Leftovers

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-09 [Older] How ‘positive’ stress could improve the welfare of zoo animals

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-08 [Older] How studying astronauts could help tackle ageing on Earth

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-08 [Older] Why should we care if there aren’t any squished insects on our windscreens?

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-07 [Older] How beavers can help create fire breaks as part of a drought preparation plan

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-07 [Older] How the ‘first bird’ leapt into the sky and soared above the dinosaurs

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-04 [Older] Science uncovers how the brain interprets artistic beauty

  • The Conversation ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] My unsung hero of science: Harriet Taylor Mill, the radical feminist philosopher who lived in the shadow of her husband

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • CBC ☛ AI-driven 'worms' that learn on the fly are the latest potential threat to your devices, researchers say

    Cheap to make, worms exploit software and password vulnerabilities and sap power as they move between machines

  • Chris Amico ☛ Who owns my stack?

    From there, it gets more complicated.

    I’m typing this post into VS Code, which Microsoft built. Microsoft also owns Github, where I host the code and the published site, via Github Pages.

    And while this site has no javascript, almost everything else I build does, and Microsoft also owns a large chunk of that stack, specifically npm, through Github, and TypeScript.

  • Techdirt ☛ Apple, Google Pathetically Buckle To Trump’s Dim And Lazy Effort To Rename Lake Ontario

    When we look back at this time and history words like “courage,” “integrity,” and “ethics” aren’t words you’re going to be associating with U.S. tech industry leadership. Everywhere you look you have tech sector executives either openly embracing fascism and the frontal assault on representative democracy, or too feckless and timid to take any sort of coherent stand on literally anything (and then wondering why the plebs are increasingly hostile to their software products).

  • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Security Signal Weekly: September 5-11, 2026

    The rest of the list is a reminder that high-trust infrastructure deserves the same attention even when exploitation has not been reported. Check Point VPN gateways, cPanel hosts, SAP systems, and GoAnywhere MFT all received consequential fixes. AdaptHealth’s breach update and the federal AI-distillation advisory then bring the week back to identity and monitoring: trusted sessions and legitimate API access can still be the path an attacker uses.

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

    • The Atlantic ☛ Dario Amodei: ‘We Owe It to Humanity’ to Slow Down AI

      By now, we’ve all become accustomed to AI industry figures issuing dire prophecies about the power of their products. Yet Amodei’s essay stands out for its urgency and for the moment at which it arrived. Worries about AI agents running amok have gone from hypothetical to real after OpenAI, Anthropic, and others reported alarming incidents in recent weeks. The question now is whether Amodei’s warning will have any more impact than past warnings, which is to say, any at all. There are reasons to believe it could.

    • Alcides Fonseca ☛ Stack-based Genetic Programming is slow

      For those who are not aware, Genetic Algorithms are a family of evolutionary algorithms that use a linear representation, typically an array of integers, encoding a solution. My hello world is the knapsack problem, when you are trying to find the combination of items that maximizes the value of the combination while keeping the total weight of the selected objects. In Genetic Programming, you can represent each combination as an array ([True, False, ..., False]). The algorithm creates a population of combinations and assesses their quality (e.g., -weight if it's overweight and value if not). Genetic Algorithms create a new generation of the population by selecting individuals with a probability proportional to their fitness (quality). First, two parents are selected, and (with a random crossover point), the first half is copied from parent 1 and the second half from parent 2. Then there is a chance that a mutation occurs, and a random position is switched.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AGI Benchmarks: Eugenic Origins — by Valerie Veatch

      It should be noted that even as companies shift their language around “AGI” or “super-intelligence” the goal remains steadfast: create intelligence that reaches or exceeds human intelligence.

      Before we continue it’s useful to examine how each of these major players define AGI today and how they frame the achievement of AGI.

    • Armin Ronacher ☛ P(doom) | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings

      What I really appreciate about Dario’s post is that he lays out a scenario that is not a huge stretch but also one that describes a clear, unfortunate outcome we should fight: persistent botnets and other forms of nuisance. And well, we don’t have to look very far to see the issues left and right. Wikipedia has a page called 2026 OpenAI agent cyberattacks which gives you at least some overview of what we figured out agents have hacked up to this point. Except I know it’s not up to date, because for instance they also poisoned RubyGems.

      Today these systems might be annoying, but they can be turned off when we figure out where they are. Except, it seems like OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at such a scale that they seemingly can be completely blind to what their systems are doing.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: LLMs are real, AI is fake (12 Sep 2026)

      Given that AI insiders have mostly cooked their brains in this fashion, it behooves us all to treat these people as unreliable narrators of their own products' capabilities. Remember: every time you repeat a story about how awfully, terribly dangerous their products are, you help them raise more investment capital, which is a key input for their business (hooking up statistical engines to money-furnaces): [...]

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ AI is breaking our proxies for expertise

      A lot of people online have interpreted this as the expected complaint from any field that gets automated: translators did it, artists and programmers have been doing it, and now it’s the turn of the mathematicians. I think this is too dismissive. Understanding the concrete problem mathematicians are upset about can help us better understand the impact of AI on our own fields, and what we’ll have to do about it.

    • Jürgen Geuter ☛ Rediscovering The Spark

      Think about a person who works on developing chemicals basically saying: “Yeah we’re just throwing random stuff together. There’s at least a 10% chance that – since we don’t really do any security – we might poison everyone, but please give me all the money you had planned to give to hospitals. KTHXBYE.” The world we currently live in is the one where we respond with “Sure Mr. Altman. Here’s also all the money we wanted to spend on schools.”

      That is not a world we should want to be in. Should allow anyone to keep us in. And opening a portal to a better world sounds hard, but the walls between potential worlds are basically just in our heads. We just need to start by breaking the chokehold tech has on the discourse. The spark is still there in each and every one of us.

    • The Verge ☛ Scam Altman says OpenAI going public in 2026 would be ‘ill-advised’

      He also said that it was ‘absolutely’ possible to build an AI beyond human control.

    • Wired ☛ Why So Many AI Researchers Think the Machines Could Kill Everyone

      A combination of rapid advances, recursive self-improvement, and agentic swarms are genuinely “spooking people” inside big labs.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Engineer turns simulated fly brain into a crypto day trader, posts downloadable sim to GitHub — 166,700 virtual neurons read candlestick charts for dopamine hits

      The open-source project has a simulation of a male fruit fly brain and eyes, and shows it a standard-issue candlestick graph with historical pricing. The fly can choose to buy, sell, or hold any given currency — although they get shown to the fly in round-robin fashion — and gets rewarded for profitable trading.

    • Dark Reading ☛ Why AI Is So Good at Scamming Humans

      If there's one thing that AI models are remarkably good at, it's manipulation.

      That's according to security researcher Fred Heiding, who spoke with Dark Reading's senior news director, Rob Wright, at the Dark Reading News Desk at Black Hat USA 2026 last month. Heiding, executive director at Menlo Park Intelligence, and former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis, spoke at the conference about their research on AI security.

      One of the trends they discussed was how AI enhances cybercriminals' social engineering attacks and scams, which cost US citizens nearly $21 billion last year, according to the FBI's IC3 Report. But Heiding also highlighted how AI technology itself has shown how very effective it is at influencing humans.

    • Interesting Engineering ☛ US Marines secure $7.3 million contract for ground robots

      They incorporate the company’s autonomous driving technology and lessons gathered through more than four years of work with the Marine Corps.

    • Terence Tao ☛ On the existence of non-sofic groups | What's new

      However, after reading up on the controversy around the Buckmaster–Alpöge case, the whole story came back to me and I realized that the answer I received from OpenAI was misleading, to say the least. I already wrote about this briefly on Mathstodon.

      I had explicitly asked about two different things: (1) whether our conversations entered training data, and (2) whether they were accessible to the solving process. OpenAI said in the Buckmaster–Alpöge case that no specific user data was accessed, but added that it “cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.” In light of OpenAI’s later wording, I cannot tell whether Sellke’s answer denied both possibilities or only direct access under (2). No qualification, explanation, or evidence was given. Whatever its intent, I regard the answer as materially misleading.

    • India Times ☛ Shoma Chaudhury on why technology needs conscience, not just innovation

      Governments, institutions and societies from Washington to Beijing to New Delhi are grappling with the same unresolved questions. Who is accountable when machines make decisions, what happens to human agency, how should power be regulated, and what does it mean to be human as the line between human and machine intelligence blurs.

  • Social Control Media

    • India Times ☛ Texas judge rules TikTok misled users on child safety feature

      A Texas judge ruled on Thursday that TikTok violated the state's consumer protection law by misleading users about how it filtered content for minors and whether its "Restricted Mode" feature shielded children from inappropriate material.

    • India Times ☛ California governor signs law to limit children's social media risks

      "This is about the features themselves. This is about actually addressing the problem, the scrolling, the algorithms. This is about addressing the substantive issue around the engineering. If you address that, then the age issue is not the essential issue," he continued.

    • India Times ☛ California governor social media laws: California governor signs laws aimed at protecting kids from risks of social media, AI chatbots

      The laws will penalize large social media companies up to $1 million per child if they are found negligent of harming children through their platforms, ban tech businesses from offering addictive feeds to anyone under 16 and require operators of AI chatbots to perform risk assessments before rolling them out.

    • Jacky Alciné ☛ Sharding my Online Identity

      I slightly loathe that in order to remain with a professional identity online, the best option is to have separate accounts. I'll eventually delete the announcement post I made - to help folks know that it's actually me but my subdomain should be enough for verification for most. We'll see how this little experiment goes.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Kevin Boone ☛ Why are modern televisions so cheap?

      I’ve never owned a regular television, so it’s no surprise that I’m out of touch with pricing. Still, it seemed obvious to me that such large, complex, feature-rich appliances couldn’t be that cheap without some kind of angle. So I investigated.

      Maybe I’m the last person on Earth to realize this, but:

      Modern televisions are surveillance devices.

    • The Record ☛ Florida says motor vehicle data breach tied to credentials stolen from officer’s personal device

      When the claims of the breach initially emerged, some cybersecurity experts believed it was tied to the recently confirmed breach involving the 153 million driver’s licenses leaked by identity verification firm IDScan. ShinyHunters had previously asked to purchase the ID database from the hackers behind the IDScan breach.

  • Confidentiality

    • CCC ☛ The gpg.fail aftermath: On responsible disclosure, GPG, and the state of security in 2026 - media.ccc.de

      In 2025, I found and disclosed a bunch of vulnerabilities in GPG, the most used PGP implementation, and held a talk at 39c3 about it. **Some** of the bugs ended up getting fixed. This talk describes the adventure and aftermath of getting there, shows some novel ones, and talks about the state of security in 2026. May contain zero-days =)

      Until May 2025, I liked PGP, and the GNU Privacy Guard. I poked at it in my free time a lot. One day, that suddenly changed, when I flew too close to the sun and ended up uncovering a vulnerability that allows you to easily spoof a PGP signature when opened naively with the GPG tool.

      Fast-forward a couple of months, the one vulnerability turned into several independent ones, up to memory corruption in the basic PGP message parser, affecting almost all PGP-related workflows.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Insight Hungary ☛ Hungary expels ten Russian diplomats over espionage concerns

    Allegations of Russian interference in Hungary peaked before April’s election, with Hungarian media reporting that Russia’s embassy in Budapest was involved in espionage, disinformation and efforts to support Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party.Orbán, who campaigned against Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and pledged to maintain low energy prices through Russian supplies, was defeated by PM Péter Magyar’s Tisza party, which formed the government in May. On election night, thousands of young people celebrated in Budapest, chanting “Russians go home”, a slogan associated with the 1956 anti-Communist uprising.

  • The Walrus ☛ I Was a CSIS Analyst When 9/11 Happened. Here’s What I’ve Learned

    Over the ensuing twenty-five years, both on the “inside” and the “outside,” I made it my goal to understand Islamist terrorism—its history, ideology, main players, and designs—and to help my colleagues identify individuals and groups within this broader movement who meant to do harm here and elsewhere. My career gave me access to sensitive intelligence on terrorist operations in Canada and abroad and the time and space to fully develop a deep knowledge of where this phenomenon had come from and where it was headed. I had access to SIGINT (signals intelligence), HUMINT (human source intelligence), and other pieces of information that informed me then and still do to this day. Our collective job, with the help of our allies within the so-called Five Eyes network and beyond, was simple: do everything possible to stop another 9/11. In that, we succeeded, although this should not be seen as a claim that we prevented all terrorist attacks, especially those at the hands of jihadis.

    To me, the most important takeaway is that, despite claims to the contrary by those who profess to be “terrorism experts,” jihadism is showing no signs of slowing down. True, major figures, such as al-Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and the head of Islamic State (ISIS) Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, are dead, as are tens of thousands of other jihadis around the globe, but the death toll in attacks in dozens of countries is still alarmingly high. Not a day goes by without at least one act of terrorism, and usually more than one, resulting in deaths and injuries; most of these incidents are perpetrated by jihadis (and not by those beholden to other types of terrorist ideology). Claims of counterterrorism successes are often hollow.

  • New Republic ☛ USPS Tries Rejecting Entire County’s Ballot Over Spacing Issue

    Leon County, Florida’s mail ballot envelope design placed the words “return service requested” 0.236 inches away from its election office’s return address, when it was supposed to be a quarter-inch, leading the USPS to reject it on September 2, the Tallahassee Democrat reports. The county’s supervisor of elections, Mark Earley, called it “ridiculous.”

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ We Do Not Swear Unconditional Obedience

    I physically shuddered as Trump began that pledge, because it reminded me so much of another pledge to another ruler. The photo below shows the pledge, as it appears in the Evangelisches Feldgesangbuch, the protestant field hymnal for the German Wehrmacht. The same pledge appears in the Katolisches Feldgesangbuch, which was the Roman Catholic military hymnal.

  • Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ George Orwell's essay on the atomic bomb anticipates Nineteen Eighty-Four

    Orwell's initial focus is:

    "The question that is of most urgent interest to all of us, namely: “How difficult are these things to manufacture?”"

• Environment

  • Nashville Public Radio ☛ Volkswagen ‘dieselgate’ payout continues to fund EV charging in Tennessee

    The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation set up the new rebate program with funding from the automaker Volkswagen, as part of a decade-old settlement.

  • Mississippi Journalism and Education Group ☛ As Data Centers Expand, Advocates Call for Regulations on Lights

    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.

    Gokhale acknowledges that his cause might not be the first or second priority for most communities. It might not even be third, he said. Yet, he argues that it may be the easiest of environmental problems to solve.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Microplastics fall across rural Switzerland, adding over 200 tons yearly to land and water

    At the urban site in Zurich, they found an average deposition of 881 particles per square meter per day. At the other sites, the values—ranging from 249 to 331 particles per square meter per day—were significantly lower and relatively similar.

  • The Verge ☛ Trump is giving data centers a pass to pollute

    “You would think that an industry buildout of this magnitude, billed as a revolution, would mean more vigilance from EPA,” Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician and a former EPA assistant administrator, said at the briefing. “Instead, EPA is doing just the opposite, thinking first about industry’s needs and weakening or reconsidering limits on toxic chemicals and harmful pollutants.”

  • Energy/Transportation

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-09-10 [Older] Amazon Jet Crash Victim's Wife Learned of Husband's Death Online After Her Texts Went Unanswered

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-09-07 [Older] Amazon Plane Crash: At Least Five People Killed After Amazon Cargo Craft Overruns Runway and Smashes Into Cars

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-06 [Older] Investigators have recovered voice and data recorders from Amazon plane crash at Miami airport

    • CBC ☛ 2026-09-06 [Older] At least 5 dead after Amazon cargo plane barrels off Miami runway and smashes into cars: authorities

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Scientists deliberately infect 6,000 American elms in hopes of rescuing them

      The survivors will be sent to a breeding program with a goal of growing the genetic diversity of disease-tolerant elm trees. They will one day be used for restoration in forests, riverbanks and backyards.

• Finance

  • Truthdig ☛ 2026-09-03 [Older] Amazon to Walmart: The Worst of the ‘Low-Wage 100’

  • Perl ☛ HeroDevs Donates $10,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation

    The Perl and Raku Foundation is delighted to announce that HeroDevs has donated $10,000 to support our work. We’re grateful for their generosity — gifts like this go directly toward the people and infrastructure that keep Perl and CPAN healthy.

  • Laurie Voss ☛ Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.

    Sixty percent of open source maintainers are not paid for the work. That's from Tidelift's 2024 survey, and it's the same number they got in 2023, and the same number they got in 2021. Of the unpaid ones, 61% work alone. Nearly 60% of all maintainers have quit or thought about quitting, and the reasons they give are the ones you'd guess: they have a life, they lost interest, they burned out.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Atlantic ☛ AI Is Running Laps Around Our Political System

    Instead, technological advances and grassroots sentiment have been moving faster than politicians have been willing to act. Now some seem to be waking up. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, said last Wednesday that he will soon unveil legislation, alongside Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota, intended to head off AI-induced biological or nuclear catastrophes. Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a Democrat, and Representative Mike Lawler of New York, a Republican, teamed up earlier this month to introduce legislation that would direct the federal government to create standards for securely deploying AI agents and preventing them from going rogue. Several lawmakers have called for Congress to reconvene specifically for the purpose of addressing the threats posed by AI. Yesterday, Representative Ro Khanna, who represents part of Silicon Valley, called for the creation of an AI safety agency.

  • Techdirt ☛ Since 9/11, Fear Has Driven Our Politics. Don’t Let It Drive The Next 25 Years.

    I’m guessing there aren’t many Techdirt readers from back then still reading today, but after a few hours of staring blankly at the TV — scared by what had happened and already uneasy about what the world would do in response — I put up a post saying that I had nothing else to say and wouldn’t be posting (other than to link to some resources). The next day, I was already expressing concern about how the world would respond, and calling out the people rushing to play the blame game. I pointed to a quote from a New Yorker saying “we aren’t in a state of war, we’re in a state of mourning.” But it wasn’t difficult to see where things were heading. Late that night I warned (in a poorly written, rambling post) about how people blindly reacting via ignorance was going to lead to bad outcomes, and how mass surveillance of the internet was likely coming.

  • New Republic ☛ Someone Should Maybe Do Something About the AI Apocalypse, Right?

    Cool, cool, cool. If I could offer my hot take, maybe someone should do something to, you know, stop this? Unfortunately, there is a series of related problems that impede the easy fix. For starters, our political system is awash in tens of millions of dollars spent by the AI industry. AI is not popular with the general public, but it is very popular among the few who expect to get, or already are getting, insanely wealthy from it—and they have all burned through small fortunes of sunk cost in this arms race, where everyone is trying to build the best (read: most destructive) AI model they can before someone else does. And the industry actually makes a habit of regularly informing people that this tech could kill us all, because when they do, it excites investors.

  • The Nation ☛ James Talarico’s Leap of Faith

    Talarico is not trying to persuade Texans to stop being religious. He is not asking them to compartmentalize their religious beliefs. He does not want them to keep their faith under a bushel—and neither will he. He is instead trying to persuade them that their own Christianity points toward different political conclusions than those championed by politicians and preachers on the right.

  • Robert Reich ☛ President AOC?

    Ever since Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed for Social Security, Republicans have used “socialism” to scare Americans away from doing anything big that we need done.

  • Robert Reich ☛ Isn’t a 10 percent threat of extinction too high?

    I was astounded that he was so complacent about a technology he believed had a 10 percent chance of ending human life. If humanity were acting sanely, we would not accept this risk. At the very least, we’d demand that those working on AI pause their work until we know more and can erect guardrails to protect humanity against this.

    Why aren’t we? Because of greed and national security.

    Both Anthropic and OpenAI are readying to go public in deals that could value the companies in the trillions based on the current and future capabilities of their models. This will immediately create many AI billionaires and millionaires, and it follows a similar IPO from SpaceX, and a likely future IPO for OpenAI.

  • The Register UK ☛ Microsoft annoints Rust as a 'Tier 1' internal language

    When Microsoft's developers and engineers sit down to code, they can now choose to work in Rust, which Redmond has added to its list of canonical languages.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Salon ☛ Kids are back in classrooms. Health misinformation could shape the school year

      “There’s just so much misinformation about [vaccines] out there, that it slows everything down and people wait longer,” she said. “And when influenza or COVID hits your community, or RSV or pertussis, it might be too late.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Relatives, friends of jailed Tiananmen trio decry 'unjust' sentences

    Relatives of three Tiananmen vigil activists sentenced on Friday for inciting subversion have decried their years-long prison terms as “totally unjust,” and have said that two of the defendants will appeal.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ HK Tiananmen vigil activists sentenced up to 7 years 3 months for inciting subversion

    The Tiananmen crackdown occurred on June 4, 1989, ending months of student-led demonstrations in China. It is estimated that hundreds, perhaps thousands, died when the People’s Liberation Army cracked down on protesters in Beijing.

    The group held the mass candlelit vigils until the event was banned in 2020, with the government citing pandemic curbs, and again the following year. They voted to disband in September 2021.

  • Hindustan Times ☛ PJ Conner: Man accused of mocking Charlie Kirk on social media; what we know

    The Pentagon has policies governing service members' conduct, including on social media, and disciplinary action may be taken when conduct is found to violate military regulations. However, whether those policies apply in this case would depend on the authenticity of the posts and any official investigation.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Futurism ☛ Support for Unions Is Spiking as AI Threatens Jobs

    According to a new survey by polling firm Gallup, a full 47 percent of Americans now say they want unions to have more influence than they do today. That’s up from 43 percent in 2023 and a dismal 25 percent in 2009 — setting, per Gallup, a new record for the 21st century.

  • Techdirt ☛ DHS Claimed It Had Found 16,000 Illegal Voters In Nevada. Now It’s Admitting It’s Less Than 200.

    It doesn’t matter whether or not anyone believes Trump or his enablers. All that matters is that Trump believes it. And if he does then a whole lot of his voting base will be willing to do anything from raid the Capitol building in DC to ask ICE to engage in voter suppression this November.

  • CS Monitor ☛ Harry Belafonte sang out for equality and justice

    The armed forces were racially segregated then, and Jelly-Schapiro notes that Belafonte’s time among Black seamen “supplied him, as a high school dropout who became a proud autodidact, with his essential political education.” His fellow service members introduced him to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and other Black intellectuals.

  • Wired ☛ You Don’t Have a Right to Safe Drinking Water, Trump-Appointed Judge Rules

    That may be true in Mississippi—but on the state level in at least nine US states, and in more than a dozen other countries, clean drinking water is in fact a protected right. In countries including Uruguay and South Africa, a right to clean water is enshrined in the constitution. New York’s state constitution, as of a 2021 amendment, states that “each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.” So too in Massachusetts, where “the right to clean air and water” has been constitutionally protected since 1972.

  • University of Michigan ☛ UMich’s data center has a similar playbook as OpenAI’s

    The anger Michiganders are feeling is understandable. When I drove by the Saline Township data center, I felt it myself. It was just a few weeks after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Whitmer and a cabinet of upper-level AI executives posed together and broke ground on the project. The development’s doting nickname, “The Barn,” flashed mockingly on a temporary road sign.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • The Moscow Times ☛ Russia Launches First 5G Networks After Years of Delays

    In Russia, the roll-out of 5G has been complicated by the fact that the military and security services have maintained exclusive control of the 3.4-3.8 GHz frequency range used for 5G internationally. Telecoms providers have unsuccessfully fought for access to that frequency range.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Patents

    • Kangaroo Courts

      • IP Kat ☛ 2026-09-08 [Older] G1/25: What are the consequences?

  • Trademarks

    • Right of Publicity

      • The Guardian UK ☛ Deepfakes are wrecking influencers’ credibility, one fake ad at a time

        The ad was based on a digitally altered version of a selfie Schuman had taken in her car and posted on Instagram years earlier. Once her followers got wind, they flooded her inbox with questions about the sponsorship as it didn’t seem consistent with Schuman’s personal brand. Soon after, Schuman discovered this was just the beginning. There was also an Instagram post where an AI version of her with darker hair appears to apply foundation to promote a makeup brand called Meroda Cosmetics, and TikTok posts with generated images of her promoting the blood testing company Superpower.

        “It’s so violating,” she said. The videos and images look “just like me, but the upside down version”.

  • Copyrights

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Inefficiency is bad, actually (11 Sep 2026)

      The most reliable way to lose a political battle is to let your adversary define the terms. For example, if you're an artist and you let your boss define the fight over AI, he'll make it all about "IP" [sic] (not labor) and ask you to help secure a victory that will make him richer and you poorer: [...]