Leftovers

• Troy Patterson ☛ Papa Was A Rolling Stone

  Just a quick reminder that today is “Papa Was A Rolling Stone” Day.

• Robert Birming ☛ Do your worst

  Stay grounded. Write your way.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Can We Stop With the Uptime Percentages?

  Then I have to remind myself of Jason’s point and re-interpret the numbers, which is more like reading earthquake measurements. The difference between a 6.2 and a 7.8 might not seem that big, but it represents a massive difference in magnitude. Uptime percentages have a similar problem: 99.9% and 99.99% look pretty much the same, but the latter is 10× less!

  Infrastructure people understand this. They even have a shorthand for it: two nines, three nines, four nines. They intuitively grasp the difference because they swim in these numbers every day.

• James G ☛ Your tiny Gallery Guide (a zine) - with words, wonder

  Yesterday, I decided to make a zine in a similar vein, except with some of my own tips for exploring galleries. In the process of making this zine, I realised that I may one day want to write another version that is more edited. There may even be space for me to make multiple zines: one for admiring the architecture of and spaces in galleries, and another for visually analysing paintings, another for analysing statues, and more. 1

• James G ☛ this is me trying (to make a zine) - with words, wonder

  After the IndieWeb Zine Pop Up in May, I decided that I wanted to make a zine. I had already made a zine before, Quiet Edinburgh, but the zine was more of a booklet. After the meetup, I started feeling inspired. I wanted to make a tiny paper zine, one that I could fit in my pocket. The idea lay in the back of my mind for a few months. Occasionally, I would think to myself I should make a zine.

• Dan Q ☛ Why I Stopped “Creating Content”

  The point is: ‘content‘ have become a catch-all term so broad as to be meaningless. A tweet is content. A Netflix series is content. Everything in-between that is passively or mostly-passsively consumed is content, whether it’s AI-slop music or template-driven memes. And content exists to trigger engagement and drive traffic and oh shit now we’re down a rabbithole of meaningless SEO jargon.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Ryan Gibb ☛ The Package Calculus

    Package managers are numerous and diverse, yet all fundamentally solve the same problem, while remaining ad hoc and non-interoperable. This fragmentation prevents multilingual projects from expressing precise dependencies across language ecosystems; it leaves external system and hardware dependencies implicit and unversioned; it obscures security vulnerabilities that lie in the full dependency graph.

    In our paper Package Managers à la Carte we present the Package Calculus: a framework to understand and reason about package managers in their commonality and diversity.

  • Jasper Tandy ☛ Maths

    Seems perfectly reasonable. Then I tried to think about how you'd photograph a guitar from all the angles needed for a guitar to be have like a 3D object. It's not even really the number of images, as much as it is trying to stage the guitar so that you get all the angles in a consistent way.

• Career/Education

  • RIPE ☛ Bridging the Gap Between Theory and Practice in Internet Operations

    Some of the most valuable conversations at RIPE Meetings happen when research meets operational problems. Questions from the network community open up new avenues of investigation for researchers, and researchers in turn share findings that help network operators better understand the networks they run.

    RIPE Meetings already bring these groups together around the shared interest of understanding how Internet infrastructure behaves in the real world. In that setting, researchers get to hear more about operational experience, technical challenges and potential sources of data, while operators can pose questions to researchers that they might not have the time or resources to explore for themselves.

    But a lot of this collaboration depends on chance encounters rather than deliberate planning. So the question we want to look at is: how can we make it easier for researchers and operators to find each other, identify questions of mutual interest, and turn promising conversations at RIPE Meetings into collaborations that continue beyond them?

• Hardware

  • [Repeat] Tom's Hardware ☛ AI data center investment projected to hit $32 trillion by 2050 — infrastructure spending estimated to exceed capital requirements for railways, electrification, or the [Internet]

    PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) estimates that spending on AI data centers could reach as much as $31.6 trillion in the next decade and a half, with optimistic outlooks suggesting that capital expenditure could potentially hit $50 trillion. Bloomberg reports that this amount exceeds the spending that railways, electrification, or the [Internet] required when they were being set up for the first time. It also pointed out that investments in AI data center infrastructure aren’t a one-time expense that would last decades, unlike railroad networks, the power grid, or fiber optic cables — instead, data center operators are expected to purchase new GPUs and related infrastructure every four to six years.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Techie creates a database of coil-whining graphics cards, power supplies, and liquid cooler pumps — open-source project wants community reports of affected parts

    Most of us who build our own PCs have at some point experienced this: you install a new graphics card, fire up your favorite game that now runs faster, and you're greeted by this weird buzzing noise. That's called "coil whine," and while it's most prevalent in graphics cards, it can also affect power supplies, AIO cooler pumps, and many other electronics. Buying pricier gear is no guarantee it won't be affected, too, which is probably why Lowell K. Wood IV (aka iBlessi) of TechFuelHQ created a community-powered database of coil-whining parts.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ With eyes on stalks, this ingenious camera lighting device is an affordable friend for macro photography and bug hunters

    The LED panels are powered by an integral 3300mAh lithium-ion battery, which is said to give over three hours of running time at 100% brightness. This is recharged via a USB-C connector, which takes 2 hours and 20 minutes to recharge. The panels offer a color range from 2800-6500K.

  • Matt Birchler ☛ NVIDIA is doing the iPhone thing

    It is fascinating to see this phenomenon happening again. Years ago, Apple's iPhone revenue wasn't so much based on how much demand there was in the market, it was literally how many iPhones they could manufacture. Today, NVIDIA is in the exact same spot. Their hardware revenue is capped at how much they can build, not how much people will buy. Technically, that's a business problem, but it's the sort of problem you're lucky to have.

  • David L Farquhar ☛ Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982

    On September 1, 1982, the Commodore 64 launched. Its name referred to the amount of memory it had on board: 64 kilobytes. And it was the first computer with 64K of memory to sell for under $600.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Derek Sivers ☛ Bangalore India hospital flow

    At the Indian hospital, when I tried to book an appointment in advance, they were confused. “Just come in”, they said. I tried to explain that I’m coming from abroad for this major surgery and can’t stay for long, but their answer was the same. “Just come in.” So I flew there with no appointment.

    The top specialists - some of the best in the world - are available within hours. I showed up at 7am and made appointments to see four specialists at 8, 9, 10, and 11.

  • Pivot to AI ☛ UK AI medical transcription is dangerous and doesn’t work

    Why are doctors even using these things? Mostly, it’s massive NHS pressure. The doctors are flat out just keeping up, and it’s cheaper than hiring people. Doctors can see more patients, faster! Quality is not a metric here.

    Checking the transcript for more than a second never happens, because the excuse for the AI is the doctors don’t have the time in the first place.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Crooked Timber ☛ Don’t use a gmail.com address

    We are being flooded with spam coming from fake gmail.com addresses at the moment. So, for the moment, I’ve set our spam filter to delete everything from gmail.com

  • [Old] Ben Johnston ☛ R For SEO Part 5: Common Excel Formulas In R

    Welcome back. It’s part 5 of my R for SEO series and I hope you’re all finding it useful so far. Up to now, we’ve covered the basics, using packages and Google Analytics & Search Console, data visualisation with GGPlot2 and wordcloud and in our last piece, we looked at R functions for SEO. Now let’s start seeing how the power of R can help us replicate the common Excel formulas we use in our day-to-day, but faster and on larger datasets.

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

    • Wired ☛ These Russian Mathematicians Taught AI Models How to Talk to Each Other Without Using Words

      The startup used the approach to build a model that has rocketed to the top of ARC-AGI 3, a notoriously difficult competition for AI models. (They wouldn’t tell me more because they want to win the contest.) To demonstrate the idea, however, they also created a bridge between two Chinese open-weight models: the largest version of GLM-5.2, which has 753 billion parameters; and a 4-billion-parameter version of Qwen-3.5 that can run on a mobile device. The resulting hybrid system costs one-twentieth of the full GLM model, and its performance is exactly halfway between the two.

    • Framework Computer BV ☛ Choosing a Framework Desktop for Local AI: 32GB, 64GB, and 128GB

      Fast forward to September 2026, and memory supply constraints across the industry have pushed up prices, including for the Framework Desktop. Fortunately, this has coincided with the release of new, smaller open-weight models that are well suited to the 32GB and 64GB configurations, making the less expensive versions more capable and helping to offset the impact of higher memory prices. The new Qwen3.8-27B can run within 32GB with a suitable quantization, while models such as Qwen Image and MiniMax-H3 bring image, video, and audio generation within reach on the same configuration.

    • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Personal Effort to Reduce Biorisk

      I'm pretty worried about how AI might change the world a lot very soon. In some of these cases things go very wrong very quickly, in others things go very right very quickly, but I'm increasingly (relative to 2024) expecting a messy middle path where, whether we end up with a good or bad outcome, things might get weird for a while. Our supply chains are fragile, fulfilment is largely just-in-time, and if we'll suddenly need way more of some things they might not be available. Thinking a lot about biosecurity for my day job, I'm especially worried about how people, AIs, or some combination might release something to spread through the population.

  • Social Control Media

    • The Verge ☛ Congressman says TikTok backed out of a meeting to avoid child safety questions

      After negotiating “in good faith” to bring TikTok’s chief security officer before the House Select Committee on China to answer questions about Chinese government access to Americans’ data and the TikTok algorithm, Chair John Moolenaar (R-MI) said in a statement Thursday that the company reversed course. “Now, TikTok is refusing to appear citing its own desire to avoid broader scrutiny of its child safety practices,” Moolenaar wrote. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    • Marty Day ☛ Proof Reddit Isn’t Always Terrible: Wile E. Coyote’s AMA

      What made this particularly great though? Like Mr. Coyote traditionally communicates, every one of his answers was via a hand-held sign.

    • Lee Peterson ☛ Where do I share my photography? - LJPUK

      I really enjoy any sort of photography, if you have read my blog for a while you will probably know this already. I don’t mind which camera I have on me I’m always on the hunt for a nice photo or interesting angle to take. What I’ve found over the years of using different services is that I have really settled into three places

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Security Week ☛ Manchester Airports Group Data on 8.8 Million People Leaked After Ransom Refusal

      The airport operator disclosed that hackers had exfiltrated email addresses, phone numbers, vehicle registrations, and postcodes, noting that its operations were not affected by the incident.

      MAG confirmed that the stolen information was stored in a database hosted by a third party and that it received a ransom demand from the attackers, but refrained from sharing further details on the matter.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • APNIC ☛ What part of 'No!' is so hard for the DNS understand?

      One effective form of attack on the Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure, including the root servers, is the so-called ‘random name attack’. If you want to target the online availability of a particular domain name, then a random name attack will attempt to saturate the domain name’s authoritative nameserver (or servers) with queries to resolve names in that zone. That can put the server (or servers) under such a level of load that ‘legitimate’ queries are no longer answered. The result is that the name goes dark and the denial-of-service attack is successful.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Record ☛ Health data of more than 9.5 million people leaked from Aesto record system

      Aesto provides data migration and archiving services to medical facilities upgrading their technology or switching electronic health record vendors and supports healthcare groups purchased by other companies. At least 30 healthcare organizations were affected by the Aesto breach.

      Aesto filed breach notices in several states on behalf of its customers, including Together Women's Health in Texas and California.

    • 404 Media ☛ Flock Taught Cops How to Surveil No Kings Protesters

      In the webinar, Flock’s director of market management Caity Peak explains how real time crime centers — which are police surveillance centers that utilize Flock cameras and other surveillance cameras — can be used for emergency response, but can also be used to surveil “established events” like 4th of July fireworks displays, parades, bike races, Mardi Gras, and protests. The webinar shows just how routine the idea of always-on surveillance has become, and how casually it is used during extremely innocuous events.

    • Wired ☛ This Is Flock’s AI Search Tool for Cops

      WIRED rebuilt Flock’s latest search tool from code the company sends to a police officer’s browser. Its AI can keep watch across multiple cameras for anyone fitting a written description.

    • PC World ☛ Microsoft OneDrive wants to back up everything. You don’t have to let it

      Windows Latest is getting credit for noticing that Windows is apparently allowing you to opt out of Windows Backup by way of OneDrive as part of the out-of-the-box (OOBE) process of setting up a new PC. Previously Windows simply kicked that decision down the road for a period of three days; now, you can opt out forever.

  • Confidentiality

    • Tor ☛ [tor-dev] Upcoming C-tor security release - 0.4.9.12 - tor-dev - Tor Project Forum

      Next Tuesday, September 8th, we will do a C-tor release (0.4.9.12) containing fixes for a set of high severity issues.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ The Rise of the Billionaire Lobby

    California’s Proposition 40 would tax roughly 200 billionaires to fund health care for millions. Google cofounder Sergey Brin and friends have responded by inventing a new kind of pressure group: a lobby whose only client is the billionaire class itself.

  • The Record ☛ New pro-Ukraine hacker group targets Russian companies with custom ransomware

    The group, which calls itself VantaCore, has targeted at least seven known victims, Russian cybersecurity firm F6 said in a report published this week. Researchers first detected its activity in August, although the group's data-leak website appears to have been created in early June.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Imperialist Delusions and the Price of Fuel

    Notice, also, that Bessent didn’t point out that these attacks on Russian oil would end if Russia were to end its attempted war of conquest. But far from demanding an end to Russian aggression, the Trump administration infuriated the democratic nations of Europe by inviting Russia’s finance minister, for the first time since the Ukraine war began, to Monday’s meeting of the Group of 20 major economies.

    But wait: There’s more background here. Bessent, as much as or more than Trump, has been effectively an enemy of Ukraine from the beginning.

  • Karl Bode ☛ Never Forget How Eagerly Apple And Google Coddled Fascism

    The US slide into autocracy has been enabled at every step by pathetic tech executives that enthusiastically embraced a complete lack of ethics.

  • The Next Move ☛ Russia Is at War With the West. Don’t Call It ‘Hybrid.’

    If Russia attacks Europe, and Europe doesn’t call it war, is it actually a war? As the Kremlin continues to probe the West’s defenses, it’s clear that European leaders would prefer you call it “hybrid war,” hoping that the focus stays on the “hybrid” half of the equation and not on the “war.”

    Last month, Russia carried out a drone attack at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany. One UAV was discovered before its payload could be detonated; a second collided with a cargo plane.

  • Crooked Timber ☛ The US Navy loses another war

    … but that won’t change any minds

  • Le Monde ☛ Leaked Spanish report claims 'total permissiveness' of Morocco over Ceuta crisis

    A leaked report alleges some Moroccan police officers guided crossings into the Spanish enclave, undermining Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's insistance Rabat did not orchestrate the crisis.

• Environment

  • Wired ☛ The 2026 El Niño Is Being ‘Supersized’ as Impacts Worsen

    The World Meteorological Organization is warning that the climate phenomenon that has the Pacific running a fever will last until at least February, with dire consequences for weather worldwide.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Midterm Candidates Rethink Data Centers as Opposition Grows

    The shift follows growing public resistance to data centers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Residents and opponents have raised concerns about higher electricity costs, environmental impacts, water use, and the broader expansion of AI. Shapiro said conversations with Pennsylvania residents influenced his changing position, while legislative gridlock prevented lawmakers from passing new regulations.

    Democrats and Republicans both are recalibrating on data center development as opposition has grown across the midterm landscape. In New York, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul signed a moratorium on data center development this summer, while in Texas, Republican Governor Greg Abbott paused data center projects pending an audit, Inside Towers reported.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ Organizing for Survival in an Era of Climate Chaos

    Our current infrastructure was built for a world that no longer exists. How do we build the power to survive when the systems we depend on fail us? In this episode of Movement Memos, I talk with Keyante Aytch, Alice Liu, and Brandon Bunt about the tools and relationships that can help make communities resilient — from mesh networks and off-grid solar to neighborhood disaster hubs.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ How To Avoid Getting Arc Flashed

      Despite being a professionally trained and certified professional, being called out to diagnose a weird issue on a slightly unusual solar farm’s electrical installation already worked against him. After having spent some time doing said troubleshooting, he finally tracked down the auxiliary transformer that normally powers the low-voltage gear, along with the spicy parts that should absolutely be unpowered after flipping the breaker into the ‘off’ position.

      Testing for no power confirmed that the power had indeed been cut, which was when the wiring that normally connects the auxiliary transformer was spotted still lying just out of reach in the back of the cabinet. Clearly this was the cause behind one of the issues that the owner had been having.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ I pay my parking tickets like any other Corporate Person: a million dollars at a time.

      I was gonna make a joke about how many parking tickets you thought a regular meatsack Non-Corporate person could get and still keep their license, but it turns out that the answer is infinitely many as long as you pay them.

    • Gazetteer, San Francisco, California ☛ Waymo has been slapped with more than 8,300 parking tickets since January 2025

      New SFMTA data obtained by Gazetteer SF shows that Waymo vehicles got hit with 4,178 parking tickets in 2025, and is set to blow by that figure in 2026, with 4,131 infractions through July 19. On average, Waymo has received more than 106 parking tickets a week in that time period.

      This is a major rise in infractions since 2024, coinciding with a surge in overall Waymo usage in San Francisco. Waymo received 589 parking tickets in 2024 with a total fine of $65,065, according to a 2025 Washington Post analysis.

      That dollar amount looks paltry today: From January 2025 through July 17 this year, Waymo racked up $957,008 in fines.

    • Avi Loeb ☛ Detectable Flashes from Light-Sail Transport Systems Between Habitable Exoplanets

      The primary challenge of rocket propulsion is the burden of needing to accelerate the spacecraft’s own fuel, resulting in only a logarithmic gain in maximum speed as propellant is added to the spacecraft. Light sails offer an attractive alternative in which fuel is not carried by the spacecraft, with acceleration being provided by an external source of light. By artificially illuminating the spacecraft with beamed radiation, speeds are only limited by the area of the sail, heat resistance of its material, and power use of the accelerating apparatus.

• Finance

  • Mike Brock ☛ The AI Trade is a Psyop

    A psychological operation is a coordinated effort by an interested party to move a target audience toward a specific belief by supplying that audience with framed information at scale. What has been running on the tech beat for the last eighteen months meets every element of that definition. The operator is the consortium of frontier labs and their investors. The target audience is the pool of people whose confidence in imminent artificial general intelligence supports the equity price. The framed information is a weekly cycle of papers, blog posts, and reporter briefings describing frozen token-prediction systems as agents that scheme, blackmail, and resist shutdown. The interest being served is a valuation the underlying engineering does not otherwise justify, and a regulatory posture that would make the incumbents’ position permanent. Say it plainly and it stops sounding like a conspiracy theory and starts sounding like what it is, which is a marketing campaign.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Wired ☛ Nobody Is Saying Why OpenAI and Anthropic Had Outages Today

    Frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI all experienced rare outages on Thursday morning, creating downtime for their corresponding AI chatbots. SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, said on Thursday afternoon that the issues with Grok resulted from “an outage at our Memphis compute center this morning.”

  • Wired ☛ OpenAI Cut Off a Billion-Dollar Customer to Avoid Elon Musk

    OpenAI recently estimated its Cursor partnership would make more than $1 billion in revenue a year, WIRED has learned. It still walked away after Elon Musk’s SpaceX acquired the AI coding startup.

  • The Verge ☛ The NBA explains Steve Ballmer’s jumbotron corruption scandal

    Last September, Steve Ballmer insisted in an ESPN interview that the Clippers weren’t involved in a shady-looking $28 million endorsement deal for his star player, Kawhi Leonard, that involved no actual endorsing. Now, the former Microsoft CEO has been suspended by the NBA for a year, while the league says his team will forfeit five future draft picks and pay a $30 million fine, among other penalties.

  • Robert Reich ☛ It’s Not Age

    The big takeaway from this primary season isn’t one of “generational change.” It’s the growing power of progressives, along with voters’ increasing suspicion of giant corporations, Big Tech, and the billionaire class.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ GoPro sold at a bargain price after years of decline

    The deal is worth $285 million, more than twice GoPro’s market capitalization. The sum nevertheless remains a fraction of the heights the company once reached. In 2015, one year after going public, GoPro was valued at $12 billion. Since then, it has endured a long and painful decline, marked by plunging sales and wave after wave of layoffs. Its new owner plans to leverage GoPro’s “leading expertise in optics and its intellectual property” to target the AI and defense markets.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • CPJ ☛ Neither free nor imprisoned: Tunisia’s journalists in legal limbo

    In Tunisia, at least four journalists and commentators sentenced to prison over the last year remain free, trying to work and carry on with their daily lives while knowing they could be arrested and taken into custody. Two others are in exile, unable to return home without risking imprisonment. Whether they will eventually be forced to join three other journalists who are currently behind bars in Tunisia — Zied el-Heni, Mourad Zghidi, and Borhen Bsaies — remains unclear.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Wired ☛ Wikipedia Workers Unionize for the First Time

    More than 200 staffers at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind the encyclopedia Wikipedia, have voted 158-14 to join the Communications Workers of America labor union. The US National Labor Relations Board counted ballots on Thursday.

  • Mike Brock ☛ A Twenty-Year-Old is Dead Because the United States Government Put a Monitor on His Leg

    It was too heavy to play soccer in. It restricted him to a seventy-five-mile radius. It was visible under his clothes. When his JROTC unit distributed uniforms, Pierre did not receive one, and his father believes the omission was because of the device on his leg. Classmates saw it and taunted him. On Instagram in late July, before he died, Pierre wrote: “I came to this country to pursue my education. I didn’t come here to commit a crime or hurt anyone. Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg, carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

    His father said Pierre felt like he was treated like an animal.

  • NPR ☛ Gloria Steinem, trailblazing journalist and activist, dies at 92

    Starting in the 1960s, at a time when women were largely limited to domestic roles, Steinem challenged gender stereotypes and championed feminist ideals like equality, sisterhood and reproductive freedom. In doing so, she inspired generations of women to do the same. Today, she's a household name that is synonymous with the women's rights movement.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Consumer Rights Wiki tracks every shady and sketchy trick they pull

    The Consumer Rights Wiki documents anti-ownership and anti-consumer shenanigans ranging from planned obsolescence to subscription traps, with every shady and sketchy practice in between. Right-to-repair restrictions are far from history despite it becoming the law of the land in state after state.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Preparing for a post-Trump [Internet] (03 Sep 2026)

    Which brings me to the post-Trump [Internet]. Trump isn't the first president to figure out that the [Internet] could be weaponized for geopolitical ends. As the Snowden disclosures showed, there has been a longstanding bipartisan consensus that the [Internet] is a great tool for American surveillance, conducted against friend and foe alike.

    But Trump is the first president to openly, directly recruit American tech companies to simply brick foreign officials who displease him, starting with the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, who lost his Office 365 and Outlook accounts in retaliation for swearing out a genocide warrant for Netanyahu: [...]

  • Neil Fraser ☛ Neil Fraser: News: .name Termination

    On 15 April 2026 Verisign proposed the destruction of the entire 3rd level of the '.name' hierarchy in order to simplify their administration. Astonishingly, on 28 July 2026 ICANN approved this action. I found out about this a few days ago when my registrar emailed me.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • The Verge ☛ Nvidia will officially bring DLSS 5 to older GPUs — but won’t give gamers full control

    That said, the company tells me that developers could pass along certain controls in their own settings menus, like they’ve done with other graphics tech. (Early DLSS Super Resolution was also just an on/off toggle, but today’s games let you pick between varying levels of quality or even an exact percentage, depending on the game.)

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ RCN Urges Judge to Toss the Major Labels' 'Last' Piracy Liability Lawsuit

      Internet service provider RCN has asked a New Jersey federal court to reconsider a six-year-old ruling and dismiss the major record labels' piracy liability lawsuit. RCN argues that the Supreme Court's decision in Cox v. Sony wiped out the legal basis for the claims. With "repeat infringer" cases against other ISPs already dropped, RCN says it is the last major label lawsuit of its kind still alive.

    • David Bushell ☛ Plagiarism ain’t cool bro :(

      I believe so. The colour scheme is almost identical. The oval green logotype. The use of a pink star shape. My star is a custom vector, Jordan is using Unicode “✦” (U+2726). The sans-serif for body copy and script font for headings. Lobster is not a bad choice if you’re limited to Google Fonts but it’s kinda played out. The combination of all these things is key.

      I doubt anyone can look at the side-by-side and say the similarities are coincidence.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Unpermissioned research (02 Sep 2026)

      Worse: by demoting a labor rights issue to a mere property rights issue, AI critics are setting workers up to fail. Say the issue with AI training really is mere copyright. If that's so, the media companies who want nothing better than to pauperize creative workers can amend their standard contracts so that any worker who does business with them must irrevocably transfer their "AI training rights" to the company.

      Then, that company will absolutely, 100% license those rights to an AI company to create a model designed to replace that worker. The company will get paid for the training, and the resulting model will come with "guardrails" to stop other media companies from using proprietary data to compete with it.

      This is the story of the past 50 years of copyright expansion: every new copyright we've created "to help artists" was scooped up by their bosses, who grew more powerful and were able to demand more concessions from those artists, who were therefore poorer and thus needed more copyrights to help them (lather, rinse, repeat): [...]