and pipelines are some of America’s oldest and creakiest pieces of infrastructure, built long before the internet existed, and certainly long before AI made [cracking] much easier. While you may assume most [crackers] are in it for the money or for data, some have targeted critical infrastructure like water systems or energy grids in ploys for control or disruption — or worse still, as acts of war.

      And, as last week’s attacks show, the nation’s water system is woefully unprepared. But how worried should you be that the very infrastructure that keeps our water taps running is, apparently, [crackable]?

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Despite federal warnings, thousands of U.S. industrial controllers used in water systems remain exposed online

      The scan, run through the Shodan search engine Monday, found that 2,844 of the exposed controllers (65%) were in the United States.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Carl Schwan ☛ What's new with SAML support in Nextcloud

      Several months ago, as part of my internal move to the “IdP” team at Nextcloud, I started to co-maintain the user_saml application. This application allows Nextcloud users to implement single sign on with the SAML and Kerberos protocol. This protocol is based on XML and is mostly used in combination with Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS), Microsoft Entra ID, Authentik, Okta, Google Workspace and more.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • TruthOut ☛ Palantir Paid No Federal Income Tax. Its Global Tax Rate Is Just 1.4 Percent.

      The study, Who Pays for the Surveillance State?, was written by the Center for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research (CICTAR) in partnership with the European Federation of Public Services Unions. The report “examines how Palantir is capturing ever-larger government contracts while paying no US federal corporate income tax and shifting much of its foreign profits back to the US, avoiding taxes in Europe.”

    • Wired ☛ Hackers Stalked Me by Hijacking a Smartwatch for Kids

      When the reporter arrived at WIRED’s Manhattan headquarters half an hour later, Stykas hijacked a feature in the watch that allowed him to silently take a photo from its camera, capturing the moment when the reporter stepped into an elevator. After a few minutes, he took another snap of the reporter at his desk, then used a different feature to pick up audio from the watch’s microphone, transmitting it to another researcher, Felipe Solferini, who listened as the reporter’s coworker described his weekend visit to an art exhibition. At no point did the watch show any sign that it was listening, taking photos, or otherwise being hacked.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ ICE Is Buying Access to Credit Card Records

      Through data brokers, ICE is buying the information you provided to open a credit card.

    • Fortra LLC ☛ Beware Cut-Price AI Services that Read Your Every Word

      You need to remember this. Any AI prompts you enter via this service travel first to Poison Claude's servers, which then are forwarded to the real Claude, and then the answer is passed back. So Poison Claude can see exactly what you typed.

      So everything you type, every question you ask, every piece of code you paste in, every document you share, is seen by Poison Claude.

      And who knows what Poison Claude might they do with it. Maybe they will accidentally leak it, or sell it? Maybe they will harvest whatever useful business information, API keys, passwords, or sensitive personal data happens to float past their noses?

      Remember, Poison Claude had no qualms about creating the fraudulent accounts to abuse Amazon's generosity. Can you feel confident that they will care about your privacy and security?

      We already know that their security is less than perfect. Okta's researchers found an exposed API endpoint for Poison Claude which revealed it was running from a web hosting service in Mumbai, as well as some information about its paying customers.

    • Yle ☛ Police adding surveillance cameras in 10 new Finnish municipalities

      Authorities already use police surveillance cameras in dozens of Finnish municipalities.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Enshittification of Everything (Part 2)

    But as power and wealth have moved to the top in America (and, to a lesser degree, in other “rich” nations, almost everyone else — whether on the old right or the old left — has become disempowered and less secure.

    America’s huge middle class has become a small shadow of what it once was. The bottom 90 percent are struggling to make ends meet. The richest 10 percent account for a large and growing portion of all consumption. The top one-tenth of one percent holds an increasing portion of all wealth.

    Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Who's the World's Worst Billionaire?

    Or maybe Peter Thiel, for hating democracy? You’re getting closer. But no.

    The winner is …

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-06 [Older] Germany arrests Ukrainian suspected of spying on arms firm

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-05 [Older] German Airport on High Alert After Explosive Drone Is Found Near Ukrainian Aircraft at Major Cargo Hub

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-03 [Older] Ukraine’s security chief to head foreign intelligence

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-02 [Older] On Ukraine's front lines, female soldiers testing Canadian-designed body armour

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-02 [Older] Poland: Prime Minister Tusk defies anti-Ukrainian violence

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-01 [Older] Ukraine: Zelenskyy says Patriot missile shortage costs lives

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-01 [Older] War in Ukraine: Why Crimea has become a strategic target

    • Truthdig ☛ 2026-07-29 [Older] The Illusion of Ukraine’s Latest ‘Turned Tide’

    • CNN ☛ 2026-08-06 [Older] Russian authorities detain suspect over St. Petersburg cafe blast

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-06 [Older] Why is Russia selling its gold?

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-05 [Older] Russian missile and drone barrage in Ukrainian capital region kills 17

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-05 [Older] Ukraine: Russian strikes on Kyiv, surrounding region kill at least 17

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-05 [Older] Will Russia start a fresh mobilization drive?

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-05 [Older] FBI Probed if Cheeto Mussolini Acted 'Wittingly or Unwittingly' as Russian Agent, Newly Revealed Memos Show

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-04 [Older] Turkey asks Russia, Ukraine to guard Black Sea shipping

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-04 [Older] Ukraine drone strikes kill five near Moscow, Russia says

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-03 [Older] Russian embassy blames Ukraine for restaurant bomb

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-03 [Older] Fact check: Russian disinformation targets German elections

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-03 [Older] Russia: Bridge-building with North Korea

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-03 [Older] Russia says civilians killed in strike on Black Sea resort

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-02 [Older] Ukraine hits targets deep inside Russia, killing eight

    • 2026-08-01 [Older] The double extortion of a Russian ransomware threatens the medical records that Diater has kept for 10 years.

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-01 [Older] Russia batters Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, killing at least 10

    • HRW ☛ 2026-07-31 [Older] Mali: Russia’s ‘Africa Corps’ Airstrikes Kill Civilians

    • The Local SE ☛ 2026-07-31 [Older] Swedish court convicts former military consultant of espionage for Russia

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Robert Reich ☛ Who's Responsible for This Mess?

    That’s why the public needs to know who is doing what when important decisions are made inside these buildings and departments. It’s the only way anyone can ever be held accountable.

• Environment

  • Vox ☛ Indyx review: Wardrobe apps say they’ll help you shop less. Do they overpromise?

    What the marketing gets right is that the fast fashion problem is real. “Anywhere from two to 10 percent of our global greenhouse gas emissions are associated with fashion,” said Brie Berry, assistant professor of environment and sustainability at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania.

  • TruthOut ☛ You Can’t Drink Data: Native Communities Are Resisting the AI Death Cycle

    “It comes down to the stealing of everything that is and the taking of everything that is,” says Joseph White Eyes. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes talks with Native organizers Joseph White Eyes and Krystal Two Bulls about the struggle against data centers in Native communities. The conversation explores how the AI boom is advancing a new era of colonial extraction, and how Native communities are resisting land grabs and exploitative technologies.

  • Western Water ☛ DATA CENTERS AND WATER: What Congress found

    A large data center can directly consume as much water each day as about 2,600 households.

    Arizona data centers may indirectly use Colorado River water delivered through the Central Arizona Project.

  • Wired ☛ Two Fossil Fuel Companies Are Betting Big on Data Centers

    Data centers are becoming “a big driver for both power and gas demand in the US,” says Ashish Sethia, the global head of commodities and energy at BloombergNEF. The group published a report last week that found that increased demand for natural gas by the mid-2030s, driven partly by data centers, means that the US would need to increase production by 36 percent.

    The boom could have big climate implications—even when considering projects that aren’t connected to the larger grid. Just five of the seven data-center-connected gas-fired power plants highlighted in these two companies’ second quarter results could emit as much as 21 million tons of greenhouse gases per year, according to their permit applications. That’s an amount roughly on par with the annual emissions of Guatemala, though the actual emissions may be lower than what’s on the permits.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Protesters haul a guillotine to city council meeting about a potential AI data center, company rep cornered by protestors — ‘ it no longer felt safe to stay,’ developer escorted out by police

      But because Verrus submitted its application before the moratorium announcement, the city is still processing its proposed data center project. That does not mean that it will get an immediate green light, though. It still has to go through an extensive permitting process, which includes technical studies, permit conditions, and enforceable agreements, among others.

      Oregon is one of the first states to enact a law that ensures large consumers, like data centers, pay for the majority of the grid upgrades needed to serve their needs. This allowed Portland General Electric, the state’s largest power provider, to increase the bills of users who used more than 20 MW by 30%, while also affecting a 1.3% cut in residential electricity costs. But despite this protection that stops ratepayers from price shocks, many people are still against data center projects in their towns and cities.

    • Jim Grey ☛ Changes at the Walker Motel

      Plenty of hotels on bypassed US highways fell into disuse and disrepair. Many were ultimately demolished. But the Walker’s owners found a way forward, and turned their rooms into apartments.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Burnham-Clacton Pier mile run challenge, Nigel Farage, Count Binface & the rest

    In earlier blog posts about my nomination in the Clacton by-election, I suggested that running for office should involve some real running.

    The incumbent candidate presents himself as a champion of the imperial units of measure and the contest to be the first person to run one mile under four minutes was a legendary grudge match between and Englishman and an Australian.

  • Fabio Akita ☛ Why a Perfect Digital Election Still Wouldn't Be Viable?

    Many people conclude from this that the answer is digital elections, but with a different system. This article is a computer science exercise: what would a hypothetically perfect system look like? And, more importantly, the final conclusion: why even that perfect system would not be a viable option.

    One thing worth emphasizing before we start: the system I’m about to describe would require no secrecy from the government. No secret components, no secret processes, no locked rooms with credentialed people standing guard. Everything — the code, the data, the whole structure — could be 100% open, accessible to anyone, no restrictions whatsoever. And it would still be possible to prove, mathematically, that fraud is impossible. It’s the exact opposite of the current model, where trust is born out of secrecy.

  • European Commission ☛ Open Source Observatory Newsletter

    The open source model is a natural fit for modern Europe. Across the continent, individuals, experts, and public officials join forces to advance technology for the common good. What could be more European than that? This unique mesh of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal collaboration creates a resilient fabric of technological solutions that underpins and strengthens the digitalisation of the European public sector. In this month’s OSOR newsletter, we showcase prime examples of how cross-border collaboration delivers tangible results.

    Germany’s healthcare system is set to adopt an open source communication platform built on openDesk, a collaboration suite developed by the German government. When people’s lives depend on the code, the software must meet the highest standards. As Alexander Smolianitski, head of open source products at ZenDiS, explains, open source provides the flexibility needed to meet these requirements. The openDesk platform has already grown beyond Germany, forging partnerships with the Netherlands and France.

  • So-called 'FSFE'

    • FSFE ☛ 2026-08-03 [Older] A quarter-century of Software Freedom: the FSFE turns 25 [Ed: Fake 'FSF' turns 25]

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Conversation ☛ AI is making disinformation harder to spot – but we’ve found a new way to catch it

      Until recently, identifying malicious accounts was often quite straightforward. Many campaigns relied on people writing in a second language. So, posts sometimes contained grammatical mistakes or unusual word choices. Detection systems could look for these patterns in the language used.

      But generative AI has changed that. AI systems can now produce fluent, natural-sounding text that is much harder to distinguish from human writing. For example, patterns like use of em-dashes and the word “delve” used to be telltale signs of a text being generated by AI. But AIs are adapting, and these older systems are increasingly ineffective.

    • Chuck Carroll ☛ Why We Believe in the Preposterous

      We all have that friend or family member that believes in the most ludicrous things, convinced of a conspiracy that doesn't fit into the reality shared by the rest of us. I don't think an empirical mindset is the default for humans, but is something that's built over time, usually through education (though I wonder how much of our bullshit-detector calibration arrives with us at birth).

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Citizen Lab ☛ Inside the Fake Copyright Racket Silencing News Outlets

    Journalists and civil society are increasingly being silenced by accusations of copyright infringement, says senior researcher Alberto Fittarelli in a report by the OCCRP.

    Unlike bot comments, falsely reporting videos for copyright infringement is “virtually invisible,” and leaves the burden of proof on victims to challenge accusations.

    These attacks represent a “global threat to civil society,” says Fittarelli.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Paying for News Is Cheaper Than Not Having It

    Many people have a vague sense that there is less professional journalism than there used to be. But they may not understand quite how much of a crisis we’re in, or how it is going to make their own lives worse. This chart, from a recent Justin Fox column at Bloomberg, is one clarifying way to see where we are: [...]

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Unions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech Work

    Two University of California tech workers explain their unionization process — and how unions can help recapture the original promise of tech being used to better people’s lives rather than make the worst people in the world ever richer.

  • Futurism ☛ The Diarrhea Lettuce Company Has Been Linked to Forced Labor

    When the United States ratified the 13th amendment in 1865, federal lawmakers very nearly outlawed slavery for good — but not entirely. Tucked within arguably the most important corner of the US constitution is a massive caveat: “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States” (emphasis added.)

  • Rogue ☛ Lettuce isn’t the only shitty thing about Taylor Farms

    Today, both state-owned industries (like the DMV) and private companies can hire (“hire”) prisoners. And they get tax credits for doing so. Prison labor produces goods and services worth in excess of $11 billion a year while the inmates are paid somewhere between literally nothing and pennies per hour. And, fun fact, prison labor is exempt from OSHA, so there’s no required training or safety regulations.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Inside Towers ☛ FCC Proposes Expanding D2D to Unlicensed Wireless Devices

    UPDATE The FCC wants to see if direct-to-device (D2D) connectivity can work in unlicensed spectrum as well as it does using licensed bands. The agency voted 3-0 yesterday to begin a proceeding to explore that premise, potentially unlocking 200 MHz for unlicensed wireless devices to communicate with satellites.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Ruben Verweij ☛ Owning media again

    This year, one of my aspirations is to rely less on the big streaming services for my entertainment. Why? Well, for one thing, if we give too much power to large corporations by getting overly attached to their services, that leads to monopolies, inequality and ultimately, democratic decline. How’s that for a positive opening?

  • Nick Heer ☛ Digital-Only Media Is a Loss for Libraries, Too

    If libraries are restricted from keeping working copies of digital media due to software restrictions, prohibitive costs, and legal concerns, people are going to look back a hundred or more years from now and wonder why we decided we no longer wanted to keep a cultural record. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Terry Godier ☛ Browsers have standards, the App Store has judgment — Terry Godier

    It occurs to me that the browser has standards and the App Store has judgment.

    On the web, if I build something that works within the standards, it works. Whether people use it is up to them. On iOS, there is another question entirely: whether Apple decides it should exist.

  • John Gruber ☛ Daring Fireball: App Store Rejection of the Week: Dark Hours

    But that’s not what happened at all. Godier proceeded through a series of escalations up to the App Review Board and the Review Board responded that they determined the original rejection was valid because, I shit you not, “We understand that the app includes a live tarot reading feature.” Which isn’t even about astrology. It’s straight out of Kafka.