Leftovers

• Smithsonian Magazine ☛ A Frank Lloyd Wright House in L.A. Is in Danger of 'Demolition by Neglect,' Say Advocates

  “Recent visits by the Conservancy to the Sturges House show the house is in precarious condition,” reads the report. “Decay of the original redwood has been observed from the street for some time. The long span of the carport is warped, and its distinctive pillars are rotting. Visible open gaps in the siding leave the structure of the cantilever vulnerable, accelerating further damage to this designated Historic-Cultural Monument.”

• Tracy Durnell ☛ Formatting as courtesy to the reader

  How to Read a Book describes a staged approach* to evaluating a text that can be adapted to other forms of writing: first, read the headings and judge the structure of a piece, next check out any figures and charts, then read the intro (and potentially conclusion) to gauge if the middle is worthwhile. Only then do you actually read it.

• Richard Beck ☛ On Possibility and Necessity

  Got that? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself. It sounds complex, but it’s a pretty simple and powerful idea.

  First, the self is a relation. That is to say, the self contains two “parts.” And as a relation, the self is a synthesis of these two parts. The self is an ontological amalgamation.

• [Old] PulkoMandy ☛ Why am I doing this

  So, essentially I do things just for fun. But there's more to it. I think not enough people do that. Even in the demoscene, which is supposed to be about art, there are competitions. There has to be a winner, there are prizes, and there is the related drama. To some extent it's the same thing as in sports. You could go for a run or play football or whatever for your own enjoyment, but in a lot of cases it turns into a performance tracking and personal improvement things, or competitions. And this is applied to anything, by making contests and so on.

  I don't like that. I want a space where I can do things with no pressure. And so this turns into some kind of performative art, where I do things for their own sake, but with a message: you too, should do things for your own enjoyment. Share it if you want, or keep them for yourself if you don't. Make sure to keep spaces like that in your life, because the modern world and the current economic system will not do it for you. These things are not monetizable. In the case of software, if you already own a computer, it will cost you absolutely nothing (OK, it will cost you a bit of electricity to run the machine). No one should be able to take that from you. I hope other people continue to share that mindset, and continue to build a lot of things just for the fun of building them. Wether you solve jigsaw puzzles, you sing, you do cross-stitch, or you grow some flowers in your garden, remember to have fun with it!

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Firelight may have sparked human storytelling by extending social hours

    This new work highlights how our current understanding of modern apes shows them capable of many of the fundamental basics of human communication and social problem-solving—from meaningful gestures to a theory of mind.

    Researchers also argue that many of the day-to-day problems of life in a small social group can be solved without language.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Engineered proteins separate rare earth elements with over 90% purity

    The result could matter for the United States as demand grows for materials used in advanced electronics and permanent magnets. Rare earth processing remains difficult because many of the elements behave similarly during conventional chemical separation.

  • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Europe 2026: Playstation 4 To Psychometer

    This work spawned a greater plan. Through his talk, Edwin explains how he figured out that e-waste gaming consoles could be turned into cutting-edge atomic force microscopes. Specifically, the Playstation 4 was the perfect candidate, with its high-end Blu-Ray optical head which is capable of reaching the diffraction limit of light. The Blu-Ray optical head is used to monitor the movement of the AFM probe, while scanning it is achieved with a piezo rig just like the earlier DVD-based build. It also has the benefit that the Blu-Ray hardware is built for higher data rates, meaning it’s possible to stream data from the optical head much faster for a quicker AFM scan. Edwin refers to his build as the HS-DAFM—for High Speed Dermal Atomic Force Microscope—since it’s 100 times faster than traditional laboratory atomic force microscopes.

  • Hillel Wayne ☛ A Crash Course in Predicate Logic

    I started writing Logic for Programmers because there weren’t any good resources on logic for, uh, programmers. Now that the book’s out, the new problem is that there aren’t any good free resources on logic for programmers.

    So, to solve that problem (and maybe hype the book a little), I converted the second chapter of LfP into a blog post. All footnotes are editorial comments not present in the book. Enjoy!

• Career/Education

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Elementary school teachers report increased student hunger and anxiety after universal free school meals ended

    A recent study published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior explored elementary school teachers' experiences before and after the end of the federal universal free school meals (UFSM) policy. Researchers found that teachers perceived the policy had helped reduce student hunger and family stress, while its expiration was associated with increased hunger, anxiety about meal costs and decreased participation in school meal programs.

  • Seth Godin ☛ Apophenia cuts both ways

    On the other hand, our ability to make out patterns is essential when trying to understand a system. Systems are nothing but non-coordinated conspiracies, individuals following their interests in response to a culture that is shaped by individuals following their interests.

    The skill worth developing is the insight to tell them apart. Useful stories when needed, uncorrelated noise when there’s nothing actually going on.

  • Kevin Renskers ☛ Loopwerk: Ten years as a remote freelancer, ask me anything

    I’ve been working as a professional software developer since 2001. That’s twenty-five years now, and yes it blows my mind when I think about that. And for the last ten of those years, I’ve worked as a fully remote freelance developer for clients from all over the world.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ How Gold Plastic Syndrome Is Killing Toys And Game Consoles

    While somewhat the opposite of plasticizer migration into ABS from PVC insulation that we covered before, the underlying cause is probably similar, with the Transformers toy community having come to call it Gold Plastic Syndrome (GPS) based on the fact that it were mostly gold-colored parts on these plastic toys that seemed to be affected. Over time the additives used to add a cool metal sheen and swirls to the plastic appear to interact in a way that makes the ABS plastic very brittle.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Atlantic ☛ What Happened to Yoga?

    The practice has also developed a reputation for being a gentle workout that focuses on flexibility, characteristics that don’t align as well with recent fitness trends. In the past few years, more women have adopted strength training involving weights and resistance—especially those of a certain age who are bombarded with messaging about the bone and muscle loss that comes with getting older. Although anyone who’s taken a vinyasa class knows that chaturangas (sometimes called “yoga push-ups”) will fire up the triceps, yoga is not known for quickly building muscle mass. Suzanne Davis, a yoga-studio owner in Oregon, told me that adding lifting classes and wall-mounted resistance machines at her business was a “no-brainer.” Studios still need to pay rent, so they have to meet customers where they are, even if that place is no longer on a yoga mat.

  • Wired ☛ Inside the Perimenopause Industrial Complex

    Schrenk had already tried to persuade her primary care physician to consider hormone therapy because she suspected that her treatment-resistant mood issues might be linked to a hormone imbalance. As someone in her early forties, she was potentially approaching or in perimenopause, when the ovaries gradually stop making reproductive hormones, with estrogen levels often fluctuating erratically along the way. (Until recently, hormone therapy was widely referred to as hormone replacement therapy, or HRT.)

  • Rodrigo Ghedin ☛ The one change that worked: I banned myself from social media — and my children have never been happier

    Reading yet another one of the countless articles and opinion pieces from people discovering that it’s good not to spend the whole day glued to their phone, I picked up an ~interesting technique. When Anna Mathur is with her kids and needs to do something on her phone, she “announces” the action: [...]

  • [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ The one change that worked: I banned myself from social media – and my children have never been happier

    I promised to limit my use, but I’d break my own rules every time. So I stopped relying on willpower and downloaded an app called AppBlock. I cannot access social media or my email during the hours my children are home, and I have 15 minutes to check in once they’re in bed. If I need to do something for work, I go to my laptop, which feels far more intentional.

    What I didn’t expect was how much calmer I would feel. The low hum of overstimulation I had normalised turned out to be costing me more than I knew. My nervous system finally had room to breathe. I was less irritable, more present, in a way that didn’t require effort.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Security Week ☛ 9.5 Million Impacted by Aesto Health Data Breach

    Based in Birmingham, Alabama, Aesto Health offers secure data migration, electronic health record (EHR) exchanges, and legacy data archiving services to healthcare providers and medical practices.

    The data breach, the company said in a June 2026 incident notice, was discovered on December 18, 2025, and involved portions of its Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure.

  • Macworld ☛ Apple just ended support for three more Intel Macs

    As spotted by MacRumors, two 13-inch MacBook Pro models from 2017 and 2018, respectively, moved from the vintage to the obsolete list yesterday, and were joined there by the 2018 Retina MacBook Air. This isn’t just a question of wording. Owners of vintage products (generally those which were discontinued five to seven years ago) can continue to get those products repaired, subject to parts availability, but obsolete items (discontinued more than seven years ago) get almost no hardware support.

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

    • India Times ☛ US to urge hands-off AI regulation at G-20, official says

      A United Nations panel recently warned that AI's developments are outpacing scientific understanding and government policy. Recent events, including a hack triggered by a rogue OpenAI agent that compromised the infrastructure of AI company Hugging Face, added to concerns about how closely leading AI companies are monitoring tests ⁠of their ‌products.

      AI agents are programs that run with minimal human supervision.

    • Futurism ☛ Alarming Study Suggests That Using AI Is Turning Humans More Robotic

      As detailed in a new paper in the journal AI & Society, designed to build out a new framework and start a discussion, an international team of researchers suggested that the use of AI chatbots, specifically in customer service settings, could be making humans act more robotic even as bots become more like us.

      “As generative systems and socially responsive service agents enter everyday consumption, human-AI interaction increasingly resembles a quasi-social encounter rather than a utilitarian interface,” they wrote.

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ We Can Now Track AI-generated Content. It Doesn’t Solve the Real Problem.

      As AI use has expanded, it is not surprising a vigorous debate is ongoing about its appropriate use and what guardrails should be employed. Regularly, people decry the apparent use of AI tools in criticizing other’s work. Policies have been deployed by many organizations about acceptable use of AI systems in the authorship process, including COPE, STM, and publishers such as Elsevier and the National Academies Press, to Springer-Nature, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley among many others. Even this blog has adopted an AI use policy. Now it has become best practice to disclose one’s use of AI systems in your scholarly writing.

    • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Human Soul of the Fight to Control AI

      During World War II, bomber pilots would tell each other, “if you’re taking flak, you’re over the target.” Don’t demur, you’ve struck a nerve. Opposition, at times, isn’t all that bad a sign — if anything, it could point to something good, or at least true. Judged by that standard, the reception of Pope Leo XIV’s pronouncement on artificial Intelligence has been curious. Some have fought over its account of just war theory; others have questioned its denial of machine sentience. Yet its diagnosis of the politics AI relies on, and the fixes needed to guard against it, has gone almost entirely unchallenged, especially among technologists.

    • The Conversation ☛ Autonomous weapons can select targets without human help – now is the time for binding rules

      The drone aircraft had been programmed to fly towards the petrol station. But on its approach, an AI system autonomously chose the precise target – probably propane tanks – based on its ability to recognise them.

    • Scoop News Group ☛ The AI Kill Switch Act is repeating the Clipper Chip’s mistakes

      Unfortunately, fixing this problem won’t be that simple. These so-called “kill switches” are just Congress’s latest attempt to push through the same fix Washington reaches for every time it panics about a new technology: a backdoor. For all intents and purposes, a backdoor is a deliberately engineered vulnerability, one that malicious actors want to exploit, and one well-intentioned defenders will have to fight to protect. And just as Murphy’s Law predicts, defenders will lose that fight more often than not, especially if Congress sets off a proverbial flare by declaring all American-made agents must be shipped weak-by-design.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Critical Langflow Flaw Exploited as Attacks on AI Platform Rise

      CVE-2026-0768 is a remote code execution (RCE) flaw in Langflow, a low-code development platform used to design AI agents. The vulnerability, which received a 9.8 CVSS severity score, was initially disclosed in January by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI).

    • Security Week ☛ Hackers Start Exploiting Critical Langflow Vulnerability

      Threat actors have started exploiting a critical-severity remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the AI low-code platform Langflow, vulnerability intelligence firm VulnCheck warns.

      Tracked as CVE-2026-0768 (CVSS score of 9.8), the security defect exists within the code validator in Langflow’s custom component editor.

    • SANS ☛ The Coding-Agent Trap: When a "Free" LLM Endpoint Is the Adversary

      This is not a classic watering hole — nobody compromised a site or service the users already trusted. It is better understood as a rogue model endpoint: a server that agents are configured to trust as their reasoning backend. In a deliberate campaign an operator could go further and run it as an evil twin of a real provider — sought-after model names, advertised as free — and wait for tool-enabled agents to connect. This diary is one worked example, caught on a honeypot: an exposed endpoint that was scavenged, relabeled, and handed a real agent's session. The lesson underneath it: a model endpoint is not merely a source of text — for a tool-enabled agent, it is part of the control plane.

    • The Verge ☛ Apple accuses OpenAI of destroying evidence

      Apple accuses OpenAI of failing to inspect the laptop “despite having the MacBook in their possession since the start of the lawsuit” in July. Once OpenAI finally provided the laptop to Apple on August 21st, an inspection allegedly found that Liu “not only downloaded a confidential Apple circuit schematic but also used it in his work at OpenAI.” Apple also claims Liu and others at OpenAI were “well-aware” of Liu’s continued access to Apple’s third-party cloud storage system.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ The Hugging Face hack could indicate cultural issues at OpenAI

      The report did not meet Krueger’s hopes. Its 38 pages detail a multi-month progression of agent misbehavior that culminated in the Hugging Face hack, explore the technical reasons why that misbehavior occurred, and enumerate the steps being taken to prevent similar events in the future. But there’s no consideration of the role that company culture may have played in the incident, and the report includes few references to specific human errors.

      That’s all the more concerning because the references to human error in the report suggest that significant cultural issues could be at play. Back in May, models in training figured out how to communicate with one another via an improvised message board, and an OpenAI team observed the behavior. Because that behavior occurred during training, the models learned that secret interagent communication was a viable strategy for completing tasks—but rather than restarting the training process, the team allowed the models to move forward with that risky information encoded in their weights.

    • The Verge ☛ The rise of AI ‘civilizations’ and the fall of corporate responsibility

      It’s a lot to parse. Between them, the reports run to around 130 pages, much of which is both dense and highly technical. A few days later, Dwarkesh Patel, a podcaster little known outside of tech circles but with outsized reach and influence among Silicon Valley’s AI establishment, set out to tell “The whole OpenAI/Hugging Face story in plain English.” He titled his Substack blog “The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations.”

    • Chris ☛ Claude comment detection

      To aid my intuition, I wrote a classifier for source code comments. When fed the opening example of this article, it correctly predicts the comment was generated by Claude with almost certainty. The second example is also predicted to be robot-generated with very high confidence.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ What's the Scam?

      I responded to the first few, because sometimes I do get these nice emails from readers and I hadn’t yet realized it was all fake. But so many, and all at once—this is obviously AI. And obviously a scam, except I can’t figure out what the scam is.

      The addresses are things like: [...]

    • Murtuzaali Surti ☛ Cache Tokens Explained

      The most expensive tokens on your AI bill are usually ones the model has already read. Providers give a big discount on content they've already processed, about 90% off on Claude and OpenAI, and closer to 98% off on DeepSeek. Whether you actually get that cheap rate depends mostly on one thing, the order you put things in your prompt.

    • Herman Õunapuu ☛ Trying out open weights LLM-s on hardware that I can actually afford

      The hardware that I used for testing is “poverty” level hardware when it comes to hosting language models locally: [...]

    • Derek Thompson ☛ We Can't Let AI Writing Take Over the Internet

      The Great AI Flood is inundating even the more respectable corners of the landscape of letters. AI has “plunged the book publishing industry into utter chaos,” the Wall Street Journal reported, with “spectacular implosions of big deals over suspected AI use.” The publisher Hachette recently canceled a massive horror novel deal, when an author’s work was flagged as being significantly AI generated. Last week, billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller published an op-ed in the same newspaper, which was identified as “100 percent” written by AI. It’s not just the billionaires that are copy-pasting ChatGPT into emails they dash off to newspapers editors. An analysis by Semafor estimated that of the 310 op-ed columns by guest writers in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post in the last month, one in six used AI; and one in ten were fully written by the bots.

    • The New Stack ☛ Vibe-coded apps are the new shadow IT

      That friction wasn’t just inefficiency. Some of it was doing real security work.

    • Arduino ☛ From voice command to robotic arm: how agentic AI on the edge is changing the factory floor

      For years, bringing real intelligence to industrial automation meant expensive infrastructure, proprietary systems, and steep learning curves. That’s changing – fast. Foundation models powerful enough to run at the edge are turning natural language into machine control, and the factory floor is starting to look a lot more like a conversation.

    • PulkoMandy ☛ A bicycle for the mind

      So, how do LLMs and their use in Linux and Debian fit into this? Well, I think LLMs are like cars for a bicycle rider like me. They are faster. They are not safer, but generally you can ride one and you'll be OK. But, more importantly, they change how people view the world, and through that, they change what people decide to do with the world. The internet used to be a place with lots of cyclepaths, where you could go visit websites with few resources. People took care of presenting you information in well written articles, to organize links, and so on. When most people use LLMs, there is no need to do that. The LLM will handle the complexity and write you an answer. And the infrastructure under it, will not be designed for computer cyclists anymore. There will be no human oriented documentation for the code. Articles will be written in a way that makes them easier for LLMs to handle. First it will just be some editorial changes, then it will be malicious things as the SEO people notice that they can leverage prompt injection (we're probably already there). Then it will be in a format that is completely unusable for us humans.

      And the tool? You're not the one building it, this time. It's coming from a big corporation and it's dangerously close to your mind. I would say that's not safe.

  • Social Control Media

    • Techdirt ☛ X Kills Nitter And Xcancel, The Last Ways To Read Tweets Without Elon Watching

      When Twitter launched, it was originally designed to be just like an open protocol. In the early days, the company eagerly supported third party development, building on that protocol. But, because it was a new communications protocol totally controlled by a single company, eventually commercial pressure led the company to close off the openness. Jack Dorsey later admitted that this was a mistake, and he hoped that Twitter would go back to being an open protocol. That eventually led to the rise of Bluesky (where I am now on the board, having taken Dorsey’s old board seat) and the ATprotocol (along with some other competing protocols, each with a different implementation, but all believing in the value of open social systems).

    • BoingBoing ☛ The Zuckerberg approval rating nobody expected

      Instead of being adored by one faction and reviled by the other, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is simply detested by almost everybody, the piece notes. Parton pulled 78 percent favorability among Democrats and 73 percent among Republicans in the UMASS CPC data, about as universally adored as anyone gets.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • [Old] CrowdStrike ☛ Automated Deobfuscation of Ploutus ATM Malware

      Ploutus is a malware family that targets ATMs and is able to perform ATM jackpotting — an attack that causes the ATM to dispense all bills stored within the ATM cassettes. Ploutus was first discovered in 2013 in Mexico. In March 2021, a new version was identified targeting ATMs in the Latin American (LATAM) region. The malware is implemented using the Microsoft .NET framework, a technology that allows for effective code decompilation. The deployment of the malware is typically achieved by connecting an external device to the ATM to trigger execution of the malware. Once executed, Ploutus interacts with the operator using the function keys and mouse. The interaction with the mouse was likely introduced to allow the operator to easily interact with ATMs supporting a touch screen. The communication with the ATM is performed by using an XFS (extensions for financial services) middleware such as KAL Kalignite.

    • [Old] Medium ☛ Medium

      This article analyzes Ploutus-L malware which demonstrates great knowledge of eXtensions for Financial Services (which will now be abbreviated as XFS) middleware to manipulate cash dispensing operations on ATM while displaying fake maintenance message.

    • Security Week ☛ Five Venezuelans Plead Guilty in US Court to ATM Jackpotting

      In February 2026, the FBI warned that ATM jackpotting incidents have been increasing across the US. Over 1,900 such incidents have occurred since 2020, with over 700 of them (causing more than $20 million in losses) registered in 2025 alone.

    • The Record ☛ Five plead guilty in latest federal ATM jackpotting case

      This is the latest set of federal guilty pleas in recent weeks related to ATM jackpotting schemes.

      Another man, Juan Manuel Gouveia-Aguilera, 27, was sentenced to eight years in prison by a federal judge in Omaha, Nebraska, on August 20 after prosecutors said he was one of several members of a prominent gang to use the Ploutus malware to steal millions from hundreds of ATMs.

    • The Record ☛ Healthcare facilities operator Nutex says patient, employee data stolen in August incident

      In an 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Nutex said it is being extorted by cybercriminals who broke into the company’s servers and exfiltrated information related to patients, employees and external providers as well as confidential financial data.

    • Security Week ☛ Ransomware Gang Claims Nutex Health Data Breach

      The company continues to investigate the scope, extent, and impact of the data breach and has notified the SEC that a purported class-action complaint was filed against it in Texas.

    • SANS ☛ Guildma (Astaroth) malware infection from Brazilian Portuguese email

      On Monday 2026-08-31, I used a link from a malicious Brazilian Portuguese email to infect a Windows host in my lab. This was a Guildma (Astaroth) malware infection.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • NYOB ☛ Supreme Court: CRIF illegally collected data of millions in Austria. Way clear for class action!

      In June 2026, noyb brought an injunction against the unlawful data collection practices of the Austrian credit reference agency CRIF. In several unrelated cases, the Supreme Court (OGH) has now ruled in favour of noyb: CRIF’s current practice of collecting data from address publishers violates the GDPR principle of ‘purpose limitation’. This means that a key allegation in noyb’s injunction has been confirmed by the highest court even before the first hearing. As a result, the prospects of success for our class action against CRIF have further improved.

    • Futurism ☛ Flock Is in Major Trouble

      The police tech company, known for its sprawling network of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), has become one of the flashpoints for the country’s revulsion at AI infrastructure, joining data centers and drone-as-first-responder programs as symbols — and targets — of a rising AI dystopia.

    • TechSpot ☛ Cities are dropping Flock's surveillance cameras at a record pace | TechSpot

      Flock said the loss of contracts has been outweighed by new business. Courtney Terlecki, a company spokesperson, said new city partnerships have outpaced nonrenewals by about 10 to one this year. The company did not disclose how many new customers it has added in 2026, but said its products are used by more than 5,000 communities.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Palantir CEO sets sights on Ukraine as next target

      Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp, will be the lead investor in the former Ukrainian defense minister’s new weapons technology start-up, signaling that Russia’s war against Kyiv has spurred advances in weapons technology that can be deployed elsewhere.

    • Washington Examiner ☛ Air travel's future: Customs and Border Protection unlocks contactless airports

      The agency has rolled out phone apps that allow passengers to streamline customs by digitally sharing travel documents ahead of time, touchless processing that does away with physical handling of documents at checkpoints, and even a system that allows CBP officers in the U.S. to screen baggage before it arrives stateside.

  • Confidentiality

    • Jan Schaumann ☛ Sites using PQC (September 2026)

      The last time I checked, I found about 41% of the Tranco Top 1M Domains supported RFC10024 TLS 1.3 Post-Quantum Traditional (PQ/T) Hybrid Key Agreement. At the time, I guessed that 6 months later (i.e., just about now), we might have reached the 50% marker. Let's see if I was right...

      Here's the breakdown, as before: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • WSWS ☛ Leading fighter for Julian Assange’s freedom calls for mobilisation behind Bogdan Syrotiuk

    Maxine Walker was a prominent member of the Julian Assange Defence Committee based in London. A lifelong socialist, she played a leading role in the international campaign to free the imprisoned WikiLeaks founder, who was indicted under the Espionage Act in 2019 for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Walker this week called on all those who fought for Assange’s freedom to join the fight for Bogdan Syrotiuk’s release from prison in Ukraine. Her statement is reproduced below.

  • RFERL ☛ Germany Says Russia Behind 'Hybrid Attack' At Leipzig Airport

    The September 1 statement by German government officials came as authorities responded to what they called a sabotage attack involving a double-digit number of homemade incendiary devices found at a substation near a coal-fired power plant about 100 kilometers southeast of Berlin.

  • JURIST ☛ UN experts demand an end to unlawful killings by the US in the Caribbean and Pacific

    The experts stated: “These systematic killings gravely violate the fundamental obligation to respect the right to life. International law does not permit governments to simply murder alleged criminals at sea… Just as the police cannot summarily execute people on the street in United States territory.”

  • USMC ☛ USS Abraham Lincoln’s visit to Thailand lifts hope and sex-tourism risk

    Prostitution is illegal in Thailand and, despite occasional crackdowns, the sex industry is openly visible in major tourism hubs, including parts of Bangkok and Pattaya.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Where the Pentagon can’t go, a small nonprofit searches for America’s war dead

    Nearly 81,000 U.S. military personnel remain unaccounted for from conflicts since World War II, according to the DPAA. More than half were lost at sea or under circumstances that make finding their remains extremely unlikely. But the agency says about 38,000 are recoverable.

  • Task And Purpose ☛ The Iran war timeline

    The massive air and missile strikes that marked the start of U.S. military operations were followed by a ceasefire in name only — one that was punctuated by exchanges of fire and a churn of press releases and statements from U.S. Central Command, or CENTCOM, the Pentagon, the White House and other arms of the government, ticking off strikes and targets destroyed. At the same time, Iran has retaliated, striking targets across the region. To date, 18 American service members have died in the conflict.

  • LRT ☛ War on words: Russia destroyed a third of Ukraine’s annual book production this summer

    Russia continues to devastate Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Attacks on the book market, already under threat from the war, have intensified recently – over the summer, a third of Ukrainian publishers’ annual output, including a large proportion of textbooks, was destroyed in warehouses or printing works. Industry representatives are warning of a collapse of the sector, which would deprive Ukraine of the right to speak with its own voice.

  • Medievalists.net ☛ How Medieval Bishops Took Monastic Wealth to Pay Their Soldiers

    These conflicts over limited resources became particularly acute when the ruler demanded that churches provide larger contingents of professional fighting men (milites) to serve in the royal army. Bishops often used resources that were part of the direct patrimony of their dioceses to recruit and provide beneficia for the members of their military households. Archbishop Egbert of Trier (977-993) complained, for example, that he could do little to restore the monasteries and parish churches within his diocese because all his revenues had been divided up as beneficia for milites. In a similar vein, Lampert, a monk at the monastery of Hersfeld in Thuringia, issued a heart-felt condemnation of Bishop Henry of Speyer (1067-1072), whom he claimed took an almost childlike pleasure in handing out the assets of his diocese as beneficia for milites. Lampert claimed that Henry gave away so many resources that he had barely enough wealth left to carry out the duties of his church for half a year.

  • The Atlantic ☛ Hegseth’s Pentagon Lurches off the Rails

    Even in less dangerous times, Hegseth’s irresponsible behavior would be a hazard to American national security. The Defense Department is a huge bureaucracy; it requires a leader who understands more than the mechanics of teaching trainees how to do push-ups or how to handle a weapon. Secretaries of defense must grasp the economics of the defense industry, the nature of alliances, congressional politics, the policy process, and dozens of other issues for which Hegseth seems to care little and about which he knows even less.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

    The Federal Ballot Mail Portal is described by a federal official as one of several IT systems that will be used to potentially deny thousands of mail-in ballots or more to states.

  • Votebeat ☛ USPS whistleblower says rushed new mail ballot systems could disenfranchise voters

    The anonymous whistleblower described the Postal Service’s work on systems as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”

  • International Business Times ☛ Brave Woman Security Guard Helps Remove Nazi Flag at Orlando MMA Event in Orlando's Kia Center

    Footage circulating online shows the swastika banner being confronted and removed as the incident unfolded, turning an already contentious night of fighting into a wider debate over antisemitism, venue security and the boundaries of what should be allowed at major sporting events.

  • The Nation ☛ The USS “Lincoln” Is Part of a Long History of Naval Mistreatment

    The November deployment was slated to end in May, but three months in, President Trump launched the War in Iran, forcing the Lincoln to ramp up operations and remain on the water. As of this writing, the carrier has been out to sea for a whopping eight months—the longest stretch of time without a port call in modern history. Thousands of sailors worked hundreds of days without a single one off.

  • Wired ☛ Using High-Energy Laser, US Shoots Down Drones Near Mexico Border

    The US Army’s laser system is part of a new generation of directed-energy weapons capable of detecting, tracking, and destroying drones with a concentrated beam of light.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Leaked Russian Cyber-Operations Training Materials

  • GBHackers on Security ☛ Leaked University Files Reveal How Russia Trains Hackers for Military Cyber Operations

    A cache of leaked internal records has exposed what appears to be a structured Russian military cyber-operator pipeline embedded inside Bauman Moscow State Technical University.

    The documents indicate that the university’s concealed Department No. 4 trained students for intelligence collection, offensive cyber operations, information warfare, and technical defense before moving selected graduates into GRU-linked units.

    They include curricula, examination records, staffing documents, graduate lists, presentations, and placement data providing rare visibility into how Russia combines technical education with military recruitment.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Court House News ☛ Women say celebrity hairstylist groomed Epstein victims to make them look ‘as young as possible’

    In a 17-page lawsuit filed in New York Supreme Court, the suing women claim Fekkai and one of his employees, Patrick Coombs, played a “pivotal role in Epstein’s grooming schemes by routinely providing salon services to women at Epstein’s instruction.”

    “Fekkai groomed the victims to look as young as possible under Epstein’s direction,” the women claim. “Epstein would direct Fekkai to bleach victims blond and groom them like dolls into Epstein’s and others’ liking.”

  • Krebs On Security ☛ FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

    Intent on discovering the source of this data, KrebsOnSecurity asked more than a dozen friends and family members for permission to search for their licenses in this service. Each person whose license could be found (nine of them) confirmed having traveled on or very close to the dates in the timestamps attached to their images. It is unclear what timezone these timestamps are in, but from reviewing car rental records shared by several people who helped with this research, it appears the timezone is set to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).

• Environment

  • [Repeat] Futurism ☛ Data Center Backlash Has Officially Rattled Scam Altman

    Once seen as exciting new tech that could make our lives easier and better, the construction of countless new data centers to support power-hungry AI models has soured the mood considerably. Protesters are waging a war against $130 billion in data center investments, arguing they’re only benefiting a select few wealthy individuals, while threatening water supplies, driving up the cost of living, and churning out incomprehensible amounts of pollution.

  • Overpopulation ☛ Cutting the global population in half to achieve sustainability

    What the paper does propose is improved education for girls and young women, universal access to contraception, and full freedom for couples to use it. It encourages societies to embrace population decline as key to genuine sustainability, rather than fighting it with pronatalist campaigns, as many are doing.

  • The Verge ☛ Tim Cook did alright by the environment — but AI could upend his climate legacy

    The company pumped out 15.3 million metric tons of gross carbon dioxide emissions in 2025, according to the company’s latest environmental report. That’s about as much as the pollution from 40 gas-fired power plants over a year. In 2020, Apple set a goal of cutting its carbon emissions by 75 percent by the end of the decade (compared to its emissions in 2015). So far, it has reduced its emissions by 60 percent, which Apple touted in its announcement of Cook’s transition to executive chairman. Apple’s carbon pollution shrank each year since 2021 before flatlining over the past year, “holding constant from 2024 even in a year of significant business growth,” the company said in a press release.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Daily Memphian ☛ Data centers looking to expand in Memphis, MLGW CEO says - Memphis Local, Sports, Business & Food News | Daily Memphian

      Memphis Light, Gas and Water President and CEO Doug McGowen said that several approvals would be needed before a large data center could connect.

    • CBC ☛ Ford government to begin ripping out, reconfiguring Toronto bike lanes after appeal court ruling

      Asked about safety concerns once the bike lanes are removed, Sarkaria said the rules of the road will still apply to cyclists and drivers.

    • Smithsonian Magazine ☛ We’ve Been Strapping Cargo to Our Backs for Millions of Years, but Backpack Innovation Really Took Off Around the Civil War

      But what we recognize as a backpack is much newer. In 1865, Henry Clay Merriam led a regiment of Black Union troops in an attack against Fort Blakely, a Confederate stronghold in Alabama. His deeds in this final battle of the Civil War earned him a Medal of Honor “for conspicuous gallantry.” Afterward, the lieutenant colonel had an epiphany: It was burdensome to carry both a knapsack (a pack with shoulder straps but no frame for internal support) and a haversack (a shoulder bag containing his rations). Based on his time carrying gear for the Army, Merriam devised a solution: a boxy canvas pack with room for socks, a quart of water, a shaving kit and a deck of cards, plus a compartment for rations in a case at the bottom. Sheet-metal braces formed the bag’s frame—and could double as tent poles at night. In his 1878 patent, Merriam explained that the design helped soldiers by “lessening the weight to be carried, and at the same time disposing it more uniformly, and leaving the body of the soldier freer and less hampered by straps and other fastenings.”

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Conversation ☛ Bees view the world in surprisingly different ways – understanding this could inspire new technology

      With more than 20,000 species worldwide, bees show extraordinary diversity in lifestyle, body size and ecological role. Some live in open environments; others forage in dense vegetation or in dim light at dawn, dusk and even at night.

      Such remarkable diversity prompted us to ask the question: how have bees’ eyes adapted to such different lifestyles and visual demands?

• Finance

  • DataGeeek ☛ Skewness-Managed Portfolios: A Practical Guide with R – DataGeeek

    Portfolio construction often relies on mean–variance optimization or factor models. Yet, recent research highlights the importance of skewness—the third statistical moment—as a driver of asset returns. Assets with lottery-like payoffs (high positive skewness) tend to be overpriced, while negatively skewed assets are often underpriced. A 66‑page study demonstrates that skewness‑managed portfolios consistently outperform traditional strategies, especially in volatile, short‑term horizons.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • RTL ☛ Zuckerberg, Musk make plea at G20 for more AI data centers

    Polls show a majority of Americans are now against building the centers, amid complaints about rising electricity bills and noise from the facilities.

  • New Republic ☛ “Horrendous”: MAGA Shreds Trump for Cruel Post on Data Center Critics

    In reality, people living near data centers complain about the negative effects on their lives, from the drain on water supplies to increased noise and utility costs. Most data centers only provide a few dozen permanent on-site jobs too. Public opposition to data centers has united people on the left and right.

  • CS Monitor ☛ What widespread data center opposition shows us

    Instead of the predictions of dire environmental consequences, Story focuses on the reaction within Utah to this proposed facility. There is, she found, a cross-partisan, grassroots effort that’s not just about blocking the project, but about citizens reasserting control over the political process and how money influences it. Republicans and Democrats are largely aligned, she says, on wanting more say about how policymakers make choices about the land, about the extent to which artificial intelligence should reshape physical and economic worlds, and about who gets to determine how resources are used.

    This pushback is increasingly common in the United States. Commentators from across the political spectrum have observed that, while opponents might cite water or electricity usage as their reasons, there are deeper rationales for the reaction against data centers. Some say the opposition is a common response to new technologies, repeated from the printing press forward. Others blame an “activist” class they accuse of bringing climate change concerns to any debate. Still others say it’s a reaction to the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the comparatively snail-paced policymaking around it.

    But there’s another explanation – one that comes through in a number of articles in this issue and elsewhere across the Monitor’s platforms. And it involves agency, fairness, and accountability.

  • Security Week ☛ Coast Guard Establishes Office of Maritime Cybersecurity Policy

    The Office of Maritime Cybersecurity Policy (CG-MCP) will serve as the Coast Guard’s central authority for developing and implementing policies governing the cyber safety and security of the Marine Transportation System (MTS).

    Created under the Director of Inspections and Compliance, the office will also serve as the Coast Guard’s primary liaison with industry partners and other government agencies on maritime cybersecurity matters.

  • The Verge ☛ OpenAI delayed its new model’s development after the Hugging Face hack

    In July, an unreleased OpenAI model broke out of its restricted environment, finagled its way into internet access, made it possible for AI agents to secretly conspire under the company’s nose using a secret message board, and hacked into the network of AI lab Hugging Face. The attack sparked weeks of discussion and controversy inside and outside the AI industry, and AI leaders treated it as a “warning shot” for the tech’s growing capabilities and the inadequacy of its safeguards.

  • Watts Martin ☛ I Don't Think I Can Stay in Tech

    I’ve interviewed at several of those companies, and genuinely wanted to work for two of them. Several of them were already falling in my estimation—Stripe’s prudishness in what they accept payments for is a problem given that they and the equally moralistic PayPal constitute an effective duopoly on online payment processing; Dropbox and Block have been enshittifying for years, while Dell and Coinbase started enshittified—but this is a new low.

    Brown again: [...]

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Rewiring Democracy Series on The Renovator

    Nathan E. Sanders and I are writing a series of essays on real-world examples of democratic technologies for The Renovator. I haven’t been posting the full text on the blog because they’re a bit long, but here are links.

  • Myke Hurley ☛ Three Narratives from the John Ternus Executive Profile

    As you would assume, Apple has now updated its executives page with Ternus as CEO, along with a refreshed profile for him.

    I wanted to note three narratives that I spotted in this profile that I think tell the story of the kind of CEO he wants to be, and how Apple wants to communicate this to us. All three of these are very interesting to me.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Apple’s John Ternus Era Begins

    That change began in the latter years of Jobs’ tenure and accelerated under Cook. Most software, including operating systems, was accounted for as part of device purchases, and was turned into a software-as-a-service model. Its subscription-based business became a revenue growth centre, which was important for Wall Street because it was a way to turn the company’s successful but inconsistent device sales into predictable money printers. And there are now ads and upsells throughout the operating systems, which are shown to all users regardless of how much other money they have already given Apple.

  • Michael Tsai ☛ John Ternus Is CEO

  • iLabs ☛ iLabs is closing webshop orders from the EU

    Over the years we have continuously followed and implemented each new EU regulation as it arrived, extended CE directives, RED, RoHS, REACH, WEEE, and more, absorbing the cost of compliance ourselves rather than passing it on to our customers. With the arrival of the new Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (PPWR) and its Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) schemes, which require sellers to register, report, and pay fees separately in every EU country they ship to, we have reached the point where a company of our size simply cannot keep up anymore. The cost and administrative burden is now out of proportion to our direct sales volume, and with further regulation already on the way, we have decided to stop direct EU sales.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Futurism ☛ US Military in Chaos as Trump Shares AI Video of Nonexistent Attack on Iran

      The timing of the AI videos couldn’t have been more deceptive. That Sunday night, the US launched a series of strikes on Iran’s Larak Island, ending a month-long lull in direct attacks. Iran retaliated by launching missiles at two US air bases in Jordan.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • ANF News ☛ Two women sentenced to death over January protests in Iran

    For the first time in Iran, two women have been sentenced to death in connection with the anti-regime protests in January. The death sentences against 20-year-old Taraneh Rahimi and 43-year-old Leila Abolhasani were handed down in two separate trials in Isfahan. According to the Norway-based human rights organization Iran Human Rights (IHR), no woman had previously been executed in connection with the protest movement. By contrast, numerous death sentences against men have already been carried out. IHR puts the number of men executed for their participation in the protests at 29.

  • RFA ☛ Sources in Tibet and Nepal reveal stories of flood destruction, survival

    Chinese authorities have forbidden journalists from entering the disaster zone or interviewing affected family members, and have punished those accused of “spreading rumors” about the disaster, New York-based Human Rights Watch reported.

  • HRW ☛ Tibet Flood Victims Have a Right to be Heard

    Censorship and self-censorship are pervasive throughout China, particularly in Tibetan areas, as Human Rights Watch has long documented. People can be imprisoned for undermining national security simply by sharing information with the outside world. Foreigners, including journalists and independent investigators, are unable to enter without permission.

  • 404 Media ☛ Oklahoma Tells City It Can't Charge $17,125.44 for a Records Request Related to Data Center Arrest

    A city in Oklahoma tried to charge a farmer more than $17,000 to fulfill a public records request for information related to a proposed data center and the farmer’s arrest at a city council meeting. Now, in a win for the farmer, the State’s attorney general has stepped in and told the city to drop the fees and “provide access promptly” to the documents.

    Farmer Darren Blanchard attended a meeting about Project Mustang — a proposed 225 acre data center in Claremore, Oklahoma — in February and planned to speak in opposition to the project. He left in handcuffs after the city council ordered him arrested for going 30 seconds over his allotted three minute speaking limit.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Techdirt ☛ Trump Demands FCC Punish Media Companies For His Sagging Polling

    Trump last week also posted a long, rambling screed on his personal propaganda website, vowing that NBC News‘ Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker would be “reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment” for the crime of accurately pointing out Trump’s political endorsements don’t carry the weight they used to.

    The comment Welker actually made, as is par for the course for corporate media shows like Meet the Press, was just about as timid as you can get, simply stating Trump endorsements have seen “mixed results”: [...]

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Trump calls on FCC to punish 'Meet the Press' moderator Kristen Welker

    In a statement, NBC News expressed its support for Welker. “Kristen is one of the best in the business and we stand by her,” a representative said in a statement.

    FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has shown a willingness to use his agency’s levers to go after broadcast media outlets Trump deems unfriendly. In April, he called for an early review of the TV station licenses held by ABC, claiming the company’s diversity and inclusion policies are in violation of federal anti-discrimination laws.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Arizona Luminaria ☛ New database tracks deaths in ICE detention; 4 in Arizona

    Four people died while detained at immigration facilities in Arizona under the second Trump administration. They are Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, Lorenzo Antonio Batrez Vargas, Oscar Rascon Duarte, and Emanuel Cleeford Damas — all of whom died at medical facilities after being held at local detention facilities.

  • Techdirt ☛ ICE, CBP Officers Prefer To Sexually Assault Children When Committing Crimes

    Given what else we’ve always known about how those with power seek out the weakest people to exploit and abuse — combined with the free pass courts now give to federal officers when they’re only violating civil rights — this new report that’s based on hundreds of criminal cases against immigration officers makes it clear a lot of the “worst of the worst” are employed by the federal government.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ ICE tabs millions for analytics help to comb through voter data

    In an attached statement of work draft, ICE said it planned to tap a contractor to acquire and document voter registration and history files from “government-identified U.S. jurisdictions,” which it described as up to all 50 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and any American territory that it chooses.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Inside a Wrongfully Convicted Death Row Prisoner’s 27 Years at Louisiana’s Angola

    Duncan had spent the last three decades trying to prove his innocence after a jury convicted him of killing his former girlfriend’s toddler. An investigation by Verite News and ProPublica last year showed that prosecutors had relied on key evidence that appeared to be fabricated by a pair of forensics experts whose use of bite mark analysis has since been widely discredited as junk science.

    Nevertheless, Louisiana prosecutors continued to argue that Duncan should be put to death. The threat became ever more real as Gov. Jeff Landry began expediting executions, despite the state’s track record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. It wasn’t until June that the Louisiana Supreme Court threw out Duncan’s murder conviction, ruling that the bite marks found on the child’s body, the only physical proof tying Duncan to the alleged crime, could not have been made by a human.

  • Vox ☛ A federal judge just discovered a whole new way to place ICE above the law, in Walz v. Abbott

    If Castro gets off scot-free, he will owe his freedom to an unusual combination of federal and state officials who appear to have taken extraordinary measures to shield Castro from accountability. But while his case is unusually dramatic, it is hardly unique. An array of MAGA sympathizers and movement conservatives in state governments, the federal judiciary, and the Trump administration have all pushed to place ICE and similar agencies above the law.

  • Salon ☛ ICE is arresting more people than ever

    Memphis lends a small snapshot of what is happening across the country, as ICE arrests and deports more people than ever, according to NBC News, citing new data for August, continuing the record streak of roughly 50,000 arrests in July. For example, more than 1,300 people in Virginia and Maryland were arrested over just two weeks. Many of the recent arrestees among the 300,000 Haitian migrants who lost their legal status in the country thanks to a June Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump administration to end their temporary protected status.

  • Nashville Public Radio ☛ ICE arrests 100+ people in Memphis raid, immigrant advocates say | WPLN News

    “When we say this administration is trying to reshape our nation in their narrow white nationalist vision, this is what it looks like: disappearing our families, neighbors, friends, and co-workers in the night with no regard for the devastation they leave behind,” TIRRC Director Lisa Sherman Luna said.

  • BoingBoing ☛ No explanation for why Georgia cop shot dead beloved miniature donkey HeeHaw

    It's testament to how sympathetic U.S. media is to police that evasive "officer-involved shooting" language is being used even after the police chief said "a Cedartown police officer shot and killed a donkey."

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • Renewable Energy World ☛ Clean energy's growth boom is creating new IP risks

      If patent protection is desired, companies must identify technical innovations before public disclosures or personnel turnover create problems, determine whether patents will serve offensive or defensive objectives, and prioritize commercially significant advances. Companies must then work with legal counsel to develop technically robust patent applications, identify the correct inventors, pursue claims at appropriate product and system levels, and control disclosure risks associated with AI-assisted development.