Leftovers

• Derek Thompson ☛ You Are No Longer Invited to Dinner

  We’re witnessing the death of hosting in America. The share of adults who say they regularly have friends over has declined 70 percent since 1975

• Dan Q ☛ Tangled earphones were a feature, not a bug.

  First, the default was NOT to listen. If I was waiting in a queue, or walking somewhere, it just wasn’t worth taking out the tangled mess. So I didn’t. I just stood there. Being bored was the default.

  Second, when I did listen, it was a choice. “Is this worth untangling right now?” Most times, the answer was still yes. But I was still deciding.

• Crooked Timber ☛ Aggravated by “algorithms”

  Next up is “algorithm”. Until recently an algorithm was a defined procedure, guaranteed to yield a correct answer to an appropriate class of problems given the right starting conditions and sufficient time. The classic example is Euclid’s algorithm for finding the greatest common divisor of two numbers.

  Now the term is used to mean the undefined and incomprehensible way in which a variety of decisions (from the content of social media feeds to the selection of bombing targets) are derived from the inputs fed into complex models[1]. The term carries over the connotations of precision from the original definition, often for people who would deride any inference described as coming from a “model”. This battle is pretty much lost, but I’m not giving up quite yet.

• Austin White ☛ I Buried a Honda Civic SI in My Yard

  The system is in now—I have re-landscaped everything, and now the grass is growing again before winter and we feel much better. We did not have a choice to not do this, but the work from the amazing company was the equivalent price of buying a brand-new 2026 Honda Civic SI in the ground.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Determining Diamond’s Properties Under Extreme Pressures

    In this research (paywalled) by researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), it was investigated how close theoretical simulations were to physical reality by blasting diamond samples with a laser. This ablated the surface and sent a shockwave through the material that caused it to melt. Using X-ray diffraction data this entire process was followed, elucidating the exact melting temperature under such conditions.

  • Hackaday ☛ The Deep Magic Of 3D Graphics Perspective

    When starting out as a programmer, [Gabriel] used various tools that provided a camera somewhat automatically. But after reaching the limits of these types of frameworks, the next step is to learn how that works from scratch. It turns out that it’s a bit of matrix math, with values for foreground and background clipping planes as well as aspect, field of view, and position. This basically replicates a trapezoidal prism which can be thought of as a viewer looking at a scene from the perspective of a camera. To provide the depth effect, the X and Y coordinates are divided by the Z coordinate within this matrix system, making far-away objects smaller and generating the 3D effect.

  • Hackaday ☛ Testing Coulomb’s Law And Similar Fundamentals Yourself Remains Tricky

    To the dismay of the average physics student, experiments that demonstrate these fundamental laws of physics are still pretty hard to replicate without some solid time and monetary investment. This is demonstrated quite succinctly in the linked article, where the question of how to demonstrate the force between two charged particles, as in Coulomb’s law, and that it is an inverse square relationship is attempted.

  • Medievalists.net ☛ Medieval Arab Coins Found Near Viking Trading Centre in Poland

    The location of the discovery makes the coins particularly intriguing. Truso was a major early medieval trading settlement situated on Lake Druzno, less than 10 kilometres from modern Elbląg.

• Career/Education

  • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Are Libraries Prepared for the Second Digital Transformation of Distinctive Collections?

    Academic and research libraries, as well as public libraries, historical societies, and other organizations, hold extensive collections of rare and unique materials, such as archival and manuscript collections. These materials form an essential part of humanity’s cultural and historical record, and they are the vital source material for many humanistic fields. I believe that a second digital transformation is at hand for distinctive collections. How can library leaders establish a strategy for their distinctive collections that is fit for purpose today?

  • University of Michigan ☛ LSA pauses first-semester pass/no credit grading pilot program

    Originally, beginning in 2027, all first-year LSA students were going to be automatically enrolled in the program. Students would still receive grades and instructor feedback, but those grades would not impact their GPAs. The University would retain internal grade records for usage in advising, scholarship and internship applications and certain other purposes.

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Norwegian 12-year-olds: British English is 'cringe'

    Rindal researches English language learning and has recently interviewed sixth- and 10th-graders about how they use English and perceive the language.

    "The students I interviewed want to speak American English because it's what they hear most often and are most familiar with. And if they speak American English, they are perceived as proficient in English because that's how English should be spoken. But they don't associate the accent with American culture. It's completely separate," says Rindal.

  • RIPS Law Librarian Blog ☛ Boredom as a Signal, Not a Problem: A Law Librarian’s Case for Volunteering

    Schott and Fischer’s research suggests that we should rethink our approach to boredom. They argue that boredom is actually a functional emotion that signals our progress toward goals is unsatisfactory and motivates us to pursue something new (Schott & Fischer, 2023). Rather than viewing boredom as inherently harmful, they propose we can harness it productively when the right organizational conditions exist.

    Their frame work identifies four clusters of positive outcomes from workplace boredom: [...]

  • Christian Tietze ☛ Mastery is a Wicked Problem • Christian Tietze

    You aren’t, of course, ever ‘done’. That’s the boring answer. You are just good enough to adapt and take wisdom with you.

    Mastery is a wicked problem in any craft. No two masters of woodworking produce the exact same furniture. Master roofers will all produce a roof that doesn’t leak, but in isolation, they might choose different material and joinery. Master bakers will certainly not all churn out the same cake all day every day, but specialize.

  • Abhigyan Tripathi ☛ to, my college juniors

    When you call me, my junior, and tell me about all the things that trouble you, it reminds me of all the times I mentioned above. I recall my own attempts and failings, my struggles and my ideas that never saw completion. I hear you completely and feel your sorrow a little too, but the best I can tell you from the other end of the process is that it will get better. Even for people from my batch struggling right now, I have no doubt they’ll find their place and comfort. Everyone eventually reaches where they want to. That’s what I believe.

• Hardware

  • Security Week ☛ New Spectre v2 Variant Exposes Intel, AMD, Arm CPUs to Data Leaks

    Branch Target Reuse (BTR) is a new Spectre v2 attack targeting JIT compilers in web browsers, language runtimes, and the operating system kernel

  • [Old] IEEE ☛ How the Spectre and Meltdown Hacks Really Worked - IEEE Spectrum

    These types of attacks, called Meltdown and Spectre, were no ordinary bugs. At the time it was discovered, Meltdown could hack all Intel x86 microprocessors and IBM Power processors, as well as some ARM-based processors. Spectre and its many variations added Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) processors to that list. In other words, nearly the whole world of computing was vulnerable.

  • [Old] Medium ☛ Meltdown and Spectre, explained

    The vulnerabilities are astounding; I would argue they are one of the most important discoveries in computer science in the last 10–20 years. The mitigations are also difficult to understand and accurate information about them is hard to find. This is not surprising given their critical nature. Mitigating the vulnerabilities has required months of secretive work by all of the major CPU, operating system, and cloud vendors. The fact that the issues were kept under wraps for 6 months when literally hundreds of people were likely working on them is amazing.

  • Hackaday ☛ Electromechanical TV Goes 3D With This Light-field Display

    A mechanical TV — the kind that makes an image with a Nipkow disk and a single lamp with some help from persistence of vision — is easy enough to wrap your head around. Moving that technique into the third dimension, though? That’s a bit of a head scratcher. Luckily for us [AncientJames] provides a simple visual explanation for how the magic happens.

  • Hackaday ☛ Improved Double-Sided Toner Transfer Method

    The method starts out as a standard single-layer board in effect. Toner is ironed onto a copper board, in this case using a laminator, which allows the board to go into an acid bath which washes away all of the un-tonered copper. But with the second layer exposed, this would wash away the other side of the board completely. [Bettina] is using a new method here to protect that layer during the first bath: covering it in ink from a magic marker. With the first board etched, the ink and toner get washed off and the second layer is carefully lined up, put through the laminator, and then the opposite side gets covered in ink for the second acid bath.

  • Bunnie Huang ☛ Name that Ware, September 2026

    We seem to be on a theme of hybrid circuits! This aesthetically pleasing ware was submitted anonymously. Thank you, you know who you are!

  • Bunnie Huang ☛ Winner, Name that Ware August 2026

    The Ware for August 2026 is the “IC unit” from a Lafayette 150-in-1 “IC Electronic Project Kit”, part number 99-35107.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Greece ☛ Energy drinks pose growing youth health risks

    A systematic review linking them to poor sleep, anxiety, lower academic performance, smoking, and substance use is prompting bans in several European nations. High caffeine doses also trigger cardiovascular risks, including blood pressure spikes and arrhythmias.

  • Joe Crawford ☛ ArtLung: Proj on (I realized I am less buoyant today) ~ 29 Sep 2026

    So the anger was at the unfairness. I remain technically obese, but I’m not obese enough to float easily in foamy surf.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ High screen time can hurt children’s learning and language skills, study suggests

    Researchers examined data on more than 2.8 million children across 64 countries and concluded that elevated screen exposure could affect children in areas including academic achievement and emotional problems. It is one of the largest ever studies on the subject.

    The impacts are “similar in magnitude to or larger” than other factors linked to child development and mental health outcomes including family wealth, the behaviour of parents and whether or not children were born prematurely.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Attackers exploited Citrix NetScaler zero-day for at least three weeks undetected

    The earliest known instance of CVE-2026-88772 exploitation occurred Sept. 3, Mandiant researchers told CyberScoop Tuesday.

    The besieged security vendor and researchers didn’t confirm the attacks until late last week. By then, Mandiant says, organizations in North America and Europe spanning the government, financial services, education, telecom, legal and professional services sectors were already likely compromised.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Nomenclature

    It sits next to "retro", the Intel i7 10.13.6 Mini that still exists solely so I can run Illustrator CS6. (VirtualBox emulation is too slow.)

  • Ian Dick ☛ 20 Years of Mac – Ian Dick

    I’d bought an iPod in 2003 and almost since day 1 and experiencing iTunes on Windows I hankered after a Mac. I’d used Mac’s at Glasgow Uni and looked on enviously at some of the Mac apps at the time with their skeuomorphic designs and large indie developer community that didn’t really exist within Windows.

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

    • The Conversation ☛ US tech leaders are urgently calling for rules on AI – China already has them

      Yet there is a China-shaped hole in this narrative. The Asian superpower is portrayed as the difficult final participant in a governance system that the US and its allies must first create.

      In fact, China has already established an extensive system of AI rules, assessment, filing, technical standards and government oversight. Here’s how China’s AI governance system has developed in stages alongside the technology itself.

    • Semafor Inc ☛ IMF chief warns AI boom is masking economic fragility from oil shocks

      Global growth is tracking at about 3% this year, exactly where it was expected to be 18 months ago, despite two wars, $100 oil, simmering trade battles, and higher borrowing costs. IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva’s explanation: The Middle East conflict is a supply shock dragging growth down, while the AI investment boom is a demand shock pushing it up.

    • Digital Music News ☛ AI Streaming Scammer May Get 4 Years of Prison + $8M Fine

      In March, the 54-year-old Smith admitted to having used AI to generate thousands of songs and using bots to stream them billions of times. He was arrested in 2024 and charged with multiple counts over using bots to continuously stream his songs on major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music as early as 2017. Smith entered a guilty plea on a single count of wire fraud and agreed to pay back over $8 million in royalties.

    • Bloomberg ☛ Inside US Military ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School

      Some US intelligence analysts took notice, the officials said. Bloomberg reported in June that one analyst detected changes to the site as early as 2019, and logged remarks about the modifications in a system that wasn’t connected to the primary military intelligence database, which informs targeting.

      Inside Centcom, which conducted the US attack, some personnel relied too much on the artificial intelligence embedded in Maven Smart System, the officials said. Maven, which is made by Palantir Technologies Inc., allows users to view and coordinate complex military operations — from targeting to command and control — using AI-enabled software that fuses more than 150 different data inputs into a coherent set of information to inform commanders’ decisions.

    • Techdirt ☛ Dallas Goes Dystopia, Outfits Garbage Trucks With ‘AI Cameras’ To Generate ‘Blight’ Citations

      That’s right, Dallas homes were being judged by cameras and algorithms, assigning “blight” scores to homes the garbage trucks serviced. It will come as no surprise to anyone that the highest concentration of cameras (and, consequently, the highest amount of “blight” determinations) targeted the poorest neighborhoods in Dallas.

    • American Library Association ☛ Bots Attacking & Scraping Library Catalogs - Intellectual Freedom Blog

      Bot activity during normal business hours can also negatively impact catalog performance for legitimate users. Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report indicates that bot traffic is “infiltrating industries, bypassing security measures, and disrupting digital ecosystems,” and that AI is rendering bot activity more pervasive and damaging, a trend that has only gotten worse in 2026.

    • The Verge ☛ AI researchers put out videos saying superintelligence is ‘exactly as dangerous as it sounds’

      Former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo went as far as claiming that superintelligent AI “would basically be god-like powerful,” and added, “unfortunately we don’t know how to control them at all. And so probably nobody would control them. This is exactly as dangerous as it sounds and must not be allowed to happen.”

    • Terence Tao ☛ Joint Statement about Mathathon

      Mathathon is centered around one question: how can we use AI to augment human understanding of mathematics?

      This past week, the original organizers of Mathathon, two coauthors of an open letter about the mathathon, and other members of the Caltech community engaged in a conversation to redesign this event. We quickly reached a consensus: problem solving is but one component of mathematics; mathematical understanding and exposition are similarly meaningful. But these components have often been overlooked by grantmakers and hiring committees. We want to celebrate human mathematicians who undertake this work.

    • MWL ☛ Gumroad Stores Dead

      I hadn’t been watching Gumroad. I kept them around to support VAT, and a handful of you used them. This morning I learned that gum road has gone fully AI. I can’t trust them with my intellectual property. Their support is also managed by AI, so I can’t trust them with money. This is disappointing, but mostly it’s a reminder that I need to keep a better eye on my retailers.

    • Matthew J Ernisse ☛ Spammers Continue To Be Laughably Dull, Now With AI!

      I got this flood of absolutely stupid crawler activity from what looks like someone's cable modem. Their bots are a bit thick, continually ignoring the "permanently" part of the 301 Moved Permanently response that my webserver sends to requests either lacking HTTPS or the www prefix. This in it of itself isn't exactly shocking. These days most bots are either someone driving a HeadlessChrome instance or some vibe-code level quality pile of hopes and dreams.

    • Martin Alderson ☛ The AI margin collapse is gathering pace - Martin Alderson

      Here's how the current prices stack up (per million tokens), along with the cost of two example agentic sessions. Session A is 10M cache reads, 0.5M input and 0.2M output. Session B is more cache-heavy: 20M cache reads, 0.2M input and 0.1M output. I've ignored cache writes for simplicity.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Meta’s Muse AI agent: a hilarious security disaster

      Muse does everything! It’ll go through your email! It’ll book appointments! It’ll even make phone calls for you, using AGI — A Guy Instead. Calls are made by humans in a call centre.

    • [Old] American Affairs Journal ☛ Understanding the LLM Bubble - American Affairs Journal

      The tools at the center of the investment boom are Large Language Models (LLMs) that evolved from decades of language modeling based on the probabilistic pattern-matching of neural networks. Arguments that LLM investments are the key to future economic growth are based on the belief that growing LLM capabilities will lead to the rapid automation of a broad range of jobs, driving major improvements in business productivity. More importantly, advocates claim that in a few short years, today’s LLM apps will achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), which could be one of the most important technological breakthroughs ever, as it will supposedly allow humanity to solve a wide variety of critical problems.

      This essay aims to disprove and overturn that view: it is divided into three sections, each with a main counterargument to advance. The first is that the current LLM industry is not economically viable. Equity appreciation, repayment of the investors currently funding data center expansion, and the belief that the industry could drive huge national productivity growth all depend on the claim that LLM software will achieve superintelligence by (roughly) 2028. This section will explain why inherent, structural problems with current LLM software preclude the medium-term ability to achieve superintelligence; they also preclude the significant near-term improvements to their problem-solving capabilities needed to reduce the industry’s huge current cash flow drain. The question is not whether LLMs have value—it is whether they create enough value to justify the orientation of today’s industry, which is entirely focused on extremely large general-purpose LLMs that require trillions in investment. If the industry cannot provide end users with huge increases in productivity-enhancing capabilities, those end users will not provide the revenue the industry is forecasting, and the equity and investment boom will inevitably collapse.

    • Wired ☛ AI Agents Are About to Flood the Workforce. No One’s Ready for It

      The rise of AI agents—systems, based on large language models, designed to complete tasks autonomously—has launched a tsunami of companies selling the services of digital employees. These agents are supposed to be the perfect worker bees: available 24/7, never complaining, and providing superhuman intelligence.

  • Social Control Media

    • Techdirt ☛ EU Kids Act Won’t Keep The Internet Accountable And Trustworthy

      The EU Kids Act aims to protect children from risks associated with social media, video games, and AI systems by introducing age-based access rules, safety requirements, and stronger enforcement and oversight measures. It presents itself as building on the Digital Services Act (DSA) and puts into “hard law” some of the safety-by-design measures specified in the non-binding DSA guidelines on minors’ protection.

      The proposal is built around the following elements: social media age “delay”, safety by design, age assurance and parental responsibility, and strong enforcement. Each of these measures are concerning.

    • Press Gazette ☛ Guardian creates 40 jobs to train journalists as content creators

      The new Digital Journalist Scheme will employ 40 journalists on 18-month fixed-term contracts with a salary of £48,000.

      At least 20% of their time will be spent training and they will complete an apprenticeship qualification as a content creator.

    • Wired ☛ Meta-Led Anti-Terrorism Group Faces Mass Resignation of Expert Advisers

      The tensions between the independent advisory committee and the GIFCT date back to an email the counterterrorism and free speech experts received in July from Meta’s Nell McCarthy, a vice president overseeing content policy. For years, the group had advised the GIFCT on how to prevent platforms from becoming havens for the radical organizations and individuals blamed for some of the world’s worst mass violence.

    • Anil Dash ☛ The Facebook Fake-out

      There’s a pattern that Facebook (well, Meta — you know, those folks behind Instagram and WhatsApp and the direct enabling of the Rohingya genocide) has been following for decades now that everyone in the worlds of policy and regulation and journalism seems to be constitutionally incapable of understanding. So I wanted to take a moment to explain it, clearly and simply, in hopes that this will at least make it obvious when everyone is being tricked again. Feel free to use this as a reference to send to your favorite legislator or journalist the next time they’re getting fooled by Mark Zuckerberg.

    • The Wrap ☛ Is Political Podcast Ad Spending Eating TV's Lunch?

      Political podcasts increasingly look and function like television. Distributed through YouTube and available on connected TVs, they compete with cable and broadcast news for political attention — raising a consequential question for the television business: Are advertising dollars leaving for the newer, sexier medium?

      TheWrap’s findings suggest that, at least for now, the growth of political podcasts is expanding the advertising market rather than simply siphoning dollars from TV news. That distinction matters as the midterm elections approach, with a record $11.6 billion in political-ad spending projected for the 2026 cycle — including $5.6 billion for broadcast television, according to AdImpact.

• Privatisation/Privateering

  • Mediahuis Group ☛ Microsoft and POST launch Azure Extended Zone to boost cloud and AI in Luxembourg

    Microsoft and Post Luxembourg have launched a partnership which will bring selected cloud and artificial intelligence capabilities closer to businesses and public-sector organisations.

    The partnership combines Microsoft’s Azure platform with Post’s local infrastructure and expertise.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Newsom signs bill banning tee-time brokers at public golf courses

    Getting tee-time reservations at L.A. municipal golf courses had long been difficult. But after golf influencer Dave Fink revealed evidence of the broker network to his viewers, the problem became public.

  • [Old] Irish Examiner ☛ Nuclear option: Could Ireland emulate Finland’s energy model?

    Rather than co-investing in generation, large users such as data centres and pharmaceutical firms typically secure power through long-term contracts.

    In a liberalised market shaped by marginal pricing — where gas often sets the electricity price — electricity is bought, not built. That makes a Finnish-style, cost-sharing model for nuclear far harder to replicate.

    It is difficult to imagine a fully privatised nuclear programme emerging in Ireland without substantial State guarantees. Private investors generally avoid assuming the enormous upfront risks of nuclear construction alone.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Techdirt ☛ Reporting Confirms: Stupid Over-Reliance On Palantir AI Helped Lead To US Bombing Of Iranian Schoolgirls

      Around that time, I was asked to be on a panel debating whether or not it was good for employees to protest contracts like this with one of Palantir’s founders. Little did I know that the reason that founder was so vehement in his contempt for the Google employees protesting was because, right at that moment, Palantir was swooping in to grab the contract that Google was dropping.

    • 404 Media ☛ Surveillance Company Tells Cops It Wants to Add Facial Recognition to Flock Cameras

      “Flock Safety generates plate reads and clips continuously. Your investigators use that data on active cases. But that Flock data does not connect automatically to your Axon evidence system,” the salesperson wrote. “VIDIZMO Intelligence Hub closes that gap. It brings Flock Safety data, Axon body worn camera footage, and any other evidence source into one searchable platform. Investigators search across all of it simultaneously — by face, vehicle, or object in seconds.” The email was obtained using a public records request by DeFlock Johnson City and was shared with 404 Media. The Johnson City PD told 404 Media in a statement that it did not take a call with the company.

    • Patrick Breyer ☛ EU Chat Control: Governments push “Search Plans” to permanently legalise chat mass scanning in Final Trilogue Showdown

      As European negotiators enter what is intended to be the final trilogue on the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation (CSAR or “Chat Control 2.0”) on September 29, internal leaked documents reveal EU governments pushing a “compromise” based on “search plans” that would enable large-scale scanning of private communications — while insisting the permanent law must not “achieve less” than the current Chat Control 1.0 mass-scanning status quo.

      Under the EU Council’s proposal, an authority could grant platforms a “license to scan” parts of their service—namely private chats and e-mails—for months at a time.

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ How Cyber Eavesdropping Works Without Breaking Encryption

      Device linking, compromised endpoints, and mailbox access can expose private conversations while encryption keeps working. Here is what defenders need to check.

    • Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection ☛ Eric Leijonram, Director-General: Data Protection Today – Reflections and Priorities from the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection

      Personal data is collected, processed, and even bought and sold, in astronomical volumes – every second, every day. And now, as artificial intelligence and other technologies are rolled out across one sector after another, this is accelerating. The volume of data that can be collected about us is increasing, as is what that data can be used for.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Stars And Stripes ☛ NATO’s front line now stretches across Europe, top commander warns | Stars and Stripes

    Grynkewich also reiterated his concern that allies must be ready for conflicts in more than one region at the same time.

    China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are “collaborating in ways directly counter to all of our global interests,” Grynkewich said.

  • Wired ☛ Anthropic Says It Discovered a Crispr-Like System. Now What?

    Other scientists are less enthusiastic about the finding, which is the first to come out of a research group formed by Anthropic earlier this year. “The experiments are still in the queue. The PR is already live,” says Le Cong, a professor at Stanford University focused on integrating AI into genome engineering research.

  • Meduza ☛ Russia keeps attacking Ukrainian data centers, calling it a ‘mandatory digital detox’

    Russian forces continue to strike Ukrainian data centers. On September 25, they attacked an office building in Kyiv that houses a Datagroup data center. The center was damaged, but the company said all its services continued to run from backup sites.

  • The Zambian Observer ☛ Ukraine Prepares for Major Internet Disruptions as Russia Targets Data Centers

    Part of Ukraine’s critical digital infrastructure is being relocated underground, where it will be better protected from missiles and drones. Other systems and essential data are being transferred to cloud storage or physically relocated abroad to provide additional layers of protection.

  • India Times ☛ Russia hits Ukraine's largest mobile provider, strikes data centres

    Russia hit the headquarters of Kyivstar, Ukraine's largest mobile service provider on Sunday, the company told local media, as Moscow continued a bombardment of Ukrainian data centres and communications infrastructure.

  • Meduza ☛ Putin bans online publication of fuel export and oil refinery processing data in a bid to make Western sanctions harder to enforce

    Only information disclosed by energy companies themselves is exempt. However, as The Bell notes, the decree sets no penalties for violations.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Michael Geist ☛ The Wrong Target: Why the CBC Should Be Asking About the Yom Kippur Protesters, Not the Journalist Who Reported on Them

    In February 2017, a group of protesters gathered outside Masjid Toronto during Friday prayers, calling for a ban on Islam and blocking some worshippers from entering. That same week, the mosque apologized after it emerged that a supplication delivered there had called for Al-Aqsa to be purified “from the filth of the Jews.” Both incidents were referred to the police hate crime unit. The public response treated the words spoken from the mosque’s own pulpit as a matter for the police, not as a reason to target the people praying inside. Years later, a crowd outside Yom Kippur services harassed and intimidated those entering the services, yet some defend the conduct.

• Environment

  • Science Alert ☛ Melting Permafrost Is Poisoning Rivers With Metal Levels 70 Times Higher Than Normal

    The rust, Evinger and colleagues say, can be attributed to thawing Arctic permafrost. As water seeps through once-frozen soils, it encounters bedrock minerals that have been locked away for potentially thousands of years.

    When these minerals are oxidized, they release metals – iron, aluminum, manganese, zinc, nickel, cadmium, and rare earth elements – that can then seep into waterways, hence the rivers' rusty appearances.

  • Common Dreams ☛ Trump Administration Guts Mile-Per-Gallon Auto Rule

    Trump’s action is illegal because the law requires that the fuel economy standards be set at the “maximum feasible” level. The final rule ignores the feasibility of clean technology and the millions of fuel-efficient cars already on the road.

  • Rebecca Solnit ☛ To Starve a Whale: Letter from a Hot Planet

    I've also often said that the only true borders on earth are between land and water, and those are mutable, shifting, a meeting place as much as a marker of difference. The edge of the sea has always spoken to me of eternity and infinity, of a rhythm that is ancient and unstoppable of lunar cycles, tides, waves, of a vastness like no other on this earth but the sky. I've gone there for sunrises and sunsets and comforted myself, thinking of climate, that we will still have the unstoppable beauties of the elemental world no matter what we do to the biological. I've gone to it for refuge again and again and joke that it's my real mother. We did, after all, emerge from the sea, where life began.

  • The Washington Post ☛ Satellite images show the scale of America’s data center build-out - Washington Post

    Across the United States, forest, farmland and desert are being cleared to make way for the physical infrastructure that powers our technology.

  • The Register UK ☛ Open source datacenters and open source thinking will undo self-inflicted DC damage

    Take energy. Without numbers that can be trusted, it's impossible to judge the environmental effect of using datacenters. How much energy does it take to ask Claude to write a limerick or a database? Who knows. TThere are wildly differing estimates, but nothing reliable enough to inform personal choices or public policy on ethical use. We need to know this not just in broad terms, but with enough accuracy and currency to differentiate between models and hardware generations.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • The Guardian UK ☛ Saunas, cinnamon buns and coastal scenery on the new rail route from Malmö to Oslo

      I’m on Snälltåget’s iconic red-shelled train, on the Swedish rail company’s new route from Malmö to Oslo – a 6.5-hour journey along Sweden’s picturesque western corridor. Until now, the journey between the two cities involved long bus rides and fragmented train transfers. This direct line is easier and cheaper, with tickets starting at £11 each way. It’s already a hit, shuttling more than 25,000 passengers since launching this summer.

    • CBC ☛ Will Meta’s data centre raise Alberta power bills? Experts say it could

      Data centres accounted for 4.4 per cent of U.S. electricity demand in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, which predicts this share could rise as high as 12 per cent by 2028.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • CBC ☛ Elephants may use medicinal plants to treat themselves and their babies

      Small study uses local knowledge to identify 35 medicinal plants used by elephants in Kenya

• Finance

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘Online sex workers literally have to bare it all’: why Patricia Nilsson is exposing the world’s biggest porn bosses

    Her investigations led to the discovery that the industry’s owners were now tech nerds and bankers, with no particular interest in pornography itself. “I started realising: this industry isn’t really about porn any more. I would go to these porn conferences and I couldn’t find anyone who actually worked with porn. I couldn’t find anyone who even knew someone who worked with porn, because all these people were working in [web] traffic or payment processing,” she says. I’ve attended a couple of these conferences and have been equally struck by the quantities of men in zipped tech-bro gilets who want to talk about impenetrably dry notions like affiliate marketing, barely acknowledging that they work in the world of explicit adult content.

  • Perl ☛ NVIDIA Donates $12,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation

    The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF) is grateful to announce a gift of $12,000 from NVIDIA in support of Perl and CPAN. Contributions like this one let us keep maintaining the Perl 5 core and support our mission of keeping critical infrastructure alive.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Salon ☛ Fox News tries to cool conservative anger over AI

    Over the past three years, as Trump’s alliance with tech oligarchs deepened, network hosts have seemingly dropped their culture war suspicion of AI, which at first centered on ChatGPT and accusations that the chatbot, produced by OpenAI, was “woke” and exhibited an “anti-Trump bias.” They have now adopted an aggressive defense of the industrial buildout behind the technology. What began as a moral panic over Silicon Valley chatbots and censorship has turned into a desperate campaign to douse the flames of a conservative grassroots rebellion against AI data centers.

  • Wired ☛ OpenAI Gets Sued Over the Hugging Face [Breach]

    The suit was filed by Legal Advocates for Safe Science and Technology (LASST) and the law firm Gerstein Harrow in California Superior Court in San Francisco, where OpenAI is headquartered. It alleges that OpenAI’s agents violated California’s Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act (CDAFA) by breaching Hugging Face over the summer. The suit, which comes amid ongoing disclosures across the industry of agents going rogue, claims that OpenAI should be held responsible for the activity given a California AI law in effect since January 1 that says “it shall not be a defense … that the artificial intelligence autonomously caused the harm to the plaintiff.”

  • India Times ☛ Data centre IPO hopefuls brave tougher market as investor scrutiny grows

    The Singapore-based company develops and operates data centers for cloud and AI customers. It plans to make its filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission public in mid-October and list in November, the people said, speaking anonymously to discuss confidential matters. The plans, including the timing of the IPO, are subject to change, the people cautioned. DayOne declined to comment.

  • New Republic ☛ Mike Johnson Has Bonkers Excuse for Surging Data Center Hate

    Republicans seem to be going all in on data centers, despite widespread public opposition.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ MGX looks for data center assets in the Asia Pacific

    Abu Dhabi-backed technology investor MGX is looking east for data center assets as the UAE capital’s deep pockets become central to the global AI buildout. The fund is an investor in the BlackRock-backed AI Infrastructure Partnership, which together with Australia’s IFM Investors is in exclusive talks for Stack Infrastructure’s Asia Pacific data centers, a portfolio expected to be valued at as much as $25 billion, Bloomberg reported. Stack, owned by US alternative asset manager Blue Owl Capital, has sites in Australia, Japan, and Malaysia.

  • Futurism ☛ Microsoft Shrivels When Asked If Its "Good Neighbor" Data Center Policy Will Involve Actually Supporting Community Groups

    That all sounds lovely, at least on paper. But as a group of community organizers in Indiana learned, those liaisons are much more interested in laundering Microsoft’s image in data center towns than in actually supporting local programs.

  • Ars Technica ☛ Microsoft goes quiet after church groups ask for 1% of data center costs

    In Georgia, a recent audit found that the state “gave up $474 million in sales taxes in one year—and got back just $41 million from the industry,” journalist Ronan Farrow reported. Why Georgia is willing to give away so much in tax breaks is unclear, Farrow noted, since “by the state’s own estimate, 70 percent of the data center construction would have happened anyway.”

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • Hindustan Times ☛ Nvidia's Jensen Huang calls data centers 'superintelligence factories' after Trump's AI renaming push

      Signatories included Trump, Huang, Musk, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Amodei, and Brockman.

    • Robert Reich ☛ Why is Trump airing taxpayer-funded ads for himself?

      At least since the 1950s, Congress’s funding bills have routinely banned the use of taxpayer funds for “publicity or propaganda.” The Government Accountability Office defines this as stuff that’s “purely partisan” or “self-aggrandizing.”

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • RFERL ☛ In Rare Show Of Dissent Amid Crackdown, Iranian University Students Stage Protest

    Students at Allameh Tabatabai University in Tehran rallied on September 28 against the country's hijab law, called for the release of classmates who have been imprisoned, and decried the poor living conditions on campus.

  • BIA Net ☛ Court orders comedian Deniz Göktaş’s release after sentences for ‘insulting’ Erdoğan and religion

    Ahead of the hearing, the square outside the courthouse and entrances to the building were closed. Access was limited to lawyers, people attending hearings and those filing petitions. Riot police were deployed behind barriers on the floor where the court is located.

    After an argument between officials and people seeking access to the courtroom, the court opened another room where the proceedings could be followed through Turkey’s audiovisual court system.

  • Meduza ☛ ‘Yes, I regret going’: Russian IT specialist returned to Russia to visit his ailing father and was charged with treason over €30 sent to his ex-girlfriend in Ukraine.

    The purpose of this article is simple: We have no right to judge the circumstances that compel our readers abroad to travel to Russia. We want to remind them to weigh the risks and take precautions.

  • CS Monitor ☛ How colleges are responding to Trump administration’s ‘call to action’

    Two months after the Department of Education called on colleges and universities to publicly state their commitment to principles the Trump administration accuses them of abandoning, a pair of major state university systems have complied, while many more institutions remain wary.

    Even that limited response is vastly different from the uniform rejection from nine leading universities last year of the administration’s previous initiative, the Compact for Academic Excellence. That effort tied compliance to federal research and grant funding.

  • The Dissenter ☛ Florida Senate Threatened Legal Action Against Newspapers

    The legal counsel for the Florida senate threatened to prosecute the South Florida Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel if the newspapers did not destroy a report on insurance company corruption. The report was obtained through a public records request.

    Both newspapers did exactly what media outlets should do when faced with such intimidation. They invoked the Pentagon Papers case, published a copy of the report, and directly challenged the state’s trade secrets law.

  • CBC ☛ TikTok, X reportedly barring ads for documentary about Elon Musk

    But on Friday, a story in the Hollywood Reporter said indie distributor Bleecker Street was rejected by all four companies when it attempted to buy ads on the platforms for the film. YouTube, TikTok and Meta — parent company to Facebook and Instagram — reportedly blamed its "political content" while X, which Musk owns, did not comment.

  • Deutsche Welle ☛ Turkey: Comedian convicted for 'insulting' Erdogan in show

    The judge provisionally sentenced Deniz Goktas to 19 months in prison, but ordered his release pending the judicial review and appeal process that would finalize the verdict.

    It was not immediately clear how long this process might take.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ World News Day: Would you like your news with or without hallucinations?

    But we also all remember the brutal comedown. What happens when the autocrats shut down the internet or throw your citizens in jail? Who continues to document the story in Iran or Egypt or Syria for the outside world?

    It turned out social media algorithms were not driven by a need to search for the truth.

    Silicon Valley worked out it would make more money promoting anger and outrage. It also turned out bad actors could manipulate these algorithms to promote lies. Not surprisingly, untrained citizens were not equipped to help society navigate the pollution of our information ecosystem.

    Wind forward another decade and we are here again as we are presented with another ‘news agency killer’, the utopian future of Artificial Intelligence.

  • Press Gazette ☛ BBC to cut local radio and regional TV news with 90 jobs at risk

    In October 2022 the BBC cut 139 local radio jobs as it shifted investment towards online news. It rolled out widespread sharing of coverage between the 39 local stations, including much local coverage being replaced with national programming.

    In an all-staff briefing on Thursday, the BBC confirmed it needed to reduce headcount in its Nations division by around 250 full time posts by 2027/28, a saving [sic] of £33m.

  • Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University ☛ Court order / Poor view / Get with God?

    Court order. Against President Donald Trump’s continued efforts to curtail free speech and a free press, American courts have used the First Amendment as a first defense, reported CNN’s Brian Stelter.

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ With bans and taunts, Trump escalates his assault on the media

    Trump’s escalating attacks on the press come just weeks before the midterm elections, as former officials and election experts warn the administration could seek to undermine confidence in the results. They also come at a precarious moment for public trust in the media, with more Americans saying limits on the press can be justified to combat misinformation.

  • NPR ☛ News organizations ask court to bar White House enforcement of access ban

    "The White House's words and actions leave little doubt that it will immediately reinstitute a complete ban of CNN, MS NOW, and POLITICO if allowed the opportunity," lawyers for CNN, MS NOW and Politico wrote in a filing late Monday.

    "Because the ban is an unlawful assault on the most fundamental First Amendment freedoms and will inflict irreparable harm on Plaintiffs and the public if not restrained, this Court should preliminarily enjoin its enforcement pending the resolution of this case," the filing said.

  • RFA ☛ Radio Free Asia builds on major milestone with new chapter ahead

    Marking a key milestone in its history, when listeners in Beijing first tuned in to Radio Free Asia’s inaugural Mandarin broadcast on Sept. 29, 1996, RFA President and CEO Bay Fang outlined a refreshed strategic direction and vision for the company.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • The Guardian UK ☛ The night sky is getting 10% brighter every year. We’re forgetting what darkness feels like

    Every year, the night sky is becoming 10% brighter. Eighty per cent of people live under light-polluted skies. And while the UN declared a healthy environment – clean air, clean water – to be a human right, I believe we also all have a right to darkness as well.

  • Salon ☛ The untold origins of Trump’s plan to sharply restrict mail-in voting

    According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the administration initially floated an idea that would have virtually shut down mail voting: requiring all ballots to be delivered exclusively through certified mail. The proposal — which would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots — was ultimately abandoned, after vehement Postal Service objections that it would have been impossible to execute.

    Even after the idea fizzled, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the Trump administration moved forward with what became the final executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. Issued in March, its contents came as a shock even to the Postal Service’s lawyers.

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Websites ‘in jeopardy’ amid U.S. Web Design System takeover, coalition tells GSA

    Those tensions boiled over last week when a newcomer to the project, Ryan Parker, stated plans to “automate as much accessibility testing as possible across current and future USWDS versions.”

    While automation is part of accessibility testing, experts said that it is not yet able to be a stand-in for human review, and worried that the apparent direction that the new team appears to be taking would reverse hard-won progress for web accessibility.

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ After Assaulting David Huerta and Then Lying about It, Ryan Ribner Lied So He Could Spy on SEIU

    So before filing the subpoena targeting — among other entities — SEIU, liar Ryan Ribner had to swear that he was investigating terrorism or money laundering.

    He was not.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • Yash Garg ☛ Hijacking the PS5's RTMP Stream

    Sony has progressively locked down what you can do with the PS5’s hardware. Streaming is a good example: the console gives you a nice, convenient “Broadcast” button, but the moment you want to do anything outside the handful of services Sony supports, it gets annoying very fast.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Digital Music News ☛ Yes, the BOTS Act Can Apply to Ticketmaster, Judge Rules

    The FTC originally sued Ticketmaster and its parent Live Nation for allegedly violating the BOTS Act by allowing brokers to bypass its ticket purchasing limits with hundreds or thousands of accounts under fake names. The lawsuit claims that Ticketmaster enabled this behavior so that brokers would resell much of their haul on the platform’s own secondary market and generate even more money in resale fees. Live Nation and Ticketmaster have denied the allegations. Earlier this year, Live Nation’s Legal Chief Dan Wall testified before Congress that the company has made numerous anti-broker initiatives in the name of protecting artists and fans. While that may be true, the company’s argument that it can’t be sued under the BOTS Act as a primary ticketing platform didn’t hold any water in court.

  • Copyrights

    • CopyrightLately ☛ Signed, Sealed, Affirmed: Third Circuit Backs Thomson Reuters over ROSS

      As I’ve written about before, Judge Bibas reached his ruling via a dramatic about-face. In 2023, he sent fair use to a jury. In 2025, he reversed himself, finding that ROSS infringed 2,243 headnotes, that even headnotes quoting opinions word for word are original (courtesy of a sculptor analogy I didn’t love), and that ROSS’s use wasn’t transformative because it was building a Westlaw competitor. He stressed that ROSS’s tool wasn’t generative AI, then certified the case for appeal to the Third Circuit, where he normally sits. (He’d been hearing the case as a trial judge by designation.) Tuesday’s affirmance is the first federal appellate ruling on fair use in AI training.

    • Torrent Freak ☛ IFPI Wants Open Source YouTube Downloader yt-dlp on EU Piracy Watch List

      Music industry group IFPI has asked the European Commission to add the popular open source YouTube download tool yt-dlp to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. The submission names four of the project's developers by their GitHub handles and describes the software as a major problem for the music industry. What IFPI wants done about the software, however, isn't mentioned.