Leftovers

• Ruben Schade ☛ Web form invalid validation

  I’m impressed, on so many levels. It also indicates that someone, somewhere out there, has a null email address. I’m jealous.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ An Ode to Links

  But a link is a cultural thing: an invitation, a citation, a gift, a shortcut, a connection.

• Fernando Borretti ☛ The Other Road

  Now, the trajectory of technology has shaken out such that we’re closer to AGI than to transhumanism. But, realizability aside, I find it surprising and demoralizing that the “AGI future” seems to be much more popular than the “transhuman future” (more clearly: transhuman, but human-descended). I thought “become as the gods” would be more attractive than “build a benevolent god to rule over us”.

• Heliomass ☛ The Wasp & The Whisky

  I return to the balcony and realise for once I’m looking up from my phone, noticing the world ticking around me. All that activity, and I just had to pay attention for a moment. More of that please. Less doomscrolling. More moments of awareness, less rumination.

• Ava ☛ after all... why not?

  Update: After a suggestion by Sven, unsatisfying.penis.ceo is now redirecting to Elon Musk!

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • John D Cook ☛ Bayesian OCR

    The Greek letter β (beta) and the German letter ß (eszett) look similar, especially in some fonts.

    Now suppose an OCR program sees some character that could be a beta or could be an eszett. It could calculate some kind of distance between between the pixel pattern of the character and the pixel patterns of beta and eszett. But that would be discarding context.

• Career/Education

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Universities Are Teaching the Virtue of Overwork

    Although the University of Chicago bears “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched” as its official motto, a different slogan entirely has attained much wider fame. Thanks to long-cemented campus lore, the university is best known instead by the refrain of its student body: “Where fun goes to die.”

  • Neil Selwyn ☛ Digital Literacy is not the answer … the need for Critical Digital Literacy

    This is why digital literacy needs to be called out for what it is – a distraction, a smokescreen, a disingenuous gesture towards empowering people in the digital age. Instead, much more attention needs to be paid to the idea of critical digital literacy – an approach that genuinely sets out to help people actively question, scrutinise, challenge and resist the worse aspects of the tech that they are presented with … and actively engage with the idea of other technologies.

    Critical digital literacy efforts aim to help people develop understandings of how to best work with, work around and work against the technologies that they encounter in their everyday lives. Critical digital literacy efforts aim to help people develop critical consciousness both of the technical logics and business logics of the big digital systems that have come to dominate contemporary society.

  • Lou Plummer ☛ That Sticky-Icky

    My home life wasn't pleasant. My mom was married to an abusive (in more ways than one) narcissist who didn't like me any more as a teenager than he had as the first-grader I was when he entered our lives. Getting busted was the last straw. The way to keep the peace turned out to be me leaving home for good. I moved to my uncle's farm, where the adventure continued.

  • Jim Grey ☛ Summer's denouement

    Even now, fall and winter make me feel restricted, buttoned down. Deep in me, school has started again.

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ What would excite you for a new tech device?

    Ben Harris-Roxas posted a fun thought experiment this morning about what would get him excited about a new tech device. He mentioned having deliberate restrictions placed on it not just for AI or tracking, but as a way to foster creativity.

    I love all of it. I’d only add a few more things: [...]

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • The Revelator ☛ Toxic Dust and PTSD May Be Accelerating Brain Aging Among 9/11 First Responders

    While what happened on 9/11 was unprecedented, similar tragedies happen quite frequently. As a physician in occupational health who works with 9/11 first responders, I can easily imagine those same thoughts from other firefighters, paramedics and construction workers trying to save lives after the deadly summer 2026 earthquakes in Venezuela, Colombia and Indonesia or the disastrous floods in Nepal.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • The Register UK ☛ VMware defends ending downloads of SDK that helps VM backups – or migrations to rivals

    VMware has defended its decision to end public downloads of its Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK).

    VDDK is an SDK that a Broadcom technical document describes as “a set of libraries and utilities that enable software developers to create applications that can access and manipulate virtual disks used” and also “provides APIs for backup and recovery, cloning, and other operations on virtual disks.”

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

    • Futurism ☛ Anthropic Is Building a Huge Surveillance System to Spy on Anti-AI Activists and Predict Their Activities

      News of Anthropic’s system was first reported by the American Prospect, which spoke with Anthropic senior security officials and indexed job postings to get an understanding of the dragnet.

      On top of keeping tabs on protests in the vicinity of Anthropic offices, the publication notes that the AI lab is taking a “pre-crime” approach to watching for potential civil unrest.

    • Futurism ☛ OpenAI's Supposed Mathematical Breakthrough Devolves Into Explosive Drama as Mathematician Accuses It of Stealing His Work

      Adding to the suspicion, Buckmaster said he had been using OpenAI’s Codex tool to help check his work, insinuating that the company accessed his sessions, accidentally or intentionally, to copy it. When Buckmaster asked OpenAI about this, he didn’t get an answer, he claimed.

      OpenAI’s response to Buckmaster’s allegations only added fuel to the fire. While denying that its researchers and AI agents accessed or saw the mathematician’s work before it was publicly released, OpenAI also admitted that it “cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.”

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ They really do think AI might kill everyone

      This is why AI researchers care so much about “alignment”: building AIs that share genuinely human beliefs and values. If we build a “misaligned” superpowerful AI — an AI with goals that are alien to us — it might sweep humanity away. It could kill everyone deliberately, e.g. to stop us getting in the way of some goal. It could kill everyone in passing, e.g. like we might pave over an anthill to build a road. Either way, everyone dies.

    • Nat Bennett ☛ The Paperclip Maximizers are Already Here

      What I find funny about people who think that AI might kill everyone is that this is already happening. If this is the shape of the AI apocalypse it's not a "next year" thing." It's happening now, and it doesn't require AGI.

      The paperclip in question just happens to be a GPU.

    • Modus Create LLC ☛ Are we formal proofs yet? On formal proofs of programs with coding agents

      TL;DR While I find the capability of LLMs to generate formal proofs very promising, I’m not convinced that code generation constrained by tight specification is a very good or efficient way to program (at least not in its absolutist sense where most of the code is generated by an LLM).

    • David Revoy ☛ AI Overused Expressions - David Revoy

    • David Revoy ☛ Monthly production report for August 2026 - David Revoy

      After the "Fire" episode 63 with young Pepper, I felt like I had to speak about what was hurting me, and translate this into a comic. So, I tried to write a metaphor around the comments accusing my art of being AI-generated. A real challenge in only four panels!

    • Derek Thompson ☛ AI Safety Is Having a Moment - Derek Thompson

      In this essay, I’m trying to answer several questions:

      1. If people working at the AI labs think they’re building something that could destroy the world, why are they building it?

      2. Are their fears justified, or do they reflect certain misconceptions about AI (and China)?

      3. What is “recursive self-improvement,” or RSI?

      4, What should we do?

    • Fabio Akita ☛ You're an Idiot if You Believe the Misleading Ads from OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, DeepSeek. Here's Why

      If you read this week’s headlines and walked away excited thinking the Terminator is coming, or that the machine became God, you fell for the propaganda. And I’m going to take it apart piece by piece so you understand why.

      And let me put my cards on the table right away, because I’ve been repeating this for a while on the podcasts I show up on. To me, Dario Amodei, of Anthropic, has a god complex. The guy genuinely believes he’s saving humanity, with that slightly scary woke messianism of his. And Sam Altman, of OpenAI, is a mobster. He thinks he’s Michael Corleone, the cold and calculating boss from The Godfather, but in practice he’s Fredo: the weak, bungling brother who thinks he’s the smart one in the family and keeps screwing things up. Hold on to those two portraits, because everything I’m about to explain below proves both of them.

    • Futurism ☛ CNN Just Ran One of the Worst AI Puff Pieces We've Ever Seen in Our Lives About That "AI Actor" Tilly Norwood

      The drama reignited a heated debate over the tech threatening to put human creatives in the industry out of a job, a nightmare scenario that has enraged some of the most influential minds in Hollywood.

      Put simply, Norwood is the epitome of the AI industry getting high off its own supply, deluding itself into thinking that watching lifeless AI agents going through the motions on screen is something that anybody actually wants.

    • Futurism ☛ There's a Huge Economic Problem With Tesla's Cybercabs

      Basically, he pointed out, “if running a fleet of Cybercabs were actually profitable, Tesla wouldn’t sell you a single one.” It’s like claiming you’ve found an infinite money glitch — and then instead of quietly profiting off it, selling a get-rich-quick book on how to do it yourself.

      There are also looming technical questions. Musk’s lofty promises of a vehicle that completes ride-hailing requests autonomously while also appreciating in value has little, if any, bearing with reality in 2026. To the contrary, the EV maker’s offerings are among some of the fastest depreciating vehicles on the market today.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Cyberattack in Berlin: 1.4 million files on the dark web

      It was a story that almost went unnoticed amid all the clamor surrounding the closely watched state election in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6. This highly alarming story is one of many recent reports that have detailed attacks on infrastructure or drone attacks on airports carried out by hostile foreign powers. Incidents like this one in the German capital highlight just how vulnerable Germany's data networks are.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Maury ☛ A rant about phishing: It's not the user's fault (and not DNS either)

      All an attacker has to do is write a website with a password box and the company logo. The URL doesn't matter because users have learned to ignore it.

    • The Register UK ☛ Trezor, BitBox users targeted in newsletter phishing spree

      Crypto hardware wallet maker Trezor says the third-party email service provider it uses to send newsletters has been breached, and customers are now being sent phishing messages.

      There is good and bad news. The good news is that the emails appear easy to spot. They are not bespoke to each recipient and resemble a spray-and-pray campaign rather than sophisticated targeting that uses customer-specific data to enhance the email's perceived authenticity.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Deutsche Welle ☛ Digital data leeches: Trading on our profiles

      US tech companies gather, link, and sell more and more information about their users. The scandal involving the dating app Grindr shows how easy it is for highly sensitive data to fall into the wrong hands.

    • NYOB ☛ SCHUFA insists on shadow database. noyb lawsuit now certain

      Two weeks ago, noyb sent a cease-and-desist letter to SCHUFA regarding its shadow database. At the same time, we announced that we would bring an injunction should the credit reference agency refuse to comply with the requests set out therein. SCHUFA’s deadline has now expired. In a public statement, it has rejected the allegations. Therefore, it is now certain: noyb will file an injunction. People can also still express their interest in a potential class action here.

    • NYOB ☛ Open Letter: Civil society coalition urges EU to kill the cookie banner!

      For once, EU legislators have an opportunity to deliver genuine simplification for people: a solution to the ongoing issue of misleading cookie banners. As part of its highly controversial Digital Omnibus package, the EU Commission has proposed legally binding automated privacy signals. These would allow you to set your privacy preferences once, and very rarely see another banner. Unfortunately, the tracking industry is pushing back. Therefore, a coalition of currently 19 civil society organisations, businesses and academics has joined forces. We urge the Commission, the Council and Parliament to support automated signals for privacy choices and a strong Article 88b in the Digital Omnibus.

    • Futurism ☛ Mother Horrified When Meta's AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters

      Robins, who detailed her dystopian experience in a viral Instagram video, decided to engage with the Facebook AI feature to see what would happen. To her horror, it coughed up a detailed response that named not only her daughter who was pictured in the video, but her other daughter as well. It did so, seemingly, by cross-referencing information from her Facebook page with other posts on Meta platforms going back years — information largely shared not by Robins, but by family members including excited grandparents.

    • Futurism ☛ LG TVs Caught Secretly Recording Users and Scanning Their Homes For Other Devices, Even When Disconnected From the Internet

      The widely respected computer hardware experts at the YouTube channel Gamers Nexus found that the company’s boob tubes and pricey OLEDs can scan your Wi-Fi network to search for the devices you own, secretly record audio logs of your conversations using built-in microphones, and keep tabs on what you’re watching and listening to.

      It collects all this data, Gamers Nexus found, even when the TV is disconnected from the [Internet] and appears to be off in standby mode.

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Ask the Chefs: AI and Copyright Licensing

      On September 2, 2026, the US Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest in the copyright infringement litigation between The New York Times and OpenAI and Microsoft, et. al., currently underway in the Southern District of New York. That Statement outlines the perspective of the current administration on the case and argues strongly in favor of OpenAI and against the case for infringement of the publisher’s copyright based on the principles of Fair Use, supporting OpenAI’s case that this use is transformative.

    • EDRI ☛ Europe’s cookie law is really a law about surveillance

      Europe has seen a similar market emerge. Journalists have obtained billions of commercially traded location records from Germany and Belgium. The data exposed movements around hospitals, religious sites, trade union offices, government ministries, military sites, EU institutions and NATO buildings. Information gathered through ordinary apps for advertising can reveal intimate details of people’s lives, identify public officials and create security risks for entire institutions.

    • OpenRightsGroup ☛ Nudity scanning tech will leave us more exposed

      The Government’s proposals to prevent under 18s from creating or sharing nude images aim to address serious issues such as sextortion, grooming, and abuse. While these are worthwhile objectives, there are unintended consequences of introducing this kind of scanning onto our phones.

    • Victor Kropp ☛ LG TVs caught spying

      Gamer Nexus YouTube channel claims that LG Smart TVs are spying on their users even in standby mode. They record audio & video playing on TV, capture ambient sound (e.g. people talking near the TV), scanning Wi-Fi networks, etc. What’s even worse, the system that they have maybe abused by hackers.

    • Nick Heer ☛ LG’s Smart Televisions and Displays Are Rotten

      LG told Harding it is only listening for the wake word, but Gamers Nexus was able to capture audio in a variety of different ways because there are so many microphones and, in many cases, so many vulnerabilities in LG’s software. If I had one criticism, it is that Gamers Nexus connects the voice recording and transcription to LG’s ads service — an apparently real-life version of the conspiracy theory. I do not think there is enough evidence to support that, even as speculation.

    • Kore Nordmann ☛ Designing a dbt Pipeline for Consent Withdrawal

      Our platform processes student data only with consent, and consent can be withdrawn at any time. Withdrawal has teeth: The student's pseudonymised data must disappear from the platform, promptly and completely.

      At the same time GDPR is clear that irreversibly anonymised data is no longer personal data. A course's completion rate aggregated over hundreds of students does not become illegal because one of them withdrew consent. And losing years of research statistics to every withdrawal would make the platform useless for some of its purposes.

      So two things must be true at once: [...]

• Defence/Aggression

  • Defence Web ☛ Why is Islamic State Mozambique expanding its reach into Niassa?

    “Such an attack has multiple objectives. Firstly, it is a way to resupply. Food, some weapons and other equipment were likely taken. At least two vehicles were also taken, though later abandoned. Second, it is a significant economic target, and targeting it undermines the state’s control of that part of the country. For the tourism hunting sector in particular, it comes at a bad time, right in the middle of the July–November hunting season in Niassa.

    “Finally, it gains a lot of international attention. This is particularly valuable to Islamic State globally, which can use any images that attackers took in future propaganda products.

  • Meduza ☛ EU falls behind on plan to wean itself off Russian oil and gas

    The EU launched the REPowerEU program in 2022 to cut its dependence on Russian energy resources. The program calls for developing renewable energy, expanding connections between EU countries’ energy grids, and diversifying oil and gas supplies. Over four years, EU countries have spent only 54.3 billion euros of the 300 billion euros available for REPowerEU projects.

  • The Atlantic ☛ What Russia Is Really Up To in Europe

    U.S. intelligence assessments conclude that a conventional Russian attack on a NATO country is likely to happen sometime from this fall to 2029. But another possibility is that Moscow will remain content with sabotage and intimidation. This hybrid campaign is all the war Russia wants or needs—and stoking fear that Moscow just might directly strike Ukraine’s European allies is part of it.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ NATO allies foil Russian operation to cut undersea cables

    A joint operation between the US, UK, and Norway foiled a Russian operation to cut undersea cables near the Arctic’s Svalbard archipelago this spring, Reuters reported.

  • The National Security Archive ☛ Chile – Coup d’État, 1973 | National Security Archive

  • [Old] TriContinental ☛ The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973 | Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

    The widely held understanding in Chile and abroad is that the United States’ participation in the financing, organisation, and execution of the 1973 coup took place in response to the copper nationalisation process. However, this perspective does not allow us to appreciate the power of the nationalisation project and its implications with respect to the Popular Unity government’s international economic relations policy and strategic approach. In dossier no. 68, The Coup Against the Third World: Chile, 1973, the Instituto de Ciencias Alejandro Lipschutz Centro de Pensamiento e Investigación Social y Política (ICAL) in Chile and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research present an analysis of the 1973 coup against Chile and its effects on the Third World and non-aligned countries, which contain lessons that the peoples of the Third World must keep in mind today and always. This dossier also provides key information about why coups take place. In particular, it describes the role of the United States in the plotting of the coup against Chile. This is evidenced by documents that were kept secret at the time, as they reveal an imperialist nation’s interference in the internal affairs of a democratic country that had asserted its autonomy to build a new social project for its people. This dossier develops two axes: first, the political objectives of the nationalisation of copper, and second, the role that it played within the framework of a broader conversation among Third World countries aimed at the creation of a New International Economic Order (NIEO).

  • Common Dreams ☛ Trump’s Desperate Attempt to Bribe Voters Ahead of Election is a New Low

    “Every Republican at the convention and across the country should loudly and vehemently denounce Trump for proposing this dangerous and transparently illegal scheme. The fact that no one has done that yet is cause for deep alarm about the future of American elections.”

  • Hackaday ☛ Open Source Acoustic Drone Detection

    The result is VolAnti—an open-source drone detector. This route was chosen as a reliable way to detect incoming multi-rotors, since spinning propellers tend to create a telltale sound that can be plucked from the noise quite specifically. In a world where fiber optic drones eschew RF emissions, it also proves particularly useful for early warning of such craft.

  • Jakub Steiner ☛ The other WTC Attack

    The explosion was devastating. The blast tore a 30-meter crater through five floors of underground parking and damaged several support columns, though the main structural frame of the tower held. Though the tower didn't collapse as the terrorists had originally planned, the shockwave destroyed the main electrical wiring and emergency lighting, and smoke rose as high as the 93rd floor. Six people lost their lives and more than a thousand were injured, most from smoke inhalation during the grueling evacuation through dark stairwells. Operations in both towers were completely paralyzed and the complex had to be shut down for nearly a full month. Total damages and subsequent repairs cost roughly half a billion dollars.

    Because of the '93 bombing, the Port Authority installed photoluminescent safety markings along the steps, landings, and handrails throughout the towers. When the planes struck eight years later and emergency lights flickered or failed, these glow-in-the-dark strips guided occupants downward. According to National Institute of Standards and Technology, 33% of survivors in the North Tower and 17% in the South Tower directly credited these markings with aiding their escape. The stairs were well-lit by battery-pack emergency lights and photoluminescent guides, and people moved much faster. Survivors who had been in the building during both attacks noted that the 2001 descent took roughly half the time it did in 1993.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Pro Publica ☛ Questions Grow Over FBI Investigation of Omar al-Bayoumi 25 Years After 9/11

    That evidence and other FBI information, now filed in a federal lawsuit against the Saudi government by victims of the attacks, has undercut both Bayoumi’s claims of innocence and the FBI’s profile of him as a genial, pro-American civil servant. While he was living publicly as a student, it shows, Bayoumi worked closely with Saudi religious officials, operated as a Saudi intelligence asset and collaborated with several clerics who would later emerge as militant Islamists tied to al-Qaida.

  • BBC ☛ Landlady to 9/11 hijackers reveals their links to alleged Saudi spy

    But Bayoumi, the one-time resident of 152 Parkwood, is now at the centre of the $1 trillion (£733bn) lawsuit brought against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by several thousand families of victims and as well as survivors of 9/11.

  • The Gray Zone ☛ Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA sponsored by Israeli govt-aligned outfit, leaked contract shows

    A leaked contract obtained by The Grayzone reveals that TPUSA entered into an agreement with the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ) to sponsor a series of ostensibly Christian faith-based summits between 2025 and 2027. Signed on May 16, 2025, the contract committed IFCJ to pay $700,000 to TPUSA over two years. In exchange, the group was to receive a series of promotional benefits including main stage speaking slots for its President, Yael Eckstein, and the distribution of pro-Israel “activism kits” to over 200 college campuses.

  • International Business Times ☛ Trump Flew on Jeffrey Epstein Jet With Unnamed 20-Year-Old Woman According to Newly Unsealed SDNY Email

    It states that flight logs list Trump alongside Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and members of Trump's family across a three-year span. The DOJ has said some documents in the broader release contain 'untrue and sensationalist claims' about the president, while it has not specifically disputed the flight-log email.

• Environment

  • The Revelator ☛ Conservation’s Blind Spot: Why Language Matters for Biodiversity

    These names are far more than local expressions. They reflect generations of close observation about how the forest functions and how people have learned to live with it.

    Much of this vocabulary is quietly disappearing. In administration, education, and even conservation practice, diverse coastal landscapes are increasingly gathered under a single term, mangroves. The forest remains, but the distinctions that once helped people recognize its ecological diversity begin to fade.

  • Futurism ☛ Fire Marshal Uncovers House of Horrors Lurking Inside Bitcoin-Mining Data Center

    As a result of the copious fire hazards, the city gave the data center a “failing” grade, indicative of a building with severe structural or safety failures.

    When it comes to data centers, fire safety is no small matter. The structures are already highly prone to conflagration due to massive electrical loads, lithium-ion batteries, and chips that run at extremely high temperatures.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Memos expose secret industry push to kill California plastic laws

    But now as the law’s deadlines and requirements finally take shape, a hefty industry-oriented consortium is quietly organizing to burn it — and its companion law, the state’s Truth in Recycling law — to the ground.

  • Wired ☛ August 2026 Was the Hottest Month Ever Recorded: Copernicus Data

    The global average temperature for August was 1.65 degrees Celsius (3 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average, according to Copernicus. While it was hot globally this summer, the impacts played out with dangerous and sometimes deadly results locally.

  • Inside Towers ☛ Data Centers Are Looking to Rebrand

    Bipartisan opposition appears to be translating into legislative action. In mid-July, New York enacted the first statewide ban on data center construction, and over a dozen states, both red and blue, have since weighed similar proposals, Inside Towers reported.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ Climate: Who Dies, Who Fights, Who Surrenders, Who Sabotages

    As you read further, the CBC piece nonchalantly drops that "In Nunavut, warming in winter could exceed 10 C." Nunavut is the indigenous-governed province created in 1999, and this has to mean its utter destruction. That's genocide against Canada's indigenous Arctic peoples; the place would be unimaginably different and the peoples' elegant cold-weather adaptation that is central to cultural stories, skills, and practices would be obsolete. There was a book by Philip Gourevich about the Rwandan genocide of 1994 titled We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda; this is a report that could be titled We Would Like to Inform You That You, Your Descendants, and the Very Place That Shaped Your People Will Be Destroyed But Oil Will Be Briefly Profitable for Some Canadian Corporations.

    The Canadian report seems to regard this as an inevitability rather than something to act to prevent. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit climate leader from Nunavut I had the honor of meeting in British Columbia in 2025, wrote a book titled The Right to Be Cold that begins "For the first ten years of my life, I traveled only by dog team." She describes being wrapped up and secured atop the dog sled where she would "view the vast expanses of Arctic sky and feel the crunching of the snow." The right to be cold is being destroyed.

  • NPR ☛ Scientists say August was Earth's hottest month they've measured

    According to Hausfather, "it is increasingly likely that 2026 ends up beating 2024 as the warmest year on record, and almost certain that 2027 beats both, potentially reaching as high as 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels on the back of an unprecedentedly-strong El Nino event."

    Some days may hit an even higher climate threshold, 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above mid 1800s, Burgess said.

    "Until humanity stops burning colossal amount of coal, oil and gas, the pollution this causes will keep baking our planet, and extreme heat will keep smashing all-time records, killing millions and costing trillions, hitting transport and health systems, and pushing up prices for household basics like food," United Nations climate chief Simon Stiell said. "This is the spiraling price of humanity's fossil fuel addiction, and the global climate crisis it is fueling."

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Stanford University ☛ Racing on sunlight: Stanford Solar Car Project completes its first road race since 2017

      It did so as part of the 2026 American Solar Challenge, a biennial competition for college teams that design, build and race solar-powered cars. The group, named the Stanford Solar Car Project, placed fifth overall and second among teams from American colleges.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Multi-kilojoule fusion lasers could power next-gen US air defense

      Laser fusion works by using intense laser pulses to compress and heat fuel until it reaches conditions where nuclear fusion can occur. The challenge is developing lasers that can deliver these pulses repeatedly while keeping energy consumption, maintenance, and operating costs under control.

• Finance

  • Bill Bennett ☛ Fibre companies dispute ComCom's regulated returns model

    One of the key arguments to emerge from the submissions is the question of how far back you should look when deciding what is a reasonable return. A core debate centres on historical data windows, specifically whether to look at market trends starting from 1931 or 1900.

    While this sounds esoteric, in practice it can make a substantial difference to the profits fibre companies can earn.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Tedium ☛ Automattic Minus Matt: Mullenweg’s Forced Break

    “I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied,” Mullenweg wrote in a company Slack channel, according to the report. He’s now been temporarily replaced by the man he claims conspired against him, Automattic CFO Mark Davies.

    (Mullenweg still has a role on the board, but given that the board just removed him from the CEO role, something tells me that the only thing working in his favor there are Robert’s Rules of Order.)

  • Cyble Inc ☛ EU's 24-Hr Vulnerability Reporting Rules Take Effect Friday, A Year Before The Rest Of The Cyber Resilience Act

    The CRA covers products with digital elements placed on the EU market, a category broad enough to take in enterprise software, consumer IoT devices, industrial controllers and much of the component software beneath them.

    Under Article 14, manufacturers must file an early warning within 24 hours of becoming aware of an actively exploited vulnerability or a severe incident affecting product security, a fuller notification within 72 hours, and a final report within 14 days of a corrective measure becoming available — one month in the case of severe incidents.

  • The Verge ☛ Schools are catching on to Big Tech’s playbook

    Singer’s book recounts how more than a decade ago, the country’s largest tech companies embedded themselves directly into school curricula through courses for Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles classes. Apple and Microsoft each created their own curricula, featuring their own tools like Apple’s Swift or Microsoft’s Minecraft. “What’s striking about this is you can imagine that parents would not want, say, Pfizer AP Biology, or Northrop Grumman AP Physics, or ExxonMobil Environmental Science AP,” Singer says. She found that those in the medical field would likely understand why — medical students who are trained by a company on how to implant their proprietary device, one expert told her as an example, rarely choose to try another.

  • Pete Warden ☛ Why the software industry needs a lot of regulation

    Structural engineers have a physical stamp that they apply to plans they approve, and if a building falls down due to design problems, they’re directly and personally responsible. Software engineers can deploy code that kills hundreds of people without anywhere near that level of accountability. Here’s why I don’t think that’s right, or even sustainable.

    They say regulations are written in blood, and it wasn’t until the failure of the St Francis Dam killed around 400 people in 1928 that licensing of civil engineers become a requirement in California. Software design flaws have already taken a much larger toll, and the future promises to make our work even more deadly. Already the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to autonomous drones having to take software-driven decisions about who to kill, and its clear that code will be a big part of warfare going forward. AI models are also becoming crucial components in safety-critical systems in almost every industry, and while I’m skeptical about the eschatological predictions of them gaining consciousness, any victims won’t care if the cause of a disaster was a malicious Skynet or just incompetent engineering.

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Greatest Threat to America Since 9/11?

    The supposed experts who think they understand America better than the rest of us, along with the domestic threats to liberty and to the United States itself, all share some version of the same argument: that the [Internet] is an unprecedented, extremism-generating "chaos machine," to borrow the title of former New York Times journalist Max Fisher's book. The chaos machine exposes public displeasure with Donald Trump, the innate contempt for government tyranny symbolized as everyone from the NYPD to ICE to the FBI and CIA, dissatisfaction with the elite, the opinion shapers, the priorities of the country, the inequities of society, and in general, for the dated old ways.

    The national security types call that terrorism.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Russians abroad are losing access to passport renewals and other consular services. Belarusians know what comes next.

    In the summer of 2026, Russian authorities banned Russians abroad who have been convicted in absentia from receiving any consular services. The ban applies to anyone convicted under any article of the Criminal Code, as well as anyone with an administrative fine for “discrediting the army,” failing to label themselves a “foreign agent,” or working with an “undesirable organization.” In effect, many will face an illusory choice: return to Russia and serve their sentence, or live in another country without a foreign passport, since it can no longer be renewed. Because of this, the law has already been dubbed the law on “stripping citizenship.” Belarusian citizens who have left the country have been in a similar situation for three years already. In 2023, Alexander Lukashenko banned them from obtaining passports at embassies and consulates. Meduza spoke with them about life without a passport.

  • Heather Burns ☛ The age-gating of history

    Enter the pearl-clutching brigade, who have deemed real history to be “age inappropriate” content so shocking that it requires age and identity verification to view.

    You want my age and identity verification to watch that “content”? That verification is me. Hello. I’m the human here. I exist.

    And don’t even get me started on this: [...]

  • The Next Move ☛ Remember Hong Kong - by Jay Nordlinger

    We should not let Hong Kong fade away. We should not let Joshua Wong fade away. Or Jimmy Lai, or others. Let me elaborate.

    For a few years—2019 and 2020 in particular—the eyes of the world were on Hong Kong. It was probably the chief battleground in the perpetual war between freedom and tyranny, democracy and dictatorship.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • [Old] FOSS Force ☛ Can the Linux Foundation Speak for Free Software?

    I first heard of the Linux Foundation when SourceForge (now Geeknet) sold it the Linux.com URL. Overnight, the Linux.com news site run by Robin “roblimo” Miller and Lee Schlesinger was shut down, and I was looking for a job. I quickly found new places to write, but ever since I have viewed the Linux Foundation with mixed feelings. What has changed is that my reaction has grown less personal and more political as I watch how it operates.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Futurism ☛ Elon Musk Has Been Calling Women "Breeders" Since His First Marriage, His First Wife Says

    “I learned the term gaslighting through my relationship with Elon,” she said in the documentary.

    She also claimed that Musk refers to the mothers of his many children as “breeders” who “are interchangeable,” a vile descriptor perfectly highlighting the entrepreneur’s deep-rooted misogyny and bizarre obsession with procreation.

  • The Nation ☛ Dolly Parton Understood That Working 9 to 5 Doesn’t Really Pay the Bills in Today’s America

    They’ve been embraced by audiences across generations, in part because their music is rooted in experiences that are all too universal—hard work that doesn’t pay as well as it should; families and communities that are vibrant, yet struggling day-to-day. But as the cost of living rises and with creative fields threatened by AI, it’s becoming more and more difficult for musicians and artists to get by. This is a burden that falls disproportionately on those without means—and it’s imperiling the nation’s proud history of working-class artistry.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Fidium Fiber outage: Internet down for users across Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont

    Update: Fidium Fiber appears to be back up after a brief outage on Thursday. During the outage, users across Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont reported widespread [Internet] problems. The cause of the outage is still unknown.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ New Disney+ app: move by 12 October

    The more consequential change is for mobile-only subscribers, who will be migrated to Disney’s new Basic plan. Disney said this will widen the number of devices they can watch on to include TVs, which the mobile plan excludes. Sign-ups to the Basic plan will run through MTN, with Disney saying details on availability will follow.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Pirate IPTV Operators Face $32.7 Million Judgment and Self-Expanding Blocking Injunction

      TelevisaUnivision has asked a Florida federal judge to enter a $32.7 million default judgment against the operators of three pirate IPTV services, who all failed to appear in court. The proposed permanent blocking injunction expands its already-broad predecessor, letting the broadcaster add new defendants without a judge's sign-off.

    • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Two more newsrooms are suing OpenAI. It's complicated.

      That’s a genuine problem! Expanding the scope of copyright law really does affect free expression. It’s an important concern to bring up — if the market dilution argument held, it could protect all sorts of businesses, both small and multinational.