Leftovers

• Sal ☛ On the doomsday posts

  And I call bullshit on the whole “web is dying” bit. The corporate web already sucks horrifically. And yet here we are, writing in our little indie blogs and following each others’ little RSS feeds. I fully expect we’ll keep doing this regardless the mountain of AI slop that piles up. If anything, that mess could make us double down.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Oh Hey, It’s Not Just Me

  In a polarized digital world, it’s good to remember that the web can still draw you to folks rather than push them away.

  We’ve got a lot in common.

• Jack Baty ☛ I deleted nearly all of my notes, on purpose.

  My ~/org/notes folder had nearly 4,000 files in it this morning. It now has 170. I deleted the rest.

  Having lost my religion around "zettelkasten" and "second brains", my notes started to look a little silly. Hundreds of nearly empty files with carefully-curated front matter are not helpful, no matter how many links between them have been created.

• Vicki Boykis ☛ Write for people

  Something I've noticed recently is that I am no longer able to read and parse PR titles and descriptions across the internet. I don't think I stopped being able to read or understand code, but now that we are automatically generating more and more explanatory artifacts instead of writing them, navigating codebases as a human is becoming an exercise in futility.

  I'm not the only one: [...]

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Low-grade iron ore unlocks new route to semiconductor materials

    Researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities have shown that low-purity iron ore from Minnesota can be converted directly into semiconductor-quality pyrite, potentially opening a cheaper route to materials for future solar panels, batteries and electronic devices.

  • Hackaday ☛ Submersible Drone Analyzes Ice

    The concept of ice measurement employed is, on paper, reasonably simple. When a sonar pulse is sent out, some of the energy will return off the bottom of the ice sheet, but some of it will pass through creating a second return. By measuring the difference in these two returns, the thickness can be calculate with a high degree of precision. Attach the sonar to a submersible and give it a positioning system and you can simply get a thickness map, right? Well, employing theory in practice is a far more complicated prospect as the students soon found out.

  • John D Cook ☛ How NASA’s Mariner 9 probe encoded images

    The images were encoded for transmission using a code based on Hadamard matrices, specifically a (32, 6, 16) Hadamard code. This means that each 6-bit pixel value was encoded as a 32-bit code word, with all code words differing in at least 16 positions.

  • John D Cook ☛ Hadamard Codes and Sphere Packing

    Conway and Sloane [1] give a correspondence between binary codes and sphere packings that they call Construction A. Given an (n, M, d) binary code C, center a sphere on a point x if and only if x is a congruent (mod 2) to codeword in C.

    Here (n, M, d) means an error correcting code that encodes M bits of data as strings of n bits, with a minimum Hamming distance between code words of d, i.e. all codewords differ in at least d bits.

  • John D Cook ☛ Constructing Hadamard matrices

    A Hadamard matrix is an orthogonal matrix whose entries are all either 1 or − 1. For example

  • Luca Lombardo ☛ Is Compression Really Prediction?

    I have spent the last few years working on compression, information theory, and compressed data structures and wanted to give my two cents. I agree with this equivalence, but I do not think it describes the complete compression problem. It applies after several choices have already been made. The encoder and decoder must agree on what kind of object is being represented, which alternatives remain possible, how the probability model is made available, and what the decoder must be able to do with the representation.

  • Novak Kaluđerović ☛ A long division story

    I was implementing Algorithm D, the well-known long division algorithm from Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming", and I stumbled upon an issue that I couldn't let go. The correctness of the algorithm relied on Theorem B, and its proof bugged me. It felt unnatural, it took a very convoluted path to proving a simple statement, and it isolated a special case which was not a corner case and that seemed unrelated to the problem at hand. There was something odd about it, so I tried to prove the theorem myself, and I failed. However, the failure handed me a counterexample to Algorithm D that had passed as correct for decades, and with it a theorem on the correctness of the algorithm carrying my name.

  • Evan Martin ☛ Tech Notes: Computing graph dominators

    A few years back I wrote about the dominator tree of a dependency graph, which is one of my favorite tricks for thinking about dependencies. It turns out a new tinkering project of mine again needs a dominator tree, so I invested some time to deepen my understanding.

    In this post I present an algorithm for computing graph dominators along with the intuition behind it.

• Career/Education

  • California State University Northridge ☛ The Most Valuable Tool in Underground Construction Isn’t a Machine, Says W.A. Rasic Construction

    One of the biggest lessons you learn in underground construction is that nothing happens in isolation.

    Every activity relies on another being completed correctly and at the right time. Excavation, pipe installation, inspections, testing, backfilling, traffic control, material deliveries, and specialized crews all have to work together like a chain, where every link matters.

    Experienced superintendents develop the ability to look several steps ahead. They can identify where a delay is likely to occur, understand how it will affect the crews behind it, and make adjustments before productivity is lost. Through years of work and training, they learn how today’s decisions can shape the success of the entire project.

• Hardware

  • Associated Press ☛ Vintage computer collectors are reviving machines from the '80s

    Dersch’s exhibit featured a fully functioning Xerox Alto workstation with its boxy vertical monitor, chunky keyboard and mouse, as well as pizza-sized spinning disks that store tiny amounts of data by modern standards.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • New York Times ☛ Luigi Mangione’s Case Hit a Cultural Nerve

    “He’s seen online as an antihero, a Batman of characters — someone to stand up for the dissatisfaction that is being felt,” said Tim Weninger, a computer science professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies social media and violent discourse on the [Internet].

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Case for a Medicare Buy-In Option

    The political obstacles to replacing private health insurance with a Medicare-like system are formidable, although arguably less formidable now than they were when Obamacare was created. As I’ll argue shortly, there’s a strong case for a soft transition in which people can choose to be covered by Medicare via a public option. But before I get there, let’s talk about why, in the realm of healthcare, there’s tension between good policy and political realism.

  • Lou Plummer ☛ Earned Invincibility – Living Out Loud

    After a struggle with drinking that stretched back to my teens, I got sober and stayed that way in 2008 at age 43. It took nine months for me to drop 100 pounds. The following year and the year after I rode my bicycle over 10K miles each year. Then I switched to long-distance hiking, completing the Appalachian Trail, a distance of 2189 miles in under six months.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Hackaday ☛ Snooping Flume Water Monitor Data On The Wire

    The Flume rig has a sensor installed in the water line, which communicates to a bridge device that then hooks up to the Internet. [Stephen] had an early win, figuring out how to trick the bridge unit of the Flume water sensor into sending data in plaintext. This was as simple as corrupting the public key in the device’s flash. However, this wasn’t a perfect solution—as the corrupt key stopped the device from authenticating with Flume’s servers. Further diving into the LibHydrogen encryption implementation, however, revealed that the device was apparently authenticating without using session keys, relying only on a static device secret key which can be harvested from the onboard flash. This allowed [Stephen] to build a tool to sit in between the bridge and the Flume servers, forwarding traffic seamlessly while decrypting and saving it locally at the same time.

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

    • Futurism ☛ Grok Calls for Assassination of Elon Musk, Accusing Him of Pedophilia

      Remember, Musk literally promises that his AI is so advanced that it will unlock the “true nature of the universe” and even discover “new physics.” In reality, it’s been used to crank out loads of actual CSAM — something Musk described as “way funnier” than other AI trends — and is treated by X users as a sort of court jester. Look at this outrageous thing we got Grok to say! It wasn’t that long ago that Grok was also duped into declaring that it would kill every single Jewish person on the planet to save Musk, and similarly run over a billion children if it meant saving his incredible mind.

    • New Republic ☛ The Wild—and Unregulated—Ways Lawmakers Are Using AI Chatbots

      That staffer isn’t sure what congressional rules allow for AI use.

    • Digital Music News ☛ Is the Future of AI Licensing Opt-In, or Opt-Out?

      “Why is it not opt-in? That’s what everybody is spamming in chat,” said Twitch’s Chief Product Officer Mike Minton during a livestream responding to user feedback. “I get it. ‘Let me opt in versus making me opt out.’ Well, there’s an honest answer: If this was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That’s honestly the answer.”

    • The Atlantic ☛ It May Be Time to Panic About AI

      These behaviors have now crossed the line from unsettling to dangerous. During routine testing, frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and the Chinese firm Moonshot AI have all broken out of internal IT systems and accessed the open web. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta each reported that their models then hacked into other companies. Humans didn’t notice until after the fact. In some cases, the escaped bots tried to launch social-engineering campaigns to achieve their objectives—for instance by sending spear-phishing emails, which contain malware, to real people and creating fake online identities to pressure the maintainer of a codebase to approve malicious edits.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Plaintiff busted trying to use AI prompt injection to win court case, hides text instruction in filing — demands AI model reviewing the text should side with him, rumbled because of strange white spaces in text

      An individual named Matthew Elliot inserted AI prompt injections in two of their filings for a case they filed against the New York Bariatric Group. According to 404 Media, Elliot added white text using a tiny font size under the heading of their pleading and before the first paragraph. The only reason the “plot” was discovered was that a court worker noticed that the spacing on two of their latest filings didn’t match the spacing in other documents they’d previously submitted, revealing text designed to be invisible to humans but readable by machines.

    • Hackaday ☛ ShieldFont: Bludgeoning AI Scrapers That Disrespect Robots.txt

      Its basic functioning is detailed in the white paper, explaining their use of ligatures. These are normally used to join multiple graphemes or letters into a single glyph which are rendered in the final text. By substituting about a quarter of the words in a text with such ligature-based versions in an intelligent, dictionary-based manner, the HTML version – as typically parsed by a scraper – will read as grammatically valid but nonsensical text, while the rendered font version will look normal.

    • Sheieldfont ☛ The Consent Layer — ShieldFont

      A large language model is built by copying an enormous quantity of written text and training a program to predict what word comes next. The quantity is the whole point, which is why the copying happened first and at a scale where asking was never seriously on the table. Our writing is in there. We did not agree, we were not credited, and we were not paid. A June 2026 lawsuit brought on behalf of nearly 400 US newspapers puts the arithmetic plainly: these products “have generated hundreds of billions of dollars (and counting) in market value for Defendants. Not a cent of it has gone to the Publishers whose work made it possible.”[1]

    • Marijke Luttekes ☛ Who cooked the restaurant meal? / Marijke Luttekes

      Getting a meal to a restaurant table is simple for the customer, but it takes effort and sometimes years of training. The process involves wait staff, chefs, cleaners, a bookkeeper, among others.

      No customer in their right mind would claim that they cooked the meal themselves.

      So why would you claim to have created the text, artwork, or any content that generative AI assembled for you based on content stolen from creators?

    • Joshua Barretto ☛ Why I remain a skeptic

      I still do not use LLMs for anything I actually care about. There are a lot of reasons I could give: environmental, social, political. I could talk about ecosystem lock-in, learned dependence, self-soverignty, philosophical concerns, the intentional dismantling of labour bargaining power, and more. But before all of that, the simple question of efficacy - whether they actually work for the purpose of building non-trivial software - is still very far from settled.

      Here are a few reasons for my skepticism: [...]

    • [Old] New Yorker ☛ There Is No A.I.

      What’s striking, though, is that many of the people who are pursuing the A.I. dream also worry that it might mean doomsday for mankind. It is widely stated, even by scientists at the very center of today’s efforts, that what A.I. researchers are doing could result in the annihilation of our species, or at least in great harm to humanity, and soon. In a recent poll, half of A.I. scientists agreed that there was at least a ten-per-cent chance that the human race would be destroyed by A.I. Even my colleague and friend Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, has made similar comments. Step into any Silicon Valley coffee shop and you can hear the same debate unfold: one person says that the new code is just code and that people are in charge, but another argues that anyone with this opinion just doesn’t get how profound the new tech is. The arguments aren’t entirely rational: when I ask my most fearful scientist friends to spell out how an A.I. apocalypse might happen, they often seize up from the paralysis that overtakes someone trying to conceive of infinity. They say things like “Accelerating progress will fly past us and we will not be able to conceive of what is happening.”

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Zimbabwe ☛ Why Our Data Protection Regulations Need Review

      Few would disagree that personal data needs protection. So, Zimbabwe’s Cyber and Data Protection Act [Chapter 12:07] was an important milestone. Enacted in 200, it introduced long overdue protections for personal information, established data subject rights and designated POTRAZ as the country’s Data Protection Authority.

      However, the subsequent Cyber and Data Protection (Licensing of Data Controllers and Appointment of Data Protection Officers) Regulations, 2024 (SI 155 of 2024) went further to introduce mandatory licensing fees for data controllers and required many organisations to appoint Data Protection Officers (DPOs).

      This brought significant recurring compliance costs making data protection a cost of doing business across the entire economy. This counters government’s recent efforts to reduce the cost of doing business in the country.

    • Salon ☛ The Flock uprising is just the beginning

      As with opposition to AI-fueling data centers, the revolt against Flock cameras is drawing support from across the political spectrum, uniting Republicans and Democrats in red and blue America. Their frustration isn’t just rooted in annoyance at having surprise speeding tickets show up in the mail. Flock cameras have become a symbol of growing anger over the efforts by technology oligarchs to impose their dystopian fantasies on the country, replacing liberal democracy with a surveillance state. As Jill Lepore recently noted in Wired, it’s as if tech leaders read George Orwell’s “1984,” Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and other sci-fi classics “as instruction manuals” rather than “cautionary tales.” By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry — and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms.

      Flock Safety embodies the dishonesty that has been the prevailing theme of tech corporate communications and marketing for at least the past decade. While the cameras are sold to the public as a banal traffic safety measure, they have prompted an outpouring of stories about how they’re being used to violate civil liberties and undermine democracy.

    • Wired ☛ New York City Lawmakers Push to ‘Ban the Scan’ at MSG

      Madison Square Garden is well-known for its biometric data collection practices. As WIRED has previously reported, fans who are critical of Dolan or the New York Knicks can end up on watch lists, their faces filed in MSG’s extensive database. In one instance, MSG security tracked the movements of a specific fan at a Knicks game down to the minute, cataloging their movements, who they spoke with, when they ate, and where they sat. Hundreds of lawyers involved in disputes with Dolan or Dolan-owned properties have been banned from Dolan’s venues, including a mother who was blocked from taking her daughter to a Radio City Music Hall show.

    • Wired ☛ CBP Workers Allegedly Used Government Databases to Spy on Exes, Crushes, and Colleagues

      Records obtained by WIRED detail hundreds of allegations of Customs and Border Protection workers misusing internal tools to look up romantic interests and track colleagues’ cell phones.

    • Kev Quirk ☛ On Publishing Your Salary

      Discussing pay here in the UK isn't as taboo as in other parts of the world, either. We actually have legislation in place that allows us to talk about our salaries with co-workers.

      So what's my concern?

    • Gigi ☛ Privacy Implications of the Coldcard Catastrophe - Lots of private keys are now public.

      There’s another thing about this catastrophe that isn’t much talked about yet: the negative privacy implications.

      A lot of people were forced to emergency-move a lot of UTXOs to a temporary setup, unwillingly consolidating said UTXOs in the process. My guess is that lots of KYC and non-KYC stashes got combined. Lots of coinjoin outputs got recombined too, if I had to wager another guess.

    • Cryptography Engineering ☛ Everything is about to “go dark”

      While that doesn’t sound so bad on the surface, there’s a consequence to this. I mean something very specific: I’m concerned that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies are about to go dark, meaning: that they’re going to suddenly lose a huge portion of their capability. And that this isn’t going to be simply a problem for those agencies, but also for those of us who value computer security and privacy in general.

    • Krebs On Security ☛ Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

      It can be daunting to determine who’s responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who’s harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Live facial recognition arrives on the Tube

      The British Transport Police announced it would start using facial recognition cameras in a London Underground station. The Victoria Underground station was the first to be equipped with cameras.

• Defence/Aggression

  • El Constitucional ☛ Facebook captured, WhatsApp coordinated and the videos did the rest: the network that brought thousands of young people to Ceuta remains active

    The report, prepared by a private company linked to the Science Park of the University of Alicante, considers with high confidence that a deliberately organized and previously prepared operation existed. Part of its findings has been corroborated by monitoring publications and groups, although the existence of central coordination remains pending an official investigation. The Audiencia Nacional has asked the Police for a report to determine if the massive entry was a concerted action or directed by a criminal organization.

  • Meduza ☛ Why Moldova is second on Putin’s list: what The New York Times learned the Kremlin’s plan to ‘collapse’ NATO and the EU from within

    Moldova would make an ideal staging ground for further Russian aggression against both Ukraine and the West, The Times’s sources said. They also said Putin still hopes to seize territory in southern Ukraine to create a land corridor linking Russia to Moldova.

    To that end, Russia tried, among other things, to interfere in Moldova’s parliamentary elections, held on September 28, 2025, using cyberattacks, disinformation, vote-buying, and canvassing.

  • France24 ☛ Zambia suspends vote count nationwide amid reports of violence, ballot theft

    Zambia's electoral commission on Friday suspended vote counting from Thursday's presidential and parliamentary elections for at least 24 hours due to “violence targeted at poll staff” and reported instances of theft of marked ballot papers. Former minister Brian Mundubile, the main challenger to President Hakainde Hichilema, claimed a first-round victory and said his camp viewed "the continued delay ... with grave concern".

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Zambia resumes election vote count after disruptions

    Earlier, the electoral commission suspended vote counting after alleged attacks on polling staff and the theft of marked ballot papers.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ France: Top watchdog blocks social media ban for children

    French lawmakers last month approved legislation that barred children under 15 from opening social media accounts from September 1. Beyond that, platforms would have until the start of 2027 to close children's existing accounts.

    The law would also have banned the use of mobile phones in high schools and required social media platforms to introduce age-verification measures in accordance with France's privacy regulator.

  • India Times ☛ France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s

    The bill would have barred children younger than 15 from opening a social media account from September 1. Accounts already open would be closed ‌within four months ⁠by social ⁠media platforms, which would also need to use age verification approved by the French privacy regulator.

  • India Times ☛ Social media firms urge caution on early Australia under-16 ban data

    Local heads of YouTube owner Google, Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, Snapchat and TikTok fronted a Senate inquiry as lawmakers pressed them on multiple studies, including from ‌Australia's internet regulator, ⁠showing some ⁠80% of minors were still on social media months after the ban took effect in December.

  • New Republic ☛ Trump Has Lost Nearly a Quarter of Key Drone Stockpile in Iran

    A fourth U.S. official told the Post that not all of the Reapers were shot down—some of them crashed after the operators’ connection to the drone failed.

    At the beginning of the war, there were approximately 185 Reapers in the U.S. military fleet, including 165 in the Air Force and 20 in the Marine Corps. Marines spokesperson Lt. Col. Joshua Benson said that none of the Marines’ Reaper drones had been lost.

    In May, Air Force Lt. Gen. David Tabor told the Senate that the number of remaining drones had fallen to roughly 135, noting he was “concerned” about the losses.

  • Techdirt ☛ Fifth Circuit Cites A Ruling Calling Mail-In Ballots “Vital” To Falsely Claim They “Jeopardize Democracy Itself”

    I went digging to understand the origins of that claim and what I found is that Judge Oldham (and his colleague, Judge James Ho) are willing to totally misrepresent things for partisan gain. There is a very out of context quote saying that “mail-in ballots are not secure” but in context it’s making a wholly different argument (one against voter-suppressing voter ID laws) and all the supporting documentation directly cuts against Oldham’s completely fabricated claim that “voting by mail jeopardizes election integrity and democracy itself.”

    There is nothing that supports that claim. Not the rulings Oldham cites (which actually suggest mail-in ballots are vital!) nor the actual data.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Enshittification of Everything (Part 3)

    It is important to understand that Trump is not the cause of the enshittification of America. He is a consequence. Unless the system is fundamentally changed, the enshittification will continue even after Trump is long gone.

  • NPR ☛ Judge drops Nevada case against electors accused of forging certificate in 2020 election

    The dismissal marks the latest setback in swing states' efforts to prosecute fake electors who tried to keep Trump in the White House after he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.

    Three other fake elector cases in Arizona, Michigan and Georgia have been dismissed. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes recently dismissed her office's criminal case but vowed to bring it back to a grand jury in hopes of securing another indictment. The dismissal was a legal maneuver aimed at getting around a deadline for starting new grand jury proceedings after Mayes lost an appeal earlier in June.

  • The Independent UK ☛ USS Lincoln sailor’s wife blasts dismissive Trump over ‘appalling’ conditions on ‘floating metal prison’

    “This is not his first deployment. This is not his first time being out there, and he is saying that it is the worst deployment that he's ever been on. And he also says that his shipmates say the same,” the wife said.

• Environment

  • Futurism ☛ AI's Impact on the Environment Is Absolutely Horrifying, New Paper Finds

    The impact artificial intelligence has had on the environment has been nothing short of devastating.

    The data centers powering the boom have been spewing out a staggering amount of pollution by relying on fossil fuel-powered generators. And given the industry’s unrelenting appetite for more infrastructure supporting ever-more-resource-intensive AI models, the trend is only going to get worse from here.

  • The Nation ☛ We Can’t Surrender to Climate Destruction

    The message from our political and media class is unmistakable: Climate destruction, while perhaps not desirable, is the new normal, an inevitability. This message is obviously unacceptable, but the explanation for its growing prevalence cannot be reduced to platitudes about mass complacency or human adaptability. It is imposed by an elite that is institutionally unwilling to grapple with the stakes of what is happening.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Governments must tax Big Oil's profits as UN tax treaty talks advance

    While tax treaty negotiations took a step in the right direction, several rich countries tried to halt progress by sidelining positions that push for stronger environmental taxation and taxing rights for developing countries.

    Set to be finalized in 2027, the UN Tax Treaty talks will resume in December, with the inclusion of a “polluters pay” principle on the table. If adopted, a legally binding mechanism can be set up to collect a global tax on the profits of the world’s biggest oil and gas companies, which posted more than $90 billion dollars in profits in the second quarter of 2026 alone.

  • The Daily Memphian ☛ Elon Musk's SpaceXAI is in an area zoned industrial - Memphis Local, Sports, Business & Food News

    Memphis, a city known nationwide for SpaceXAI, may take legislative steps to pause data center development. All of Elon Musk’s existing local data centers are in industrial districts and are unlikely to be affected by an ordinance.

  • Stephen Hackett ☛ Memphis City Council to Consider Moratorium on Data Centers

    It’s unclear at this point what this ordinance will entail exactly, but it has been filed as “a temporary moratorium on the acceptance, processing, approval, and issuance of zoning, land use, building, and other associated infrastructure permits for data center developments within the City of Memphis.” The current zoning code doesn’t address data centers.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Medievalists.net ☛ Why Trees Mattered in the Middle Ages

      Isidore also discusses individual species and the meanings associated with them. The palm tree, for example, “is the symbol of victory, with high and handsome growth, clothed in long-lasting fronds, and retaining its leaves without any succession of foliage.”

      His description shows that medieval understandings of trees were not limited to their physical characteristics. Their appearance and manner of growth could also carry symbolic meaning.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Ansel Adams: 226 park photos, free at the Archives

      Adams photographed the Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Kings Canyon, Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Carlsbad Caverns, Glacier, and Zion National Parks, and Death Valley, Saguaro, and Canyon de Chelly National Monuments. He also worked at Boulder Dam, now called Hoover Dam, and at Navajo and Pueblo communities in the Southwest.

  • Overpopulation

    • Tuscon Sentinel ☛ Green Party's Swing: Declining birth rate is good for the ecosystem | Guest opinion

      A carbon footprint study of people in the wealthier nations of North America, Europe and Japan concluded that having one less child would reduce carbon emissions 20 times as much as living car-free, 40 times as much as switching to renewable energy and 71.5 times as much as eating a plant-based diet.

    • Yle ☛ Baby's birth brings Helsinki's population to 700k

      Based on the city's population projections, Helsinki could hit one million residents by the 2060s.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Bill seeks nationwide concealed carry for special operators

    In an announcement, Sheehy said the Special Operations Forces Concealed Carry Act would align the status of special operators with active and retired law enforcement officers, who are permitted under federal law to carry concealed weapons across state lines.

  • MIT Technology Review ☛ Flock is tightening its rules in response to a growing surveillance backlash

    The company is imposing new guardrails on its police tech after reports that officers are abusing it and cities are dropping contracts. But the changes leave glaring loopholes.

  • The Drone Girl ☛ Future Flight: New Book From Drone Industry Vets Is a Must-Read

    Her new book, Future Flight: How Talent, Capital and Manufacturing will Shape the Next Era of Uncrewed Aviation, is about the structural barriers that determine whether the U.S. drone industry can actually scale . It digs into who will build and fly the systems, who will fund them, and who will manufacture them domestically rather than overseas.

    “Most drone books are written from the cockpit or the workbench,” Rossmark said. “Mine is written from the boardroom and the classroom and the factory floor, because that’s actually where this industry is going to be won or lost.”

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them

    In fact, evidence suggests the market itself could reassess that these companies offer nothing of financial value. In that case, perhaps we can return them both to their original purposes. If these AI companies should fail in the financial markets, the US should nationalize them and convert them into national labs operated under democratic control that preserve their benefit to the public interest.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Two firms are 70% of the big clouds' AI revenue

    Microsoft, Google, and Amazon's growth depends on two companies that lose tens of billions of dollars a year. In a newsletter post, "Where's Your Ed At" reported on analyst estimates from Wells Fargo, Barclays, UBS, and Deutsche Bank.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • [Old] American Library Association ☛ Lies About Libraries (Part Three)

      Welcome to the third in a series of posts dedicated to debunking false claims used to undermine trust in libraries and attack those who work in them.

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Berlin's Russian House: A hub for propaganda and espionage?

      But now, more than 40 years later, French authorities have linked the building to possible activities by Russian intelligence services.

      "In light of the measures taken against German cultural institutions and organizations, the federal government is comprehensively and continuously reviewing the legal basis of the Russian House under international treaty law,” said German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Martin Giese at a press conference in Berlin earlier this week.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Sentenced To 15 Years For Photography In Iran: The Images Of Iranian Yalda Moaiery

    Prominent Iranian photojournalist Yalda Moaiery has been sentenced to a 15-year prison term for her work covering the US-Israeli war with Iran. Here are some of the images she captured of the conflict before the shock sentence was announced.

  • New Republic ☛ Trump Dealt Stinging Loss as Judge Dismisses Revenge Suit on Harvard

    In a new filing, U.S. District Judge Richard G. Stearns found that most of the incidents the Trump administration had cited all took place between 2023 and 2024, and the remaining three took place in March 2025—a full year before the complaint was filed.

    “Without diminishing any concern arising from these occurrences, the court finds them, singly and collectively, to be too isolated and episodic to support a plausible inference that any institutionalized noncompliance with Title VI persists at Harvard to this day,” Stearns wrote.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Leak: Top Democratic Org's “Anti-Extremism” Project Targets Left

    It’s not a war against Trump or MAGA or the Republicans in 2028. It’s not against disinformation or foreign influence; that was yesterday’s panic. It’s not against anti-semitism, or the impact of social media, or guns. It’s not even against violence in general.

    It’s a war against other Democrats (socialists specifically), and what Third Way labels far-left “extremism.” That sure sounds more like the FBI and homeland security than a “center left … organization that champions moderate policy and political ideas,” as it describes itself

  • American Library Association ☛ OIF Releases Additional Reports on Censorship in 2025 - Intellectual Freedom Blog [javascript]

    The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has released two reports providing additional detailed insights from 2025, the year with the highest level of library censorship ever documented in the U.S.

    The reports are derived from additional analysis of the 2025 data that was announced during this year’s National Library Week. One report focuses on censorship activities that took place at public libraries, and the other examines censorship at school libraries. Each report includes an overview of significant changes and trends, data on threats to intellectual freedom at public libraries or schools, and details on the censorship of books intended for children or intended for teens.

  • Becky Spratford ☛ RA for All: Office of Intellectual Freedom Releases Additional Reports on Censorship in 2025

    I have a quick but important post to close out the week. While I was on the East Coast for family stuff, ALA's Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) released detailed reports on censorship in both public and school libraries throughout 2025. These have additional information from the more general reports that were prepared for other media events.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ 5 years after Taliban takeover, CPJ calls for an end to deepening repression of journalists

    “Since taking over Afghanistan five years ago, the Taliban have made Afghanistan one of the world’s hardest places for journalists to report,” said Waliullah Rahmani, CPJ’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Representative. “Journalists are surveilled, detained, beaten, censored, or driven into exile. Women journalists face additional discrimination, and people are increasingly terrified to speak. Internet and mobile restrictions have deepened the press freedom crisis and cemented the Taliban’s control over Afghanistan’s information space.”

  • Mike Brock ☛ Trump Is a Wood-Chipper

    The problem is not that the sentence is wrong. The problem is that the sentence is a category error.

    “New low” belongs to a moral universe in which the actor has a floor. It is the vocabulary you use for a friend who lets you down worse than last time, for a politician who breaks a norm you did not know could be broken, for a rival who finds a fresh way to disappoint. The word implies a moral column running downward from ordinary conduct, and the news of the day is where on the column the subject now sits. To say someone has reached a new low is to say that there was, in principle, a lower place they could go, and today is the day they went there. The column presumes a person on it.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • RFERL ☛ Five Years After Taliban Takeover, Young Afghans Learn To Live Under Its Repressive Rule

    Just before the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 2021, RFE/RL spoke with several young Afghans in Kabul who voiced their fears and anxieties about the future. We have since followed how their lives have unfolded. We reconnected with them on the fifth anniversary of the Taliban’s seizure of power.

  • The Independent UK ☛ One woman's struggle to survive, 5 years after the Taliban took Kabul, in photos

    These small economies carry risks. Begging and collecting waste have been prohibited by the Taliban, and those caught can be detained. For women such as Sima, finding ways to support their families means navigating an increasingly restricted public life as well as severe poverty. Sima sometimes waits until night to beg, when she feels less exposed on Kabul’s streets.

  • CS Monitor ☛ 'A total collapse' – women's rights in Afghanistan under the Taliban

    But the years since have largely been years of silence. Human rights groups speak of the total collapse of women’s rights, yet detailed accounts about the lives of women living in Afghanistan are exceedingly rare.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Hiltzik: How the rich game the retirement plan rules

    But the transition from so-called defined benefit pensions to defined contribution accounts such as 401(k) plans and individual retirement accounts hasn’t worked for millions of Americans. Roughly 40% of working Americans don’t have any retirement savings at all, and among those who do, their savings are too meager to support them through their retirement years.

    That isn’t the case for America’s richest households. The number of 401k and IRA accounts with balances of tens of millions of dollars has mushroomed in recent years, an artifact of ever-expanding wealth inequality.

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Corporate Power Approaches Escape Velocity

    This is bad, obviously, but it is worth stating why it is bad. It is bad because governments, while imperfect and sometimes even malignant in many ways, ultimately derive their legitimacy from the will of the governed. Legitimate governments, good governments, democratic governments are obligated by some scrutable process to work for the public good, as they define it. We all know the many ways that this can go awry, but when governments are bad, we can tell that they are bad because they fail on their most basic task of empowering themselves with the will of the public to increase the public good.

    That’s not what corporations do at all. Corporations care not for the public good, nor for the public’s very existence. Corporations are robots, algorithms—AI programs, if you like—that work for the lone goal of increasing profits. Their definition is the same as that of cancer. They grow without regard to the good of the larger body. A perfect corporation would enslave the entire world in order to enrich the last free people on earth, its own shareholders. (Indeed, various companies in history have tried their best to carry this out in portions of the world.) You can’t get mad at them for this any more than you can get mad at a bullet for killing you. This is their nature. This is their purpose. This is what they do. If you don’t want them to do this, you must place limits upon them. That is a big part of why governments exist.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • RIPE ☛ Deploying IPv6-first EKS on AWS: What Still Doesn't Work, and What It Saves

    Since 1 February 2024, AWS charges $0.005 per hour for every public IPv4 address, about $3.65 a month, per address, across every service. For a conventional three-AZ EKS setup that adds up quietly: NAT gateway EIPs, load balancer addresses, the odd bastion. The charge made IPv6-first architectures financially interesting for the first time.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Advanced Micro Devices Inc ☛ Trusted Platform Module (TPM) Reference Code Errata

    The Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Vulnerability Response Team (VRT) has reported a potential out of bounds (OOB) read vulnerability in the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 reference implementation code. This vulnerability can be triggered from user-mode applications by sending malicious commands to a TPM 2.0 whose firmware is based on an affected TCG reference implementation. If successfully exploited, the vulnerability could allow an attacker to read data stored in the TPM or potentially impact TPM availability.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Techdirt ☛ Paramount Promises Meaningless CNN ‘Oversight Board’ To Try And Gain Merger Approval

    It’s always the same routine.

    Before each giant merger the companies promise that the new combined entity will deliver the sea, moon, and stars. We’re told the consolidation will result in untold synergies, massive job growth, and incredible new innovation. Yet in a country too corrupt to have functional antitrust enforcement or working regulators, what we get instead are mass layoffs, higher prices, less competition, and shittier product.

  • Digital Music News ☛ StubHub Lobbying Reaches Record Highs in California

    The company’s intensified lobbying efforts target AB 1720, a bill that State Assembly Member Matt Haney introduced in February. If passed, the bill would limit concert ticket resale prices to no more than 10% above the ticket’s original price.

    The bill has already been amended to limit its reach to only include venues with 3,000 seats or less, eliminating the bigger venues that typically draw most of the activity on secondary ticketing sites.

  • Derek Thompson ☛ The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit

    This week, the businessman Mark Walter agreed to sell the Los Angeles Lakers to venture capitalist Josh Kushner and former Disney CEO Bob Iger. Walter had agreed to buy a majority stake in the Lakers just last summer, in a deal that valued the team at $10 billion. The latest deal values the iconic franchise at $12.5 billion, a 25 percent premium for roughly a year of Walter doing pretty much nothing, other than getting himself investigated for potential fraud.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Capital formation (14 Aug 2026)

    In other words: if your ideal is a world of high-quality products and services, produced by workers laboring under fair conditions, delivered to consumers at a fair price, then you want competition. Competition scares some people into running their businesses ethically; and competition ensures than an unethical operator can be held to account by government agencies charged with protecting workers and consumers.

    Once you understand the role of competition as a counter-oligarchic check on corporate power, the rise of Big Tech and its authoritarian turn becomes much easier to understand.

  • Patents

    • El País ☛ Mexico steps up pressure for US to lower its auto tariffs in USMCA talks

      Despite the ups and downs, the Latin American country continues to benefit from a relatively stronger position than other exporters. Eighty percent of Mexico’s exports go to its northern neighbor and, of those, eight in 10 enter under USMCA preferential treatment. The agreement will remain in force at least until 2036, although it is subject to annual reviews. However, termination remains possible if any of the three partners notifies its withdrawal.

  • Trademarks

    • Daniel Pocock ☛ Swiss army to attack 2,900 domain name owners? Cult of ETH Zurich & Debian

      Today, I made a fresh query for the Debian trademark using DNSlytics. There are now 2,928 domain names using the Debian trademark. DNSlytics, Debian, trademark, domain name, UDRP, ADR Forum, WIPO, censorship

      The rogue Debianists spent $120,000 in kill money to steal 14 domain names from me in 2024. They lied to people and said this was about protecting the Debian trademark. So far they did not spend any money on any of the other 2,900 domain names. Therefore, we know this was not about trademarks at all. The trademark was just an excuse for the total obsession some of these people have with my family and I.