Leftovers

• Manuel Moreale ☛ 28 down, 16 more to go

  You might be wondering why I’m already back hiking since I walked more than 40 km just a few days ago. And the answer to that is that I’m not hiking. This was a short stroll to briefly visit a church that would normally be part of the tenth and final segment of this ten-part loop.

• Kyle Reddoch ☛ Phishing Simulation to Study Prompts and Controls

  A click rate by itself says very little. A recipient may recognize the exercise after opening the message, a gateway may rewrite the link, an automated scanner may visit it, or the reporting button may be too hard to find. The more useful questions are whether the message was authenticated and filtered as expected, whether the report preserved the headers, whether anybody received that report, and whether a stolen password would still be enough to reach the account.

• Baldur Bjarnason ☛ Creating media with an uncooperative mind

  The other observation was more positive. Although this audio production lecturer’s subject wasn’t the direct beneficiary – back then as today, people didn’t listen to what they were listening to – he noted that many of the students had what looked like a head start when it came to studying the practice of visual storytelling. Video, specifically. They might not know the terminology, but they recognised the practice and structure of it when they saw it.

  They could “hit the ground running” in ways they couldn’t with writing, designing, or working with audio.

  This was a quarter of a century ago.

  When I say that our current era of video dominance has been a long time coming, I mean it.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Digital Camera World ☛ World Photography Day: How NASA imagery has shaped our understanding of the Earth, the universe and existence

    Since its inception in 1958, NASA has arguably played the most important role in furthering our knowledge of Earth, the universe and natural phenomena.

    Through its mesmerizing photos captured by spacecraft imaging devices and pioneering astronauts with handheld cameras, the agency has compiled the premier portfolio of pictures that have helped us, as visual creatures, understand our place in the cosmos.

    This World Photography Day, take a look at some of the most iconic of these images, delving into why they helped shape our perception of our very existence.

  • John D Cook ☛ Big little hexagon

    A new paper just came out, The Maximum-Area Small Polygon Problem. The paper solves the problem of finding, for each n, the n-gon with diameter 1 and maximum area.

    For odd n, the solution is what you might expect: a regular n-gon. I would expect this to be the solution for even n as well, but it’s not.

  • Hackaday ☛ An Early History Of Space Stations: The Brick Moon Made Real

    People have lived in space stations for decades now, but something is wrong with them. Where are the big rotating wheels? You know the ones. They show up in old paintings of the future and, perhaps most memorably, in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Spin a great wheel in space, and people can stroll around inside with something that feels suspiciously like gravity. It seems like an obvious idea.

    It is also an old idea. Much older than actual spaceflight, in fact. But to find the beginning of the space station, we have to go back to a time when powered aircraft were still several decades in the future.

  • Hackaday ☛ 3D Printering: Why Is My PLA So Brittle?

    Over the years poly(lactic acid) (PLA) – also known as polylactide – has become a popular thermoplastic for a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is that it’s easily produced from a renewable resource, i.e. lactic acid, with the resulting polymer even being compostable if you assume that your compost pile hits a steady 65°C or more, well above the polymer’s glass transition temperature (Tg).

    That said, PLA by itself is a pretty crummy material, being exceedingly brittle and inferior to common alternatives like PET(G) in many metrics. Over the decades much research has gone into figuring out this material, its amorphous and crystalline states, as well as how to use plasticizers, copolymers, mechanical manipulation and PLLA/PDLA blends to produce more useful variants of PLA.

    Today’s spools of thermoplastic filament that gets marketed as ‘PLA’ are the result of such engineering, though with plenty of remaining issues, as anyone who has struggled through a spool of brittle PLA filament can attest to. Although you can find plenty of tips online about how you should ‘just’ toss said spool into an filament dryer, oven or similar to bake it – with accusing fingers pointed at moisture intrusion, hydrolysis and kin – it helps to understand the fundamentals of how PLA works, and how it degrades.

  • David Pogue ☛ My Total Eclipse Sunset

    My photo here, I’m sorry to say, lies. Most Google eclipse image searches lie, too. They show a black ball against a black sky, and that is not it at all. In fact, the sky is a surreal indigo/blue. It’s an intense white corona against an intense glowing blue sky. No camera ever made can capture the range of light you see in person.

    Through a freakish coincidence, the moon happens to be exactly the right size and distance to cover the sun perfectly. The sun is 400 times as big as the moon, but also 400 times farther away.

• Hardware

  • Lee Peterson ☛ Casio step trackers are to encourage not be 100% accurate - LJPUK

    When I read how many things can have an effect on the readings I realised that I’m overthinking this. This isn’t a Garmin competitor, it’s a gentle reminder to move around more. This has completely changed how I’m thinking about this watch and if I take it back to the original requirement, a comfortable watch that I like that also reminds me to get up and move more - even without being 100% this watch serves its purpose.

  • Jasper Tandy ☛ Jasper is blogging: Black and brass and neon

    Making some changes to my keys this week. Still one bit to come but I'm impatient. I'm absolutely sick of them rattling, and Dan told me about these quick release things so got a couple for my car keys. When I first passed my test my dad said not to hang too much from the key when it's in the ignition so I've always had it separate, but now I can have it separate with a cool brass thing. And I bought some neon paracord to do a new wrap for my Shard.

  • Protesilaos Stavrou ☛ The hyperoptimiser’s mechanical keyboard trap

    Mechanical keyboards give you the power to be maximally opinionated about your keyboard configuration. You can choose keycaps, switches, layout, firmware-level settings, and even materials to affect the overall touch and sound. All contribute to an individualised setup that may only work for you—and that is part of the charm.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Lou Plummer ☛ A Grits Explainer

    People who aren't from the parts of the south where grits are commonly served are often suspicious of the dish. After all, the name suggests something you'd spit out rather than swallow. Because of all the other well-earned baggage being a southerner entails, I've never been one to join the battle of Grits Mountain to defend our dietary choices. Don't like grits? Fine. More for me. You don't know what you're missing. Never tried grits? Don't be close-minded.

  • [Old] Ann Arbor Observer ☛ Inventing the Fleetwood - Ann Arbor Observer

    I was sweating bullets, but by some miracle, it didn’t come to blows. Still, I was sure that wasn’t the end of it. When I finally closed at three the next afternoon, what little sleep I got was fear-addled. I had to figure out how to save my dream—and avoid getting my butt kicked—the next time Jay and Chucky met up.

    And then it came to me. Just a gamble, but I had hope.

    By the next time they both showed up, I had a new item on the menu board above the counter: Grits. “Eggs ’n’ Grits, with Sausage, Bacon, or Ham. $1.30.”

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Kyle Ford ☛ Too Much Kyle: The App – House of Kyle

    Back in January, I wrote about how over the past several years I’ve actively worked to decentralize my online presence and reduce (as much as is realistic) my use of giant social media platforms.

    Since it’s not realistic to expect my followers to join me on these wild journeys, I made a little site called Too Much Kyle that weaves all of my cross-service activity together into one place, with options to subscribe to it all via RSS or email.

  • Yury Molodtsov ☛ How Linear Turned Craft Into a B2B Growth Strategy

    Linear is an opinionated project management platform designed for high-performing software development and product teams. It was built as an opposition to JIRA, the “most hated software” ever created.

  • Independent Brand Archaeology ☛ The Rebrand Registry

    Compare current and former product names, see how long each identity lasted, and follow the evidence behind every transition. Now with logos, because apparently names alone were not enough paperwork.

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

    • Wired ☛ Silicon Valley Doesn't Get Why You Hate AI

      The rest of popular culture, meanwhile, is finding ways to capitalize on AI hate. Just look at this new commercial for Liquid Death and Garage Beer. The two beverage brands teamed up with former Philadelphia Eagles football player and Taylor Swift brother-in-law Jason Kelce, who invited people to pee in bottles and send them to AI data centers. In an interview with Marketing Dive, Liquid Death’s creative lead said the data center backlash was “literally the one thing that unites all Americans right now.”

      More than half of Americans under 30 say they are more concerned than excited about AI, a figure that’s grown 24 percent in the last five years, according to a Pew Research Center survey published earlier this week. More than 70 percent of people polled in all age groups say they believe AI will lead to fewer jobs.

      But other recent polling data shows that people have broader anxieties about the technology that go far beyond jobs and the data center boom. Americans also think AI will harm young people’s ability to form meaningful relationships, that tech companies should be required to compensate creators whose works were used to train models, and that AI could harm the critical thinking skills of students.

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ How to Secure AI Workflows With Practical Controls

      Picture a fairly ordinary MSP automation project. The first version reads an incoming support ticket and produces a summary for the technician. It saves a little time, touches one source of information, and cannot change anything. Then the team connects it to the documentation platform so it can suggest a fix. Someone adds access to the RMM, then the ticketing system, then email. Before long, the same workflow can read a customer request, search internal documentation, choose a script, run it against an endpoint, update the ticket, and notify the customer.

      Nothing in that progression sounds reckless by itself. Each addition solves a real problem, and each one makes the demonstration more impressive. Taken together, however, they create a privileged operator that receives instructions through natural language and works across several customer systems. The security question is no longer whether the model writes a good summary. It is whether the business has put reliable limits around what the complete workflow can see, decide, and do.

      That distinction gets lost in a lot of conversations about AI security. Teams discuss model safety, prompt wording, or which provider performs best while paying less attention to the identities, APIs, retrieval systems, approval screens, logs, and operating procedures surrounding the model. Those components are not supporting details. They are where authority is granted and where a bad decision turns into a business action.

    • Fernando Borretti ☛ Our Servants Will Do That For Us

      The implicit promise of modernity is: we have to work really hard for a few centuries, but eventually we’ll get to the Star Trek future where we’ve automated all the drudgery, and all work is meaningful, heroic, and dignifies the spirit. We will be artists, scholars, captains of the starship Enterprise, etc. There’s a few problems with this idea:

      1. “Drudgery” and “meaningful work” are in the same complexity class, so the technology to automates the former also automates the latter.
      2. Our revealed preference seems to be that we prefer solipsistic convenience over human relationships.

      The rest of this post elaborates the argument.

    • David Revoy ☛ The Aesthetic Rebellion - David Revoy

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The actual epistemic crisis (20 Aug 2026)

      It's a very putinesque way of living. Vladislav Surkov was Vladimir Putin's media strategist, and he had a deadly effective tactic: he announced that he was covertly funding some of the groups that publicly opposed Putin, but did not disclose which of those opposition groups were fake. That meant that any of the groups could be fake, which meant that any discussion of the opposition was liable to devolve into an argument about its authenticity. Anything could be a lie, so nothing was necessarily true. Putin's method isn't to get you to believe a lie – it's to keep you from believing that anything is true.

      That's life under AI – a world of uncertainty, an epistemological void full of plausible phantasms, some of which are actually real. A world where it's impossible to know what's true, and where anything might be fake.

      But here's the thing: AI's assault on our ability to know isn't a new battle – rather, it's the latest barrage in a war that's been waged for years, as corporations grew larger and more powerful, capturing their regulators, who let them lie to us and abuse us with impunity.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The ordinariness of evil (19 Aug 2026)

      It seems weird that they won't stop fretting about this terrible potential – until you realize that every public pronouncement about this terrible potential is also a public boast about its potential, period.

      That's very, very important, because all AI really has is potential. Actual, existing AI is useful at the margins, if you're already a skilled practitioner who can discern correct from incorrect outputs, and if you integrate AI judiciously so that it doesn't overwhelm your ability to pay attention to those outputs and apply your discernment to them: [...]

  • Social Control Media

    • New York Times ☛ New Jersey Teenager Drops Bellwether Social Media Addiction Lawsuit

      A California plaintiff won the first of those cases, and the second was dropped.

      The New Jersey teenager, identified only by her initials as P.M.Y., filed her suit in 2023 when she was 14. She settled similar claims with TikTok for an undisclosed sum ahead of the trial, which had been scheduled for October in Los Angeles County.

    • The Record ☛ Senators press TikTok over withholding of safety features for some users

      Two U.S. senators are demanding answers from the social media giant TikTok following media reports that the company intentionally turned off security features for a subset of users to test how the protections would impact their engagement with the app.

      In a letter on Wednesday, Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) criticized the company for having “knowingly withheld a critical safety measure for millions of American users—including children—in order to determine whether protecting users would impact its financial bottom-line.”

    • The Verge ☛ Australia says Roblox hasn’t fixed its child predator problem

      Roblox believes it meets its Online Safety Act obligations, according to eSafety. But the company will be adding further safety measures that include: [...]

    • Jeremy Cherfas ☛ No, I do not want to be on YT

      I’ve been quietly seething for months now about the dumb emails I get from people wailing about my podcast’s invisibility on YouTube. Increasingly urgent, promises that this is the last time, more in sorrow than in anger, blah, blah, blah. I don’t reply, of course. That only encourages the bastards. But if I did I would probably say something elitist like, if I wanted people to “listen” on YouTube I would have done that now without your help.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Silicon Angle ☛ Google's attempt to buy Spirit Airlines' data might come unstuck

      Google LLC’s artificial intelligence researchers had been salivating at the prospect of getting their hands on a trove of business data acquired from the defunct airline Spirit Airlines Inc. in an auction, but the proposed deal is being challenged by two separate parties.

    • International Business Times ☛ Singles Are Turning LinkedIn Profiles Into Background Checks Before Agreeing to a Date

      The trend blurs a boundary LinkedIn has spent years trying to enforce, turning a platform built for job titles and endorsements into an informal vetting tool for personal relationships. The shift raises real questions about how professional data, posted for career purposes, ends up being repurposed to judge someone's dating potential. And it leaves users to navigate the gap between policy and practice alone.

    • Security Week ☛ Surveillance – Everything You Wanted to Know, But Were Afraid to Ask

      All of it affects our privacy, some of it could affect our employment, some of it could affect our bank balance, some could affect our freedom, and some could affect our national interest. In all cases the perpetrators claim they are justified in doing so; and all forms of surveillance are now being supercharged by AI. Our only defenses are regulations and our own awareness.

      In what follows, we group those that surveil us with the primary methods they use – but it should be noted that any group could use any surveillance method. We also look at the use of AI in surveillance, and the possibility of controlling surveillance through regulations.

    • Wired ☛ Reverse-Lookup Service Exposed Millions of Photos of People’s Faces

      The people-search tool ClarityCheck says its reverse image search service is “private and secure”—but it left a database containing more than 9 million image files exposed.

    • PC World ☛ Windows 11 quietly backs up your files to OneDrive. How to stop it

      However, it is not good that this backup runs opaquely in the background and, in the latest versions of Windows, can only be stopped after several prompts and mouse clicks. This is because it has been known for some time that Microsoft scans OneDrive storage using automated processes to prevent the distribution of images and documents containing illegal content.

    • PC World ☛ Gmail offers fully encrypted email. But better alternatives exist

      For personal accounts, Gmail only encrypts email while in transit (if supported by the receiving party) and at rest. The data isn’t fully end-to-end encrypted because Google and the other email provider can see it.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Police Are Hiding Their Use of Flock Surveillance Cameras

      A usage policy for Flock license plate reader cameras tells police not to talk about the cameras: [...]

    • Laserphile ☛ laserphile: AliExpress webpage keeping multipoint Bluetooth headphones active with WebAudio fingerprinting

      AliExpress has plenty of reasons to distinguish normal shoppers from automated or suspicious clients as well as tracking users browsing habits. The site has to deal with account takeovers, fake accounts, scraping, automated purchasing, payment fraud, review manipulation, and abuse of coupons or new-customer promotions. They also like most large businesses make use of large datasets of user behaviour to better market products and services.

      Cookies are not especially reliable for this purpose because they can be cleared, copied, or replaced. A fingerprint made from many independent browser measurements is harder to manipulate consistently.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ Silicon Valley’s Billionaire Cults Are Coming for Democracy

    "We can have billionaires or we can have democracy. We cannot have both,” Gil Durán says. In this episode of Movement Memos, Gil and I discuss the bizarre fixations and political fantasies of tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, and how those ideas are being translated into real-world governance. We also talk about Silicon Valley’s Christian cosplay, and how traditional Christian ideas are being used as wrapping paper for the pursuit of AI-first, corporate fiefdoms.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Robert Reich ☛ Who’s Raking it in as the National Debt Explodes?

    The problem is that an increasing portion of our nation’s budget — and your tax dollar — is dedicated to paying interest on this growing debt. Annual net interest payments on the federal debt have surpassed $1 trillion, making servicing the debt one of the largest of all federal budget expenditures.

    That’s money we don’t spend on schools, healthcare, roads and bridges, and social safety nets. We’ll soon be paying more in interest on the federal debt each year than we spend annually on Medicare.

    So, who exactly receives these interest payments? This is an issue you hear very little discussion about, because the wealthy and powerful of this country would rather you not know. (And don’t expect Trump suck-up Bessent* to tell you, because he’s too busy denying that economic inequality is worsening.)

• Environment

  • International Business Times ☛ 'A Vital Lung of the Earth': Indonesians Beg World for Wildfire Help While Orangutans Flee the Flames

    Wildfires tearing through Indonesian Borneo have already burned more than 200,000 hectares of land this year, forcing desperate public appeals on social media for international firefighting help as smoke from West Kalimantan drifts across the border and chokes Malaysia's Sarawak state.

    One widely shared appeal describes the region's rainforest as 'a vital lung of the Earth' and calls on the EU, UK, China, Japan, South Korea and Singapore to send fire suppression technology, monitoring tools and cost assessments.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Wyoming County Moves to Tighten Data Center Rules

    Commission members stressed that they were considering how to regulate data centers, not whether to allow them. Chairman Marty Shepard said requiring special-use permits would give the county greater authority to impose conditions and protect taxpayers. The debate follows a proposal for a large data center and power generation complex on ranchland northeast of Wheatland near the Goshen County line.

  • Cowboy State Daily ☛ Plan For Data Center Puts Spotlight On Lax Fremont County Zoning Laws

    The Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality’s Air Quality Division is proposing to approve a request from ETC DC OpCo LLC to install eight natural gas-fired emergency generator engines at a site roughly 3 miles northeast of Lysite, according to a DEQ public notice reviewed by Cowboy State Daily.

    The Air Quality Division is accepting public comments on the proposed approval through Sept. 14.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ Superconducting Temperature Record Set At Ambient Pressure

      Target material was a cuprate, specifically HgBa2Ca2Cu3O8+δ, also known as the HBCCO series or Hg1223 for short. Hg1223 has been the subject of much research and experimentation since the 1990s, with it demonstrating a transition temperature (Tc) of 133 K (-140°C). With this quenching method – which sees the high pressures on the cooled sample suddenly released – this bumped the Tc up to 151 K, or -122°C.

    • Chris Glass ☛ Making the best of a cancelled flight in New York

      It just happened and hadn’t hit our notifications. If you have the opportunity during this tiny window, say yes to any next available flight and don’t ask questions. You can always adjust things later.

      We hemmed for 45 seconds and seats on the afternoon flight were snatched.

      Lesson learned.

    • BoingBoing ☛ Your kid can't legally drive, so why did you buy them a 40 mph motorcycle?

      It's really just as simple as holding the parents responsible. E-bikes are a fantastic form of transportation and should be encouraged. Unlicensed teens and pre-teens hooning them through busy city streets isn't legal, and their parents should be reminded with a ticket.

    • WBUR Radio ☛ Child e-bike injuries have skyrocketed across Mass., ER doctors warn

      "Every one of these e-bikes that we have interaction with are usually modified,” Tusino said, “so they go in excess of 40 miles an hour.”

      As e-bike crashes and complaints pile up, Milford and nearly a dozen other local police departments have issued public safety warnings about teenagers on e-bikes.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Digital Camera World ☛ Gray wolves may no longer be endangered in this US state – and a network of 1,311 trail cameras capturing more than 2 million images is helping to prove it

      In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the gray wolf population has recovered enough that the species may no longer need to be labeled as endangered, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR).

    • Avi Loeb ☛ Are We at the Top of the Cosmic Food Chain?

      Today I visited a magnificent rainforest in Costa Rica, where I saw butterflies, macaws, tadpoles, red eyed tree frogs, coatis, snapping turtles, bats, toucans, Capuchin and howler monkeys, sloths, parrots, jaguars, boars and pumas. The diversity of wildlife is astonishing on a single habitable planet out of billions of habitable exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. It therefore makes little sense for humans to presume that they occupy a supreme status in the cosmos.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Kelson Vibber ☛ Regarding Empathy

    Over the last few years, right-wingers have finally started to realize that what they’re missing is empathy. Several decades’ worth of “I didn’t realize how bad this policy was until it hurt someone I know personally!” statements had already made that clear to the rest of us. “I didn’t think the leopards would eat my face!” as a meme goes back a decade now. But instead of realizing they should develop some, they’ve decided empathy must be bad, much like they previously decided that being aware of systematic injustice must be bad, and turned “woke” into a pejorative.

  • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Thoughts on Taking OpenAI Foundation Funding

    Which brings me back to the two concerns I mentioned above. On (a), independence, SecureBio has two divisions, Detection and AI. This grant funds Detection, while the AI side of SecureBio evaluates models from many firms, including OpenAI. The grant does not give OpenAI or OAIF any formal control over what anyone at SecureBio can say publicly about any models. That was important to us, but it was also key to OAIF: Yo was very clear that they did not want to influence SecureBio AI's work, and wanted to review our policies to make sure they were sufficiently robust.

  • The Washington Post ☛ GOP memo warns Ohio Sen. John Husted is being dragged down by data centers

    Republicans are warning that former Democratic senator Sherrod Brown’s relentless campaign to tie Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) to unpopular data centers could cost the incumbent his seat — and make politicians even warier of supporting data centers in the future.

  • Axios ☛ Exclusive: GOP warns AI companies that data centers are politically radioactive

    The Senate GOP campaign arm, in a private memo to top AI companies, warns that toxic views of U.S. data centers are killing the party's chances of holding a vital seat in Ohio.

    • In the memo, obtained by Axios, the National Republican Senatorial Committee says Democrats have made data centers a "centerpiece" of their campaign to defeat Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) — and that it's working.

    • "If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice — and they will not go near the next one," the memo says. "This has become a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle."

  • Sean Monahan ☛ data centers of doom

    The memo was addressed not only to Republicans, but also to executives at AI companies. The subtext is clear: if you want our political support, you have to generate the public support. Directly from the NRSC memo: [...]

  • Robert Reich ☛ Corporate America EXPOSED! (In the most unlikely place)

    He starts by conceding that, and I quote: “The widespread popular dissatisfaction with the working of modern American capitalism may be the product of some real, objective problems in the way American capitalism is working: income and wealth inequality on a scale not seen in a century; the concentration of economic, cultural and increasingly political power in a class of technology leaders whose products are dissolving the bonds that keep society together; the tightening nexus between business elites and the people who control the political process; rampant corruption and a political establishment that doesn’t seem interested in accountability; the revival, after decades of stable prices, of inflationary pressures that are pushing the cost of living to painful levels.”

    I swear I didn’t ghostwrite this.

  • Robert Reich ☛ The Last Stand of the Corporate Democrats

    That truth is the captains of corporate America are so rapacious that they’re willing to throw average working Americans under the bus to make billions more.

  • Diziet ☛ Open Letter to the Wikimedia Foundation Board

    Wikipedia has become one of the pillars of the free and open Internet. Across the world, reliable sources of information are under attack.

    I'm proud to have played my very small part in the community of editors of English Wikipedia for the last 20 years. I am also proud of my contributions to the Free Software movement, including especially Debian. Debian, whose constitution and package installer I originally wrote, has become one of the technological foundations of the open Internet.

    Unfortunately, there are signs that the Wikimedia Foundation is not performing its proper role as bulwark against attacks on democracy, including from moneyed interests. Recent events at WMF have been very alarming to me, and seem to form part of a disturbing trend.

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Pocock, Binface & nobodies vs Farage: defamation before UK High Court

    A Letter of Claim has been sent to Nigel Farage, leader of Reform UK in relation to the widely quoted defamation on the night of the Clacton-on-Sea by-election in 2026.

    One of the key remedies sought is a sum of compensation of five million pounds to be paid to each of the rival candidates disparaged in news reports about "nobodies".

    We are currently looking for a defamation lawyer to advance the claim on our behalf.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Richard J Tofel ☛ What The Next Journalism Should Be

    Tom Rosenstiel has been one of the nation’s leading thinkers about journalism for decades. He is the co-author of The Elements of Journalism (with Bill Kovach), now in its fourth edition. Rosenstiel founded and for 16 years led the Project for Excellence in Journalism at the Pew Research Centers, and then ran the American Press Institute for nine years. These days he is professor of the practice and the Eleanor Merrill Scholar on the Future of Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism as well as a senior fellow at NORC at the University of Chicago. Much of his time as a working journalist came at the Los Angeles Times and at Newsweek.

    Tom’s new book, The Next Journalism: How The Press Must Change to Serve Democracy, was published Tuesday. I strongly recommend it, even as I’m skeptical about some aspects, as you will see below. Our conversation about the book took place in late July, and has been edited for length and clarity.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ A Sloppy Interface Is a Security Liability 

    You’ve probably seen these: interfaces designed to look like some other product in order to provide a facade of authenticity and exploit someone.

    What struck me in listening to Feross was this idea of how the quality of your interfaces can be a protection mechanism against attackers.