Leftovers

• Rob Knight ☛ Greyscale in Doodle Scan

  Last night I was reading this excellent post about scanning pencil artwork and the first step the artist mentioned is setting the pallette to greyscale. This made me realise how useful that would be on Doodle Scan — the black and white mode is good but only in some circumstances where the drawing is just lines, greyscale would be much more useful for illustrations with colour or shading.

• Antonio Santos ☛ This Blog Has Moved

  I’ll be posting on otolock.net moving forward. I wrote a little about why I moved.

• Antonio Santos ☛ Hello, Internet!

  Previously located at antoniosantos.io, I've decided to start publishing content on otolock.net moving forward, and I'm still debating if I will be migrating my content to this new domain.

  The main reason for the change is cost. .io domain renewals went up last year to $51.80, with reports that another 12% increase is expected for 2027. That is simply not sustainable especially when other TLDs like this .net I got only costs around $12.50 to renew.

• Abhigyan Tripathi ☛ thank you, welcome | abhigyan trips.

  Funnily enough, after the last time I documented “thank-you replies”, I started noticing even more of them. They already exist everywhere, it’s just that they happen quickly and smoothly enough that I don’t catch them.

  But at the same time, I also notice it when people don’t do the special Indian “thank-you” thing that people say Indians do. I realized I almost find it rude when people reply to my “thank-you” with a simple “welcome”. Even though it’s the expected reply! And even though it’s still polite — you’re thanking someone for doing something, and they’re saying you’re welcome to ask them to help again.

  Anyway, here’s some more examples of both replies that I’ve received in my surroundings.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • LabX Media Group ☛ US Research Cuts Drive Scientists to Germany

    Tzelepis is one of about 25,000 scientists who lost their positions following Donald Trump’s return to office. The new administration canceled 7,840 research grants, according to Grant Witness, a project that analyzes data from government agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. The work these grants once supported ranges from cancer cures to environmental research.

    Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has presided over a radical dismantlement of the research establishment, cutting funding, revoking grants, firing advisors, and tightening immigration protocols for visiting academics. This attack on science has resulted in a loss of national scientific talent, according to researchers.

    The contraction of research funding in the United States has presented other countries with the opportunity to recruit the scientists America pushed away. One country that has taken a strong initiative to capitalize on this shift is Germany.

  • John D Cook ☛ The part of Navier-Stokes no one is talking about

    That was the rule of thumb: forty hours per page. And this in the context of undergraduate textbooks. Research publications are much denser than textbooks. Furthermore, page 100 of a textbook probably depends mostly on material on pages 1 through 99. A sentence in a research article could cite anything that has been published before.

• Career/Education

  • Futurism ☛ Scientists Say LLMs Appear to Be Acting as a Cognitive Virus Among Humans

    “Here we introduce the idea of [large language models] as cognitive viruses,” they write. “Culturally transmitted technologies whose spread is promoted by their usefulness but can also increase dependence through cognitive offloading.”

    Researchers have previously warned that AI is actively damaging our cognitive abilities. Students, in particular, are choosing to use AI tools in the classroom, allowing them to offload much of their critical thinking.

  • MinnPost ☛ Why Johnny can't think: AI and the unmaking of U.S. education

    Johnny is a sophomore at a good American university. Last night he finished a problem set in 11 minutes. It should have taken three hours. He typed the problems into an AI, copied the answers, and went to bed. He will get an A on the problem set. He will get a B on the exam. And in three years, when an employer asks him to solve a problem no machine has seen before, he will not know how. Nobody taught him. Everybody assumed somebody else would.

    I taught from 1982 to 2023 — at the University of Massachusetts, at Washington University in St. Louis, and for over two decades at the University of Minnesota. I worked on artificial intelligence when it was unfashionable, teaching neural networks in 1992 to students who asked why they should bother. To be clear, I am not afraid of this technology. I helped build its ancestors. I am afraid of what we are doing with it, which is nothing.

    Here is what we know. Not what we suspect — what we know.

  • Alcides Fonseca ☛ Fall 2026 Recommendations for AI in Higher Education

    The situation in academia is dire. More students are failing than ever and, worse, others are passing without being able to apply the expected skills the following semester, only to find themselves unable to get a job after graduation. Classes are empty, morale is low, socialization is at its lowest, and no one knows what to do about AI.

    Both MIT and, closer to our local reality, Coimbra have released reports on AI in education and offered recommendations for action. Here, I present the recommendations I agree with, the one I do not, and a short list of the actions I consider most important.

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ Decoding The NEC V20 Microcode ROM

    The NEC V20 is an Intel 8088-compatible processor that features the same use of microcode, though with its own characteristics. This makes it important to use this same microcode if your goal is to create a cycle-accurate emulator of this processor, as [GloriousCow]’s goal is. Cue decoding the microcode ROM in a die shot of this CPU, in order to create a usable ROM image.

  • System76 ☛ Meet System76's new GPU-focused Linux workstation, the Thelio Mira AI

    The new Thelio Mira AI model combines an AMD Ryzen 9000 Series CPU (a high-performance, lower-cost alternative to the AMD Threadripper) with two NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPUs that provide 96 GB of ECC (error-correcting code) memory per GPU (or 192 GB total) to accommodate the memory demands of machine learning. Consumer desktop GPUs max out at 32 GB, while dual RTX Pro GPUs provide six times the memory and protection against bit flips that can result in the incorrect result or corruption that goes unnoticed.

  • Jim Nielsen ☛ Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables

    Now every time I pull that box out to add YAC (yet another cable), instead of asking myself, “Why do I keep this box?” I’ll see that skeet and I’ll be reminded why I do what I do. I’ll feel a spark of joy, motivation, and purpose rekindled. (Not to mention the fact that it will serve as a warning to anyone in the family who thinks “I should just throw this away…”)

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Flushing the toilet can release a ‘plume’ of breathable pathogens – and closing the lid won’t stop their escape

    New research shows turbulent flushes create toilet-generated aerosols that can transmit legionella, influenza and norovirus

  • MinnPost ☛ New Farm Bill is cutting programs that gave me a start as a farmer

    Through the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, or EQIP, I’ve planted pasture and hay meadows and seeded cover crops. Through the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP), I’ve added soil and tissue sampling, GPS guidance and spray nozzles that cut drift. None of it is charity: I put in my own money and labor, and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) shoulders part of the risk. My yields are up. My weed pressure is down. In the fall my cattle graze cover crops instead of eating through bought feed.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths Have Nearly Doubled. It’s Worse in Abortion-Ban States.

    Such deaths typically occur in the first trimester, after a pregnancy fails to properly implant in the uterus and begins to develop elsewhere, most commonly inside a fallopian tube. The embryo grows until it causes the organ to rupture, triggering catastrophic bleeding.

  • Robert Birming ☛ The secret

    Maybe that’s why it’s so hard. It seems too easy.

  • BoingBoing ☛ Texas won't show voters its post-ban maternal death report until after they vote

    Texas health officials set a schedule, then realized when the election was. The state's maternal mortality committee documented that its next biennial report would be published by September 1, 2026. They've moved that date, without giving a reason, to December.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Anti-vax/anti-trust (09 Sep 2026)

    As once-extinct diseases sweep through America, sickening, maiming and killing, the wild lunacy of anti-vax superstition grows ever more difficult to excuse.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Alcides Fonseca ☛ Ending the Golden Era for Backward-Compatible Apps

    Apple is really dropping the ball on macOS software. My 2016 MacBook Pro is a perfectly capable machine for today's standards. Except that it has lost support for the latest macOS software, which makes it unusable for running all things that I need™.

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

    • Techdirt ☛ AI Agents Are Not Going “Rogue,” But Recent Developments Lead Increasingly-Concerned Researchers To Call For AI Slow Down

      That may read as yet more anthropomorphization, but it is hard to see what other words could be used to describe what are very human-like operations. Cotra’s last surprise also involves a very human-like activity: deception.

    • 404 Media ☛ First ‘Take It Down Act’ Sentencing Puts Man Behind Bars for 15 Years

      Investigators found another 2,400 images and videos on his phone depicting “nudity, morphed child sexual abuse material or violence.”

    • 404 Media ☛ 'Tell Everyone:' A Man Died by Suicide After Talking to ChatGPT. His Former Partner Wants to Warn the World About AI

      We know so much about how Austin's relationship with ChatGPT progressed because it's laid out in court documents. In January, Austin's mother Stephanie Gray filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of creating a product imbued with “excessive sycophancy, anthropomorphic features, and memory that stored and referenced user information across conversations in order to create deeper intimacy.”

    • Cyble Inc ☛ ChatGPT Sandbox Flaw Let A Planted Prompt Ship Victim's Gmail Data To Another Account - The Cyber Express

      The flaw sat not in the model but in the infrastructure beneath it. Containers running individual conversations cannot address one another directly, Check Point found, but every container could reach the same internal JFrog Artifactory instance OpenAI used for package management. An item-management feature there let any container attach text metadata properties to cached items and read properties written by others, turning a package cache into a two-way message board between environments meant to be isolated.

    • Wired ☛ The AI Researcher Who Just Quit Anthropic Says It’s ‘Crunch Time for Humanity’

      What’s less obvious is how exactly these AI fears will come to pass and what the world is supposed to do about the concerns being raised by the people building AI. Coxon, who also worked at OpenAI, tells WIRED that threats could manifest through AI-enabled biological threats or cyberweapons. As a first step, he recommends that OpenAI and Anthropic coordinate on limiting recursive self improvement—the industry term for when AI is used to build new AI systems. Down the line, he thinks coordination among international power players, including the US and China, will be necessary.

    • Lionel Dricot ☛ I Don’t Want to Interact With Stochastic Parrots

      I don’t care if you call it AI, LLM, chatbot, or whateverGPT. I simply don’t want to interact with it in any form. If you interact with me, make sure to never send me any output from those nor to use it as a "source" to justify one of your arguments.

      I’m one of those people deeply interested in all the extraordinary stuff other humans have to say. Unfortunately, life is already too short to hear them all. I need to make a lot of choices. That’s why I will not tolerate any attempt to steal the little time I’ve on this planet by making me interact with stochastic algorithms trained to produce tons of "average," non-human content.

      The direct consequence of my choice is that I will refuse to interact with humans who take pride in making themselves a meat interface between me and the algorithm they’ve chosen to replace their free will.

    • Nathaniel Snelgrove ☛ My AI Psychosis

      Claude is a terrible designer. Every suggestion it made was terrible. I thought the “value” in using an LLM for this task would be strengthening my own opinions, but the fact I felt the need for it at all clearly indicated a lack of confidence on my part. I consider that part of the project largely a failure. It both slowed me down and created new neuroses for me to work through with a therapist.

      Using an LLM for copywriting assistance has proven to be a disaster in different ways.

    • Yle ☛ "People don't know it's happening" — Deepfake crisis spreads across Finnish schools, workplaces and military

      Speaking to Yle News' All Points North podcast, Yle investigative journalist Johanna Vehkoo said that Finland is facing an "epidemic" of deepfake imagery.

      "It's happening in schools. It's happening in workplaces, as I've just described. It's happening to well-known women, and it's happening to women who are not that well-known at all. It's happening to children. And it's happening in the army."

    • Omicron Limited ☛ AI ethics problem may lie with organizations, not engineers, study finds

      The researchers describe this as "ethical awareness without ethical agency": engineers who know the right thing to do but are unable to act on it.

      Presented at the 10th Data for Policy Conference, the research raises questions about whether current oversight frameworks measure genuine ethical practice or merely the documentation surrounding it.

    • Futurism ☛ Fashion Founder Emily Oberg Says She Tried Using AI for Photo Shoots, and It Was a Failure Because It Will "Never Possess Good Taste" Like Humans Do

      In a post on her Substack, Emily Loves, Oberg discussed her experiments using AI to help her run Sporty & Rich, the fashion and lifestyle brand she founded in 2018 on the back of a popular moodboard she created. One area where she’s been testing AI, she wrote, is by using AI to generate e-commerce images — and according to the founder’s postmortem, the test was a failure.

    • Futurism ☛ Dolly Parton's Sister Begs Public to Stop Posting "Fake AI Garbage" in the Wake of the Beloved Singer's Death

      “Sadly, because of the way our lives have been lived in front of the public, we have no choice but to be subjected to incredible pressure and insensitivity from strangers,” Stella wrote in a statement posted to social media. “There is a tremendous amount of AI and endless garbage being posted everyday and it’s been challenging to absorb and or ignore.”

      While thanking fans who have showed “genuine support,” Stella rounded out her message by calling for “more compassion” while celebrating Dolly Parton’s life and moving on from her death.

  • Social Control Media

    • Futurism ☛ Wait, Did Zuckerberg Just Steal Muse the Band's Instagram Handle For His New AI?

      Indeed, an archived version of the band’s website shows that just last month, it held the @muse handle on Instagram. Now it’s going by @museband, because Mark Zuckerberg apparently couldn’t settle for his new tool being stuck with the handle @museAI. A similar swap happened on X. Meta’s newfangled AI got the @muse handle, while Muse had to settle for even clunkier @musetheband.

    • Salon ☛ Space Force's new uniforms scream fascist supervillain

      While the dress blacks looked suspiciously close to uniforms worn by Adolf Hitler’s SS, explanatory text that accompanied the mock-up made the Verhoeven homage explicit. If “Starship Troopers” was just the sci-fi schlock many contemporary critics took it to be, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Trump loves campy things, after all, and his administration has bent pop culture to fit their agenda many times over, unmoved by how often the creators ask them to stop.

    • Wired ☛ San Francisco Orders Meta to Stop ‘Allowing’ AI Child Abuse Ads

      The City Attorney’s Office has asked Meta to explain how the harmful ads repeatedly ran on Facebook and Instagram. The company claims the ads are not under the city’s jurisdiction.

    • Martin Fowler ☛ Social Media Engagement: summer 2026

      From time to time, I look at the traffic on these sites. (Last time was in 2025) 1 The main thing I'm interested in is how much engagement I get from each service, so I can get a sense of their importance for my announcements. There are three data items that I can use to sense this: retweets, likes, and replies. Here's some plots of that data for my posts over the last couple of months (19 total)

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Scoop News Group ☛ FBI officials say AI is bolstering adversaries, emphasizing need to focus on cyber basics, patching

      “The adversaries are still [exploiting] basic principles or basic cyber hygiene principles that we are not following,” he said, referring to a recent FBI emphasis on 10 fundamental defensive measures like multifactor authentication. “If we can harden up those top 10 controls that we talked about, it would certainly reduce the risk of both criminal and nation-state targeting of our environment.”

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • University of Toronto ☛ Polkit insists on there always being administrative users

      This turns out to not quite be true (you can force people to fail authentication without a password prompt), but getting there is a journey.

      Operations using Polkit can require "authentication by an administrative user", and Polkit lets you control what an 'administrative user' is. This is done by writing a JavaScript function that 'specifies what identities may be used for administrator authentication' (possibly in general or possibly for a specific operation). You pass this function to Polkit's polkit.addAdminRule() and then it later gets called and returns something. There can be multiple functions; they're called in order of registration (which is generally lexical order of the .rules files) and the first one to answer wins.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • International Business Times ☛ Anthropic Built a Security Operation To Monitor Protests and Threats Around Its Executives

      Anthropic has built out an extensive internal security operation that monitors protests near its executives and offices, according to a report by The American Prospect. The firm has also reported users to police over messages sent to its Claude chatbot, in at least one case without showing police the actual messages.

      The revelations come from a podcast interview with two of Anthropic's senior security officials, alongside a recent job listing and past comments the company gave to other outlets. Anthropic did not respond to The American Prospect's request for comment on the story, published on 9 September.

    • Wired ☛ You Can Now Destroy Flock Cameras for Cash in GTA V

      “GTPLR is not an endorsement of the activities that it allows in the game in the same way that GTA is not an endorsement of the activities that are allowed in the game,” says Kolman, referring to the fact that GTA is largely about doing fictional crimes. “But I think there is a public appetite for some kind of cathartic release against these machines.”

    • Nick Heer ☛ Live Rewind Is a Creepy Part of Apple’s Audio Intelligence Suite

      But good luck explaining that to anyone around you after you read back an exact transcript of what they just said. Apple says they should be sufficiently notified Live Rewind is active because “an audible chime plays from the speaker on your Apple Watch, even if your Apple Watch is on silent or you have headphones connected”, plus the watch plays an animation, but it is not clear to me when this happens. It is not shown in Apple’s video. The impression I get is that Live Rewind is always running in the background and these notifications are only played after you double-click the Digital Crown to look at the text.

  • Confidentiality

    • Tor ☛ Tor VPN Beta: What we've learned building our own VPN for Android from scratch | The Tor Project

      For years, Tor Browser has been one of the most effective tools for protecting privacy and bypassing censorship online. But most people don't experience the internet through a browser anymore. They connect to it via their favorite apps. Wouldn't it be nice to extend the same privacy protections to messaging apps, social media, email, and other services?

• Defence/Aggression

  • France24 ☛ Chile protesters see shades of Pinochet in new security plan

    He is Chile's most right-wing leader since the end of Pinochet's brutal 1973-1990 military dictatorship.

  • El Constitucional ☛ The Civil Guard pointed out Morocco's "passivity" while Ceuta was overflowing: "They are allowing the arrivals"

    The conclusion appears in one of the 40 documents declassified and published this Wednesday by the Government, a decision that allows reconstructing the information available before and during the crisis. The report was prepared on July 30 by the Operations Section of the General Staff of the Deputy Operational Directorate and updated at 6:15 p.m., when Ceuta had been receiving arrivals by land and sea for a good part of the day.

  • Robert Reich ☛ How Would A Wealth Tax Work?

    Well, he’s partly right. Bezos has gotten away with paying no income tax in some years, so technically doubling that wouldn’t help. That’s why we need a wealth tax that even the slipperiest of billionaires can’t wriggle their way out of.

  • NPR ☛ Whatever happened to the Taliban threat: 'We will flog the women'?

    Samira Hamidi, South Asia regional campaigner at Amnesty International, says she agrees. "The increased use of public floggings and other corporal punishments serves not only as a form of punishment but also as a tool of intimidation and social control."

    Beyond the brutality of these punishments, legal experts say they violate the country's commitment to international law.

  • Yle ☛ Google announces €13bn additional investment in Finland

    The operations will be focused on the municipalities of Kajaani, Muhos, and Vaala — where Google has previously purchased land from the Finnish state — as well as expanding the existing centre in Hamina.

    [...]

    Google has been steadily expanding its operations in Finland since converting an old paper mill into a data centre in Hamina, on the southeast coast, in 2009.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Yale University Library ☛ Declassified Government Documents & Human Rights - History of U.S. - Latin American Relations - Yale University Library Research Guides at Yale University

    Chile and the United States: Declassified Documents relating to the Military Coup, 1970-1976 (National Security Archive)

  • The Gray Zone ☛ As criticism grows over landslide inaction, leaks show Nepal’s new leaders groomed by CIA cutout

    As public anger against the Nepalese government mounts after deadly landslides in Nepal, files show the country’s new prime minister and several of his colleagues came to power thanks in part to a covert program sponsored by the US government.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Nuclear submarines can stay underwater for months, here's how

      The secret is not simply the nuclear reactor. A nuclear submarine is essentially a self-contained environment that can generate its own power, oxygen and fresh water while carrying enough food and supplies to keep its crew alive for extended periods.

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Batteries just broke another record in the US

      Massive, utility-scale systems are leading the way; they’re responsible for most of the record-setting quarter. Seven new gigascale battery installations (those with a capacity of over one gigawatt-hour) came online during the three-month stretch, according to the report, published by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the Solar Energy Industries Association.

    • [Old] Medium ☛ We Need a Moratorium on Data Centers

      I went to Japan once. It’s densely populated. Tokyo was, until very recently, the largest city in the world by population, with 33.4 million people — more than NYC, LA and Chicago combined. I took a commuter subway train so packed that I was sure no other living soul could enter, only for the doors to reopen at the next stop and two elderly women dropped their elbows and barged on without even a break in their conversation. I visited Hiroshima (on the Shinkansen, then the world’s fastest electric bullet train) and saw a large, vibrant, modern high-rise city, all built from scratch in just 70 years. Why am I telling you this? Because the number of new data centers planned globally are set to add the electricity demand equivalent to the whole of Japan by 2030 — just four years time. A clone of the world’s fourth largest economy just plopped onto the grid, eradicating all the world’s energy efficiency and renewables gains in the process.

    • [Old] Linköping University ☛ The battle for power – who has the right to our electricity?

      The discussion ultimately concerns who is actually able to access capacity in our electricity grid. For example, Amazon’s server halls in Katrineholm are currently the largest electricity consumer in the municipality. They have reserved a quarter of the grid’s capacity, despite not knowing if they will need it all. Meanwhile, others must queue for access to electricity. Another example is the bakery Pågen in Malmö, which a few years ago was forced to relocate its planned expansion due to Microsoft’s nearby establishment.

      “When a bakery has to compete with a global cloud giant for electricity, something is fundamentally wrong. Everyone says we must electrify and digitalise, but who actually gets space in the grid when one sector, the digital industry, and the major players have reserved a large share of the capacity?

      [...]

      In practice, data centres often win the race, as they are planned industrially and quickly, while their lifespan is uncertain. At the same time, closures and decommissioning are not uncommon. Julia Velkova warns that we risk living longer with the ruins of today’s digital expansion than with the actual benefits of these projects.

    • [Old] Forbes ☛ In A Surprise, China-Linked TikTok Grabs Power Norway Needs To Make Ammo

      With all the easily accessible regional energy in central Norway now spoken for, ammunition provider Nammo AS is out of luck.

      Unless Norway acts to secure energy resources for the ammunition manufacturer, Nammo AS will be unable to increase production of much-needed NATO-standard 155-millimeter howitzer shells.

    • [Old] AlgorithmWatch ☛ Despite plenty of renewable energy, data centers split Norwegian society

      Close to 90 data centers are currently operating in Norway (not all of them dedicated to generative AI). Together, they used up 2.79 terawatt-hours of energy in 2025, slightly more than one in fifty watt-hours consumed in the country.

      An additional 53 data centers are registered with the electricity network operator Statnett, which has reserved 3.4 gigawatts for them. This represents over 8% of the country’s currently installed capacity. Many more are queuing for capacity, though the operator makes clear that not all projects in the queue will see the light of day.

    • Google ☛ Google Deepens Commitment to Finland with Two-Year €13 Billion investment in AI Infrastructure

      Partnership with Fingrid and Business Finland to identify locations for Google’s infrastructure and grid friendly connection. By building new data centers in Finland's northern rather than southern region, Google utilizes existing grid infrastructure near carbon-free energy sources. This approach reduces new grid investments and helps lower overall system costs, across Finland, and the Nordics.

      A 22-year life extension power purchase agreement (PPA) with Finnish energy company, Fortum, to provide the long-term revenue certainty needed to support life extension program for the Loviisa nuclear power plant, located near Google’s Hamina data center. Without the lifetime extension investment program, the plant – which currently employs approximately 580 people and provides 10% of Finland’s electricity – could not continue operations beyond 2030. Keeping this clean energy asset online for decades to come will help stabilize electricity prices and support long-term resilience of Finland’s grid.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • The Atlantic ☛ Zoos Are Doubling Down on Very Unnatural Habitats

      Regardless of how well wild animals are cared for in captivity, their lives by definition shrink. In enclosures, removed from nature’s shifting circumstances and perils, and, often, the company of their own kind, they “lead very impoverished lives,” Clara Mancini, a pioneering researcher in the field of animal-computer interaction at the Open University, in the United Kingdom, told me. Technology may at first seem to make captive animals’ lives more artificial. But it’s starting to look like a good way to coax them into behaving more wildly.

    • Deseret Media ☛ Have You Seen This? Elephant gets daily pedicures

      Sabu is a male Asian elephant at the Cincinnati Zoo. He was born with a congenital inward rotation of his limbs. Because of that, he has a bow-legged walk that causes issues with jumbo nails and the pads of his feet. So naturally, he gets daily "pedicures" to keep his feet healthy and functional.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Recognised again: Raspberry Pi and the London Stock Exchange's Green Economy Mark

    We’re delighted to share that Raspberry Pi has once again been awarded the London Stock Exchange’s Green Economy Mark. Having first obtained the mark when we listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2024, retaining the recognition is a welcome affirmation that sustainability remains at the core of what we do.

  • Federal News Network ☛ CIA eyes ‘more technical’ workforce amid cyber, AI challenges

    Earlier in his remarks, Ellis described how the CIA is grappling with the implications of the “dual use technology race” with the Chinese government. He said that while the spy agency still needs to focus on traditional military and political targets, there is a new imperative to collect foreign intelligence relevant to “economic security” as well.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ CIA’s Michael Ellis says cyber intelligence is changing how the agency operates

    He provided no details about the methods, systems or sources involved. He also did not explain how cyber intelligence established Maduro’s location or how the agency confirmed the information before the mission.

    Reports from the operation, including statements made by President Donald Trump, stated that power outages during the operation were the result of a cyberattack. Experts told CyberScoop in the aftermath that cyber operations may have been involved, but the visible physical attacks that were also part of the operation alone could plausibly explain the outages.

  • The Verge ☛ Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg placed on leave

    Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of WordPress.com owner Automattic, has been placed on a paid leave of absence, as reported earlier by 404 Media. In an internal message by the outlet, Mullenweg claims Automattic chief financial officer Mark Davies “conspired” with board members to place him on leave.

    “They voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that,” Mullenweg wrote, referring to Davies, along with Automattic board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker, 404 Media reports.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • 404 Media ☛ Smear Campaign Says Anti-Flock Movement Is Chinese Propaganda

      Many of the most vocal defenders of Flock are attempting a strategy that Flock itself tried soon after evidence of the abuse of its automated license plate reader camera systems was reported by 404 Media and other local news outlets: They are suggesting that anyone who opposes this technology or points out its shortcomings must be part of a coordinated group of people who hate the police and want the United States to fail by picking out a few generally inconsequential social media posts by people on the fringes. Some of Flock’s defenders—a mix of people who work for billionaire-funded think tanks or have direct financial investments in Flock—have suggested that the people who oppose Flock are being quietly funded by billionaires or shadowy organizations to do so.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • New Republic ☛ Flock Employee Calls Cops on Reporter Filming Them

    Taking pictures and videos in public spaces where there is no reasonable expectation of privacy is protected under the First Amendment. But Flock Safety’s close relationship with police departments across the country seems to have afforded the company protections beyond the scope of the Constitution.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Atlantic ☛ When Mothers Get Arrested for Mothering

    This past June, a Virginia mother named Karyann Parkinson took a bike ride with her 5-year-old son and stopped by a pond inside their gated community to collect goose feathers from the grass. The two of them rode back home, whereupon Parkinson’s son asked his mother if he could walk back to the pond by himself to fetch a few more feathers. Parkinson, who was eight months pregnant with her fifth child, studying for the bar exam, and—perhaps most pressing—making lunch, agreed. The walk was relatively short, along a sidewalk 10 feet from the road and across two intersections with crosswalks, which Parkinson knew her son could navigate successfully (he had done so six times that morning). But on his way, the boy was spotted by a concerned passerby, who notified a community security guard, who in turn notified the police. Before long, several police officers were at Parkinson’s door, followed by Child Protective Services agents. Officials in the case decided to press charges against Parkinson, and last week she was convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and placed on Virginia’s child-abuse-and-neglect registry, where she will remain for seven years.

  • Erik Kroes ☛ Accessible colours don't exist

    I often see claims about "accessible colours". Colours can play a huge role in accessibility. Colours also stand out for me when they're the cause of issues. They're very visible! (Or sometimes, it's actually the lack of visibility). But there is no such thing as an accessible colour.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Walled Culture ☛ US government argues that fair use applies to OpenAI’s training of LLMs in key copyright case

      One particularly important issue is whether it is fair use to use copyright material to train AI (at least in jurisdictions where fair use rights exist). The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a long history of defending fair use, and of trying to thwart attempts to expand copyright protections – a theme that also runs through Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available). As a recent EFF post explains, companies are once again attempting to expand the reach of copyright’s legal protection because of developments in the AI world: [...]

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Private Torrent Tracker Lawsuit Takes Bizarre Turn: 'I'm a Different Matthew Schneider' (Updated)

      The copyright lawsuit targeting PassThePopcorn, BroadcasTheNet, HDBits, and three other major private trackers has taken a bizarre turn. After a Canadian filmmaker filed a sworn declaration confirming he has nothing to do with the case, the plaintiff argues there are simply two filmmakers with the same name, who coincidentally created movies with the exact same titles.