Leftovers

• [Old] The Guardian UK ☛ The Fat Freddy's Cat Omnibus by Gilbert Shelton

  As Gilbert Shelton well understands, cartoons should be silly. They should be about dignity compromised, made risible, and anyone who has observed a cat try to compose itself with desperate nonchalance after, say, slipping off a window ledge, should know that cats are already halfway to being cartoons of themselves. Shelton captures this admirably. No one to my knowledge has observed so well how a cat looks in panic or disaster, or, with such economy of line, their self-absorption while washing themselves; it excuses and indeed validates the strips (and there are, it has to be admitted, a few) where the punchline is weak even to the point of non-existence; but then when you are faithfully drawing an animal, you are going to have to be largely faithful to its drives, which revolve around eating, shitting, fighting and fucking.

• Thomas Jensen ☛ Home network v2 — the never-ending story

  Now — five years and 17 posts later — I don’t really have any idea where I am going with this… I’m continuously improving my home network. That is a big part of my homelab hobby, a never-ending story.

• [Repeat] Ruben Schade ☛ A closing department store in Carlingford

  I don’t remember much from my early childhood in Australia before we moved overseas semi-permanently, but I do recall my mum and sister busying themselves downstairs in these department stores while my dad and I went upstairs to look at the televisions and electronics. Since coming back, it appears most of these chains have been relegated to being storefronts for the same rebranded tat you can buy online. This strikes me as odd: if online stores are threatening to eat your lunch, acting just like them doesn’t seem like a winning strategy. Then again, I’m no retail expert.

• Jeff Dickey ☛ Dotfiles That Save Themselves

  mise bootstrap already supported two common ways of managing dotfiles: keep them in a repository and symlink them into place, as GNU Stow does, or generate the live files from stored sources and templates, as chezmoi normally does.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Logikal Solutions ☛ ISAM - Because Academics and AI Get It Wrong

    A Cylinder is some number of tracks in the same place on every platter. It very much is that thing from high school geometry you have such fond memories about.

    A Track is a ring of sectors going all the way around a single platter. Yes, sectors change size as you move to the spindle in the center. Historically we wasted a lot of storage because nobody had figured out how to implement disk blocks allowing us to use all of the rust on the platter.

    Today many would refer to a sector as a disk block, but it wasn’t. It was a slice of a track. They were different sizes in each track, but they were the same percentage of that track. That concession was required for sanity.

    When you re-organized an ISAM file, some portion of the “records” or primary data area was left empty. The same was true for the index at the top. Inserting records was inefficient but the data had to be kept in sorted order. You could not span a track. If the record, or index, did not fit, it had to go to overflow.

  • Kieran Healy ☛ Research Workflows

    I’m teaching MPTC again this semester and have been developing a few workflow slides. Here’s a popular one.

• Career/Education

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ People and Blogs interview : Juha-Matti Santala

    Hi, I'm Juhis! I'm a community builder, writer, tech educator and software developer from Finland. I've been writing on the web since my early teenage years and I love sharing ideas, experiences and knowledge openly to inspire others to learn and create things they are interested in.

  • Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti ☛ Tech needs humanists more than ever

    My suggestion is to go back to the humanities and learn a language or two (not the ones you use to code; the other kind). When AI can take care of retrieving facts and putting words together in reassuringly trite ways, your edge as a carbon-based lifeform lies in your ability to go deep, have stances, and know how to convey and defend them. You can do that if you train in the dojo of Plato and Chomsky.

    Let me offer an alternative to learning a trade like plumbing or carpentry. Cast the monkey wrench aside for a moment. Instead, start looking at the intellectual foundations of human culture and consider studying philosophy (of any kind), literature, linguistics (the computational flavor is OK), math, history, or anthropology. If you already hold a degree in that area, it’s time to dust it off. And if going back to university is not your thing (I know it’s not mine), self-study is the way to go. If you’re an engineer, adding a bundle of Classics to your skill tree will do you good. Not that degrees guarantee you’ll become a thinker, mind you, but some of it might stick on you still.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • US Right to Know ☛ Bill Gates’s African farm revolution: hunger rises, yield growth lags

    Now, nearly 20 years of data are in, and AGRA’s results fall far short of its promises. They raise fundamental questions about AGRA, the Gates Foundation and their influence on African governments and institutions.

    The AGRA effort drew more than $1.5 billion in donations (two-thirds from the Gates Foundation), as African governments spent an estimated $1 billion a year in subsidies for fertilizer and other inputs in AGRA’s target countries.

  • SBS ☛ The unusual tactics some shoppers admit to as fruit and vegetable prices spike

    More than four in 10 shoppers are buying only what they can afford rather than what they want to eat, according to a new survey.

  • [Old] Scientific American ☛ Bill Gates Should Stop Telling Africans What Kind of Agriculture Africans Need

    A primary proponent of this view is the Cornell Alliance for Science (CAS), founded in 2014 to “depolarize the charged debate” around genetically modified (GM) seeds. With $22 million in funding thus far from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the CAS in fact consistently defends GM seeds, arguing that they are healthy, productive and environmentally friendly, while attacking agroecology as economically and socially regressive.

    In contrast, the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), which represents more than 200 million farmers, fishers, pastoralists, indigenous peoples, women, consumers and others across all but five African countries, holds that agroecology is what our continent needs. Small-scale, ecofriendly cultivation methods using indigenous knowledge and inputs and cutting-edge science increase the variety, nutritive value and quantity of foods produced on farms while stabilizing rural economies, promoting gender equity and protecting biodiversity.

  • [Old] IATP ☛ Whose Agenda? The Corporate Takeover of Corn in SE Asia

    In terms of threats, the immediate issue facing our countries right now is the importation, testing and commercial release of transgenic corn. It is important to ensure that the interests of farmers, consumers, the environment and the poor in general are firmly accounted for in this process. Many people throughout the region are getting active in biosafety debates, as well as the discussions on the new round of multilateral trade negotiations at the WTO. Both of these could decisively protect or neglect the public interest, depending on the level of society's involvement.

    At the same time, changes in technologies or markets should not undermine the opportunities for rural families to continue cultivating corn in the context of sustainable agriculture in Southeast Asia. Despite the growing influence of private sectors on our governments, we need strong public research systems that develop corn varieties and technologies relevant to poor farmers and to the food needs of our people. We also need to support alternative research and marketing structures where farmers can take control in setting priorities and improving production, processing and distribution systems themselves. Alternative farmer-led research and development approaches can be very successful on the ground, as we have seen in our countries with rice.

  • Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa ☛ The Green Revolution Has Failed Africa: Twenty Years of Evidence and What Works Instead [PDF]

    For more than two decades, Africa has been promised an agricultural transformation based on improved seeds, synthetic fertilisers, mechanisation and commercial markets. Governments were urged to subsidise inputs, reform policies and attract private investment. Yields would rise, farmers would prosper and hunger would fall.

    Twenty years is long enough to ask: what has this model delivered?

    This report tests those promises against the evidence. Across the thirteen countries prioritised by AGRA, fertiliser use more than doubled and cultivated land expanded by 46 per cent, yet staple-yield growth did not accelerate. Much of the production increase came from bringing more land under cultivation, while crops such as millet and sorghum lost ground. Most troublingly, the number of chronically undernourished people increased by 58 per cent.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Crytek Hit by More Layoffs in Turkey and Germany

    Crytek, makers of the legendary, PC-crippling Crysis and The Hunt: Showdown 1896, has seemingly conducted another round of layoffs—making this the second in as many years, following layoffs in February 2025—per reporting by Insider Gaming. The layoffs have not yet been officially announced, but insiders told the publication that the September 2026 layoffs have affected teams in both Istanbul, Türkiye, and Frankfurt, Germany.

  • Mike Rockwell ☛ Windows XP Telephone Activation Tool

    But I needed a way to get around Windows XP’s activation countdown. This tool did the trick for me.

  • Cendyne Naga ☛ Can you even "own" a passkey?

    Passkeys are finally mainstream and the specs for passkeys and WebAuthn Level 3 (the latest version) just reached Recommendation status at the W3C. Yet education on passkey's security properties, proper implementation, and how they work has not reached a ubiquitous threshold in the software development community. A question I recently answered in a chat started with: [...]

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

    • RTL ☛ 'Tremendous mistake': Macron, SKorea leader warn at film summit of AI risks to creativity

      Hollywood favourite George Clooney brought some of his star power to the event, which brought together more than 200 guests from dozens of countries, including top executives from US studios such as Sony Pictures and Disney.

      Called the Lumiere summit, in a nod to Auguste and Louis Lumiere, the French brothers considered the inventors of the motion picture, the event took place in the medieval village of Saint-Paul-de-Vence near Nice and was co-chaired by South Korean President Lee Jae Myung.

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Build a digitally sovereign second brain

      A while ago, we read the book Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte (Figure 1). It starts with the idea that we are all a little overloaded and bombarded with information, and how overwhelming it can be to not be able to retrieve the information that we need at a later time. The foundation of a Second Brain is to increase the capture and cataloguing rate of information, and the book delves into lots of custom systems to tag, organise, prioritise, and retrieve information. This Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) idea feels similar to the ideas of David Allen and the older, but still brilliant, ‘Getting Things Done’ system.

    • Michael Taggart ☛ Unsafe At Any Speed

      The objective here is to do things better than a human, and by "better" I do not mean "faster." We do not require the models' speed to build quality software. It is unclear whether the attendant costs of that speed allow us to maintain secure, high-quality software if LLMs are the primary means of production.

      Are the models' solutions more elegant? No; the models produce highly verbose solutions that are difficult to maintain and often suffer from "feature creep," adding bloat and complexity to the output.

      Are the models' solutions more creative? Indeed, they can't be, since their very architecture will regress to the mean of their training data when generating responses.

      Are the models' solutions more secure? Weirdly no—despite advances in finding vulnerable patterns in some types of code, models seem dreadfully locked in to the insecure patterns they've learned from example code. Perhaps they can't be blamed ("I learned it by watching you!") but again, this tool is supposed to exceed our capacity, not repeat our mistakes.

      Ah, but I'm getting hung up on whether the tool works. I don't care whether it works right now; I care why we want it to.

    • Justin Duke ☛ Hiring and firing a DBA

      The second reason is that the LLM consistently overclaimed — both the scale of the improvement it was making and its confidence in being able to make any change whatsoever.

      I led with the exciting headline: it cut 25% of our reads. Which is great! But that impressive feat is itself roughly 25% of what it claimed it was going to do. Yes, the math there is not a typo. Largely, I think, this is because we did not — for obvious reasons — give it access to the actual production dataset, only the metadata about it. So it was calibrating a lot of its estimates against synthetic datasets it would conjure up itself, and synthetic data is a flattering mirror.

      The combination of the two meant this experiment had crossed from positive value into negative-value territory.

    • Fernando Borretti ☛ The Education of a Doomer

      If you follow me on Twitter, or read this blog, you have noticed that I went from being generally optimistic and excited about AI to being extremely concerned. And I thought, I should explain why I changed my mind. Each section of this post is about some aspect of AI where my views shifted. I begin each section by explaining my previous beliefs, and why I held them, and then explain why those beliefs changed.

    • arXiv ☛ [2609.03344] Large-Language Models as a Cognitive Virus

      Large-language models (LLMs) are rapidly becoming part of human culture, reshaping how information is produced, transmitted, and used. Here we propose that their diffusion can be understood through a viral analogy, with LLM use spreading through populations, becoming embedded in cognitive and cultural practices. We model transitions among uncoupled, coupled, and persistently dependent users, and show that the interplay between social transmission, recovery, and collective reinforcement can generate tipping points and technological lock-in. A central consequence is the possibility of runaway dynamics: once a critical threshold is crossed, small increases in adoption can trigger rapid population-level shifts toward persistent dependence, with abrupt losses in cognitive competence. The same framework, however, identifies conditions for cognitive immunization, based on reducing transmission and facilitating reversibility. Our results highlight how LLM adoption may involve nonlinear collective transitions with important consequences for cognitive autonomy.

  • Social Control Media

    • Robin Berjon ☛ Media Media

      All of those have pro-authoritarian leadership, and the only one that isn't MAGA-aligned (outside of the US) is TikTok. Those numbers are for reach, but they correspond to reported numbers on news referrals as well as with socio-cultural influence. A few other sources make a decent showing in the list (SnapChat, LinkedIn) but they remain small. No European app makes the list.

      This is well-known, but it's not the whole story. Two other factors must be taken into account. First, social media isn't just another media — it's the leading distribution channel for other media too. In a sense, what we're dealing with is media media. Globally, social media is the number one source of news and social media native forms of news are rising sharply. Second, social media is editorial media and is only marginally influenced by social aspects. According to Meta's own disclosure, only 7% of time spent on Instagram (and 17% on Facebook) involves content from people you follow. You read that right: 93% of time spent on Instagram is on content chosen editorially by Meta. We don't have numbers for other platforms, but the existing evidence points in the same direction (e.g. both YouTube and TikTok actively push boys towards toxic masculinist content).

      To summarise: [...]

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] Schneider Electric Easergy, EcoStruxture, PowerLogic, and Saitel Products (Update A)

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] Tycon Systems TPDIN-Monitor-WEB2 (Update A)

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] OPCFoundation OPC UA LocalDiscoveryServer (LDS)

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] IXON VPN Client

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] Rockwell Automation ControlFLASH

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] Rockwell Automation ArmorStart LT

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] Rockwell Automation 1756-ENBT Module

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] Inductive Automation Ignition

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] Pyramid Solutions NetStaX EtherNet/IP Stack

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] Tycon Systems TPDIN-Monitor-WEB3

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-02 [Older] CISA Adds Seven Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-01 [Older] Rockwell Automation RSLinx Classic

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-01 [Older] Rockwell Automation Redundancy Module Configuration Tool

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-01 [Older] Rockwell Automation Logix Platform

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-01 [Older] Rockwell Automation FactoryTalk Activation Manager

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-01 [Older] Rockwell Automation ControlLogix, CompactLogix, CompactLogix 5480, GuardLogix, Compact GuardLogix

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-01 [Older] Rockwell Automation Historian ME

    • CISA ☛ 2026-08-31 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Bitdefender ☛ How a hole in Lenovo's login system let hackers walk into 5,000 Dropbox accounts

      If you ever linked your Dropbox account to a Lenovo ID - perhaps to make life easier when logging in via a Lenovo laptop - you might want to take heed.

      Dropbox has confirmed that approximately 5,000 customer accounts were accessed between 4-21 August, after hackers exploited a legacy login integration between Dropbox and Lenovo's own identity system, Lenovo ID.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Independent UK ☛ EU entry-exit system has been a ‘shambles’, Ryanair chief says

      Since its launch, extensive queues have caused severe disruption for some travellers, leading to missed departures. Airports in Spain, Portugal, France and Italy have been reported among the worst affected, with more than 100 easyJet passengers missing a flight from Milan Linate to Manchester in April amid passport desk delays.

      In May, the Port of Dover declared a "critical incident" during half-term after wait times hit four-and-a-half hours on a day handling roughly 8,500 outbound tourist vehicles.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Mistrust’ of Palantir may affect NHS research, says health minister

      The government is deciding whether to axe the company’s £330m contract to operate the health service’s federated data platform, which is intended to improve efficiency and patient outcomes.

      Frith’s comment, in a letter to Layla Moran, the chair of the Commons health committee, follows a rise in patients opting out of allowing their medical data to be shared. In the two months from mid-May to mid-July, 60,000 more people withdrew their private information under a mechanism called the national data opt-out.

    • CBC ☛ Grindr to pay $48-million settlement over sale of users' info — including HIV status

      The claim alleges Grindr violated U.K. privacy protection laws for a period prior to April 2020, when Grindr updated its consent guidelines, by sharing data with other companies in exchange for payment or commercial benefits.

    • Futurism ☛ Man Arrested After Allegedly Shooting Flaming Projectile at Flock Cameras, Melting Them Into Slag

      On social media, supporters further fanned the flames, expressing support for Williams and blasting the police department for deploying the devices in the first place.

      “What it boils down to is this, either y’all can take them down or somebody will!” one Facebook user declared under Fox5‘s post about the arrest.

      Another commenter made an appeal to patriotism: “it wasn’t him, he was at the library rereading the Constitution!”

    • EDRI ☛ Why the EU age-verification tool does not solve privacy concerns

      Confusingly, instead of an app, the Commission had back then published a mere ‘blueprint’, meaning a sample design based on which Member States were themselves invited to build their own app, together with a demo app showing what the end result might look like. The Commission nicknamed this the ‘mini-wallet’, as it recommends basing its technical specifications on those of the eID Wallet, which each government must provide to its residents by the end of 2026.

      At EDRi, we argue that there are ways to ensure online safety without resorting to widespread, mandatory age verification. If lawmakers still insist on using age-gates, however, then it’s essential that this be done via tools which respect the highest standards of privacy, cybersecurity and data protection, and which are available to all without discrimination. The Commission promises a tool which supposedly respects these ‘highest standards’, but hasn’t delivered yet. Let’s look at this infrastructure of control whose deployment is unfolding so quickly.

    • Ava ☛ health data and broad consent

      Health data is in this weird spot where most people do not wish to share it, but on the other hand, most of us are supportive of research and new scientific discoveries that could help prevent, treat or cure disease. This doesn't immediately seem like a contradiction, because after all, we have clinical trials. Unfortunately, they only get us so far, as they are limited in scope, population, and variables. That is also why there is a period of time after market authorization (in EU at least) where a drug is additionally monitored as the general population starts to use it for the first time, and more trials are needed.

  • Confidentiality

    • The Register UK ☛ Welsh environment regulator's FoI blunder exposes diversity data of 2,000 staff

      Natural Resources Wales (NRW) says diversity data belonging to around 2,000 current and former employees who worked at the environmental regulator between April 2013 and March 2018 was exposed in a classic Freedom of Information (FoI) blunder.

      The Welsh government-sponsored body confirmed on Friday the information was "inadvertently disclosed" in a spreadsheet published on a website. Its statement did not identify the site, explain how the sensitive data came to be posted there, or say how many people were affected.

      NRW subsequently told The Register that around 2,000 people were affected and said it had released the information in 2021 as part of a response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

• Defence/Aggression

  • New Eastern Europe ☛ What would a Russian test of NATO actually look like? - New Eastern Europe

    The CIA director’s unusual trip to Moscow came amid warnings that Russia could challenge the Alliance without starting another conventional war. Along NATO’s eastern flank, repeated incidents are already revealing how governments respond when Russian intent is difficult to establish.

  • Yle ☛ Finland completes construction of 200km fencing along Russia border

    Speaking at a press conference near the Nuijamaa border, in the southeast of Finland, Interior Minister Mari Rantanen (Finns) said there may be a need to extend the fencing areas in the future.

  • France24 ☛ Only the beginning? German far-right's breakthrough shakes Europe to its core - The Debate

    Not enough to win outright but enough to shake Germany and Europe to their core: the far-right Alterniv für Deutschland trouncing the ruling conservatives in the impoverished former East German region of Saxony-Anhalt. We’ll ask about the consequences of voting for an anti-immigrant, pro-Russian party that wants schools to teach less about the ills of Hitler and more the glory of Bismarck.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ US sinks an Ecuadorian ship in the Pacific it alleges is tied to drug trafficking

    The sunken vessel, whose name has not been released, was the fifth targeted by U.S. forces in less than two weeks.

  • India Times ☛ China humanoid robots military: From dance floor to war: China readies humanoid robots for combat

    Two days after the Games ended, the People's Liberation Army's official newspaper drew its own conclusions from the show. The PLA Daily called for researchers to accelerate the transfer of cutting-edge technologies from laboratories to military training grounds for robotic "combatants."

  • Salon ☛ Putin is testing Europe. How far will he go before war?

    At the moment, we’re in the middle of an international shadowplay, an arena where Putin excels. Nobody really believes he wants to start a new war in Europe, especially considering how his first one has gone. But plenty of people will tell you he’s already started one. If that seems like an impossible contradiction, welcome to the mid-2020s, where reality seems increasingly like dystopian science fiction mixed with an especially opaque John le Carré spy thriller.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Neo-Nazis and the Impotence of Trumponomics

    In the days and weeks ahead there will be many analyses of the results and its implications from people who, unlike me, know something about German politics. For now, let me do something more parochial, and write about what the Sachsen-Anhalt election might teach us about U.S. political economy.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ U.S. running low on advanced defensive missiles and could be for years

    The statistics are sobering — so sobering that Defense Department officials refuse to confirm, deny or discuss them.

    From Feb. 28 through July, the first five months of the war with Iran, U.S. forces burned through almost 60% of the nation’s advanced defensive missiles — the Patriot and THAAD interceptors that protect American troops.

  • Sweden ☛ Sweden to buy US artillery rocket system and enter Sweden-Finland cooperation on rocket artillery

    The Government is authorising the Swedish Armed Forces to procure the US High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS). In a separate announcement, Sweden’s Minister for Defence Pål Jonson and Finland’s Minister of Defence Antti Häkkänen have signed a Joint Declaration regarding cooperation on the countries’ rocket artillery systems.

  • Yle ☛ "Russia's imperial ambitions will not end with Ukraine," Finnish defence minister says

    Häkkänen made the remarks during his opening address at the 257th National Defence Course, which brings together leaders from government, the media and academia to discuss national security issues.

    "Russia's imperial ambitions will not end with Ukraine," Häkkänen said. He added that Moscow is seeking to restore at least the spheres of influence it had during the Soviet era.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • International Campaign for Tibet ☛ ICT calls for timely, independent information and access to Tibet on humanitarian grounds after Nepal-Tibet disaster

    In the wake of the catastrophic floods and mudslides along the Nepal-Tibet border on August 26, the International Campaign for Tibet has called for the immediate release of complete, timely and independently verifiable information on casualties, missing people and conditions in Kyirong (Chinese: Jilong; also referred to as Gyirong) County in Shigatse, Tibet, together with meaningful access for independent journalists and observers.

    These measures are urgently required on humanitarian grounds: to help families determine the fate and whereabouts of missing relatives, identify affected communities and unmet needs, and support an effective rescue and relief operation. ICT is also calling for unhindered access for international humanitarian organizations and for governments worldwide to press Beijing to provide information and access commensurate with the scale of the disaster.

• Environment

  • The Tyee ☛ The Making of an AI Data Centre Warrior | The Tyee

    The first thing that Bek MacIntosh, a 42-year-old business owner and mother of three, wants Albertans to know is this: it is possible for a community to stop a $10-billion hyperscale data centre dead in its tracks.

    The free Fringe Patio on Granville Island will feature all-ages live music co-presented with Coastal Jazz over the Labour Day Weekend.

    Even when the local and provincial governments have different plans.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • RTL ☛ Drought to ensue: Panama Canal considering more cuts in transits due to El Nino

      In 2023, El Nino forced a reduction in daily transits from 38 to 22 due to the dramatic reduction in reservoir levels.

    • Bhaskar English ☛ Sergey Brin Superyacht Dragonfly Refueling Cost & Features | Spain

      At 466 feet long, the yacht is too large for ordinary private yacht marinas. That is why it had to use a Spanish Navy cruise berth for refueling.

    • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Bidirectional Charging During Grid Outages

      David asked a great question on my solar battery system post: why buy a small battery just for emergencies when electric cars have a large battery you can also use for other things? [1] This would be great, and seems like the obvious way for it to work: when the grid goes down the panels can charge the car when it's sunny, and the car can power the house when it's not. Unfortunately as far as I can tell the only way I could do this today is with a Cybertruck, and other systems are a long way off.

• Finance

  • International Business Times ☛ 2026-09-01 [Older] Social Security September 2026 Payment Dates: Here's Exactly When Your Money Will Arrive

  • Pivot to AI ☛ AI data centre finance: building a bigger and bigger bomb

    The general public hate data centres. Politicians from both US parties have worked out they need to say no to data centres if they want to get reelected in the midterm elections in November.

    If a data centre falls to local activism, how does the lender get their money back? This is not always clear!

    Lenders try to protect against the risks with insurance. But the insurers think the projects are too risky as well.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Donald Trump Took a Wrecking Ball to the White House

    The East Wing was destroyed without civic debate or congressional approval – and is now in the process of being replaced by a 90,000 square foot luxury ballroom that is double the size of the current White House complex.

    That is an insult to the rule of law, to American history, and to every US citizen — because the White House ultimately belongs to us, not its current temporary occupant.

  • The Atlantic ☛ How the Government Wastes Our Time

    Americans are bogged down in paperwork for reasons that are sometimes necessary, sometimes thoughtless—and, at times, nefarious. In her new book, The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—And How to Fix It, my colleague Annie Lowrey looks at all those hours spent looking for tax documents or trying to certify income for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or the FAFSA and finds that things don’t have to be this way.

  • Jérôme Marin ☛ Why Nvidia is buying Hugging Face

    Hugging Face now plays a central role in open-source AI, giving developers access to models for text and image generation, transcription, and visual recognition. Over the years, the platform has expanded considerably. It now offers paid services with a wide range of tools for testing, adapting, and deploying models. The company claims to have more than 200,000 corporate customers. According to The Information, Hugging Face crossed the $150 million annualized revenue mark in August, up 50% in just two months.

  • The Onion ☛ The Onion’s Exclusive Interview With Larry Ellison - The Onion

    Larry Ellison is the co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle, as well as the largest shareholder of the Paramount Skydance Corporation. The Onion sat down with the billionaire to discuss his ventures.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • CPJ ☛ Somaliland journalist detained without charge after interviewing poet

    Ismail was arrested the following day by Hargeisa security forces and Abdiqani was detained on August 29 when he responded to a summons to the Criminal Investigation Department’s (CID) headquarters, according to the journalist’s lawyer, Tawakal Ibrahim Mohamed, and the local press rights group Somaliland Journalists Association (SOLJA).

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • BIA Net ☛ TV peace journalism: Journalists and academics gathered for Bianet's report launch

    During her section, Haydari discussed her research findings regarding how the six evaluated television channels framed the Syria agenda from a rights-based peace journalism perspective. Following the presentations, journalists, academics and media workers discussed the research findings.

  • CPJ ☛ CPJ says Kazakhstan’s new parliament should scrap rules restricting journalists’ access

    In a statement, four local media advocacy and human rights organizations expressed concern over the changes, stressing that it was normal media practice in democracies to allow journalists’ to “quickly approach a deputy after a sitting, ask a clarifying or inconvenient question, and obtain commentary on a hot topic.”

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Eiffel Tower employees strike after female staff removed

    The company that operates the Tower, SETE, said that the group had requested a visit as part of which the "interactions with women" would be limited.

    Emmanuel Gregoire, Paris' Socialist mayor, called the incident "unacceptable."

    "Equality between women and men will never end at the foot of our historic monuments, nor anywhere else in this city," Gregoire said.

  • France24 ☛ Eiffel Tower workers go on strike after female staff 'sidelined' for Hindu group's visit

    The Eiffel Tower was forced to close on Monday after staff went on strike to protest the "sidelining" and "replacement" of female employees during a recent visit by a Hindu delegation. The Paris landmark's operator said the group had requested that the private visit be organised in such a way as to limit "interactions with women".

  • The Atlantic ☛ The Charges Were Dropped, but the Damage Was Already Done

    Although those dismissals have been celebrated as victories, the cases have taken a financial and psychological toll on the defendants. For Huerta, the past 15 months have been filled with anxiety. He has endured sleepless nights and grown emotionally distant from his wife of 30 years. The public attention continues to make it more difficult to do his job. And despite his pride in standing for what he believed in, he struggles with the shame of being jailed and appearing in court in shackles—an image he worries that his two sons and niece and nephew (whom he has raised as his own) will never forget. As we spoke inside a coffee shop in his neighborhood of Highland Park one recent afternoon, Huerta’s voice rose in anger and indignation while he recounted and, at times, reenacted the minutes before he was shoved to the ground by a federal officer. He teared up.

    “The president of the union just got fucking arrested,” he said. “If they can do this to me, imagine what they’re doing to other people.”

  • Hamilton Nolan ☛ Capital Is Organizing the World to Its Advantage and Everything Else Is a Sideshow

    “The labor share, which is the percentage of output that accrues to workers in the form of compensation, was 52.8 percent in the second quarter of 2026, the lowest level in the series, which begins in the first quarter of 1947,” the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week. Here is a chart from the economist Mike Konczal: [...]

  • Alvaro Montoro ☛ La Liga's Web Accessibility Table: How Do Clubs Actually Score?

    Web accessibility ensures that every supporter (including those with visual, auditory, motor, or cognitive disabilities) can use a website. So how well do these teams' homepages hold up?

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ RPCS3 emulator can now run PS3 games on PC directly from a disc drive in landmark development — unlocks 20 years of physical titles on Windows, Linux, and macOS

    The developers of the Sony PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 have told their social media followers that it is now possible to play games straight from discs. As announced on Twitter/X, the emulator’s latest refinement works only with certain internal and external Blu-ray drives. Happily for retro gamers, there’s a lengthy compatibility list of drives featuring many models and brands, and the same drives are also compatible with dumping your media to fixed storage.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: How corporate America built a better Roach Motel (07 Sep 2026)

    The researchers' hypothesis was that dominant businesses don't maintain their lead by making their customers happy, but by making it harder for those customers to leave. There's good reasons to suspect this. Between 2002 and 2024, the average "customer relationship" (how long a customer continues to purchase from a merchant) has risen from 7.5 years to 11.5 years, a 50% surge in "customer loyalty," far outstripping any measure of customer satisfaction over the same period. This is true across all the largest sectors of the economy: "manufacturing, information, professional services, financial services, and wholesale trade."

  • Patents

    • [Old] US Right to Know ☛ Bill Gates' radical menu: ultra-processed foods, patents, monocrops

      To the techno-food industrialists, hunger and climate disruption are problems to be solved with data and engineering. The core ingredients of their revolutionary plan: genetic engineering — and patenting — of everything from seeds and food animals, to soil microbes, flavors and textures. Local food cultures and traditional diets could fade to the past as food production moves indoors to labs that cultivate fake meat and ultra-processed foods.

    • [Old] New Internationalist ☛ We must reclaim our freedom from Monsanto like we did from the British

      But the most outrageous phrase is that seeds have a ‘limited shelf life’. True seed is Bija – that which rises again and again and again. Our seeds have evolved for 10,000 years. Living seed does not have a ‘limited shelf’. Otherwise, we would have starved to death as a species centuries ago. Seeds are called heritage and heirloom seeds because they don’t have a limited shelf life like Monsanto’s GMO seeds. Living seed does not become obsolete. It renews. It has the potential to live and evolve forever through dynamic change, including contributions of farmers breeding. And as our three decades of work in Navdanya shows, living seeds have more nutrition, higher overall food output, more resilience to pests and diseases, and to climate change. Monsanto does not just force farmers to buy seed every year to collect royalties, it also owns the patent for the ‘terminator technology’ to create sterile seed. This technology has been stopped from commercialisation by the UN Convention on Biodiversity.

    • [Old] GRAIN ☛ GRAIN | Twelve reasons for Africa to reject GM crops

      In short, Africa is in danger of becoming the dumping ground for the struggling GM industry and the laboratory for frustrated GM scientists. The proponents of GM technology sell a sweet message of GM crops as the second green revolution and the answer to African hunger, but the reality is quite different. A close look at GM crops and the context under which they are developed makes it clear that GM crops have no place in African agriculture. Here are twelve reasons why: [...]

    • [Old] Celeste Schaefer Bernard ☛ Closed-Sourced Crops

      One of my favorite projects for Conservation Magazine. It gave visibility to a less-than-sexy issue (gene patenting) and its impact on biodiversity and global food supply and was beautifully written and reported by one of the best writers working today — Paul Salopek. The idea for this story was mine, but Paul took it several steps beyond the original outline.

      [...]

      Monsanto customers “are afraid to speak in public, worried that they will become victims of retaliation,” a DuPont executive complained. DuPont filed an anti-monopoly suit against Monsanto in 2009. (DuPont controls its own third of the country’s seed-corn market.)

    • [Old] Knowledge Platform for Organic Agriculture and Agroecology in Africa ☛ Who Controls Our Seeds? How Industrial Farming Undermines Food Sovereignty in Southern Africa - KCOA

      Every planting season, farmers across Malawi and Zambia queue up for government-subsidised seed packets promising higher yields, drought tolerance and pest resistance.

      The challenge is that these hybrid and genetically modified seeds cannot be saved. After one harvest, farmers must return to the agro-dealer, spend their hard-earned cash, and buy again.

      This is not an accident. It is a business model that transforms farmers from seed savers into perpetual customers.

      As the Kusamala Institute of Agriculture and Ecology’s 2023 policy brief states:

      “Industrial systems encourage uptake of hybrid and genetically modified seeds that are grown as monocrops with harmful chemicals.”

      The result? A quiet but major shift in power from farmers who once controlled their seeds to corporations that now control their future.

  • Copyrights

    • Digital Music News ☛ Early Oasis Recordings Being Auctioned Without Permission

      An archive of over 100 hours of early Oasis recordings and outtakes is up for auction despite objections from the band. Currently, the collection is priced at between £1.2 million and £1.6 million, with the sale due to take place on October 3.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ OpenAI's ChatGPT Was Built on Concealed 'Mass Piracy', Authors Tell Court

      Book authors have asked a New York federal judge to rule that OpenAI built its AI models on “mass piracy”. Pointing to internal documents, a summary judgment motion alleges the AI giant downloaded books from LibGen, hid the evidence by renaming datasets, and designed its models to supplant human writers. OpenAI filed the mirror-image motion, stressing that its data harvesting qualifies as fair use.

    • Kevin Kelly ☛ The Technium: Arguments in Favor of AI Fair Use

      I made some notes on the nature of the training of LLMs, and about whether we as a society should consider the material used to train them as a fair use of that material. I believe it would be best for us to consider them fair use, and I made some points in its favor. The context of these points is US copyright law, which I did not spell out here. There are other commonly used arguments pro, and many arguments against, which I have also not listed. I wrote these points as a way for me to think aloud along my own lines, and they are not arranged in any order to make a tight case. I welcome constructive comments, or points I may have missed.