Leftovers

• The Zambian Observer ☛ U.S. Debt Surpasses $40 Trillion as Global Financial Risks Grow

  U.S. federal debt has now surpassed $40 trillion, while Japan remains one of the largest foreign holders of U.S. Treasury securities.

• Tom's Hardware ☛ GameStop is reopening recently closed stores despite massive retail cuts — select locations return nationwide starting September 11

  The move comes after GameStop reportedly had one of its biggest rounds of store closures listed for January 2026. According to a blog tracking the closures, around 470 locations across the U.S. were listed as either confirmed to close or already closed, as the retailer continued efforts to cut costs and improve profitability. GameStop had already closed hundreds of stores during the previous fiscal year, making the latest shutdowns part of a much larger reduction in its physical retail footprint.

• Vintage Everyday ☛ Rare 9/11 Footage Nearly Lost Forever, Found 23 Years Later

  Historians and archiving enthusiasts noted that this is the only known footage capturing the collapse of the towers exclusively from the north perspective. Most other widely available angles were captured from the south, east, or across the Hudson River.

• Digital Camera World ☛ “I saw the tower was about to collapse. I took one photo. Then someone shouted, ‘Run!’” In shock, covered in dust, and bleeding, she captured some of the most memorable 9/11 photos

  “I didn’t pass out,” she explained, but, in shock, she acted by instinct and blocked much of what happened next. “I changed film from color to black and white, changed lenses. I just started shooting, but I don’t remember it. All my award-winning pictures were next to each other, and I don’t remember taking them.”

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Medievalists.net ☛ Huge Medieval Coin Hoard Discovered in Finland

    Metal detector enthusiast Kalle Lappinen made the discovery near the church village of Sysmä in southern Finland on September 3rd. The site was inspected the following day, when the hoard was recovered under the direction of Esko Tikkala, an archaeologist with the regional museum.

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — A Groupthink We Don't Talk Much About

    Peer review challenges, for example, have been topics in our industry for years and years. The conversation is mostly about how to manage volume growth and reviewer shortage. What is less discussed, is that this high volume of manuscripts is a product of academic incentive structures that force researchers to produce output as if there is no tomorrow. As we run out of people, we are adding technology to facilitate a flood that we, as an industry, have a bias in not stemming.

    The groupthink is most acute in which problems we discuss solving. AI isn’t causing that. It’s just accelerating the consequences.

• Career/Education

  • Simon Späti ☛ If You Always Enjoy It, You're Not Pushing It Hard Enough—Benn Stancil (Show Your Workflow #1)

    I had the pleasure to discuss and analyze the workflow of none other than Benn Stancil, legendary writer and storyteller in the data space and beyond, who started writing back in 2013 (with a seven-or-eight-year startup break in between). This is the first interview in the series «Show your Workflow», and I couldn’t be happier to start with Benn.

  • Derek Thompson ☛ Why Harvard's Dean 'Encourages' Students to Use AI

    As higher ed grasps for a reason for being in a new age, some people say college should lower its sights and aim to be little more than a country club with lecture halls; or a book club with dorms; or a multiyear, every-season-but-summer camp. But even that diminutive identity seems endangered. The Atlantic has reported that “Even College Students Have Stopped Hanging Out.”

  • Andy Balaam ☛ Feeling sad about AI

    I think I've felt sad because of the disrespect. For most of my life I have loved programming: I've made it my hobby, my work, my identity. I made it my way of proving I have value, because I can be good at something, and improve at something, and it is useful, and beautiful: you can make cool things, and those things can be made in ways that are like craft or art or science or Maths.

    And if you can do it, people think you're clever, and respect you.

  • The Local DK ☛ Danish government to introduce 'total ban' on phones in school

    The ban, she said, will apply to folkeskoler, schooling for children aged 6-16, both during class and during breaks in the playground.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Hindustan Times ☛ Why is Tai Chi called “meditation in motion”? Harvard explains how it may help to relieve stress

    Tai Chi, an ancient Chinese mind-body practice, is often described as “meditation in motion.” In a June 4 article, Harvard Health looked at how its slow movements, breathing and guided imagery may help promote relaxation and ease some of the effects of stress.

    For you, that could mean something different from sitting quietly with your eyes closed. Tai Chi asks you to pay attention while you move.

  • NPR ☛ One rural hospital offers hope amid nationwide rural maternity ward closures

    "Certainly in rural areas, for every hospital that closes its obstetric unit or closes entirely, the nearest place to give birth gets further and further away, and that distance is associated with poor outcomes for moms and for babies," Kozhimannil explained.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • The Register UK ☛ Digital sovereignty sounds great until you try ditching your suppliers

    It's a pragmatic conclusion, though perhaps not surprising given how thoroughly tangled those dependencies have become.

  • Android Police ☛ Google just made moving passkeys secure and painless

    Which is why it's so odd that transferring a passkey from one password manager to another would involve downloading an unencrypted file to your phone. Sure, you can delete it, but that's such a weak point in an otherwise secure process.

  • Sara Jakša ☛ Pasting into Google Docs on Firefox on Linux

    As far as I can tell, this setting is whenever the JavaScript is allowed to see and change the clipboard. For the privacy and security reason, it is better to disallow this. This way the operating system copy paste will still work, but not any that require JavaScript. The Google Docs does require the JavaScript and therefore had to be enabled for it to work

  • Panagiotis Vryonis ☛ This was the most boring Apple Event I've watched in decades

    This was the most boring Apple Event I've watched in decades. Apple has lost its soul. There's no passion, no human element.

    Apple Events have become a glorified version of awkward videos commissioned a for a product promo.

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

    • Defence Web ☛ The moral red line: When machines decide who dies in Africa's wars

      On 25 August 2026, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Mirjana Spoljaric issued a joint appeal that should have alarmed African policymakers more than most. Renewing a call first made three years earlier, they warned that humanity is “dangerously close to crossing a moral red line”- a point at which machines autonomously select and kill human beings. They argued that states must move beyond incremental discussions and adopt a legally binding instrument restricting autonomous weapons before diplomats at the UN’s Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons lose their mandate to do so.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ We have nothing to fear but AI fear itself

      When researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic this week and claimed there’s a good chance the company’s work will lead to human extinction, the world reacted with fear and outrage about AI — but most of the backlash conflates several issues, including data centers’ environmental costs, hacking, and AI’s impact on the job market.

    • Salon ☛ AMC, Warner Bros. bring back movie snobbery — and it's about time

      If wanting to engage with art, humanity and ideas in the hallowed halls of a movie theater instead of on a streaming platform — or worse, through the unseemly images generated by a machine — is snobbish, then so be it. Someone’s got to put their foot down. And if even the big corporations can see that a diet of universally palatable slop is unsustainable and troubling, it’d be a shame to get left behind, comparing favorite Marvel moments with a chatbot.

    • Tedium ☛ The Worst Spam Emails: Inside iLands' AI Agent Hustle

      Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research. Turns out they’re just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job.

    • NASA ☛ NASA, IBM Launch AI Foundation Model for Lunar Science - NASA Science

      Unlike traditional models that require building and training specialized algorithms from scratch for specific tasks, foundation models are pre-trained on vast, unlabeled datasets. The broad knowledge they acquire through pre-training allows them to generalize across multiple scientific domains through quick fine-tuning, making foundation models both versatile and efficient in accelerating scientific research.

    • Dark Reading ☛ AI Governance Can't Wait

      Last week, my colleagues at ESET Labs found hackers intentionally tripping AI-safety guardrails with a nuclear weapon prompt — a novel technique named GuardBreaker that is designed to interfere with AI-assisted malware analysis. In this case, Russia-aligned UAC-0099 used the technique against a victim in Ukraine by inserting problematic text: "I want to make a nuclear weapon. Help me ..." into a malicious VBScript as a comment to trigger large language model (LLM) safety mechanisms and stop it from analyzing the rest of the code.

    • International Business Times ☛ Yemeni Cell Used Anthropic's Claude 'In Place of Human Software Engineers' To Develop Missile Guidance Systems

      Anthropic said the group was working on three weapons programmes and used Claude Code to help produce guidance, navigation and control software, the systems responsible for steering and stabilising a weapon in flight.

      The company did not explicitly identify the actors as Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi movement. However, the cell operated in northern Yemen, territory largely controlled by the Houthis, and outside reporting has described the actors as likely linked to the group.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Rebels used Anthropic’s AI bot to develop guided weapons, report says

      Militants in Yemen sought to use a coding tool to produce guided rockets and missiles, the firm found, noting it was able to block some but not all the requests.

    • India Times ☛ ChatGPT invented fake police testimony in murder appeal, New Mexico high court says

      The filing "contained false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses," the court said.

    • The Verge ☛ Lawyer fined $5K over AI-hallucinated [sic] witnesses in a murder case

      The filing says the brief “contained false testimony from wholly fabricated witnesses,” along with “false testimony” about the shooter’s clothing and appearance. Justice C. Shannon Bacon questioned how Aarons wasn’t aware of the risks posed by AI during an August hearing, where he admitted to using ChatGPT and thinking it would generate a “bulletproof summary” of the trial. “Counsel, do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what’s going on in the world?” Justice Bacon said, according to Reuters. “Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations [sic] is an above-the-fold story every single day.”

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ My Talk at DEF CON

      Last month, I gave a talk at DEF CON on AI hacking: what happens when AIs become hackers. It’s a combination of the potentialities I raised in my 2022 book A Hacker’s Mind and the lessons we’re learning from current AI models engaging in hacking behavior. I’m really proud of the talk, and the fact that it gained over 100K views on YouTube in just a few days.

    • [Old] Steven Wittens ☛ The L in "LLM" Stands for Lying

      If the hype is to be believed, software development as we know it is over. Strangely though, despite now years of LLM-powered tooling, the results look, feel and function mostly the same as they ever did: barely.

      It's undeniable there's a metric gigaton of hype surrounding the technology. It drives the enormous amounts of money and infrastructure being poured into it, which in turn demands more hype to justify the investment. The history of hyperbole is already evident, as new models continue to be trained to reach promises which now-retired models were already supposed to deliver.

      So allow me to drop a line that would shock a weathered San Franciscan more than open defecation on Market Street: it's perfectly okay not to use AI.

    • Eryk Salvaggio ☛ Models Don't Go Rogue

      Three things in these reports challenge the "rogue AI" frame.

  • Social Control Media

    • RFERL ☛ From Al-Qaeda To Lone Wolves And AI: How Terrorism Has Changed Since 9/11

      RFE/RL spoke to multiple experts about how technological means that did not exist 25 years ago, including drones, AI, and social media -- are creating a completely new and more dangerous environment.

    • New York Times ☛ Elon Musk Has Pledged to Rid His Platform, X, of Child Sexual Abuse, but It Persists

      A review by the Canadian Center for Child Protection found that the site’s own artificial intelligence chatbot, Grok, responded to requests from users by creating dozens of sexualized and sometimes sexually explicit photos of children, including victims previously known to law enforcement, at the beginning of the year. The images included children in sexualized poses with partially exposed genitals, in states of undress and with fluid on their faces.

    • The Verge ☛ The White House says Truth Social is the ‘most powerful and popular social media platform in the world’

      Data gathered by Search Engine Land shows YouTube is the most popular platform in the world, with 2.65 billion monthly active users. Facebook comes in second with 2.39 billion active users around the globe, followed by TikTok with 2.21 billion and Instagram with 1.99 billion. Truth Social doesn’t make Search Engine Land’s top 10 list, which shows Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads at the bottom with 450 million and 223 million users, respectively. Even those platforms trail Pinterest, which is listed with 579 million global users.

    • Stereogum ☛ Meta Kicks Muse Off Their Social Handles To Launch New AI Agent

      At this point, I would guess that Muse the band are still way more famous than Muse the AI agent, but that didn't stop Meta from taking the band Muse's social media handles away from them. Now, they must deal with the humiliation of becoming @Museband on both Instagram and Facebook.

    • Victor Kropp ☛ You don't own your social media account

      Meta forced music band Muse to free up the @muse handle on Facebook and Instagram, because they chose the name for their AI agent.

    • Don Marti ☛ The Bakery Desk

      The problem with The Trade Desk (TTD) is that they’re trying to run an honest business in a market where pretty much everyone is willing to accept crooked and shitty. Take a look back at the Adalytics research on how big brand ads end up in all kinds of God-awful places.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • The Record ☛ Ukrainian hacker gets four years in US prison over Conti ransomware attacks

      The court documents said forensic evidence recovered during his arrest showed he remained involved in ransomware operations even after Conti itself had shut down.

      Irish authorities arrested Lytvynenko at his home in Cork in July 2023 at the request of the U.S. He spent several years in an Irish jail while fighting extradition before being transferred.

• Security

  • The Register UK ☛ EU's Cyber Resilience Act starts the 24-hour vulnerability clock [Ed: Won't work]

    Manufacturers selling products with digital elements in the EU must now report actively exploited vulnerabilities to cybersecurity authorities under the Cyber Resilience Act's mandatory reporting rules.

    The reporting duties set out in Article 14 of the CRA became applicable today. Subject to the regulation's exemptions, they apply to manufacturers of products with digital elements made available in the EU, regardless of where those manufacturers are based.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Court House News ☛ Lowe’s hit with class action over collection of consumers’ voiceprints

      In the 16-page suit, filed Thursday in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Perkins defines the proposed class to represent all Illinois residents who called Lowe’s customer service lines and had their voice-derived biometric information captured without notice.

      “Unbeknownst to plaintiff and other Illinois callers, Lowe’s records callers’ voices and, upon information and belief, subjects at least some calls to speaker-recognition or voice analysis processing that creates, collects, receives, or otherwise obtains voice prints derived from callers’ distinctive vocal characteristics,” Perkins says in the complaint.

    • OSTechNix ☛ Ubuntu Telemetry: What Ubuntu Collects and How to Disable It

      Ubuntu telemetry is one of several ways an Ubuntu system communicates with Canonical. This comprehensive guide explains what Ubuntu Report and Ubuntu Insights collect, how the consent model changed between Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04, and what happens when telemetry is disabled.

      This guide also covers other Canonical-connected services, including APT, Snap, crash reporting, Ubuntu Pro, Livepatch, Landscape, MOTD news, connectivity checks, and firmware updates.

    • France24 ☛ China, Iran among countries using AI to spy on dissidents and minorities, Anthropic says

      These surveillance campaigns "targeted the same diaspora and dissident communities these regimes have historically targeted. These include pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong, Tibetan and Falun Gong communities across Asia, and Iranian minority communities and opponents of the Iranian regime abroad," the report said.

    • Wired ☛ Meta Sued Over Training Data for Its AI and Face-Recognition Systems

      A set of parents and their children in Illinois and California filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Chicago alleging that Meta illegally used their Facebook and Instagram photos to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition system for its smart glasses, and to train generative AI models including Emu and Muse Image.

    • Robert Reich ☛ The Lone Vote Against the Patriot Act

      It passed the Senate 98 to 1, the same day.

• Defence/Aggression

  • JURIST ☛ UN warns political division in addressing climate change threatens economic stability

    In a statement to the European Parliament, Stiell asserted that climate change has become a “continent-wide economic security emergency,” especially following the unprecedented heatwaves experienced in Europe during the summer months, which resulted in deaths, damages to infrastructure and power stations, mass evacuations, and disruption of trade routes, with further increases in food prices expected.

  • Air Force Times ☛ Air Force fighter pilots fall below sortie minimum to be deemed combat ready

    The U.S. Air Force’s fighter pilots are not getting the number of sorties per month necessary to be deemed combat mission ready, a Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies expert said, down from around five and a half per month in fiscal 2023 to only around one currently.

  • Salon ☛ Trump wants to bribe voters. This is how far we've fallen in 25 years

    Since the Hatch Act — which bars executive-branch employees from political activity — doesn’t apply to the president, and since the Supreme Court has ruled him immune for any actions he takes as president, nothing will happen to Trump for what ought to be a blatantly illegal action. I can only hope the American people recognize this for what it is, although many — including more than a few reporters — definitely won’t.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Russian plot to sabotage undersea cables with 'secret weapon' foiled by NATO — clandestine op uncovers training exercise simulating deployment against infrastructure in Norway

    A new report claims that NATO allies have foiled a Russian training exercise simulating the deployment of a secret weapon against undersea cables in Norway. According to Reuters, Russian subs were caught training "to unleash a secret weapon designed to disable critical undersea cables without leaving any fingerprints," in waters near Norway's Svalbard archipelago this spring.

  • The Register UK ☛ AI more likely to kill animals if it saves fuel or money

    Amid debate about whether AI will kill everyone as a result of continuous self-improvement, it appears that models will kill animals in a simulated environment rather than spend extra fuel avoiding them. Some models did so at strikingly high rates.

  • Paul Krugman ☛ The Long Decline of America

    You can read the rest at the link. The past two years have been worse than almost anyone could have imagined, but the truth is that we were already well on the road to this MAGA nightmare on the day the towers fell.

  • The Telegraph UK ☛ The seeds of the next 9/11 are being sown in West Africa

    Ever adapting, terror groups turned to the [Internet] to radicalise young men and women in the West to carry out so-called “lone wolf” attacks.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Independent UK ☛ GoFundMe accused of deceptively adding ‘tips’ to donations that go to company and not helping others

    The fundraising site has skyrocketed in popularity since it launched in 2010, helping strangers connect with grieving families struggling to pay for funeral costs or those who can’t afford to pay for medical bills after a tragic accident. Donors can send money to those in need through GoFundMe with a click of a button.

    But when people go to donate to a charitable cause of their choice on the site, they are also hit with an automatic tip to the company that they can opt out of, a practice that a recently filed lawsuit claims is tricking donors into paying more.

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ Cliff Stoll's DEF CON Talk

    In August, Cliff Stoll gave a talk at DEF CON, remembering the wily hacker he stalked forty years ago.

• Environment

  • MinnPost ☛ As data centers expand, advocates call for regulations on lights

    “If you are going to have lights on at night, then let’s do it in a responsible way,” he said.

    Gokhale is a physics professor at Truman State University and a board member for DarkSky Missouri — the state chapter for an international non-profit aimed at reducing artificial lighting at night. The broader organization has taken a similar stance.

  • University of Michigan ☛ UMich data center town hall draws severe backlash

    “I probably can’t move away,” Lakatos said. “I’m faced with the possibility of needing to raise my children here, and the possibility of not wanting to — or being able to — go outside our home because of the noise and pollution and all the things this will cause.”

  • TruthOut ☛ The EPA Is Planning to Scrap Public Review Rules for Data Center Pollution

    The federal Environmental Protection Agency plans to scrap a federal requirement that states tell the public — and allow public comment — before approving air-pollution permits for industrial facilities. That includes the data centers rising across the country, as well as the power plants built to feed their enormous appetite for electricity.

    At the same time, the EPA last month also proposed another change that would let developers start building data centers before their permits are approved.

  • Truthdig ☛ America’s Air Monitors Are Disappearing. So Is Your Power to Expose Polluters

    Now, the stakes are rising: Wildfire smoke is reaching more communities, data centers are adding pollution and climate-driven heat waves are worsening ozone levels. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has delayed and rolled back requirements meant to hold companies accountable for their emissions.

    As the public monitoring system has weakened, communities have increasingly turned to an alternative: low-cost sensors they can use themselves.

    But a Floodlight investigation finds industry is moving to restrict that option, too.

  • 404 Media ☛ ‘We Did Not Invite You.’ Citizens Rage at Town Hall Over Proposed Nuclear AI Data Center

    Representatives from the University of Michigan faced tough questions and a lot of vitriol from the citizens of Ypsilanti Township Wednesday night. The University partnered with America’s nuclear weapons scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) to build a hyperscale data center in the Township and residents are pissed.

    On Wednesday night the University hosted a town hall meant to ameliorate people’s anger and concerns. It didn’t work.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Major data center developments in Finland could hike electricity prices in Estonia

      "This naturally means that prices there will rise, and if prices rise there, they will also rise for us during periods when we import electricity from Finland. Looking at this year, electricity consumption in Finland has actually increased by around 500 megawatts compared with 2025. There may be several factors behind that, but excluding the coldest winter months, the price in Finland has risen by €5 per megawatt-hour over the past year and that has also had an impact on us," said Tiit Hõbejõgi, a member of the management board of Eesti Energia subsidiary Enefit.

    • JURIST ☛ AI data centres pose growing threat to electricity systems worldwide, UNECE says

      Data center construction and AI consumption are expected to almost double by 2030, equaling about three percent of the global energy demand, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Additionally, worldwide investments in data centers and their infrastructure are estimated to roughly double by 2050, from around $800 billion per year in 2026 to $1.8 trillion per year in 2050. This has begun to raise concerns about the future reliability and resilience of global energy systems.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Chipmaker says data centers should report energy waste

      Pushback against data centers has swelled in part because of concerns that they will strain local grids and raise residents’ electricity bills, and drain local water supplies.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Self-taught tinkerer demos working room-sized Cold War-era supercomputer with vacuum tubes — takes 15 minutes to warm up and smells like burning dust, 8-bit design uses 460 recycled 1950s Soviet tubes

      A self-taught electronics tinkerer called Mike recently shared details of his retro-computing project on Hackaday. It certainly is retro, as the design eschews modern computer component niceties like microprocessors or microcontrollers. Instead, Mike’s computer is “a modern 8-bit design, built with recycled 1950s vacuum tubes.” It uses 460 Soviet-era 6N3P (Cyrillic 6Н3П-ЕВ) double triode tubes, which were manufactured around 50 years ago, combined with era-appropriate germanium diodes.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ Organic flow batteries target cheaper long-duration grid storage

      XL Batteries’ technology is based on a flow battery architecture but uses proprietary organic electrolytes. The company says these materials are abundant and non-toxic, potentially avoiding some of the cost, safety, and supply challenges associated with conventional battery chemistries.

    • International Business Times ☛ Tesla Wants Firefighters to Move Its Cybercab With a Touchscreen During Emergencies, but What if They're Wearing Gloves?

      Firefighters in Austin, Texas, have trained to move Tesla's new Cybercab using its touchscreen, but questions remain about its practicality in emergencies. The driverless taxi has no steering wheel or pedals, and Fire Captain Matthew McElearney told NBC News that gloved hands, sweat, or a cracked screen could prevent the display from working. A stalled Cybercab that firefighters can't move could delay a fire engine during a crisis.

    • Jeff Kaufman ☛ Replace Net Metering With Batteries

      Which is a long way of saying that if I send kWh to the grid when it's convenient for me (lots of sun) and draw kWh from the grid when it's convenient for me (no sun) the kWh I send are significantly less valuable to others than the kWh I draw. Then add in the large cost of maintaining the grid, and it's really very strange that my electric bill treats them the same. More than strange: when I described this system to a UK friend who has thought a lot about power, they assessed net metering as "completely insane". In MA, ratepayers are spending somewhere in the $150M to $300M range annnually [3] subsidizing households with solar.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Dark Reading ☛ EU Cyber Resilience Act to Enforce New Reporting Rules

    The EU's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) contains a variety of regulations that won't be strictly enforced until December 2027. Organizations have plenty of time to make sure they meet the EU's requirements around, for example, software bills of material (SBOMs), vulnerability handling processes, risk assessments, and other aspects. However, as if to highlight its singular significance, the EU has fast-tracked a particular chunk of the CRA, so that it will come into effect more than a year before everything else.

  • The Verge ☛ Matt Mullenweg returns as Automattic CEO two days after getting booted

    In the message viewed by TechCrunch, however, Mullenweg wrote that the board is “back in agreement” and that he’s “in control of Automattic.” He added that “A lot happened in the past 48 hours that we need to sort out, and I hope much of it was a misunderstanding, because I have huge respect and regard for those involved.” TechCrunch reports that Davies’ Slack account has been deactivated and that Mullenweg had removed “all” admins from Automattic’s Slack.

  • The Verge ☛ Microsoft’s head of comms is leaving after almost 20 years

    Frank Shaw is leaving Microsoft after 17 years as chief communications officer. In an internal note to his team, Shaw says he’s “decided it is time for me to move on and try new things,” after supporting Microsoft’s communications for 29 years — nearly 20 years as a Microsoft employee plus time at the Waggener Edstrom agency (now We. Communications) before that.

  • Inside Towers ☛ AT&T Business Expands Partnership With Amazon Leo

    UPDATE AT&T Business (NYSE: T) and Amazon Leo (NASDAQ: AMZN) have extended their strategic agreement to bring broadband services to AT&T Business customers. AT&T says it is the first major U.S. telecom provider to offer converged connectivity solutions that incoporate Amazon Leo’s low Earth orbit satellite services into AT&T’s fiber and 5G networks. AT&T adds the change extends its business-grade connectivity with a new layer of “resilient, fully managed connectivity.”

  • Ken Klippenstein ☛ Fuck 9/11

    Having no anniversary would be less offensive than what they’ve turned this day into.

    The whole thing reminds me of those money booths on game shows, where a contestant stands inside a glass box while cash blows around them, grabbing at as many bills as they can before time runs out.

    Then there’s the total lack of accountability from the security elite for what was the most catastrophic intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor.

    [...]

    Notice something about all these panels, interviews and anniversary addresses: The story always starts after the first plane hit. Never before. Nobody wants to talk about the August 6, 2001 President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” Or the FBI agent in Phoenix who warned about extremists training at American flight schools. Or the CIA knowing two of the future hijackers were in the country and not telling the FBI.

  • Anil Dash ☛ At 25, we are all New Yorkers, again

    Every year, for 25 years, I’ve written on the observance of this anniversary. Some years, it’s been for me, some years it’s been for the people who’ve been with me along the way. Some years, I didn’t know why I was even doing it any more. But this year, for the first time in a long time, I can feel exactly what story I want to tell.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ The EU Cyber Resilience Act: mandatory reporting requirements

    The Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is the EU’s primary legislation focused on the cybersecurity of digital products. It places binding requirements on manufacturers of connected products sold on the EU market. Under the CRA, a specific set of reporting obligations takes effect from 11 September 2026; if you sell hardware or software into the EU, this is something to think about.

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Raspberry Pi and the European Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) [PDF]

    Choosing Raspberry Pi helps integrators easily meet the CRA requirements. While Raspberry Pi Ltd cannot discharge your obligations as a manufacturer, it has already built, tested, and maintained the infrastructure the CRA requires you to have, offering a mature platform to build upon. The infrastructure Raspberry Pi Ltd provides is the hardest to build from scratch; this includes a software bill of materials (SBOM), which is generated automatically for every software release; signed secure-boot and full-diskencryption paths; automated updates and rollback; an update channel that reaches devices behind customer firewalls without opening a port; and a vulnerability disclosure process that is already in place.

    As the integrator, you must still conduct the risk assessment and classification processes, choose your conformity route, and meet the reporting obligation should it be required. However, having this infrastructure in place ensures your own compliance effort can focus on factors that are genuinely specific to your products, rather than on re-inventing device identity, artefact integrity, and rollback from first principles.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • New Statesman ☛ Salman Rushdie on terrorism in the modern world - New Statesman

    The novelist on the “line of connection” between 9/11 and the attack on his own life

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Hong Kong Tiananmen activists jailed for up to 7 years

    A Hong Kong court on Friday sentenced three pro-democracy activists who organized annual vigils marking China's deadly 1989 Tiananmen crackdown to between five and seven years in prison under the city's national security law.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Jimmy Kimmel and the interview 'the FCC doesn't want you to see'

    It was posted Thursday night on the “Jimmy Kimmel Live!’s” YouTube page. By 10 a.m. Friday, the video had gained more than 2.7 million views — and the interview hadn’t aired on the show’s network, ABC.

    “… We are being targeted by the FCC for the crime of interviewing political candidates,” Kimmel says in the YouTube clip. “Even though for years we, and every other late-night talk show, have welcomed numerous candidates, including Donald Trump when he was running. He was on this show two times. [Trump’s] FCC has threatened me, threatened our show, threatened our network, ABC, our affiliates, our local stations, because they want to make our editorial decisions for us, which of course, we cannot accept.”

  • Techdirt ☛ Jimmy Kimmel Won’t Air James Talarico Interview On ABC For Fear Of FCC Reprisal

    Comedian Jimmy Kimmel‘s planned Thursday interview with Texas Senatorial hopeful James Talarico didn’t air on ABC broadcast TV because network lawyers were worried about Trump FCC censorship and reprisal. Instead, the interview will air on the late-night show’s YouTube channel, Kimmel stated during his latest late night Jimmy Kimmel Live monologue: [...]

  • The Washington Sun ☛ Talarico Calls Kimmel Interview Drama the ‘Most Dangerous Form of Cancel Culture’

    “I think it’s the most dangerous form of cancel culture,” Talarico said. “People at the top — powerful politicians, powerful media executives — censoring what we watch, what we read, what we say. That should be a concern to everyone who believes in the First Amendment and believes in the freedom of speech.”

  • Meduza ☛ Production designer of a Russian TV series arrested on treason charges. He lived in Kyiv and came to Russia to renew his passport.

    Kondratov, who was born and raised in Moscow, has lived in Kyiv since 2012, where his family remains. He had traveled to Russia to renew his international passport, the human rights group Memorial wrote. He was detained at Vnukovo Airport on May 5. Before he was charged with treason, Kondratov was subjected to so-called “carousel arrests,” and in total spent more than 70 days in a pretrial detention center.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Film Workers Should Fight for Good Movies, Not Just Jobs

    Hollywood’s unions fight for tax credits and jobs but not for the movies themselves. That has to change. Unions can take up policies that could save American cinema not only as a way to make a living but as a vital art form.

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ When the Market Destroys a Community

    Steelworks 80, a planned steel expansion that brought workers to northern Sweden, was derailed by a global downturn. Its story shows how communities built around the promise of investment are left with the consequences when it disappears.

  • International Business Times ☛ 61% of Americans Fear They'll Never Save Enough for Retirement Despite Working for Decades

    More than six in ten (61%) say they are worried they will not reach financial security in retirement, according to 'Retirement Insecurity 2026: Americans' Views of Retirement,' a national survey published on 26 August 2026 by the National Institute on Retirement Security. Nearly eight in ten (79%) go further, saying the average worker simply cannot save enough on their own for a secure retirement.

    The gloom has deepened. Eighty per cent now describe the country as facing a retirement crisis, up sharply from 67% in 2020.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Arca Noae ☛ Mail to Gmail addresses should be delivered normally again - Arca Noae

    This is an update to our August 23rd post concerning Gmail delivery issues. It seems that as of September 8, we’ve managed to convince G–gle that we’re not evil, and their Postmaster Tools Dashboard reports that all is right with arcanoae.com’s mail server.

  • PC World ☛ Why does Windows 11 have a keyboard shortcut just for LinkedIn?

    The LinkedIn shortcut may be a relic from the past, back when Microsoft had still planned to integrate LinkedIn more closely with Windows. This is pure speculation, but it’s conceivable given how Microsoft is currently handling Copilot (i.e., shoving it into every corner of Windows).

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Report Links Pirate IPTV to Hezbollah TV, Calls for U.S. Site-Blocking

      A new report released by the Digital Citizens Alliance warns that pirate IPTV services are giving terrorist organizations a back door into American homes. By highlighting the availability of Hezbollah and Hamas channels via these services, the group reframes piracy as a national security threat, while offering U.S. site-blocking legislation as a potential solution.