Leftovers

• Chris Enns ☛ Reaching the End of My Selfie a Day for a Year Project

  As I write this on Monday, August 17th, there’s two more “selfie of the day” posts left for me to do before wrapping up the project. I thought I’d do a bit of a review of my thoughts about this project, as well as write about my plans for what I’m doing for the next daily project when this is over.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Medievalists.net ☛ Viking Ship Burial in Norway May Have Been Built Over Bronze Age Grave

    A new archaeological investigation of a monumental Viking Age ship burial in Norway has uncovered evidence that the grave may have been constructed on top of a much older burial mound. Archaeologists examining Grønhaug on the island of Karmøy have found traces that could date back to the Bronze Age, potentially confirming a theory first proposed a century ago.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — When Errors Become Consensus: Science’s Self-Correction Can No Longer Keep Up

    Liebig’s case illustrates a broader property of knowledge systems: once ideas become embedded across research, practice, and communication, correction is often slow, uneven, and incomplete.

    That latency, the gap between error creation and error correction, has always mattered in science. For much of modern scholarly history, the primary integrity concern has been the presence of flawed or fraudulent individual studies within the literature. The working assumption was that science is self-correcting: errors might enter the record, but replication, critique, and accumulation of evidence would eventually identify and displace them.

    That assumption depends, however, on a critical condition: that the rate of error correction keeps pace with the rate of error creation. Historically, errors entered the literature, but diffusion was slow. Reviews took time to compile. Textbooks were updated gradually. The inertia of the system, while frustrating in many contexts, acted as a form of containment.

    But that containment no longer works.

  • Marvin Borner ☛ A Dual View on Syntax

    Nowadays, the λλ-calculus is almost always introduced in the same way: There is the widely-accepted minimal syntax, potentially using some surprising rule for parentheses, or some very unusual way of declaring substitutions – no surprises. Today, I want to show a completely different (dual!) view on its syntax, that you might find surprising, and I have found to be almost more natural. It is what you observe when walking through a λλ-term with different strategies, and writing down the views as you go.

  • Joseph Lorenzo Hall ☛ When (DNA) Signatures Aren't Enough

    In a recent Science research article, King et al. report using generative genome models to design complete viral genomes. Of nearly 300 designs they synthesized, 16 produced viable bacteriophages—phages, viruses that infect bacteria. In an accompanying Science Perspective, Inglesby and Hanke turn to the biosafety and biosecurity implications.

    The headline is straightforward: AI can now help design complete viral genomes. One result in the paper points to a harder problem for defenders.

  • John D Cook ☛ Proportion of 1s in a Hadamard matrix

    The first post in the recent series of posts on Hadamard matrices describes a way of constructing new Hadamard matrices from two other Hadamard matrices by taking their Kronecker product.

    Starting with a Hadamard matrix H0 and a Hadamard matrix G, you can construct a sequence of Hadamard matrices by

    Hn+1 = G ⊗ Hn

    for positive integers n. This is known as the generalized Sylvester method.

• Career/Education

  • The Dissenter ☛ I Received An Award From The Illinois Library Association

    I will let the press release from the ILA’s intellectual freedom committee take over from here. The committee emphasized that the Elmwood Park Advocate had used the public library’s meeting room “without incident to host ‘Community Conversations,’ nonpartisan gatherings on topics like traffic safety and support for senior residents.” But as the newsletter’s reporting became “more pointed,” the library’s posture shifted.

  • Unmitigated Risk ☛ Hurst University

    It has no campus, no accreditation, and no admissions process. Joining the family is enough to get you enrolled. Graduation is another matter.

    There is only one requirement. By the time you leave the house, you should be capable of building a future for yourself.

  • Loura ☛ Blind to the Feeling of Advancement

    Have you ever read an autobiographical account about someone? I’ve read a bunch and as a kid (embarrassingly as a young adult as well) I thought they were just making stuff up. It is impossible to have a past that way. At least that’s how it appeared to me. That version of memory, the episodic kind that encompasses recalling events or episodes in your life and the autobiographical kind that builds a personal history and a sense of self, is largely locked off to me. I can grab and hold on to the factual information but everything else fades and runs together like a chalk drawing in the rain. Gone when the weather clears. If I can’t hold onto my past, what am I to compare the present to?

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Intel says it will launch new core with Nova Lake on desktop first, not in data center — VP Robert Hallock hopes enthusiasts ‘do the math’ compared to AMD

    Intel will launch its new core with Nova Lake on desktop first, not in the data center. Tom’s Hardware Premium recently sat down with Intel VP and general manager of the enthusiast channel business Robert Hallock and asked about his reaction to AMD launching Zen 6 first in the data center with new EPYC Venice CPUs — breaking with over a decade of AMD leading with a client release for its new architectures. Hallock opened up about Intel’s enthusiast roadmap and said the company is “very serious” about executing that roadmap.

  • Lee Peterson ☛ A compact camera and a phone for phone stuff

    I guess to summarise, with using a dedicated camera more my phone becomes less of an interesting device for me. It can be light and get out of the way.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Derek Kędziora ☛ The secret to longevity

    It turns out that the real secret to longevity is to live in an area with poor record keeping. Something is very wrong with modern longevity is a nice New Yorker piece questioning the whole “Blue Zone” idea.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Sean Conner ☛ Yet more noise on emails from other Sean Conners on the Intarwebs

    But one thing not brought up in the Hacker News thread is that Gmail supports custom domains. So if some other Sean Conner were to have Gmail support email for example.org, then I would expect seanconner@example.org (our hypothetical Sean Conner who is not me) to be distinct from seanconner@gmail.com (which is me). And now I have to wonder if this might be a cause for some of the issues being reported? Google is a Leviathan system with millions of moving parts where a slight mishap (like a timeout or some lost packets on a database lookup or even a bug on a system not yet updated) causes email being delivered to seanconner@example.org to end up being delivered to seanconner@gmail.com.

  • Business Insider ☛ Layoff fears are pushing some visa holders out of Big Tech

    When Vinit Juneja started as a software engineer at Amazon last year, he knew he might leave one day for a more attractive role.

    But after watching colleagues lose their jobs during two rounds of layoffs that eliminated roughly 30,000 positions at Amazon, another factor took on new importance: job security.

  • Xbox Pulls Funding for Other Projects, But Kojima’s ‘OD’ Survives

    According to an IGN report, a source familiar with Microsoft’s plans confirmed that Kojima Productions continues to develop OD. Furthermore, Xbox Game Studios remains the publisher. Microsoft is currently reevaluating its gaming slate to focus on fewer popular IPs. Therefore, the survival of this horror-genre-subverting pitch shows Microsoft still values the project.

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

    • 404 Media ☛ We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

      We placed a tracking device in a shipment of rare books to see which AI company was buying it, and found an Amazon facility where Amazon scans and destroys books.

    • Futurism ☛ Amazon Caught Destroying Rare Books to Train AI

      In an investigation by 404 Media, a bookseller suspected that an order they received for 1,000 books on Biblio, a marketplace where buyers can remain anonymous, was for an AI company. So to get to the bottom of the mystery, they agreed to place an Apple AirTag between the pages of one of the volumes.

      They tracked the shipment to a site at a massive Amazon warehouse in Nevada, where workers say their job is to strip the spines off of books they receive so they can quickly scan their pages, destroying them in the process.

    • New York Times ☛ AI Slop Is Everywhere. Spotify, LinkedIn and Others Have Had Enough.

      The digital sewage heap has sprawled across tech platforms, cheapening meaningful content and polluting the information ecosystem, as chatbots and video generators continue to advance.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ Irregular says ‘human oversight’ responsible for AI sandbox escape incidents

      Irregular said this was due to “human oversight,” and that they typically do a background check to ensure they’re not using a real company for cybersecurity tests. The instructions provided to the model also included the target’s name and “internal addresses within our network” where the model could go to find the simulated environment.

    • 404 Media ☛ The Future of Deepfakes and the Decline of Reality (With Hany Farid)

      We started talking to Hany regularly in 2017, when Sam first reported on deepfakes. As that technology evolved and changed how we perceive reality, so have our conversations. I wanted to talk to him today on the podcast so you could hear of those conversations, and so that Hany and I could zoom out, reflect on the past few years, and speculate about where we might be headed.

    • Tracy Durnell ☛ Authenticating digital works without ‘detectors’

      Right now, most people hate generative AI in their art. This may or may not remain true — a wider audience may come to tolerate its use over time — but for now, using genAI for creative work you want to sell as art is essentially verboten because audiences regard it as inauthentic, just like plagiarism, and don’t want to be associated with it. (Other reasons, too, but for now we’ll focus on authenticity.)

      Traditional markers of aura are not available online. I’ve written about alternate ways online audiences interpret aura of digital artworks — but I also wonder whether digital arenas, where aura is harder to perceive, might lean into purity and tradition instead. Both the purity and tradition views of authenticity would see anything made with genAI as intrinsically inauthentic. From the perspective of purity, genAI taints a work with the unnatural, the inhuman; through the lens of tradition, genAI represents a change in how artwork is made, producing cultural goods akin to polyester.

    • Ray Myers ☛ Reading Code Considered Helpful

      Quick strategy huddle. I’m not Sun Tzu over here, but those seem like weak-sauce countermeasures if you mean to help someone “fight back” against a “bombing”. They suggest pushing workarounds onto the user and adding more agents. Think for a second. What’s missing?

      We could use fewer agents! The situation clearly indicates that we’ve deployed them in places where the risk/reward wasn’t what we expected. What’s worse, we’re now asking workers to spend long stretches of time interacting with tools we know psychologically manipulate them. That’s. Not. Healthy.

    • Jim Nielsen ☛ Oops, Should’ve Thought of That

      Meanwhile, a hobbyist or amateur doesn’t even have the capability or experience to understand the assumed intent of an LLM until it’s too late and users have been affected.

      Software we use everyday, software that many aspects of our lives increasingly depend on, needs less unintended consequences. Less “Oops, should’ve thought of that.”

    • Six Colors ☛ LLMs aren’t writing

      This is why I find his defense so puzzling. Because a large language model could not be further away from those ideals. In the title of his piece, John describes the watermarking system as “a perversion of writing.” That might be the case if AIs were writing. But they are not; they are simply generating text. Those two things are not the same. As per the premise of John’s piece, writing is about carefully picking the words and crafting the meaning of what you’re saying, things that AI do not—and patently cannot—do.

      LLMs do not care about the words that they pick because they cannot care about anything.

    • Don Marti ☛ LLMs: damned if you don’t, worse if you do

      The Carlson Lab at the Yale School of Public Health has done some research and held some discussions, and posted The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI.

      Our lab has agreed on a blanket ban on the use of generative AI for writing….Using generative AI inherently exposes you to the risk of career-ending accusations of plagiarism.

      Even though there’s a lot of pressure on academics to adopt AI or be left behind!!1! this is a lot bigger deal. Especially for this particular research team.

    • Dmitri Sotnikov ☛ (iterate think thoughts): A practical workflow for LLM-assisted development

      When LLMs work, it can feel like magic, but when they fail, it feels like you are arguing with a confident bullshit artist. It took me many months of daily use to develop some intuition for where LLMs are likely to produce code that is useful and where they are likely to fail. It also took me a bit of time to figure out how to limit scope and provide enough scaffolding to ensure I get useful results reliably. Having invested the time to learn to use the tool effectively, I very much see the benefits, as I am able to build projects on a scale I would not have attempted before.

      In a way, the process is the inverse of regular programming. We tend to build up programs step by step when writing code by hand as we add each function with intention. LLMs tend to produce a lot of code out of the gate and the focus shifts to whittling the code down to what you actually need.

      A good way to look at the agentic loop is to view the process as a genetic algorithm. Agentic harnesses are effective because you have an evolutionary process happening. The model outputs something roughly correct before the code gets tested, and then the model gets feedback to iterate on the code. Through this process, it gradually converges on a solution that fits the parameters being tested. In that sense, it is not actually all that different from how humans write code either. You almost never solve a non-trivial problem in one shot. You write your first approximation and then iterate on it. The difference is that the LLM can do this process a lot faster.

    • Diomidis Spinellis ☛ blog dds: 2026-08-17 — A controversial proposal for hallucinated references

      Many prestigious scientific venues have suffered from papers containing hallucinated citations. GPTZero reports finding 100 hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers and 50 hallucinations in ICLR 2026 submissions. Hallucinated citations are references generated by an AI system that appear credible but point to sources that do not exist or do not support the claims attributed to them. They may contain plausible-looking but incorrect authors, titles, journals, dates, DOIs, or URLs, making them difficult to detect without thorough verification. Such citations, justifiably, undermine the confidence in both scientific publications and in the process that produces them. How should the scientific community address this issue?

    • Andrew Quinn ☛ Don't use an LLM for your README.mdAndrew Quinn's TILs

      But it has personality, and that doesn’t show through nearly as well in the new README.md. The new one is… dry. There’s no video.3 There are no odd little jokes or flashes of inspiration from yours truly. The point of the project is to make using the shell a joyous act for developers mostly on the newer, younger side of things. The new README instead feels like I wrote it for, say, the Operational Technology folks I talk to at my day job, who actually care4 about things like risk management and say words like “procurement” with a meaning behind them.

    • Futurism ☛ Congressional Staffers Are So Lazy That They're Using AI to Write New Laws

      Employees in both the House and the Senate are making liberal use of the tools, a terrifying new reality that could result in nonsensical language and hallucinations to slip into anything from congressional speeches to emails to laws themselves — if it hasn’t happened already without anybody noticing.

      That’s because there’s practically no oversight on Capitol Hill, as the WP points out. There haven’t been any instances of a staffer being formally disciplined for AI use specifically breaking a patchwork of lax rules, either.

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Anthropic Adds Invisible [slop] Watermark to Claude | EU AI Act Compliance

      The watermark cannot be seen by users, but it can help detect whether Claude was involved in creating a piece of text. Anthropic says the move is mainly linked to new transparency rules under the European Union’s AI Act.

    • Futurism ☛ People Horrified That They'll Be Busted Now That Anthropic Is Watermarking [slop] Content

      Fearless embracers of [slop] are suddenly clutching at their pearls, after Anthropic announced that its Claude chatbot will watermark the text it generates, potentially exposing anyone who wants to get away with using the tech without detection.

      The announcement has caused a meltdown in [slop] circles.

  • Social Control Media

    • International Business Times ☛ YouTube View Counts Set to Climb From August 24 as Platform Retires Old Counting Rules

      The update follows years of informal industry consensus suggesting users had to watch a standard video for roughly 30 seconds before YouTube registered a single view. That legacy benchmark created confusion for creators, particularly after YouTube adopted an instant playback metric for its short-form feed last year.

    • The Verge ☛ YouTube is changing how it counts views to give the numbers a boost

      YouTube says it’s going to keep its original view-counting method under an “engaged views” metric in its Analytics dashboard. As my colleague David Pierce notes, it’s not entirely clear how YouTube counted views before this, but “it’s generally accepted wisdom that you have to watch 30 seconds of a standard YouTube video for it to count.”

    • Carole Cadwalladr ☛ A Digital Lynching [Ed: They spent over a million pounds lawyering up against Carole Cadwalladr; the aim was to discredit her, to make it seem like anything she ever wrote was to be presumed false, plus demoralise her with online mobbing, ritual defamation]

      The media hounding didn’t just continue, it increased.

      [...] Over the weekend, there have been pieces in the UK press about Cambridge University’s failures but almost nothing at all in the mainstream media about the mainstream media’s failures or the role it played in his death.

      Arday was autistic and vulnerable. His friend, a world-leading expert in autism, Simon Baron-Cohen, issued a public warning that he considered him at risk of suicide.

      [...]

      The article the Times paid to algorithmically amplify? It’s an anonymous account from a lone student who complained Arday gave her 70% for an essay when she felt she deserved 75%. It was published in UnHerd then republished in the Telegraph and Times and then pumped out to hundreds of thousands of people across different platforms.

      This is what surveillance capitalism has given us. A recursive feedback loop that sees an ad team select a publication’s most clickbaity articles that leads to an increase in traffic that signals the “public interest” aka appetite to publish more articles. It’s a money machine.

      [...]

      Last week, I wrote somewhat personally about my trial, and I’m going to refer to my own experience again because my practical suggestions are rooted in my lived experience. I went through a pale shadow of what Arday experienced but nevertheless I know many of these names who came for him, these “journalists”, these outlets. Because it’s same ones who came for me. Brendan O’Neill even used that exact same framing. I was a “tragedy” too.

      [...]

      One of my lowest points came in October 2020 after the first hearing in my libel case, the “meaning” hearing. And I have to briefly explain what happened to explain what followed. The judge got to decide the “meaning” of 21 words I’d said in a TED talk - that a Brexit funder had told lies about his relationship with the Russian government. I still can’t explain how on earth, he came to his decision, but Mr Justice Sani decided the words “meant” that I’d said he had illegally taken money from the Russian government. If you respond to that sentence with a what-the-actual-fuck, thank you. I felt like I’d gone mad.

      It was utterly absurd. And it had profound consequences. It meant I had to defend the meaning of the words that the judge had come up with at my trial, not the actual words I’d said. And since I couldn’t defend the judge’s words, I had to withdraw my truth defence.

      That triggered a whole sequence of events, an online and press shitstorm that went on for days. Articles in the right-wing press claimed that it “proved” I’d lied. That I’d “admitted” I’d made it up. That my journalism was utterly discredited. And every fresh article fuelled the online hate machine. The day this happened remains a dismal low point.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Meta child-safety trial: Judge allows star witness and key evidence

      The team of attorneys general can also show jurors select evidence to support those claims at opening statements on Tuesday, weeks before most of it enters the record through witness testimony, Gonzalez Rogers ruled.

      The dual decision is the latest legal blow to the company, which fought hard to keep the blockbuster suit from reaching a jury and has maneuvered aggressively to restrict what can be introduced as evidence at the trial.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Daniel Stenberg ☛ There’s a libcurl.dll in my system32

      My advice: figure out which application that uses this DLL. With tasklist you can check which currently running application that uses a specific DLL, and I have been told there are tools that can scan executable files to find out which ones that use a specific DLL.

      This is not something we can do.

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Hotel Wi-Fi Security: Why You Should Use a VPN

      Microsoft recently documented a campaign it calls CaptiveCrunch, in which attackers compromised hospitality networks and manipulated the traffic passing through captive portals. Guests were redirected to fake browser and operating system updates, device-code phishing pages, and malware delivery infrastructure. The network itself became part of the attack.

      This is why I use a VPN on hotel, airport, conference, café, and other public Wi-Fi. It is not because every hotel is malicious. It is because I have no good reason to trust the path between my device and the [Internet].

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • The Nation ☛ From Urban Housing to Rural Nursing Homes, the Working-Class Fight to Protect Public Goods From Private Buyers

    These conditions are not due to something wrong with public education; they are due to lawmakers’ stripping away all the money. We live in North Carolina, where, for the last two decades, state legislators have prioritized tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy few over public education for the rest of us. Our state now, embarrassingly, ranks 50th in public school funding.

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Ricardo Mendes ☛ A Node on the Web

    Github down… 404 on any repo I visit, just another reason I’m going to switch to code.rmendes.net as primary and github as mirror for my own repos.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Hacking Public Wi-Fi DNS to Steal Credentials

      Criminals are [cracking] into public Wi-Fi devices—at hotels, conference centers, and so on—around the world and changing their DNS settings. The goal is to redirect users to fake login pages and steal their credentials.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Salon ☛ Flock is just the latest example of using surveillance to stalk women

      But there’s been another persistent, unsanctioned use: officers stalking women.

      At least 50 law enforcement officers have been accused or charged with the misuse of Flock or similar tools, and over half of the incidents involve surveillance related to romantic partners, per a recent investigation by The Washington Post. The reports include officers of all genders, but many cases involve a uniformed man stalking a civilian woman — or the people close to her. Forty-six of the cases tallied by The Post involved Flock equipment.

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Google pays $10M to get its hands on Spirit Airlines' business data for AI training

      Much of the information that Google has acquired relates to the airline’s internal operations, and it has not been given access to things such as Spirit’s 97.5 million passenger profiles or its 50 million loyalty program records. To reassure anyone who may have flown with Spirit, Google said it will make sure that all of the data it has acquired will be “rigorously scrubbed” of personally identifiable information by a third-party service provider, before it gets its hands on it.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ What Flock’s defenders are missing

      In short, Flock could design its surveillance to be much narrower. If it did, some of the company’s critics might not cease. Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU, half-joked to me that the most acceptable Flock contract by his standards is “one that is never signed” and emphasized that the best way to set limits on surveillance isn’t with new Flock guidelines but with new laws. (Flock CEO Garrett Langley, for his part, said he’ll “probably always have a different view than the ACLU.”)

    • The Record ☛ Nearly 750k had financial info, SSNs leaked in South Carolina loan company breach

      The company, Heights Finance, published a warning to customers last week about the data breach and told regulators in Texas on Friday that 734,828 people were affected. Heights Finance operates dozens of personal loan companies across Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Texas and South Carolina.

      The stolen information includes contact information like addresses; banking data ranging from account numbers to routing numbers; and government IDs that include Social Security numbers, tax IDs, driver’s license numbers or state IDs. The breach also included any personal information shared during customer service interactions.

    • Bitdefender ☛ An "invisible" car? Researcher uses machine learning to hide vehicles from Flock cameras

      A cybersecurity expert has demonstrated how computer-generated patterns can successfully prevent surveillance cameras from detecting vehicles - such as the controversial AI-powered Flock licence plate readers that are becoming increasingly common on American streets.

    • Ava ☛ shop milking their customers for social media content

      On their online presence, they clarify that there will be live events, surprises, vertical mini-series with "microdrama", aiming for "real moments with customers - unscripted, spontaneous, authentic and opinionated". They aim for producing reality TV content.

      I am baffled that someone thought this was a great idea.

    • Mozilla

      • The Register UK ☛ Mozilla adds ad blocking to Firefox for iOS

        Firefox for iOS now includes an optional ad blocker, or it will soon. According to Mozilla, the experimental feature "is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout." As such, it might not have turned up for every user just yet.

        Off by default, the block uses a filter list based on EasyList to block ads before they load. According to the organization, this means that it covers third-party advertising networks, ad-related trackers, ads served up by websites, as well as pop-ups and overlays.

  • Confidentiality

    • India Times ☛ Crypto wallet provider SafePal discloses data breach affecting nearly 40,000 users' order information

      Cryptocurrency wallet provider SafePal on Thursday disclosed a data breach that involved unauthorized access to about 39,798 customers' order information, including personal details such as names, addresses and purchase data.

      Here are some details: [...]

    • Tor ☛ Funding [Internet] freedom together: results from our first participatory funding round | The Tor Project

      What if funding [Internet] freedom wasn't driven by a few large donors, but by how many people showed up? What if $1 dollar could go as far as $100? Earlier this year, we set out to answer these questions by launching a participatory funding campaign. The goal was to test new funding mechanisms to support critical digital infrastructure at a moment of systemic funding instability.

      The round officially closed on June 19th, and the results give us reason to be encouraged. Today, we can share that the community showed up: more than $200,000 USD has been raised in total, with $174,536 being distributed to participating grantee projects.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Futurism ☛ Experts Warn That AI Slop Is Corrupting Kids' Brains

    What do you get when you let an endless feed of AI fruitslop videos loose on screen-addicted kids? A great recipe for violent extremism, it turns out.

    A new analysis by researchers at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET) argues that the AI-generated fruit videos infesting our feeds is a font for covertly spreading “violent and extremist content.”

  • LRT ☛ The 1991 treaty that still haunts the Kremlin

    In July 1991, five months before the Soviet Union formally dissolved, Russia signed a treaty with Lithuania in which it recognised something Moscow has spent the past two decades trying to erase from the record: that the Soviet Union illegally annexed Lithuania in 1940, and that Lithuania's independence, declared in 1990, was legitimate.

    That document is still in force. Russia has never torn it up. And that, say Lithuanian officials and legal experts, makes it an awkward loose end for a Kremlin that now insists the Baltic states were never really occupied at all.

  • RFERL ☛ Ukraine Exposed Weakness In Russia's War Machine. Can Moscow Still Claim Military Superpower Status?

    The question, then, may no longer simply be whether Russia remains the world's second-most-powerful military. It is what Ukraine has exposed about the limits of Russian power -- and whether adaptation can prevent those weaknesses from becoming decisive.

  • NPR ☛ Meta heads to court in a landmark trial about kids and social media addiction

    Meta will head into federal court on Tuesday to fend off accusations from a group of state attorneys general that it designed its social media platforms to hook children, lied to the public about the risks those platforms posed and gathered data on kids in violation of the law.

  • Michael Geist ☛ Thanks For Joining the Movement: French Constitutional Council Strikes Down Kids’ Social Media Ban

    French President Emmanuel Macron has been the global leader in promoting a ban on social media for kids, consistently welcoming countries that propose such measures with a “thanks for joining the movement” tweet. That includes Canada, which received its congratulatory tweet after a ban was included in Bill C-34. As I argued last month, however, I believe the Canadian ban is vulnerable to constitutional challenge on at least two fronts: freedom of expression, since blocking an entire cohort of Canadians from accessing information and expressing themselves on social media infringes Section 2(b) of the Charter, and privacy, since enforcing the ban will require millions of Canadians to verify their age to use social media services with the promised safeguards nowhere in place when the ban takes effect. Last week, France became the first major jurisdiction to have such a ban reviewed by its highest constitutional court, and it proceeded to strike down the law on substantially the same two constitutional concerns.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Misery Will Continue Until Morale Improves

    According to an old military maxim, amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics. But these days we need a third category: Immature, insecure guys think that war is about acting tough and looking cool.

    [...]

    Just to remember the story: So first we had the big warning that the U.S. military was basically running out of ammunition. That the precision missiles that are so essential to waging war were largely gone, expended unproductively against Iran. And clearly the cost benefit calculus was a disaster because the Iranians were sending cheap drones and we were using multi-million dollar weapons in an attempt to counter them.

  • The Record ☛ Ukraine says cyberattack hit Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries amid drone strikes

    “The cyber operation amplified the impact of kinetic strikes by Ukraine’s Defense Forces on Wildberries warehouses, causing further significant losses for a company that fuels the aggressor’s economy and its criminal war against Ukraine,” it said.

  • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ Australia's Social Media Ban for Teens May Not Be the Best Solution, But It's Certainly Getting People Talking

    The Aussie experiment comes amid a lack of clear evidence that the apps harm most adolescents. It may take a dramatic research pivot to finally reveal what’s going on and how to fix it.

  • The Nation ☛ Trump’s Loose Grip on Reality Could Sink the Navy’s Ships

    While the supply chain issue has been slowly mended, for a time it meant a rapid deterioration in living conditions. Even a CNN report that tried to minimize the problems acknowledged that there was “a dearth of fresh food for many months. For a stretch…their meals were reduced to tuna mixed with noodles, or corn dogs. Several described losing significant weight.” Other problems included black mold that would drip on the sailors, extended periods without laundry, and backed-up toilets spewing human waste.

  • The Atlantic ☛ NATO’s Nightmare

    “Let’s just say this is the scenario we’re currently not ready for,” Florence Gaub, the director of the research division at the NATO Defense College, one of the alliance’s main academies for officers, in Rome, told me. NATO strategists remain “keenly aware” of this gap in their planning, Gaub, who specializes in the forecasting and analysis of future threats, said. But they have not taken steps to fill that gap.

  • Bhaskar English ☛ Gen Z & Alpha Faith: How AI Chatbots & Roblox Redefine Digital Religion

    Furthermore, young kids are not just passive listeners; they are active participants. Many are now attending digitally reconstructed temples and virtual religious festivals on gaming platforms like Roblox. Coupled with app-based aartis, live temple streaming, and AI-powered Chalisa or mantra chanting apps, technology has made the divine more accessible, interactive, and deeply personal than ever before.

  • teleSUR ☛ Tech Magnate Peter Thiel Consolidates his Presence in Argentina

    The investment is directly linked to the development of Vaca Muerta and, in particular, to the progress of the VMOS pipeline and port, key infrastructure for expanding crude oil export capacity in which Vista is actively involved. The project, slated to begin operations next year, is considered by analysts to be a cornerstone for consolidating the growth of Argentina’s energy sector.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Futurism ☛ Dario Amodei's Wife Is Closely Linked to Jeffrey Epstein

    According to a new investigation from the Wall Street Journal, Amodei’s wife Cami Clark communicated with Epstein for several years while trying to get the deceased sex criminal and accused sex trafficker to invest in her women-focused porn company.

    In March 2011, Clark reached out to Epstein after being introduced to him by John Brockman, a literary agent who helped connect Epstein with scientists and tech figures, emails released by the Justice Department showed.

  • The Nation ☛ Democrats Really, Really, Really Don't Want People Investigating Their Scammy Fundraising

    The Democratic Party’s overlords are facing a multifront challenge to their authority, as their voting base has rallied behind outsider candidates and its Beltway leaders succumb to rote left-punching sloganeering. But one clear mandate still animates the party from on high: Its fundraising operations shall not come under close critical scrutiny.

    That’s the glum conclusion political scientist Adam Bonica reached at the end of an aborted eight-month collaboration with the New York Times Opinion section. As Bonica recounts in a pair of Substack entries, he launched a study based on individual contribution data from the Federal Elections Commission and Meta’s advertising library, showing that the main respondents to the obtrusive and incessant text-based fundraising appeals launched by Democratic-affiliated groups—which Bonica aptly characterizes as “Spam PACs”—are “overwhelmingly elderly, and [that] a surprisingly concentrated group of them accounts for the bulk of the money raised”: [...]

• Environment

  • Futurism ☛ AI Billionaires Are So Greedy That They're Supercharging Sales of Yachts and Private Jets

    Of course, there’s no use in having billions of dollars if you’re going to stay shuttered away in a gaudy McMansion like some Old Moneyed hermit. As such, the nouveau riche tech billionaires are spending big time on travel toys like luxury cars, state-of-the-art superyachts, and the latest and greatest in private jets.

  • Vox ☛ Climate change is undermining coral reef restoration. Could picnic coolers help?

    Rising global temperatures are heating up the ocean and fueling marine heat waves, which kill reefs. That means that much of the coral that people painstakingly plant often ends up dying months or years later — simply because the ocean is too hot. It’s like planting trees to restore a forest that will soon burn in a wildfire. And this raises serious doubts about the role reef restoration can play in the recovery, and ultimate survival, of these iconic ecosystems.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Nvidia to provide up to $105 billion backstop for OpenAI data center

    Nvidia reached a deal on Monday to provide up to $105 billion to backstop a new OpenAI data center in Ohio, as Big Tech ramped up its debt-fueled AI splurge.

  • New York Times ☛ Nvidia to Back Ohio Data Center With as Much as $105 Billion

    Nvidia’s financing for the data center in Pike County, Ohio, a project that could cost as much as $500 billion, is part of the complex dealmaking behind the A.I. boom. Using unusual arrangements with chipmakers, cloud computing providers and governments, start-ups like OpenAI and Anthropic are gaining access to computing power that they could not afford by themselves.

    Many of these deals are circular, with an A.I. start-up receiving billions of dollars from technology giants before spending those billions on the same companies to pay for chips, cloud computing and other services. Nvidia previously invested $30 billion in OpenAI, and the data center in Ohio will use only Nvidia’s chips.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Bridge Michigan ☛ Ypsilanti Township eyes moratorium on power transmission to slow U-M data center

      • Ypsilanti Township is considering a six-month pause on massive electricity transmission associated with data centers
      • The vote, planned for Tuesday, comes after the University of Michigan said it would move ahead with a $1.2 billion private data center
      • The move follows a year-long moratorium on water and sewage approvals in eastern Washtenaw County

    • Science Alert ☛ There's One Type of Driving to Avoid if You Want Your EV Battery to Last 2.5x Longer

      According to a new analysis of real-world battery-powered EVs, aggressive driving can accelerate the battery's degradation.

      And not by a small amount, either. The most aggressive driving style could cause around 2.5 times as much battery capacity loss as the safest eco-driving style.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ US Air Force picks new 800-pound thrust F143 engine for JASSM missile

      The GEK800, now officially known under the name F143, is an 800-pound-thrust (3.56-kilonewton) turbofan engine for long-range missiles and other uncrewed applications. Engineers from both firms began working on it in 2023 as part of a Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction (TMRR) phase that included engine testing.

    • Hackaday ☛ Edison Motors Offering All-Mechanical Trucks, At Least To Start

      Now, make no mistake: Edison Motors is going to be selling the series-hybrid version of these big rigs eventually. That truck will have a Scania diesel rated at 500kW driving electric motors rated at a combined 1800 kW peak power– that’s 2400 ponies. Along with the diesel generator, those ponies will be driven by a big o’le battery– but none of that is in the truck in the video. It’s the same cab, and the same frame, but in order to get some revenue in while jumping regulatory hurdles and working the kinks out of the hybrid drive, they put a conventional Cummins diesel and 16-speed transmission in the “Big D” as the truck is known.

  • Overpopulation

    • Futurism ☛ The Subreddit for "Regretful Parents" Just Might Be the Darkest Place Online

      Even in wealthier countries like the United States, having a child is a major financial liability. Per recent reporting by Fortune, the cost of raising one kid in the US has ballooned into a $300,000 financial commitment over 18 years, and the ongoing deterioration of public programs sure doesn’t help.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • India Times ☛ Stripe acquisition: Stripe clinches over $7 billion deal to buy AI firm OpenRouter

    The deal, just months after OpenRouter raised money at a reported $1.3 billion valuation, underscores the demand from businesses to find the most cost-friendly AI solutions. It could also give Stripe, a payments processing firm, a stronger footing in the fast-growing artificial intelligence sector.

  • New Republic ☛ The Republicans Are Going to Kill People—but Not Until After They Vote

    In fall 2017, less than a year into President Trump’s first term, I wrote a piece in The Atlantic titled “American Kakistocracy.” As I wrote then, “Kakistocracy is a term that was first used in the 17th century; derived from a Greek word, it means, literally, government by the worst and most unscrupulous people among us. More broadly, it can mean the most inept and cringeworthy kind of government. The term fell into disuse over the past century or more, and most highly informed people had never heard it before (but to kids familiar with the word “kaka” it might resonate).” They should pay attention now.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ AI data center optical interconnect market to hit $144 billion by 2030, an over ten-fold increase from 2024 figures, according to new projections — silicon photonics expected to account for nearly two-thirds of revenue, driven by co-packaged optics

    The solution has been a transition to photonics, moving data as light instead of electrical signals. An optical transceiver converts electrical signals from switches and processors into laser light, sends it down a fiber, and converts it back at the far end, carrying far more bandwidth over greater distances at much higher speeds. Today, pluggable transceivers pack a laser chip, digital signal processor (DSP) chips, and several optical components into one compact module. As GPUs grow more capable and AI workloads swell, both the volume of data and the speed it must travel keep climbing, pushing the industry from 400G links to 800G to 1.6T and beyond

  • Silicon Angle ☛ Stripe reportedly finalizes deal to buy AI model router OpenRouter for more than $7B

    The company’s pitch is that one integration outlives any single model. A customer writes to OpenRouter once, then swaps between OpenAI Group PBC, Anthropic PBC or a cheaper open-weight alternative without touching the code, with the router picking on cost, speed or which provider happens to be up. It takes a cut of about 5% of the inference spend passing through it and says it has roughly 8 million users.

  • Kane Narraway ☛ Beyond Zero: For The Rest Of Us

    It’s worth being clear about what this paper is and isn’t though. It’s aspirational. Google says deployments are internal-only, the components aren’t all built, and more papers are coming. This is the same playbook as 2014: publish the vision, describe the architecture at a high level, and encourage the industry to build towards it collaboratively. The original BeyondCorp paper came out in late 2014, and it took years before you could buy anything resembling it. The early solutions were charmingly scrappy. Duo Beyond in 2017 was not far off a handful of Python scripts sitting on infrastructure you managed yourself, reading from MDM APIs. It took until roughly 2020 before the mainstream had real options. COVID and remote work were the kick we needed to get zero trust done properly and now AI has finally given the industry the kick it needs to finish what we started all those years ago.

  • The Atlantic ☛ How Trump Left America Vulnerable to Cyberattacks

    But no other entity can replace the extensive intelligence gathering and threat analysis that the federal government performs by drawing on its web of agencies and cyber units, experts told us. It took years for CISA to earn the trust of state and local election officials, some of whom had been suspicious of the agency during its early days but came to appreciate its help in responding to cyber threats, limiting damage, and even assessing buildings for vulnerabilities in an era shaped by political violence.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Meduza ☛ Yandex digitally added forest to maps to hide Russian military sites

      Military expert Marko Eklund told the Finnish outlet that, “from an operational standpoint,” attempting to hide the site behind copied forest fragments makes no sense. Ukrainian and Western militaries rely on their own sources of information rather than Yandex maps, he said.

    • New York Times ☛ China Wants Its Data to Power the World’s A.I.

      The chatbot described the former N.B.A. star Yao Ming as the first Chinese woman to play professional basketball in the United States. It confused two classic works of Chinese literature, “Journey to the West” and “Dream of the Red Chamber,” which were written two centuries apart.

      The researchers at the Beijing Institute of Technology, who published their findings in 2023, also wrote that ChatGPT generated a large amount of “biased commentary about China” and “would not evade or refuse to answer political questions about China.”

    • Terence Eden ☛ And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

      Why did Vodafone send these messages? Earlier in the week, all Internet access was cut off now phones were blasting propaganda to the masses.

    • Marcy Wheeler ☛ John Solomon's Propaganda Technique: Keeping the "Who" "What" "When" Secret to Fool the Rubes

      This thing is entirely devoid of any specific anchor in space or time.

      Solomon succeeds in building stories off fumes because the far right has trained its adherents to create mobs based off the mere whiff of allegation, not because there’s any there there.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ Friends Of Arrested Designers In Iran Demand Full Disclosure Of Charges

    Almost a month after two prominent Iranian graphic designers were detained by security forces, friends and associates of the pair have issued a statement demanding public disclosure of the charges against them and immediate access to independent legal counsel.

  • Meduza ☛ Eleven years in prison for illegal speech: reactions to the verdict against Russian opposition politician Lev Shlosberg

    A Pskov court sentenced Lev Shlosberg, the 63-year-old deputy chairman of the liberal Yabloko party, to 11 years and one month in a penal colony on charges of repeatedly “discrediting” the Russian army and spreading “fake news” about the military. The formal pretexts for prosecuting him were his participation in debates and his repost of a Daily Mirror cover featuring Vladimir Putin. Shlosberg is one of the few Russian politicians who have publicly opposed the war in Ukraine while remaining in Russia. In his final statement, he spoke about the need to end the fighting between the two countries (though the judge kept interrupting him). Here’s how Shlosberg himself, his fellow party members, and other politicians and journalists reacted to the sentence.

  • France24 ☛ Prominent Mali journalist, influencer jailed for seven years for criticising junta

    A Malian court sentenced on Monday a prominent broadcaster and an influencer, who had both criticised the ruling junta, to seven years in jail, an AFP journalist saw.

    The sentences are the latest handed to Malians critical of the unstable west African country's military government, which came to power following back-to-back coups in 2020 and 2021.

  • CPJ ☛ DRC shutdown of [Internet], mobile networks in east extends for over a month amid war

    Mobile telecommunications networks and [Internet] access have been cut in Fizi Territory since July 3, impacting people’s ability to make calls, send SMS messages, and communicate using online applications, according to three local journalists, who spoke to the CPJ after fleeing to Uganda and Burundi due to the escalating armed conflict. Without [Internet] access, journalists are unable to research, publish online, or communicate securely with sources.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Incendiary comic Lenny Bruce inspired generations. During his brief life, L.A vice cops hounded him.

    But it was February 1963, and Bruce was facing obscenity charges in Beverly Hills Municipal Court. The prosecutor demanded to know what he hoped his audiences would get from his act.

    Nothing less than compassion for the human race, Bruce explained. Cops were filling jails with people who didn’t belong there.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • ANF News ☛ Yazidi Press Association holds its first conference in Shengal

    The conference was held in Geliyê Kersê under the slogan, “Those with Great Goals Make Great Efforts.” It brought together 50 delegates, along with members and representatives of the Yazidi women’s movement TAJÊ, the Shengal People’s Council, the communes, the Diplomacy Committee, Jineolojî, the Asayish Press Committee, the Yazidi self-defense units YBŞ and YJŞ, and the Free Yazidi Women’s Press.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • International Business Times ☛ Underground Schools Keep Afghan Girls Learning in Defiance of Taliban Education Ban

    The ban, imposed within weeks of the Taliban's return to power in August 2021, has left what Human Rights Watch described as 'a generation of girls without formal education'. In a statement marking 1,000 days since the ban took effect, the organisation said Afghan society will never fully recover from the loss of so many future female professionals.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Afghans cling to education for girls

    Yet, even amid a system likened to “gender apartheid,” Afghanistan’s girls and women refuse to be completely cowed. They tune in to sessions on the radio – or the internet, when it works. Some, whose families can afford it, attend clandestine informal schools in neighborhood homes. Others read and reread the same textbooks that they or their siblings used in pre-Taliban years, when girls could attend secondary school and even university.

    “I study in an online school and we have not lost ourselves,” one girl told researchers during a survey recently completed by Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security. “I am an Afghan girl, full of light, full of knowledge, full of power; they can close the school, but they can never extinguish the science from my mind,” she declared.

  • TruthOut ☛ Billionaire Google Co-Founder Spends $102M to Fund Opposition to CA Wealth Tax

    Debru Carthan, the vice president of Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, said in a statement that “California billionaire Sergey Brin would rather spend $100 million to fund a shady opposition campaign than simply pay his fair share in taxes so millions of Californians don’t lose their healthcare.”

    “That’s shameful,” Carthan added. “Billionaires already pay much lower tax rates than what working families pay out of every paycheck.”

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Trump Administration Has Been Spying on Labor Unions

    Earlier this year in Minnesota, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security infiltrated and surveilled meetings of nonprofit groups and two of the US’s biggest labor unions, the Communications Workers of America and the Service Employees International Union.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Cherokee Nation bans hyperscale data centers on its lands, won't support projects without consultation — energy and water consumption, air quality, noise, and cultural resource protection among concerns

    Cherokee Nation, the largest tribe in the U.S. with more than 475,000 citizens, has banned hyperscale data center development on its tribally owned and trust lands, after a task force convened by Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. found that 64% of 1,593 surveyed citizens opposed construction of the facilities inside the tribe's 14-county reservation in northeastern Oklahoma. The 37-page report cited energy and water consumption, air quality, noise, and cultural resource protection among citizens' concerns, and the tribe said it won't support projects on non-tribal land within the reservation without early consultation.

  • Cherokee Nation ☛ Cherokee Nation Issues Data Center Task Force Report, New Policy Actions

    “It’s clear that our Cherokee Nation Administration, Council, and citizens have serious concerns about the construction of hyperscale data centers on our tribal lands, which affect our resources and cultural lifeways. Our primary responsibility is to protect our citizens and tribal communities from these threats, so we will not support any hyperscale data centers on our reservation without proper consultation,” Chief Hoskin said. “We want these companies to know that we expect them to engage with us early and transparently, as these projects impact every Cherokee.”

    Based on the task force’s findings, Chief Hoskin is implementing a ban on hyperscale data center development on tribally owned and trust lands.

  • Robert Reich ☛ An Open Letter to Scott Bessent: Why You're Wrong and I'm Right

    As a former Cabinet secretary, I hope you won’t mind if I’m candid with a current one. Scott, your analysis is full of shite. It’s still a K-shaped economy.

    Lower-income workers continue to struggle with stagnant wages and inflation, while high-income workers are riding high on the wealth effects of the stock market. Real wages may be growing slightly more for low income than high income, but the booming stock market is mostly benefiting the high income.

    Widening inequalities are partly due to policies you and your boss in the Oval Office have been pursuing — especially your tariffs and war in Iran, both of which have been pushing prices upward and imposing a far greater burden on lower-income than high-income Americans.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Tao Bojlén ☛ I don't enjoy the Internet any more | Tao Bojlén

    I’m reminded of the video game Disco Elysium (spoilers ahead). In the game, the world is made up of distinct regions called isolas, separated by a nothingness called the pale. The pale is a gradually growing area that degrades information. Venture far enough into it and you’ll be left with a damaged mind. The pale covers most of the world, and some believe that it’ll continue to expand until it envelops everything. This sounds a lot like AI-generated content! On the Internet, we still have a few isolas here and there, but the pale is growing faster than we can handle.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • The Verge ☛ Apple ordered to stop scaring iPhone and iPad users away from third-party apps

    Apple’s changing its rules for data collection consent prompts after Germany’s Federal Cartel Office accused Apple of giving the prompts a design that favored its own apps. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency prompts reportedly cost social media apps nearly $10 billion when they launched with iOS 14.5, making cross-app tracking of users largely opt in. But as a designated “gatekeeper” under the EU’s DMA rules, it is facing additional scrutiny over whether the program provides a level playing field.

    The regulator says the prompts steer users away from agreeing to let third-party apps use their data, while encouraging them to give consent for Apple’s apps.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ Apple Proposes 15% External Purchase Fee

    I like the part where Apple’s expert argues that its normal commission rates are so high that it would still be profitable for developers to pay the proposed linking commissions on top of what they would pay to Stripe or Paddle. In other words, paying Apple for “IP” almost twice what it admits the other companies charge for “full-service, turnkey payment processing.”

  • Matt Birchler ☛ I for one, welcome our nanny state

    Look, I understand there are risks when you let people install software from outside an app store's walled garden. I would actually be okay with Apple requiring App Store distribution as long as they stopped requiring their own payment method and would only block apps for safety and security reasons, not business or content reasons. But these anti-nanny state warriors are tricky to pin down. They want absolute control over how adults use their computers in some cases but not others.

  • Copyrights

    • CopyrightLately ☛ So the People May Sing. The Anthem Still Goes to Trial. | Copyright Lately

      Corretjer died in 1985. In 1999, one of his heirs assigned his works to Latin American Music Company, a Puerto Rico–based publisher known as LAMCO, which registered them with the U.S. Copyright Office the following year. The application listed 1979 as the date of first publication.

      The problem was that most of the poems had actually been in print since the 1950s.

      That meant the poems were governed by the Copyright Act of 1909, back when copyright law took a tiny © very seriously. If you left the notice off a generally published work, it entered the public domain. No warning, no grace period, no fixing it decades later after everyone had hired lawyers.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate Streaming Giant Cineby Announces Surprise Shutdown

      Cineby, one of the biggest pirate streaming sites on the web, says it will shut its doors on August 26. The site was previously flagged as a notorious piracy operation by Hollywood and has been blocked by court order in several countries. If history is any guide, successors and copycats will line up soon to fill the gap.

    • Doc Searls ☛ You can hear the squeak of sphincters closing

      Will any writer, of anything, ever want to use any Claude text anywhere now? I've been a satisfied Claude customer, and I’m ready to bail completely. And I’m not alone. Because watermarks in text are invisible time bombs ready to scream, “The author didn’t write this! I did!” when some reader or their machine uses the right probe.