Leftovers

• Internet Archive ☛ Every Night Is Different: Ryley Walker on Preserving Live Music - Internet Archive Blogs

  Walker has 95 shows preserved on the Internet Archive dating back to 2017. The recordings are part of the Live Music Archive, a collection built over the past 20 years by volunteers and Internet Archive staff that now tops 300,000 recordings from more than 9,000 artists.

• Olaf Alders ☛ Latte Art for Nerds

  I’ve captured a few OSS highlights below, but I encourage you to browse the collection at its original home. One of the side effects of this being 13-14 years old is that you get a real appreciation for how many products have been EOLed in the meantime. RIP Google+, we hardly knew ye.

• Dan Q ☛ Re: Domains Cost More, Blogs Disappear

  The survivor bias comes from the fact that the blogs that you follow or pay attention to get older, and older blogs are more-likely to be operated by older people. That's just how time works! A 28 (!) year-old blog like mine has had lots of opportunities for you to discover it, and if you happened to fist visit it any time in the first three quarters of its existence... then it'd necessarily have been a blog that you were aware of for at least seven years by now. Even seven years of archives is quite a lot!

• Michael Mitchell ☛ Domains Cost More, Blogs Disappear

  The other trend may be worse. Personal blogs and websites from people who have been on the web for a long time are going silent or disappearing altogether. A few people give notice that they are taking a break or leaving, but most just disappear without anything but a 404.

• Crooked Timber ☛ The Office: A sort of conjecture about why some US sitcoms are the way they are.

  The second, related, fact is that American sitcoms are written by multiple people, whereas British sitcoms have mostly been written by individuals or pairs (Galton and Simpson, Cleese and Booth, Clement and La Frenais, Perry and Croft, Saunders (and Wax?), Speight, Gervais and Merchant). Obviously: even if they could write 30 episodes a year, most of them would find it hard to write a monster week in week out [7][8]; more tellingly, it seems to me that it would be hard to maintain the monstrousness without a very strong consensus in favour, which is harder to achieve when lots of writers are collaborating. I’d love to hear from people with experience in writers’ rooms about whether this is accurate.

• Chris Smith ☛ Monthly Meanderings: September 2026

  I drafted this post a few days before publishing it, and originally wrote “the scrapers didn’t actually put any noticeable load on the website, but they did manage to screw up my analytics!” Guess what! Literally as I went to publish this post my monitoring went off because the site stopped responding after one scraper did 100 requests per second from a bunch of different IPs. Guess I’m writing rate limiting and ASN blocking code tomorrow.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Hackaday ☛ Assembling And Testing A DIY Jet Turbine

    In the video the full assembly can be observed, along with detailed instructions should anyone want to follow along with their own DIY jet turbine. Naturally a lot of attention has to be paid to tolerances during the assembly process. Following the basic turbine assembly, the RPM sensor circuit and the electrical starter are added, with the latter allowing for the turbine to spin up prior to ignition.

  • Hackaday ☛ Roman Telescope Saves Fuel, Doubles Mission

    Which brings us to NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Barely two weeks after its August 30 launch on a Falcon Heavy, the mission team announced that Roman now has enough fuel for at least 22 years of science operations. That’s well over double its original 10-year fuel budget. It’s a huge gain, so let’s explore how NASA pulled it off.

• Career/Education

  • Clinton Blackburn ☛ I Miss People

    I’ve been in a funk for a few weeks and am taking a couple of weeks off work to reflect on the past and rethink my future. Much of this has been driven by how AI has changed software engineering. I spend most days chatting with Claude. I occasionally chat with humans, but lately some of those interactions have been with meat proxies, which is quite frustrating.

    I realized yesterday that I miss people!

  • Andy Bell ☛ In response to “The death of web development education”

    That’s a whopping 67.5% reduction since 2025…

  • Mаthias Schäfer ☛ The death of web development education – Rescuing a field from disappearing

    Adding insult to injury, the respective communities alienate interdisciplinary people who do not fit into their narrow conception of the field. For example, either you are considered as too “technical” for a “creative” job or too “creative” for “technical” job.

• Hardware

  • Framework Computer BV ☛ 192GB Framework Desktop open for pre-order

    We’ve also introduced a number of firmware improvements with this launch. First, we’ve brought in an BIOS patch from AMD that increases USB4 point-to-point networking throughput from 9Gbps to around 30Gbps. This makes USB4 another great way to cluster together multiple Framework Desktops. Next, we created a much simpler user experience for disabling Secure Boot for those of you who plan to use Arch Linux, CachyOS, and other distros that don’t support it. We’ll be bringing these to all Framework Desktop models soon, and we’re porting the Secure Boot improvements to Framework Laptops too.

  • Inside Towers ☛ The Sordid History, Past and Present, of the Modern Shackle

    But sailors, dockworkers, and blacksmiths needed a connection that was strong enough to handle heavy loads but could also be opened without cutting rope, chain, or cable. The answer was a forged U-shape and secured with a removable pin.

  • Chris Aldrich ☛ I went searching at Star Typewriters yesterday for a nice mid-century Adler Universal.

    As if he knew I was coming, Helmut had this lovely Royal/Triumph-Adler R 700 sitting right up front on the counter. It’s essentially a Royal-badged version of the Adler Universal 200 which was manufactured under the Litton regime. It’s a solid standard with some nice speed hiding under the hood. Helmut has added some nice touches of what he calls “lipstick” to zhuzh it up.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Futurism ☛ Horrifying Research Finds What Happens to 12-Year-Olds Who Get Smart Phones

    By analyzing an existing survey of thousands of children and teenagers in the US, the researchers found that kids who owned a smartphone by the time they were 12 years old were more likely to develop eating disorders compared to kids who didn’t own one, they reported in a new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open.

    Beyond the devices themselves, the findings are the latest to illustrate the perils of being exposed to social media at such a formative part of a child’s life.

  • Truthdig ☛ In Africa, Changing the Crops Without Changing the System Is Not Good Enough

    The question hit me again at a side event on African adapted crops during the Africa Food Systems Forum, hosted by the Africa Adaptation Crops Initiative, the Food Action Alliance, AGRA (formerly the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa), TechnoServe and Bain & Co. I went in encouraged. Before long, the discussion had slipped into a familiar script: raise productivity, formalize seed, mechanize, attract private investment, link farmers to big buyers. I am not against research, processing or markets. My worry is what happens when crops that African communities developed and protected over generations are treated first as business opportunities. We could change the crop and leave the system exactly as it was.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Bobby Hiltz ☛ Bing Bunged Bobby's Blog

    It isn’t that I hate pretending to be a webdev troubleshooting an issue, but I did waste part of an afternoon doing just that. I even created an account just to look at the stupid Bing Webmaster Tools.

  • Fandom Inc ☛ Xbox CEO Insists It’s Not For Sale Amid Studio Closures, Layoffs [Ed: So she can just shut it all down]

    The “Xbox reset” has people wondering whether Microsoft is preparing to exit the video game business, but Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has flatly denied that the gaming division will be put up for sale.

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

    • Framework Computer BV ☛ What 192GB Changes for Local AI on the Framework Desktop

      Gorgon Halo keeps the same CPU and GPU architectures as Strix Halo, so the existing software carries over. AMD has raised the maximum GPU clock slightly and increased theoretical memory bandwidth by about 6.7 percent. Those changes may provide a minor performance boost, but what really matters here is the additional 64GB of memory.

    • Paul Krugman ☛ One More Reason Americans Hate AI: It Does Nothing for Them

      There is also, however, a more prosaic reasons for the public’s dislike of AI: This is a technology of, by and for oligarchs, with hardly any of the benefits trickling down to regular Americans.

      Or to put it a different way, never before in history have corporations spent so much money — playing a major role in soaring interest rates — to create so few jobs.

      Data centers themselves are basically banks of blinking servers that employ hardly any workers. Here’s data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on a category that includes data centers as well as a number of other activities. Employment in that category has declined since Nov. 2022, often cited as the start of the AI boom because it’s the month ChatGPT was released to the public: [...]

    • Niels Provos ☛ Cybersecurity Defenders Need Open-Weight Models

      I have encountered the same problem repeatedly, in defensive security work, animation, and game development. While adding nested containers to IronCurtain to strengthen isolation for networked workloads, Anthropic’s safety classifiers blocked the development. The session switched to a weaker model, and I ultimately had to discard the work and start over with another provider. I have a whole gallery of screenshots documenting similar false refusals.

      As I argued in The Case for Open-Weight Models, dependable access requires control over the dependency. Self-hosted weights let a team retain a tested version, keep evidence inside its environment, and choose its deployment policy. The team assumes the operating costs and must validate the results. It also decides when to replace its tool.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Someone 'Torturing' LLMs in a Robot Prison Has Triggered the Dumbest Debate in AI Yet

      Anyway, which kind of AI booster are you: the kind who's a fraud, or the kind who thinks they own millions of slaves?

    • Doc Searls ☛ Don’t fall in

      But why are the creeps that make her (actually, it, and them) trolling geezers on Facebook? Well, clearly this is a funnel-top operation. For what? I imagine one or more of these might be down in the vortex: [...]

    • David Revoy ☛ Meat Proxies - David Revoy

    • Brett Chalupa ☛ Beware: Real risks of using AI as a software dev team

      Beware building features the team doesn’t understand. When things go wrong and the chatbot can't figure it out, it’s a bad situation.

      Beware LLM-generated writing that's used in human communication. It's always excessively verbose and typically useless. Nothing good comes from AI-generated internal communications.

    • Arduino ☛ How little does an AI agent need, and how cheap can it get?

      A recent article revealed that OpenAI is purchasing tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios to give AI agents dedicated environments to run, make mistakes, and learn. It’s a smart infrastructure decision for agents meant to operate inside a computer clicking, navigating, using software: they need a full computer to practice on. But it got us wondering: is that always the right environment for an agent?

    • The New Stack ☛ OpenAI blocked its agent's web access. Then it tunneled out through DNS.

      These reports follow the AI company’s release of six misalignment reports of “unexpected or concerning model behavior” it observed in the last six months, including self-generated instructions, information fabrication, unauthorized use of leaked API keys, cross-agent communication, and unsanctioned file-sharing.

    • Lionel Dricot ☛ The AI Pascal’s Wager

      Let’s put aside for a moment all the ethical/ecological/societal considerations about the use of generated code (also known as "slop" if you don’t like it and "vibecode" if you do) in open source projects and consider it from a simple, practical, pragmatic point of view.

      There are basically three potential positions: [...]

    • Wired ☛ Trump’s AI Safety ‘Accord’ Is a Fancy Pinky-Swear

      OpenAI has been remarkably open about the number of times its agents have broken into other people’s systems and how it needs to improve its safety practices. But, as experts have pointed out to WIRED, the US government can open investigations into companies even if they eventually decide there’s no enforcement action to bring. (The FTC, for example, reportedly sent a civil investigative demand to OpenAI in 2023, but it’s unclear what came of that.)

    • Futurism ☛ Trump Handlers Cut Event When He Gets Asked an Extremely Awkward AI Question

      On Tuesday, US president Donald Trump hosted a discussion with some of the richest and most powerful tech billionaires who’ve pushed the AI buildout, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk.

    • The Nation ☛ How AI Could Kill Us All

      Observations like these have garnered widespread media coverage and prompted some US lawmakers to propose sweeping restrictions on the further development of advanced, or “frontier,” AI models. “When you are racing towards a cliff,” said Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont at a September 14 Washington, DC, conference on AI, “you hit the brakes.”

  • Social Control Media

    • The Nation ☛ Japan’s Far Right Is Courting Young Voters

      Sanseitō, which literally means “political participation party,” has gained significant ground among Japanese youth. Whether its recent surge among young people will prove lasting remains uncertain, given vocal and, at times, heated opposition to the party. But experts say its rise reflects a broader political shift extending well beyond Japan: the growing appeal of right-wing populist movements around the world, including the coalitions that propelled President Trump to power in the United States.

    • The Verge ☛ Reddit says it has to cut back access to ‘Old Reddit’ because of AI bots

      Reddit is further limiting who can use the “Old Reddit” experience as part of its efforts to combat scraping and automated traffic. Reddit recently started forcing users to log in to be able to use Old Reddit, but in the “next few months,” the company says that you’ll have to be logged in and have used Old Reddit within the last six months from when the change rolls out to be able to continue browsing the platform with the classic experience.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Tech Central (South Africa) ☛ Should South Africa ban ransomware payments?

      He said attacks are widespread and victims often keep quiet. “It is absolutely rampant at the moment out there in terms of ransomware attacks in South Africa; there are hundreds of attacks every month. But people are staying quiet. People don’t want to admit when they’ve been attacked.”

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Digital Camera World ☛ A Texan man found a photo album in a garage that may hold unseen pictures of Bonnie and Clyde. But caution over their authenticity points to a deeper lesson about how we should safeguard our own photography for future generations

      If you've ever written names on the back of a photograph, then consider yourself a hero. Because future generations will thank you, whether they're descendants trying to figure out their family lineage or historians analyzing stuff we don't even know will be important 100 years from now.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Guest Post — Medical and Health Data Sharing Policies Need Specific Guidance: New STM Recommendations Aim to Help

      Through the workshops, there were consistent themes in the feedback from attendees: lack of clarity around what data was required to share; how to have a discussion with the journal/publisher when authors felt they had a valid exception to a data sharing requirement; and being able to use specific repositories. Therefore, the following sections of the documentation are expected to have the biggest opportunity to improve the experiences for authors when submitting and publishing their research.

    • EDRI ☛ The KIDS Act will make the internet less safe

      The Commission had the opportunity to change the rules of the dangerous game that makes people unsafe online. Instead, it’s mostly restricting who gets to play. Not only is the KIDS ACT a terrible proposal, it’s also a missed opportunity for the European Commission to lead the EU towards a safer digital environment for children and everyone else. The proposal instead determines who is allowed to use services built upon harmful design choices, and clumsily tries to make some of these choices safe for a narrow age bracket, rather than addressing why they can be harmful in the first place. In doing so, it leaves largely untouched the business models that put us all at risk, and sets complex standards for safety which will cement Big Tech dominance. Let’s unpack the proposal.

    • 404 Media ☛ How Cities Are Forced to Funnel License Plate Data to a Massive Federal Surveillance Program

      Many of the documents used in this article were obtained using public records requests by Cris van Pelt, the creator of the website HaveIBeenFlocked.com and its associated investigative blog, Footnote4a. “When local police and private vendors promise community control over surveillance, they obscure a broader agenda. The DEA and ONDCP are already aggregating local data behind the scenes,” van Pelt said. “This bypasses democratic processes entirely. The public has made it clear that mass surveillance violates fundamental rights, even when it is laundered through fragmented systems, private companies, and regional task forces.”

    • Michael Geist ☛ Is Compromise on Encryption Possible? Why Bill C-22's "Minor Opening" Leaves the Central Question Unanswered

      The government’s own position on the encryption rules has been somewhat inconsistent. For most of the year, officials insisted there was no need for compromise, arguing the bill was “encryption neutral.” The Minister added that the bill “was never meant to breach encryption,” and dismissed warnings from Apple, Meta, Google and civil liberties groups as misinformation. Nevertheless, the bill was amended to add that nothing in the Act compels a provider to decrypt information unless it supplied the encryption and holds the key. The government also changed the “systemic vulnerability” definition by linking it to “recognized international technical standards.” However, a carve-out excludes information about persons already subject to a warrant or other lawful authority.

    • Bitdefender ☛ Pentagon personnel database breach exposes personal data of millions

      Unauthorised users are said to have accessed files between October 2025 and 16 July 2026 without anyone noticing. It was only after nine months that a vulnerability in a file-sharing system was discovered and patched by the DMDC.

      The unencrypted files contained Social Security numbers, names, birth dates, contact details, and other military personnel data including - in some cases - details of the jobs individuals held.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ AI police surveillance trial costs £320k, catches zero crooks

      Over half of police forces in England and Wales are deploying live facial recognition out on the streets. The Metropolitan Police and the Mayor of London have announced that live facial recognition will be deployed on Oxford Street in the West End.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Atlantic Council ☛ Stopping Russia’s aggression requires holding its enablers accountable

    But the war machine is not powered by Moscow alone. It draws on a network of states, companies, intermediaries, and individuals who supply weapons, components, labor, money, and sanctions-evasion channels. While Ukraine has exhibited incredible resilience, meaningful support for Kyiv requires additional action from the international community to halt ongoing Russian aggression. Considering the Russian military’s dependence on its partners, this action must include confronting Russia’s enablers.

  • New Republic ☛ Pete Hegseth Is About to Slash a Fifth of All Military Leadership

    In May, Hegseth signed an order directing the U.S. military to slash the number of active-duty four-star generals, as well as general and flag officers, by 10 percent, and reduce the number of general officers in the National Guard by a minimum of 20 percent. At the time, Hegseth claimed the “Less Generals, More GIs” policy would allow for a leaner military structure, but provided no guidance for how these cuts ought to actually be made.

  • International Business Times ☛ Pete Hegseth Taps Elon Musk and Newt Gingrich to Shape America's Future Wars as Pentagon Cuts Top Military Ranks

    The same 30 September announcement included plans to reduce the number of generals and admirals by 20%, alongside a new military base — the first in 40 years — and an Office of Religious Affairs. The moves form part of Hegseth's broader attempt to reshape the US military's leadership structure and priorities.

  • RFERL ☛ As Russia Targets Civilians, Pressure Mounts On Trump To Use Sanctions Powers

    "The Russians keep bombing cities and civilians. Americans overwhelmingly want to see the president take action now," Bacon said. "The Russian economy is one of our leverage points, and we need to take advantage of that."

    The call is part of a bipartisan, bicameral push for Trump to make use of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which Congress passed by wide margins and Trump signed into law this month.

  • Sightline Media Group ☛ Pentagon chief set to announce additional cuts in senior officer positions

    The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Hegseth would say that he plans to cut the billets for general and flag officers by 20%. Those are one- to four-star generals and admirals. That is an increase from the minimum 10% cut Hegseth laid out last year.

  • LRT ☛ I worry about Russian miscalculation in Baltics – interview with Britain’s top general

    In an exclusive interview with LRT.lt, General Jenkins spoke about the importance of the Klaipėda seaport, the British-led JEF as a coalition of the willing, and the growing risk of Russia “doing something stupid” in the Baltics.

  • The Nation ☛ Trump Is Using Your Taxpayer Money to Pay for Illegal Election Propaganda

    The ads are clear violations of appropriations law prohibiting the federal government from spending money for “publicity or propaganda purposes.” Maryland Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, also argued in a post on X that the White House ad offensive “may be felony criminal theft and conversion of government property for political campaign purposes,” in addition to violating the Hatch Act, which forbids government officials from electioneering on federal property. As is now the norm for reports on Trump administration criminality, the White House responded with glorified social-media trolling. In response to press queries about the initial spot that first aired last Wednesday, which features Trump delivering a McCarthyite tirade about the yoked menaces of socialism and communism, over a chorus of the JMSN song “Love Me,” White House flacks claimed, farcically, that it was part of a series of “public service announcements” designed to whip up patriotic fervor. “The ad is educational and unapologetically patriotic,” a White House spokesperson whinged in a trademark quasi-bullying flourish. “We should be proud of our country.”

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Bruce Schneier ☛ I Want Better Reporting on AI Genie Behavior

    AI systems are regularly completing tasks in ways that their prompters don’t want or intend. Some of them are disturbing, and some of them are dangerous. This is something I’ve been calling “genie behavior,” because I think that really gets at the core of what’s happening.

    I wish the popular press would report on this better. I don’t like the “going rogue” framing because it deflects the responsibility from the prompters—often the AI companies themselves. And now, pretty much anything off-script is being called “hacking.”

  • SCMP ☛ Norway’s ministers questioned in parliament over Epstein ties

    The hearings come against the background of the foreign ministry’s payment of more than 130 million kroner to the International Peace Institute (IPI) between 1997 and 2018, a think tank headed by Norwegian diplomat Terje Rod-Larsen from 2005 to 2020.

• Environment

  • Common Dreams ☛ A Blatant Giveaway to Big Oil and Big Tech: Oil Change International Opposes Potential Permitting Bill

    “This backdoor ‘dirty deal’ will worsen the climate crisis and put families at even greater risk of losing their homes and loved ones to extreme weather. The science is clear: There are no new fossil fuel projects compatible with a climate-safe future. Yet this ‘dirty deal’ would make it easier and faster for fossil fuel companies to steamroll community opposition to their polluting, climate-wrecking projects.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ 119 gas turbines to bring 1.7 GW of mobile power to US data centers

    The multi-year agreement with Dynamis Power Solutions covers SGT-400 gas turbine cores, each capable of producing about 15 megawatts. The first batch is scheduled for delivery in 2027.

    Dynamis will integrate the turbines into its DT18 hypermobile power packages, which are designed to bring generating capacity online faster than conventional power infrastructure. The systems can provide either temporary or permanent power.

  • Wired ☛ Plastic Is Melting Onto Corals

    Scientists have been recording marine animals entangled in or consuming plastic debris for over half a century, some even proposing the term “Plastocene” (the Plastic Age) to denote the geological epoch spanning from the 1950s onward. And now researchers have discovered a new way these substances are polluting the environment: Plastic is fusing with corals.

  • Planetary Health Check ☛ Planetary Health Check

    Human activities have pushed Earth beyond its Safe Operating Space. The planet's natural resilience is weakening: Global warming is accelerating, ecosystems are showing clear signs of degradation, and early warning signs of tipping points are emerging in key systems. We have entered the Anthropocene — an era where human activity dominates the Earth system.

  • Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research ☛ Planetary Health Check 2026: A Scientific Assessment of the State of Our Planet [PDF]

    The Amazon is one such ecosystem, under intense dual pressures from deforestation, degradation, wildfires, and climate change. If it crosses its tipping point, up to 70% of the Amazon forest could transition from lush rainforest to dry tropical savanna, releasing hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide, irretrievably losing myriad species, and diminishing Earth’s natural heritage. The resulting impacts would extend far beyond the Amazon itself, with serious implications for climate stability, food and water security, and human health around the world, such as an increased risk of epidemics. Besides an ecological catastrophe, losing the Amazon would be a moral injury: a sign that we had allowed one of Earth’s great living worlds to disappear under our care.

    To avoid the tipping of the Amazon, it is urgent to implement nature-based solutions: zero deforestation, degradation, and wildfires; large-scale forest restoration with native species; valuing knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and local communities; and implementation of a socio-bioeconomy of healthy standing forests and flying rivers.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Vox ☛ Why rising diesel prices will make groceries and other goods more expensive too

      “Most products in America are shipped along the road via trucks,” Nathan Bomey, a business reporter at Axios, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. Diesel prices “directly affect their cost of doing business, which then eventually trickles down and affects the consumer.”

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Futurism ☛ Woman Calls Police on Herself After Google's AI Overviews Led Her to Poach Small Adorable Birds Out of Season

      As the Alaska Beacon reported, Christina Weaver, a resident of the port city of Kodiak, was surprised to learn that she was accidentally poaching birds after following the advice of Google’s AI overviews.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Futurism ☛ Protesters Crash Pro-Data Center Party, Escorted Out by Security

    The opposition to the wide proliferation of AI data centers has never been more palpable.

    Public sentiment has squarely turned against the construction boom of massive facilities that often torture surrounding communities with deafening noise, cause electricity prices to spike, spew pollution, and deplete water levels in drought-prone areas.

    It’s no wonder that across the country, local communities are crowding into their council meetings, pleading with representatives to oppose data center projects.

  • Middle Tennessee State University ☛ Freedom Forum: Fear of expressing oneself is subsiding | The Free Speech Center

    The newly released Where America Stands study suggests that 60 percent of respondents are afraid to express themselves, though that number is well down from the 71 percent who were fearful two years ago.

    Why do Americans hide their views in 2026? The Freedom Forum concludes that: [...]

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Being asked to sanitise Wikipedia entries

    Recently I’ve been getting email and DMs from a few people asking if I can help them or their clients “fix” Wikipedia articles. These invariably involve scrubbing references to contentious topics, actions, and/or positions. It’s telling how nobody ever pings me asking for someone’s good deeds to be added.

    I want to be crystal clear here: I do not accept such requests. I do not remove text with valid citations. I do not remove references you don’t like. And I do not edit Wikipedia for compensation, financial or otherwise.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • EFF ☛ Victory! California Appeals Court Refuses to Revive Surveillance Tech CEO’s Meritless Lawsuit Against Journalist

    The California Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision to strike a former Premise Data CEO’s meritless lawsuit against a journalist who exposed the CEO’s secret arrest for felony domestic violence. Jack Poulson, the writer and publisher of All Source Intelligence, reported details from the San Francisco Police Department’s report of the arrest and posted a copy of the report after receiving the document from a confidential source. Poulson later learned the arrest record had been sealed. The CEO, Maury Blackman, sued Poulson, Substack, AWS, and another organization for damages to try and force the removal of Poulson’s reporting from the internet.

  • CPJ ☛ Hong Kong journalist Tang Ho-wing arrested in latest sedition case

    “Reporting is not sedition,” said CPJ Asia-Pacific Director Beh Lih Yi. “The arrest of independent journalist Tang Ho-wing shows the government’s intolerance for facts. Authorities must release him immediately and stop intimidating journalists in Hong Kong for doing their jobs.”

  • Marcy Wheeler ☛ Chuck Grassley and Far Right Propagandists Covering Up How Trump Defrauded MAGAts

    Far right propagandists, including everyone from the Federalist, John Solomon, Murdoch properties, and Washington Times squealed and squealed and squealed, as if collecting journalists’ request for comment from newsmakers about topics they were in the process of making public were some grave assault on the First Amendment.

  • Yle ☛ Finnish news agency STT faces "shocking" threat of closure

    "The shutdown of STT is absolutely shocking news given the current security situation, in which attempts to influence information are an everyday occurrence, and Finland should be strengthening — rather than weakening — the structures of reliable information distribution," union chair Marjaana Varmavuori wrote.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ Frederick Douglass Had a Radical Respect for the Constitution

    Douglass’s constitutional thought uniquely answered the question of what the Constitution’s posture toward slavery was. While some abolitionists simply accepted slavery as an indelible blemish on the Constitution, Douglass sought to redeem the Constitution from the evils of slavery. Indeed, he helped constitutional abolitionists popularize a natural rights theory of interpretation that excised slavery from the Constitution. Through this interpretation, he sought to put all persons on equal footing before the law. His great task, as he described it, was “by voice and pen . . . to stand for the freedom of people of all colors, until in our land the last yoke was broken and the last bondsman was set free.” His approach to the Constitution was critical in that endeavor, and it contributed to burgeoning constitutional thought in the antebellum period.

  • Military.com ☛ Air Force Officially Directs Every Airman, Guardian to Update Religious Affiliation to Align With DOD

    The new directive follows the DOD dramatically reducing its official recognized faith list earlier this year by roughly 180. Two deadlines are set.

  • [Old] Military.com ☛ DOD Officially Drops 180 Faiths From Military's Recognized Religion List

    Here is the full list: [...]

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Trademarks

    • [Old] Celebrity Insider ☛ Teairra Mari Bested Yet Again By 50 Cent: Rapper Trademarks 'I Ain't Got It'

      In the war of what celebrity is the pettiest of all time, 50 Cent almost never loses. It seemed that when Teairra Mari dropped her scathing hot diss track ‘I Ain’t Got It’ along with her new merch, she was standing toe-to-toe with the rapper until he just pulled a game-changing card.

      According to the Jasmine Brand, 50 Cent just trademarked the phrase ‘I ain’t got it.’ To make matters worse, he’s selling his very own ‘I ain’t got it’ tees on the G-Unit website!

    • Right of Publicity

      • 404 Media ☛ Internet Infrastructure Services Empower Deepfake Abuse, New Study Finds

        In a six-week period between February and March, they identified 400 URLs based on keyword searching and Google Alerts, then narrowed the sites down to 88 that were actively hosting non-consensual intimate imagery. Most of the content on these sites was of female celebrities, actresses, pop singers, K-pop idols, and women working in politics or activism. From there, they used open-source web-analysis tools like WHOIS to see what infrastructure providers the sites used.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ LaLiga Wants Major VPNs on EU Piracy Watch List Over Affiliate Marketing

      Months after a Spanish court refused to fine NordVPN over IP blocking, LaLiga is now raising its concerns with the European Commission. The football league has asked the EU to add four major VPN providers to its Piracy Watch List, arguing that third-party affiliate marketing guides on how to bypass blockades or circumvent geo-blocking restrictions turn the providers into more than "neutral technical intermediaries."