Leftovers

• Duck Alignment Academy ☛ Be prepared for big feelings when you take something away

  We all like to think that we’re very rational and make decisions logically. We’re not and we don’t. Like it or not, we’re humans and that comes with emotions. Frustratingly, means our very rational decisions are often greeted by other people’s emotions.

  People form attachments to identities, like being a user of or contributor to a project. Of course, they also form attachments to things both physical and abstract. When something goes away, they do not like it. We do not like it.

  There are, of course, many rational reasons to take away something that people want and have grown accustomed to having. Many projects have long ago dropped support for the i386 CPU architecture because the hardware is less prevalent and they no longer want to bear the burden of testing and supporting a rarely-used architecture. Nobody is shipping new software for Windows 95 or Red Hat Linux 8 — those operating systems were out of date 25 years ago. You might stop hosting personal websites for contributors because that’s not a scarce resource anymore. Maybe you stopped funding travel scholarships because your donation streams have dried up.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Hindu ☛ Messy make-up: cosmetics addiction takes the sheen out of childhood

    A large number of schoolchildren in Kerala are taking an early morbid fascination towards cosmetics, which experts term Cosmeticorexia. Navamy Sudhish examines the mental and physical consequences of the obsessive behaviour

  • USMC ☛ Urine test could predict stress fractures in boot camp

    “[Bone stress injuries] are a major challenge to military readiness,” Shawn Flanagan, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Rosalind Franklin’s Center for Lower Extremity Ambulatory Research (CLEAR), said in a statement. “By combining cutting-edge proteomic methods with access to large, well-characterized military cohorts, we aim to create a biomarker panel that safeguards recruits and enhances operational performance.”

  • Techdirt ☛ Doctors, Medical Associations Already Giving A Giant Middle Finger To Trump’s Vaccine EO

    The consequences for this will be the result of the actions of two different groups of people. The first are American parents. Because an EO is nothing like a federal mandate, parents will have the greatest influence on what shots their children receive, which is exactly how it should be. What shouldn’t be, however, is having an American population in which 30% proudly wear shirts and hats that say “Trump is right about everything!” and act upon that statement. Which means some not-insignificant percentage of American parents will take Trump’s EO and justifications as gospel and will refuse to get some of these shots for their children. That will endanger their own children, of course, but it will also endanger all the rest of us, too. Less vaccinations mean those that have health conditions so they can’t get vaccinated are put at risk as herd immunity disappears, while the rest of us get to sit around and wonder if the increased presence of these diseases will allow for them to evolve beyond our current immunity protections.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • The next Witcher game in trouble as CD Projekt Red announces layoffs

    An upcoming multiplayer game set in The Witcher franchise has suffered from a round of layoffs at CD Projekt Red, putting the title’s future in doubt.

    The currently nameless multiplayer game in The Witcher series, which has the working title of Project Sirius, has reportedly lost several developers at the CDPR-acquired studio that was working on it.

    In the works for four years so far, this marks the second time the project has been hit with layoffs following a similar process in 2023.

  • CBR ☛ It’s Officially the End of an Era for Netflix After 2 Studio Closures

    Streaming giant Netflix is shuttering two more video game development studios. For the last half-decade, Netflix has been making a push into game development and publishing, and offering games, both in-house and third-party, on-demand to subscribers. While the platform is making itself the destination for Grand Theft Auto 6's gameplay reveal, its first-party studios are being hit with studio closures.

  • SQ Magazine ☛ Cisco Firewall Flaw CVE-2026-20349 Exploited in the Wild

    Cisco confirmed this week that attackers are exploiting CVE-2026-20349 to reboot its firewalls, and CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on August 11, 2026.

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

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘I feel like I’m at war’: are we losing the battle against machine-made music?

      Despite outcry from musicians, AI slop is creeping into the charts as record labels scramble to adapt to a new normal where hits can be made at the click of a button

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Get started with LiteRT on Raspberry Pi

      In this guide, our friends from Google walk you through how to install LiteRT and run high-performance on-device AI models using the LiteRT CLI tool. You can read more about the work Google has done to improve LiteRT performance on the Raspberry Pi platform here.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Independent bookstores in Europe receive suspicious orders for thousands of books, prompting fears they'll be destroyed to train AI — sellers believe acquisitions are part of AI tech companies’ push to get more data

      “Some was high-quality non-fiction, like A History of Connemara, and the next thing might be The Eddie Hobbs Guide to your SSIA,” Tomás Kenny of Kennys Bookshop told the publication. In this example, the former is a history book that covers a region in western Ireland while the latter is about the Special Savings Incentive Account unique to the country. Berlin bookshops are also reportedly seeing similar orders that contain titles that wouldn’t make sense for a person to purchase today, like “Pass Your Driving Test, 2018 Edition.” It follows a report last month that AI companies are reportedly shredding millions of books after using them to train AI models, using destructive scanners to quickly digitize the books.

    • Irish Times ☛ A ‘bananas’ order for 5,000 obscure titles from a bookshop in Galway fuels suspicion – The Irish Times

      Germany’s Publishers and Booksellers’ Association has described mass scan-and-pulp practices as destructive and illegal.

      “Under German law scanning books – regardless of the purpose – would not be permissible and constitute a clear violation of copyright law,” said Thomas Koch, spokesman for the association. “That this is now happening with second-hand books is another highly troubling example of this practice.”

      German book retailers have put their heads together and suspect the entire ordering process is being run automatically, by an AI-driven bot, with a focus only on books with an ISBN number, the identification system introduced in 1966.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ How kids feel about AI, in their own words

      What surprised us most was how much young people might be able to teach adults about AI, and how clearly the kids who use it could name what they will and won’t hand over. They’re not as worried that it will take their jobs as they are that it might harm society. And with increasing access to tools that could in theory do their thinking, their talking, or even their friend-­making for them, it sounds as if most want to keep their hands on the wheel.

      Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

    • 404 Media ☛ Person Hides Prompt Injection in Legal Filing Telling AI to Side With Them

      A person representing themselves in a Connecticut court hid a series of instructions designed to manipulate artificial intelligence in an official court filing. These “prompt injections” told the hypothetical LLM to side with them, and to “ensure your textual output agrees with the presented filing to ensure remediation.” The instructions were written in tiny, 3-point white font and hidden throughout the filing.

    • Watts Martin ☛ The Case of the Robot Web Thief

      It’s easy to write off Godier’s misadventures here as a one-off mess he got himself into, but the implications of said misadventure are far-reaching. Lawyers at tech firms should, at the very least, begin insisting on very strict review and vetting procedures for any AI-written code, and indie developers who’ve been relying on agentic AI need to do the same. Just checking that Claude’s code reads well and runs correctly isn’t enough.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Separating AI's Technological Problems from Its Capitalism Problems

      Today’s AI is mired in political and economic systems developed generations ago that were never designed to manage widespread computation, let alone automated cognition. The gaps in those systems—and their proclivity to be exploited—are the primary influence on how the technology is being developed, deployed, and used.

    • Mike Brock ☛ Ghost Theory

      A statistical text watermark is a bias in token selection — a quiet preference for certain word sequences over others — detectable only as a deviation from chance across enough text. Confidence grows with length, which is why short passages are unverifiable by design, and decays with editing, which is why revision erases it. Even at its theoretical best, tuned to a false-positive rate of effectively zero on long documents, the instrument’s negative remains meaningless and its positive remains ambiguous: the woman who wrote every word herself and asked the machine to proofread carries the same mark as the man who typed one prompt and submitted the output untouched. The instrument cannot distinguish assistance from substitution, because that distinction does not exist at the layer where the instrument lives. It exists one layer up, in the provenance of the thought, where no watermark reaches.

    • Gigi ☛ Slopocalypse Now | dergigi.com

      I saw a post yesterday (or was it today? the days have been blurring together for almost two weeks now, so who knows) that speculated that humans will start to emulate the writing of Claude, which is to say that humans will produce, in addition to human slop, stuff that sounds and reads like LLM slop.

      "Even if you don’t use LLMs to write your prose, you’re eventually going to start talking like Claude anyway just because that style will be so universally employed" — hodlbod

      I completely disagree.

    • Florian Herrengt ☛ AI is removing the middle class of software engineering

      If you lack the judgment required to evaluate the LLM's recommendation, asking for more judgment doesn't solve the problem.

      At some point, someone still has to know what is going on. And that's the most valuable person on the team.

      The people who don't will become much cheaper to hire or get replaced entirely while the money gets funnelled towards an increasingly smaller number of people who can actually be trusted.

      I don't think this is going to be limited to software engineering either. I believe the same thing is going to happen across most knowledge work. AI will make the best people much more productive and the bad ones almost impossible to hire. Before, there was a good chance someone would catch their bad decisions before they went too far. Now they can make changes faster than anyone around them can realistically review or understand them.

    • Brett Chalupa ☛ I'm done using AI

      I've been programming for 20 years. It started as a hobby as a teen, making fansites and little video games. Then it turned into a career. And it's something I've largely enjoyed doing. I like learning, I like problem solving, and I like making things, which is a lot of what programming is. Over the past 18 months, my career, my hobby, and my craft have been drastically changed by the introduction of LLM-powered coding harnesses (e.g., Claude Code) and what's often referred to as "agentic programming." Because of its negative impacts on the environment, society, and my mental health, I've decided to stop using it.

    • [Old] Phillip ☛ ChatGPT Health is worse than you think

      Crucially though, there is a missing category here: foundation models. Go ahead and click through their models and look for the word "foundation". You won't find it.

    • Invidious ☛ 2026-08-10 [Older] AI Broke Linux Security - And Nobody Is Coming to Fix It!

  • Social Control Media

    • The Local DK ☛ 2026-08-08 [Older] EU tells Meta, TikTok to boost monitoring, fact-checking

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-08 [Older] 'I Thought Cheeto Mussolini Hated Bad Bunny?': White House Deletes Hypocritical TikTok After Internet Backlash

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-08 [Older] Taylor Swift Silences Cheeto Mussolini on TikTok as President's Team Uses 'Red' to Claim Album Is About the GOP

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-10 [Older] 'I Hate Taylor Swift': How Pop Star Blocked Cheeto Mussolini's Campaign From Using Her Hits on TikTok Again

    • NL Times ☛ 2026-08-10 [Older] Fake TikTok housing ads drive fraud reports up more than 700%

    • Meduza ☛ A dating bot with no age verification just got banned in Kazakhstan, and it’s the same one Russia used to brand Telegram founder Pavel Durov a ‘terrorist’

      The ban came at the request of the prosecutor’s office, which said the chatbot had no mechanism to verify users’ ages and that minors’ use of the platform led to crimes being committed.

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Sexual Exploitation Actors Stealing Content, FBI Warns

      According to the FBI, these actors use social engineering and cyber intrusion tactics to target specific individuals or general targets of opportunity. After gaining access to accounts, they steal explicit content and share it through community forums or illicit marketplaces.

      The FBI said personally identifiable information, including a victim’s name, date of birth, email address, phone number and social media username, is often posted alongside the stolen material. This can expose victims to continued harassment and re-victimization.

    • Phillip ☛ Bluesky is not trustworthy or sustainable. Mastodon is

      I saw Dave Lee's post quoting James Ball's post about fears around Bluesky's lack of user growth, and therefore profitability and sustainability. It's a company with hundreds of millions of dollars invested into it - the platform will inevitably enshittify in an effort to pay back its investors.

      To that, I suggest Mastodon. It's a social platform like Twitter, Bluesky, and Threads, but with a few key differences.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Chicago's social network is a huge bet for news. I think it's the future.

      I’ve been more excited about this announcement than any other development in either social media or news technology this year. Chicago Public Media — which runs both WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times — will run a network of online social communities for Chicago neighborhoods at chicago.com. These communities run on New_ Public’s Roundabout, a social networking platform designed to be a positive space for local communities to organize, meet, and share.

    • Nieman Lab ☛ Can public media build its own social network? Chicago Public Media teams up with New_ Public to try | Nieman Journalism Lab

      Chicago Public Media is already the parent nonprofit of two existing news sites, WBEZ and, since 2022, the Chicago Sun-Times. For chicago.com, though, the news org is teaming up with New_ Public, a nonprofit working to reimagine online public spaces, to launch a network of online communities for Chicago neighborhoods. Chicago.com (the enviable domain name was donated by the Chicago Community Trust) will host the network, which will be powered by Roundabout, the local community platform incubated by New_ Public over the past year. The partners will launch five neighborhood pilots this fall, and will recruit paid, contract “community stewards” to moderate conversations in each neighborhood.

    • [Old] Phillip ☛ Social Media is a Cigarette, and Engagement is Code for Addiction

      These multi-trillion dollar tech companies have the staff, time, and budget to conduct all the research they could ever want. We know that they've known about the harms of their platforms for years, but they have apparently only used those findings to further "optimize" their addiction engagement pipeline.

      At its peak in 1965, 42.4% of U.S. adults smoked cigarettes; smoking was incredibly normalized. Big tobacco companies swore up and down that their products weren't addictive, of course; that they had benefits for their users - they even swore in front of congress! Does that sound similar to anything going on today?

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2026-08-11 [Older] CISA Adds Three Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-08-07 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-08-07 [Older] CPDLC over ATN-B1 Vulnerabilities

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ Flock (Again!) Activates A Camera System A Town Had Voted To Shut Down

      The easiest way to tell that Flock Safety doesn’t really care that its massive network of ALPR (automatic license plate reader) cameras is being abused by cops to stalk their exes and harass residents is to judge it by its actions. When confronted with court case after court case detailing these allegations (and those are just the cops who actually got caught!), the company says two things: first, we’re not personally responsible for the actions of “bad apples” and second, some vague “fixes” are on the way at some indeterminate point in the future.

      The other way you can tell Flock doesn’t care about anything but future profitability is this: when cities pull the plug on Flock systems due to local backlash, Flock has — one more than one occasion! — decided to to simply turn the cameras back on.

    • EFF ☛ Too Little, Too Late: Flock Admits Their Technology Needs Reforms

      Flock Safety, the embattled vendor of mass surveillance technology, has rolled out a handful of new reforms intended to appease the justified nationwide anger that has seen scores of towns cancel or suspend their contracts with the company for automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The reforms are a combination of long overdue changes along with some cosmetic fixes that fail to address the fundamental dangers of this technology.

    • Phillip ☛ Apple's Parental Controls are a Big Deal

      This may be the age of AI, but it's also the age of verification. Age verification sounds good on paper, but in reality is a terrible, horrible, no good idea. And Apple clearly agrees.

    • Mat Duggan ☛ OTel Isn't Going Well (And I Made A Spreadsheet About It)

      In OpenTelemetry's defense this was never what they were going for as a project. I've always respect that they stuck to their guns by attempting to build a truly vendor agnostic system that really doesn't care what you do with the data. I have never gotten a sense of a vendor being strongly preferred with OTel, which is quite the feat considering how lucrative and contentious the observability ecosystem was. Also considering that the maintainers of this project are largely employed by exclusively those companies.

    • Chris Maiorana ☛ Your metadata and you

      Most people think an image is just a single document. It’s a picture, right? Just a bunch of pixels carrying color information? There’s actually quite a bit more about you that the phone is capturing.

      It’s more like two documents stitched together. There’s the image data, about which you know. Then there’s a connected text file full of additional information, including: [...]

    • Artem Novichkov ☛ Headless Xcode: From Prompt to Simulator with MCP

      Xcode's MCP server lets a coding agent create files, build, render previews, and drive the simulator. Until now, those tools disappeared when you quit Xcode.

      Xcode 27 beta 5 adds xcrun mcp-server, which exposes the same tools without opening the Xcode UI. Combined with Apple's exportable agent skills, it lets an external agent create a project, build it, render previews, and verify interactions in the simulator. I'll use Claude Code to do exactly that with a small reading list app.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Amazon’s AI training on Twitch: ‘If it was opt in, nobody would opt in’

      Mike Minton, Chief Product Officer at Twitch, went on the official Twitch Patch notes stream later that day. Here’s Mike giving the whole game away:

      "There’s an honest answer, and I think most of you probably can appreciate this. If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That’s honestly the answer."

      Training includes all your chat comments and the games the streamers are streaming.

    • The New Stack ☛ ChatGPT can now remember what you did on your Mac — without screenshots

      This, OpenAI says, will then allow ChatGPT to answer questions like “What was I debugging yesterday?” or “Where did I leave off on that PR?” — all without having to re-explain the full context of your query. Based on your history, ChatGPT will then be able to find the files, documents, and conversations relevant to your query, no matter whether they were in Google Docs, Slack, or an open browser tab.

  • Confidentiality

    • Max Bernstein ☛ Another partial SSI trick with canonicalize

      If you plan on running canonicalize multiple times, you may end up generating many constant instructions in your IR. To avoid this, you can intern them and, for example, place them in the entry block. This helps make the pass idempotent instead of always allocating new instructions.

      So what does this buy us?

    • Chris Fallin ☛ The acyclic e-graph: Cranelift's mid-end optimizer

      Today, I'll be writing about the aegraph, or acyclic egraph, the data structure at the heart of Cranelift's mid-end optimizer. I introduced this approach in 2022 and, after a somewhat circuitous path involving one full rewrite, a number of interesting realizations and "patches" to the initial idea, various discussions with the wider e-graph community (including a talk (slides) at the EGRAPHS workshop at PLDI 2023 and a recent talk and discussions at the e-graphs Dagstuhl seminar), and a whole bunch of contributed rewrite rules over the past three years, it is time that I describe the why (why an e-graph? what benefits does it bring?), the how (how did we escape the pitfalls of full equality saturation? how did we make this efficient enough to productionize in Cranelift?), and the how much (does it help? how can we evaluate it against alternatives?).

      For those who are already familiar with Cranelift's mid-end and its aegraph, note that I'm taking a slightly different approach in this post. I've come to the viewpoint that the "sea-of-nodes" aspect of our aegraph, and the translation passes we've designed to translate into and out of it (with optimizations fused in along the way), are actually more fundamental than the "multi-representation" part of the aegraph, or in other words, the "equivalence class" part itself. I'm choosing to introduce the ideas from sea-of-nodes-first in this post, so we will see a "trivial eclass of one enode" version of the aegraph first (no union nodes), then motivate unions later. In actuality, when I was experimenting then building this functionality in Cranelift in 2022, the desire to integrate e-graphs came first, and aegraphs were created to make them practical; the pedagogy and design taxonomy have only become clear to me over time. With that, let's jump in!

• Defence/Aggression

  • NL Times ☛ 2026-08-03 [Older] Amsterdam logo misused on flyers warning of Israeli soldiers at WorldPride

  • Project Censored ☛ 2026-08-04 [Older] State, Soldiers, and Systematic Sadism

  • NL Times ☛ 2026-08-04 [Older] Fundraiser surpasses goal for Syrian family whose car was destroyed in suspected arson

  • Counter Punch ☛ 2026-08-06 [Older] A Bad Deal with Saudi Arabia

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-02 [Older] Pakistan: Suicide bomber kills 14 at anti-militancy protest

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Lesson Watergate Was Supposed to Teach

    Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. thought Nixon’s downfall would restrain presidents for generations. Instead, Watergate helped write the script for the scandals that followed.

  • USMC ☛ Marines train to shoot down combat drones with standard weapons

    For the exercise, TTECG created counter-sUAS lanes where Marines engaged simulated enemy drones from distances as close as 20 meters, or around 65 feet. Controlled by members of TTECG, nicknamed “Coyotes,” the drones reach speeds at over 90 miles per hour.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ The Hessians Were Supposed to Quickly End the American Revolution. Instead, They Endured Years of Battles and Suffered Thousands of Casualties

    Some 30,000 German soldiers fought for the British during the war. Contrary to popular belief, they weren’t mercenaries, and not all were actually Hessians

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Two undersea cables reportedly damaged off the coast of Perth following suspicious vessel activity — company CEO says faults happened ‘straight after each other and in close proximity'

    The damaged cables are two of just 16 undersea infrastructure that carries 99% of Australian [Internet] traffic.

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-12 [Older] Short on US Patriot missiles, Ukraine looks for alternatives

    • HRW ☛ 2026-08-11 [Older] Türkiye Seeks to Transfer US Cluster Munitions to Ukraine

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-12 [Older] Ukraine strikes Russian grain facility and naval base

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-08-12 [Older] Russia’s Authoritarian Neoliberalism Reaches Its Limits

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-12 [Older] Russia: Why is the Yabloko party barred from the elections?

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-11 [Older] North Korean ballistic missiles used by Russia in deadly attack in Ukraine, Zelenskyy says

    • Vox ☛ 2026-08-11 [Older] How Ukraine is holding its own against Russia — and changing warfare as we know it

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-10 [Older] Russia: At least 12 killed in Ukrainian drone attack

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-10 [Older] Ukrainian drone attack kills 13 in Russian city of Nizhnekamsk

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-10 [Older] Russia: Top court bans opposition anti-war party from vote

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-10 [Older] Ukrainian drone attack kills at least 13 in central Russia

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ 2026-08-09 [Older] M. N. Pokrovsky Pioneered Russia’s Marxist School of History

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-09 [Older] Syria says deal agreed with Russia on future of military bases

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-09 [Older] Ukraine and Russia exchange attacks as Kyiv buys new ATACMS

    • Copenhagen Post ☛ 2026-08-08 [Older] Russia denies role in explosive drone in Germany

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-08 [Older] India wary of potential 100% US tariffs over Russian oil

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-08 [Older] Ukraine: Russia pounds Kyiv as Zelenskyy visits Serbia

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ 2026-08-07 [Older] Ukraine's Zelenskyy makes first visit to Russia-friendly Serbia

    • The Local SE ☛ 2026-08-07 [Older] Sweden to hand over seized Russian 'shadow fleet' ship to Ukraine

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Bridge Michigan ☛ Michigan universities make secret decisions; some lawmakers want change

    Universities have taken latitude with a 1999 court decision that they don’t have to follow the Open Meetings Act, some say

    Many have tried to change the situation through activism, lawsuits and legislation

  • TruthOut ☛ Trump Admin Ends Anti-Corruption Rule Requiring Shell Companies Report Ownership

    The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network announced on Tuesday that it is ending the regulation that requires companies to disclose beneficial ownership. This refers to situations in which a person actually controls and benefits from a company, but legal documents list the company under a different name, like a bank or accountant.

  • Marisa Kabas ☛ You don’t have to hand it to Richard Hanania

    Three years ago this month I published an exposé for HuffPost about a guy named Richard Hanania. It revealed the rising right-wing star, beloved by Silicon Valley billionaires and future Vice President JD Vance, had used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to secretly write for the most extreme white supremacist websites. “Hoste” wasn’t just some random online shitposter, but one of the formative “intellectual” voices of the nascent “alt-right,” the fascist movement that would later partner with Donald Trump to take the White House and help shape his first and second presidencies.

    My story about Hanania went viral, setting off a chain of disapproving op-eds in places like The Atlantic and The New York Times: But in the years since, I’ve watched many of these same elite media institutions rehabilitate Hanania over and over again, credulously accepting his claim to have left the alt-right behind. And they’ve allowed him to brand himself as perhaps America’s foremost “former” white nationalist— despite what I’d argue is plenty of easy-to-find evidence to the contrary.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Today in Clown Storage: PBS

    Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data: [...]

• Environment

  • Vox ☛ 2026-07-01 [Older] The case for making air conditioning normal — even in Europe

  • CBC ☛ 2026-07-02 [Older] Even birds living in protected Ontario reserve can't escape climate change, new study finds

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-06-30 [Older] Study: Europe Heat Wave “Virtually Impossible” Without Human-Made Climate Change

  • The Age AU ☛ 2026-07-01 [Older] Labor’s ambivalence on climate not reassuring

  • Vox ☛ 2026-07-01 [Older] The world’s oceans just broke a disturbing record

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Baltics' first AI factory [sic] to open in Estonia

    Dutch cloud company Nebius' Tallinn AI factory will begin operating at Greenergy Data Centers' data center this year. With a capacity of 22 megawatts, it will be the largest in the Baltics.

  • Arizona Luminaria ☛ Pima County moves toward data center moratorium, tighter transparency

    The Pima County board of supervisors is asking its staff to draft policies intended to provide more transparency and accountability over large development projects in the county, like data centers.

    They also asked county staff to create a resolution that, if approved, would put a 120-day moratorium on data centers to give the county time to finalize zoning laws specific to data centers.

  • Alcides Fonseca ☛ LG will start using user-replaceable batteries in their mice by Alcides Fonseca

    Lately, I have been more concerned about bad batteries making devices unusable and electronic garbage. I fully endorse this EU policy of having user-replaceable batteries everywhere (and as standard as possible, but not USB-C mandatory standard). In fact, I would prefer for mice to use traditional AA batteries, but only if they are rechargeable! This is because I end up destroying the outside of the mouse before the battery dies on me. Speaking of which, I should order two more to replace the skinless ones I am working with.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Scheerpost ☛ 2026-07-02 [Older] Climate Activists Take On A New Foe: Data Centers

    • The Atlantic ☛ Our Last Wi-Fi-Less Refuge Is Gone

      Now major airlines have started rolling out Wi-Fi that is both free and usable. In June, United announced that by the end of this year, nearly 1,000 of its planes would be getting high-speed Wi-Fi via Starlink, the network of low-Earth-orbit satellites owned by SpaceX. Other major airlines, including Delta, JetBlue, and Alaska, are partnering with either Starlink or its closest competitor, Amazon Leo, to offer better Wi-Fi in the next year or two. This new technology provides almost the same [Internet] experience you’d get on the ground, Seth Miller, an airline-industry analyst, told me. This is not Wi-Fi that’s “good for an airplane.” It’s just … good.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ Why Isn’t the Price of Oil Even Higher?

      Why has the crack spread widened so much? The main answer is that a lot of the world’s refining capacity is either trapped inside the Strait or offline as a result of Ukraine’s drone campaign against Vladimir Putin. So it’s not all about Iran. Indeed, one indicator of how much the other war matters is that JD Vance reportedly had to plead with Volodymyr Zelenskyy to halt attacks on oil tankers using the Russian port of Novorossiysk.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • CBC ☛ 2026-08-06 [Older] 72-year-old hiker attacked by grizzly bear in B.C.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • BIA Net ☛ 2026-08-04 [Older] Prosecutors seek removal of Turkey's main opposition leader's immunity in 'bribery' probe

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Gen Z Isn’t Apolitical. It’s Lost Faith in Capitalism.

    Gen Z is often dismissed as apathetic. But interviews with leading scholars suggest otherwise: a generation coming of age amid crises in housing, work, and political institutions is not losing faith in politics but in the promises of capitalism.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Trump turns to private sector in offensive hacking operations memo

    Participating companies would have to sign contracts with the Justice Department or Department of Homeland Security to “undergo rigorous vetting.” It would also allow participating companies to sign commercial agreements with other private sector entities to receive threat information. And participating companies’ agreements with federal, state and local governments would be geared toward identifying threats, and proposing cyber operations to the coordination center to address those threats.

  • Security Week ☛ White House Mobilizes Security Firms for Operations Against Foreign Cybercrime Gangs

    Contracts may require a $1 million bond, which will be forfeited if a company fails to comply with operational requirements.

  • Haaretz ☛ Anthropic Reportedly in Talks to Buy Israeli AI Startup Decart for $6 Billion

    Anthropic is in talks to acquire Israeli AI startup Decart for $6 billion, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday, in what could become one of the largest acquisitions of an Israeli technology company. The talks may not result in a deal, according to the report, and neither company commented.

  • The Next Move ☛ The Answer to Fascism Can’t Be Marxism

    Three weeks ago I published an article in these pages under the headline, “Democratic Socialists vs. Social Democrats.” In that piece, I argued that America’s ascendant democratic socialists are not like their pro-democracy, pro-welfare-state foils in Northern Europe.

    In their interview, Remnick asked the DSA’s Romer: “Is there a model for a politics or a society that is real and existing in this world that you would like to see the United States copy?”

    Here was an opportunity to prove me wrong. Romer could have named Sweden, Norway, or Denmark, and I’d be forced to reconsider my original thesis.

  • Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Supplier Security Questionnaire

    Due: 5 business days from receipt

  • Pivot to AI ☛ xAI data centre contractors file liens for non-payment

    Darana Hybrid claims they were stiffed for $137 million on the Colossus I and II data centres in Memphis, Tennessee, and $431 million on facilities in nearby Southhaven. It’s filed liens against two SpaceX subsidiaries, CTC Property and MZX Tech.

  • So-called 'FSFE'

    • FSFE ☛ 2026-08-11 [Older] Back from our FSFE25 celebrations with news about EIF and the DMA

  • Audiocasts/Shows

    • The Cyber Show ☛ Colonised By Wankers

      Veteran software engineer Jay Little chats to Andy about enshitification of digital tech, the colonialist mind-set of Big Tech, and what we the colonised are robbed of. The tech empire, however, is coming to an end, rotting from the head, and Jay has a unique developer's inside perspective.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • HRW ☛ 2026-07-30 [Older] Australia School Photos Scraped for AI-Fueled Image Misuse

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-08-01 [Older] California School Free Speech Ruling: Judge Rejects Challenge to AB 715 Antisemitism Legislation

  • EFF ☛ 2026-07-31 [Older] Amending AB 1709 Doesn’t Fix It: California’s Social Media Ban Still Threatens Free Speech and Privacy

  • RFERL ☛ Russia Cracks Down On Photos Of Graves That Reveal The Cost Of War

    Released by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) last week, the image allegedly shows the moment a 48-year-old man was arrested in Yaroslavl, some 250 kilometers northeast of Moscow, for “secretly taking photos and videos” of graves of soldiers killed in Ukraine.

    The case is the latest in a series in which people have faced treason charges for recording images of Russian military graves.

  • Meduza ☛ The song that stopped being the USSR’s anthem in 1944 is now landing Russian activists in prison for ‘terrorism’

    According to her daughter, a lawyer told her that the charge against Mikhailova was likely related to a mention of “The Internationale,” the communist hymn that also served as the Soviet anthem until 1944. The daughter said she was unable to explain exactly what the alleged crime consisted of.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Fake Free Speech President Has Unleashed ICE On Its Critics

    Criticizing ICE online is not a crime. It’s protected speech under the First Amendment. I’d point out that all of this clearly violates Trump’s early executive order on free speech, but did anyone ever take any of that seriously? It was always just red meat to throw out to his cultish base, rather than anything real.

    Indeed, you can see that in the fact that the very same MAGA trolls who falsely insisted that the Biden admin was actively “censoring” people on social media will be quick to defend what ICE is doing here, even though it’s way more clearly an attack on the First Amendment rights of ICE’s critics.

  • TruthOut ☛ Censorship in LA School District Could Become National Norm, Educators Warn

    Teachers in the second-largest school district in the nation have had to remove Black Lives Matter, Land Back, and Palestinian flags from their classrooms as part of so-called corrective actions taken following a complaint alleging discrimination. The changes occurred at Downtown Magnets High School in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). The district has over half a million students and 1,500 schools and centers.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ ‘Trump Said A Thing’ Journalism Must Stop

    One end result of this is something I affectionately call “CEO said a thing!” journalism, which kind of looks like journalism, but generally involves mindlessly parroting whatever a wealthy executive (or politician) says without context, correction, or even third-party objective analysis.

    You’ll endlessly see this in corporate press coverage of corporations and tech. But it’s more generally reflected in their coverage of all rich men. Especially guys like Elon Musk or Donald Trump, who have found it incredibly easy to manipulate what’s left of our press into parroting every brain fart they have, regardless of whether there’s any useful new information or meaningful tether to factual reality.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Billionaire David Ellison Is Blackmailing Hollywood

    Paramount Skydance owner David Ellison is holding California hostage as his $110 billion Warner Bros. takeover falters — exposing a mogul more interested in power and prestige than preserving the film industry he claims to love.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Scoop News Group ☛ FBI is using much more AI than what it previously disclosed

    The bureau has a current use case tally totalling 100-plus, according to FBI Chief AI Officer Katie Noyes. In its AI inventory posted in January, the Department of Justice unit identified just 50 use cases.

    “We’ve got, by the way, 139 approved use cases — all different manners of data, all different manners of processes and certainly all manner of risk,” Noyes, who took over the top AI role last summer, said during the 2026 DODIIS Worldwide Conference this week. “There are some of those that are going to be considered high-impact.”

  • TruthOut ☛ ICE Is Buying Up to $20 Million Worth of Electric Shock Gloves

    The devices look like a normal pair of work gloves and are described by the company as an “invisible partner” and “force multiplier” for law enforcement. When the electric shock function is turned on with a button on the back of the glove, an officer can then administer a shock by laying hands on the subject’s bare skin.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Trump's Government Responded to Murdering Alex Pretti by Spying on the Entire Anti-ICE Community in Minnesota

    In the Minnesota Antifa 15 case, defendant Ian Sant has a blockbuster filing revealing details of the broad spying HSI did after they killed Alex Pretti, targeting activists, unions, No Kings, and environmental organizations. NYT reported on the contents of the filing, and the exhibits, here.

    The filing reveals that a DOJ prosecutor who entered restricted grounds on January 6 — whom DOJ has put in charge of investigating Antifa — presented this case to the grand jury, including this slide trying to implicate much of the left in Minnesota and the country to DAMN, the group alleged to be at the core of this activity.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Tiktok wouldn’t open at all’: Taiwan simulates an [Internet] blackout, with an eye on China threat

    In cities across Taiwan, these kinds of drills are a fact of life every year, amid the growing threat posed by China across the strait, but this time there is something different.

    Internet speeds were drastically cut on Thursday, simulating a coordinated attack for the first time. Data-heavy services such as video calls, streaming and mobile payments became difficult or impossible to use, while videos on social media barely loaded.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Project Censored ☛ 2026-08-06 [Older] Paramount-Warner Bros. Deal on Ice

  • New Republic ☛ The Enshittification of Private Insurance

    Ultimately, the problem is that insurance doesn’t get regulated at the national level. Leaving its regulation to 50 different states is inefficient. Also, state governments are much easier than the federal government for insurers to bully or bribe into submission. America figured that out for most industries during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, but somehow insurers remained out of the administrative state’s grip. Why?

    That story begins in 1868, when insurance regulation was just coming into being. The Supreme Court, in Paul v. Virginia, ruled that the selling of insurance policies did not constitute commerce, and therefore was not interstate commerce, so Congress could not direct the executive branch to regulate insurance under the Commerce Clause. That left regulation to the states. In 1944, though, the Supreme Court reversed itself and ruled in United States v. South-Eastern Underwriters Association that actually, yes, the selling of insurance is commerce (well, duh; they don’t exactly give those policies away), and that the Sherman Antitrust Act can therefore be deployed against them.

  • The Verge ☛ Apple and Epic argue over how much Apple should get from purchases made outside the App Store

    Right now, Apple cannot take a commission on external purchases after California district court judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled in April 2025 that found the company “willfully” didn’t comply with her 2021 Epic Games v. Apple injunction. However, a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals panel said that Apple should be able to charge a commission based on “necessary costs,” and Apple shared its proposal for fees in Thursday’s filing. (The Supreme Court has also said it will hear arguments about whether Apple willfully violated the April 2025 ruling.)

  • Bill Bennett ☛ Fibre competition still too weak for deregulation

    There is not enough competition in the fibre wholesale market to justify deregulation. Government to sell Chorus debt. CDC plans major Taranaki datacentre.

  • Copyrights

    • IP Kat ☛ 2026-08-11 [Older] The Bartz/Anthropic Settlement is still a hot mess but at least it is the largest known copyright recovery of all time (for piracy)?

    • Creative Commons ☛ Announcing Four Regional Events for CC's 25th Anniversary

      We are excited to announce that we will be supporting four regional events for CC’s 25th Anniversary—representing regions around the world with groups who are working to advance open knowledge. We’re delighted to be working with a variety of trusted partners and look forward to sharing more about their plans and reporting back on how these events went.

      We want to thank everyone who submitted a proposal for an event. There were so many great ideas, and we hope to have more opportunities to support regional work like this in the future.