Leftovers

• Jamie Tanna ☛ A DECADE of writing on this blog · Jamie Tanna | Software Engineer

  One of the big ones is that this blog is officially 10 years old! This post is the 1285th post I've written on here, and I still love this part of myself.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Techdirt ☛ In The Wake Of The Latest Unprecedented AI Proofs, What Now For Mathematics And Mathematicians?

    Already AI proofs run to hundreds of pages — 166 in the case of Navier-Stokes (pdf); there is no reason why they won’t reach thousands of pages one day. At that point, no human, or even team of humans will ever understand it in detail. What then for mathematics and mathematicians?

  • arXiv ☛ arXiv has updated its rate limit policy for all submitters.

    Before the advent of AI, there was an easily discernible, practical limit to the rate at which independent submissions could be produced, and arXiv’s volunteer moderators would limit submitters who were well above that threshold. With AI tools becoming more advanced and accessible to authors, the “practical limit” of how many papers can be submitted is now up for debate. As of October 1st, 2026, arXiv is instituting an updated rate limiting policy across all submitters and categories as a stopgap while we determine what may be the new best practice for authors employing more and more advanced AI tools, and to give us time to improve our moderation tools and procedures accordingly.

• Career/Education

  • American Library Association ☛ ALA, AASL Endorse the Bicameral Quality Educator Partnership Act

    The American Library Association (ALA) and American Association of School Librarians (AASL) today announced their endorsement of the bicameral Quality Educator Partnership Act (QEPA). Introduced late last week in the U.S. Senate (S.5549) by Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) and in the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R.10530) by Congresswoman Alma Adams (D-NC), the bill’s provisions either directly specify the inclusion of school library media specialists or use the term “educator,” which, as defined, includes school library media specialists.

  • Michael Heap ☛ What is trust?

    Alice might be your go-to person for producing a high quality report and the last person you would ask to feed your cat while you are on vacation. Trust depends on the person, behaviour, and context.

    After talking it through, we landed on the following definition of trust:

    Trust is the confidence that you can rely on someone in a particular situation when the stakes are high

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Wired ☛ Measles Is Forcing Hospitals to Adapt to a New Normal

    The US resurgence of measles is forcing hospitals and health systems to adopt new protocols and procedures to deal with a disease they thought was in the past.

  • Jim Grey ☛ Somewhere in Kentucky

    He built a house where hard things couldn’t be said to him. In the end, he lived in it, and died in it, alone with whatever he knew or didn’t know about what was happening inside his own body. We all stood outside it, still too well trained to knock.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Sal ☛ Re: Comfortable in Linux

    All of that said, my Thinkpad & Linux experiment is still on! My plan from the start was to have the Thinkpad as a plaything and to stick to my Macs when I just need to get stuff done. The Thinkpad can supply novelty when I’m feeling the need for it, but I can run back into the velvet cage of macOS when the edges feel too rough. I still like that plan.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Google Tacitly Acknowledges the End of ChromeOS as It Launches Googlebooks

    Well, that is not exactly true, either. I compared the update policy document against Best Buy’s Chromebook results as a kind of quick benchmark. The first result at time of writing is Lenovo’s Chromebook m 15.3″ which, indeed, Google says will receive updates until June 2036. The second result is the ASUS CM14 Flip 14″. Google says that will only get updates until June 2033. That product was released in 2023, so that would technically qualify as ten years of updates from day one, but Best Buy is showing this three year old computer as the second most relevant search result for “Chromebook”. The third result is a refurbished product so I will skip it. The fourth is the ASUS CX15, and Google says that will get auto-updates until June 2032 — but that spec matches the version released only earlier this year. Perhaps that is a bigger scandal: you could have bought this Chromebook in May, well before the Googlebook announcement, expecting ten years of updates, but Google only says it will deliver them for the next six years.

  • David Roessli ☛ iPhone 18 Pro Bluetooth is unstable

    I'm hearing a lot from friends and collegues who've recently upgraded to Apple's latest iPhone 18 Pro that they are experiencing random Bluetooth disconnects, especially with Apple's own Apple Watch.

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

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] Australian Government To Probe OpenAI Agent After It Breached Health Portal and Bypassed Security Blocks

    • Raspberry Pi ☛ Not all explanations are equal: Social Explainable AI and Critical Computational Literacy

      Dan opened with a deceptively simple question: why do we need explanations in the first place? His answer was that explanations provide orientation. They reduce uncertainty, and in doing so, they make our shared social world liveable. Explanations have evolved from Socratic dialogue, to the printed book, to the classroom, to today’s digital interfaces, and now to AI-generated explanations. But explanations have never been neutral conveyors of information. Dan illustrated this with a simple demonstration: he showed the seminar participants an aerial photo of a beach and asked what they noticed.

    • Wired ☛ Whatever AI Safety Is, It’s Not This

      Here’s a fun history lesson for you. Don’t worry, we’ll make it quick! In 1966, nearly 51,000 people died on US highways. The overwhelming evidence suggested that many lives could have been saved with modern seat belts, which by then had been around for several years. The automotive industry responded by rallying together, and, in a triumph of self-regulation, voluntarily put the safety feature in every new vehicle that rolled off the line.

      Kidding! Of course they didn’t do that. In the fall of 1966, Congress established the Department of Transportation and then passed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act as well as the Highway Safety Act, giving the federal government sweeping new authority to set safety standards. By 1968, seat belts were required in every new car. Despite a massive increase in highway traffic in the last 60 years, far fewer fatalities happen on the road today.

    • Sean Goedecke ☛ Do not build the LLM torture factory

      I think many people are pro-LLM-torture because they think expressing any reservations concedes that LLMs are conscious, or worthy of moral consideration. It doesn’t. You can think it’s wrong to torture LLMs for the same reason that installing a bunch of realistic torture video game mods is wrong: not because video game characters are real, just because that’s a messed up1 thing to do.

    • Pete Brown ☛ Optimus Prime is a made-up thing for children

      Sorry, Mr. Shevlin, but if you can’t understand the difference between talking about a fictional entity in the context of that fiction versus talking about an actual thing in the real world, you deserve to have your Hollywood Upstairs Philosophy School degree revoked.

    • Jamie Zawinski ☛ Today in the scraperpocalypse...

      Let me just take a nice long sip of this beverage and then open up my web-hosting bill for last month...

    • Jon Seager ☛ Write it yourself

      The flip side of all this excitement is that I’m experiencing a noticeable increase in my own irritation when reading LLM-generated prose. I was fortunate enough to have dinner with Bryan Cantrill and a few others at RustConf 2026 where he described being able to “spot LLM writing from space” - something I increasingly identify with. Bryan recently wrote the revolt of the reader, which accurately describes the feelings I experience when reading generated content.

    • ComiCSS ☛ comiCSS #260: AGI

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Anthropic IPO filing: the disaster in numbers

      Anthropic’s money situation is as bad as we thought. Actual revenue in 2025 was $4.6 billion. Just the operating expenses were $12.65 billion, for an operating loss of $8 billion. They spent $2.75 to make each dollar that came in.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ New AI jailbreak: get your chatbot drunk

      Or you could just get past the guard rails. It’s pretty easy — the guards are just part of the initial prompt for the chatbot, which is just text. So you can add more text!

      A team of Australian machine learning researchers has found yet another way to work around chatbot guard rails. They tell the chatbot to act drunk: [...]

    • Futurism ☛ That Company That Buys Struggling News Sites and Turns Them Into AI-Powered Content Mills Has Halted Publishing After a Futurism Investigation

      The preponderance of Brown Brothers Media’s traffic seemed to come from Google. The content farming network appeared to have figured out how to masterfully exploit the company’s platforms with its AI articles, often dominating the very top of Google News’ “For You” tab with formerly reputable publications it had acquired including VegOut, Silicon Canals, and Space Daily — frequently publishing extremely long and emotionally manipulative headlines that crowded out real journalism with many slight variations on the same story.

    • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘That’s so AI!’ What gen Alpha’s biggest insult tells us

      The year’s most popular slang reveals what young people think about artificial intelligence – and it’s not positive

  • Social Control Media

    • Kev Quirk ☛ I Don’t Remember the Last Time I Checked Mastodon

      The majority of my timeline is fun, but the outraged minority have ruined for me. To the point where I don't want to be there, and I'm much happier having not checked the timeline for the last month or so.

    • Lap Cat Software ☛ I’m leaving Reddit because of RSS

      The most ridiculous part of Reddit’s announcement was the suggestion that subreddit moderators replace RSS feeds with Discord notifications. What perversity, insanity to recommend a competing social network as the only practical way to use yours! I’m also skeptical of Reddit’s public excuse for dropping RSS: bot scraping. As I noted back in June, Reddit is already rate-limiting RSS feeds. If the current limits are insufficient, why not impose stricter limits? For my personal use, 1000 or even 500 RSS feed requests per day, over 50 maximum feeds, should suffice. If that’s not low enough to stop large-scale scraping, then I suspect RSS is not actually Reddit’s real problem.

    • Dan Q ☛ I’m leaving Reddit because of RSS

      Had I not already pretty-much abandoned Reddit 9 years ago, when it was already succumbing to an increasing barrage of enshittification, then this would be the last straw for me, too.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Dark Reading ☛ South Africa Seeks Aid After Air Traffic Control Cyberattack

      As aviation infrastructure suffers more cyberattacks, air traffic systems are the latest target, with a ransomware toolkit installed on at least one operational network.

    • Bitdefender ☛ ShinyHunters suspect arrested, and is now investigated over alleged murder plots

      The 24-year-old from Amsterdam, whom Dutch police have not named, was arrested on September 15 on suspicion of playing a role within the ShinyHunters criminal organisation. Although the authorities are declining to name the individual, celebrated cybersecurity blogger Brian Krebs has identified him as Pepijn van der Stap, a convicted [cracker].

• Security

  • CISA

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] Siemens Mendix Runtime (Update A)

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] Botslab G980H Dashcams

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-24 [Older] Eufy Omni C20, Omni X10 Pro

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] CISA Adds Four Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] lwIP TCP/IP Stack MQTT Client Application

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] lwIP (Lightweight IP)

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] Siemens Siveillance Control

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] Siemens SIPLUS and SIMATIC Products

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] Siemens Desigo CC family

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] Siemens Industrial Edge Management

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] Siemens SIMOVE Fleetmanager and SIPLANT

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] Siemens WTV676 and WTV776

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] OpenPLC Runtime v3

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-21 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-18 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-18 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Mitsubishi Electric CC-Link IE TSN Communication Protocol (Update A)

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Bransys ELD

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Mitsubishi Electric GX Works3 and Motion Control Settings

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Hitachi Energy FACTS Control Platform (FCP)

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Schneider Electric Modicon M340 Controller and Communication Modules

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Schneider Electric NetBotz 5 750/755

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] ABB Ability Edgenius

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-17 [Older] Schneider Electric PowerChute Serial Shutdown

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-16 [Older] CISA Adds One Known Exploited Vulnerability to Catalog

    • CISA ☛ 2026-09-16 [Older] CISA Adds Two Known Exploited Vulnerabilities to Catalog

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ AI agents inadvertently leak 13,000+ internal screenshots from 300 organizations — list of companies includes Fortune 500 and a frontier AI lab

      There's a private information leak most days, usually by way of misconfigured services or nasty security bugs. Sometimes, though, users will readily hand over private information without being aware of it. That's the case for over 300 organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies and a frontier AI lab, who collectively had 13,000+ private screenshots exposed — all thanks to their development AI agents being arguably too good at their jobs and performing them with little human oversight.

    • Wired ☛ The Secrets of the US Spyware King

      Yet weeks after Paragon, then Israeli-owned, was acquired by the US equity firm AE Industrial Partners in December 2024 and merged with REDLattice—an American offensive cyber firm owned by AE that this week announced plans to go public—WhatsApp alleged that Paragon’s Graphite spyware was used to infect the phones of more than 60 individuals in more than 20 countries, including journalists and activists. Most of the targets were not identified, but the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab named two journalists and two activists in Italy.

    • Victor Kropp ☛ The left hand should know what the right hand is doing

      Marcin Wichary has posted today an article “The left hand should know what the right hand is doing” on his blog Unsung. It shows several scenarios across different apps and websites, in which one part of the app suggested something useless or impossible, while the other should already have been aware that it makes no sense.

    • Bruce Schneier ☛ Connected Cars Are a Surveillance Platform

      Basically, your car’s manufacturer has you under constant surveillance, and they use that data against you.

    • Consumer Reports ☛ Your Car Is Sharing Data With Big Tech - Consumer Reports

      Your car may be spying on you—and transmitting what it learns to some of the world’s biggest tech companies.

      That’s the core finding of a series of tests conducted by privacy researchers at Northeastern University in Boston, using Consumer Reports’ vehicles and Auto Test Center in Connecticut. A study about the results will be published this week.

      It has been known for some time that many late-model automobiles collect detailed data about our driving and share it with companies that may use it for marketing purposes and even to individualize insurance premiums or auto loan rates. Regulators have reprimanded and fined automakers for allegedly failing to clearly disclose this practice, and several automakers have been sued for it.

    • Northeastern University ☛ Automatic Transmission — a data-privacy study of connected vehicles

      The first large-scale measurement study of the connected-vehicle ecosystem.

      A connected car is a vehicle with built-in internet access — Wi-Fi, cellular, GPS — that lets it communicate constantly with its manufacturer and outside companies. Over 75% of vehicles sold globally have this connectity built-in.

    • Kyle Reddoch ☛ Shadow AI Puts MSP Client Data Boundaries to the Test

      A support ticket can contain a user’s name, a screenshot of an application, a configuration export, or notes from an incident. Copying the ticket into an AI assistant to get a quick summary may feel like routine support work. It also sends the client’s information to another service. The person who opened the ticket may have no idea that service is involved.

    • Six Colors ☛ Silencing AirTags enables stalkers and domestic violence – Six Colors

      ElevationLab has released an AirTag product I find appalling, and I strongly urge they immediately withdraw it from sale and recall all inventory. The AirTag Silencer is a simple device: remove the back panel and battery from an AirTag, position the Silencer’s highly engineered pin over the speaker, tap the pin with a hammer, and the AirTag’s speaker is destroyed. This prevents it from emitting an alert in three circumstances, only one of which is triggered by an owner. The other two scenarios aid stalkers and perpetrators of domestic violence, among others. I will not link to it.

    • Don Marti ☛ How the California legislature is saving us from surveillance dystopia (twice, in 1967 and 2026)

      Big Tech’s goal is a kind of surveillance-driven centrally planned economy, where all businesses feed data into The Algorithm, which controls who sells what to who. In the world they want, no legit business can get ahead—because somewhere in a Big Tech data center, a drop-shipper or outright scammer is getting help from an AI trained on their data. Everyone gets driven into chickenization, where the pressure to serve the algorithm squeezes out all the profits from the system except Big Tech’s.

      Fortunately, the California legislature chose to protect privacy—and the other freedoms that depend on it—this year. A new bill, SB 690, was modified to leave most of CIPA’s protections in place.

    • European Commission ☛ EU KIDS Act: helping children navigate a safer online world - European Commission

      Online services and app stores will have to use tools to check users’ ages, while protecting their privacy. They can for example use the EU age verification app, which does not retain identity documents or biometric data.

      Social media services and video-sharing platforms will be required to verify age when a new account is opened.

• Defence/Aggression

  • The Age AU ☛ 2026-09-23 [Older] Israel may soon learn occupation and devastation are no guarantee of security

  • NL Times ☛ 2026-09-20 [Older] Lawyers: Alleged Islamic State security chief was not given a fair trial

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-09-21 [Older] The National Security Exception Was Never Going to Stop at Prosecuting Muslims

  • Jacobin Magazine ☛ American Capitalism Isn’t Just Billionaires

    Middling capitalists such as auto dealers, beer distributors, and niche manufacturers control a substantial amount of American wealth, which they often use to advance right-wing political priorities. Their size and power shouldn’t be neglected.

  • Mike Brock ☛ Lost Friendships and The Cost of Understanding

    This morning, I wrote that none of the terrible predictions I have watched come true required some exceptional intellect to make. They required not lying to myself, and I have been watching with a certain morbid amusement as the things I was told I was unreasonable to fear become things we are expected to accept. I would much rather have had less to be right about.

    In February 2025, I wrote “The Plot Against America” about the alliance between people who regarded democratic government as an obstacle and a president willing to attack its constraints. I saw no reason to assume that being good at building technology would make them responsible with political power, and the argument was there for anyone who wanted to explain where I had gone wrong.

  • Kelly Hayes ☛ Activists Are Preparing to Defend Elections This November

    In this episode of Movement Memos, I talk with organizer Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson about what it means to defend an election under authoritarianism, beyond simply telling people to “vote harder.” We discuss the “win, prove, enforce” framework, the strategic case for early voting, how ordinary people can help protect the voting process, and why relational organizing and staying in right relationship across political differences will matter in the months ahead.

  • Phirephoenix ☛ workers can take back tech

    Last week I gave a talk for The Walrus, a gem of a Canadian magazine. I was invited to contribute the tech angle to a Walrus Talks panel “The Billionaire Problem” (spoilers: I’m anti) so of course I talked about tech worker organizing.

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts (01 Oct 2026)

    From the Magna Carta to the US Constitution to the Emancipation Proclamation to 19th Amendment, voting rights (what you might call "Big P" Politics) were always downstream of protests, riots, petitions, mass movements, strikes and good, old fashioned community organizing (that is, "small p" politics).

    Which is to say, Big P politics matter, but to make them matter, we need a lot of small p politics. That means that democracy isn't something you do every couple of years with a ballot paper (though that's an important aspect of the process). Democracy is continuous.

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • Mike Brock ☛ Inside the Deranged Mind of the Right-Winger

    I think there is a confession in that expectation. If you regard a public office as an opportunity to reward your friends and punish the people you hate, why would someone with the means to get a desired result allow an ethical obligation to interfere? You would know what to do with the opportunity, and you assume they do too.

    In that account, Smith cannot simply have done his job. His insistence that he did becomes part of the concealment, and the absence of evidence becomes a reason to look for something he has hidden.

    Perhaps Schmitt merely knows his audience will believe it. Either way, he was willing to threaten a man with prosecution before checking whether the denial he called perjury was true.

  • Open Access/Content

    • Michael Mitchell ☛ Public Information Should Be Public

      Now, however, it seems like a huge amount of government business, alerts and notifications take place primarily on Twitter. I still can't bring myself to call it X.

      Public information should not require an account with a private company to access it. Government websites should be the primary source. The infrastructure is already there, already paid for by the public, and making information easily available should simply be part of doing the people's work.

      Government could use POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). Publish the information on the official government website first, then send it to Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr, Facebook, Threads, Instagram or anywhere else people may be.

• Environment

  • Overpopulation ☛ Reproductive rights: an unfinished project and an ecological imperative

    Modern contraceptives are an important tool to strengthen women’s bodily autonomy while simultaneously helping lower fertility rates and slow population growth. Yet in recent years, family planning programs have been deprioritised and international aid slashed. A new discussion paper from Sustainable Population Australia explains the reasons behind this prioritisation shift and explores its consequences.

  • New York Times ☛ When Data Centers Cluster Together, How Dirty Are They? One County Wants Answers.

    An unusual study aims to estimate the pollution and health costs from a cluster of proposed data centers, instead of considering each one separately.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • The Verge ☛ Microsoft’s Office and Teams chief is leaving

    After nearly 18 years at LinkedIn and Microsoft, Ryan Roslansky is leaving the company. Roslansky, who until recently was the CEO of LinkedIn, was promoted to the head of Office last year and then took control of Microsoft Teams earlier this year. Roslansky’s departure has triggered another leadership shuffle inside Microsoft.

  • Dave Karpf ☛ Paul Graham and the Cult of the Founder - by Dave Karpf

    It occurs to me that Aaron and Altman represent two archetypes of what Silicon Valley might value. Sam Altman embodied the ideals of the founder. He so impressed Paul Graham that, even though Altman’s company (Loopt) was a failure, Graham named him the the next President of YCombinator. Say what you will about the guy, but he has a remarkable flair for failing upward.

    Aaron, meanwhile, was a hacker in the classical sense of the word. He was intensely curious, brilliant, and generous. He was kind, yet uncompromising. He had a temper, but he pretty much only directed it toward idiots in positions of power. When he saw something wrong, he would build his own solution.

  • Numeric Citizen ☛ Maybe OpenAI is crossing a redline for me — Numeric Citizen Blog

    Another set of thoughts about OpenAI’s recent announcements, which trigger all sorts of reactions in me.

  • Blocks & Files ☛ Memory gold rush bonanza makes billions for Micron

    It has signed 26 SCAs to date, estimated to be over 35 percent of its revenue through 2030, and financial commitments from customers have increased to $32 billion, the vast majority of which are cash deposits. Micron says it’s signed SCAs that extend into 2031, as well as one-year extensions to 2031 for two agreements. Its customers obviously have confidence in their long-term demand for memory and storage.

  • Nick Heer ☛ How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centres to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes

    The financial structure of these data centres is scarcely believable. Meta is putting hundreds of billions of dollars behind this infrastructure, yet is keeping the expenses off its books to preserve its credit rating while also avoiding tax at the federal and state levels. And some people are still mystified by the public response to these developments.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Anthropic’s Looney Tunes IPO

    For comparison to another absurd initial public offering, SpaceX said its A.I. business lost $6.3 billion in calendar 2025, and its capital expenditures in the segment totalled nearly $13 billion. From January through June this year, spending in that segment has climbed to $23.5 billion. And Anthropic says it is prepared to spend over half a trillion dollars? I cannot wait to see if it truly believes its total addressable market is, as reported by the Wall Street Journal last month, close to the entire U.S. economy.

  • Jan Schaumann ☛ 'Winning AI'

    "Whoever wins AI wins". What the fresh fuck does that mean? How do you "win AI", and what exactly is it you won by winning AI?

    I may not know what "winning AI" means, but I do know it is the wrong framing for a meaningful debate about how to handle the many risks inherent in the development of large-language models and other artificial intelligence: "Winning" implies a zero-sum game, a competition between multiple adversarial parties and with a specific goal. Neither applies here, and the use of this phrase is a cheap rhetorical trick to avoid meaningful regulation, because of course "we" have to "win", and if you don't "win", then you necessarily "lose", and who wants to be a loser, huh? Why do you hate America?

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Project Censored ☛ Make America Read Again

    The forty-fourth annual Banned Books Week (BBW) takes place October 4 through 10 this year, but given the significant, sustained efforts to restrict what young people can read, Banned Books Week should likely be observed every week. We are living in a time of increased attacks on the free press, free speech, academic freedom, and the rights to read and know. This year’s BBW theme, “Let Books Be: Protect the Freedom to Read,” reflects these concerns.

  • The Next Move ☛ New Details: Assassins Were Indicted. Very Likely, I Was Their Target.

    The Kremlin’s fondness for international assassinations of its critics and enemies has a long history. This year, Moscow has ramped up its covert actions and sabotage campaign across Europe. So today’s news naming me and my long-time associate and Free Russia Forum co-founder Ivan Tyutrin as assassination targets cannot be called a surprise—but it’s still a shock.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • TruthOut ☛ 2026-09-23 [Older] DOJ Cites “National Security” to Defend Cheeto Mussolini’s White House Ban on News Outlets

  • CPJ ☛ Cuban journalist forced to flee island to Brazil following threats by state agents

    LLerandi told CPJ that the threats began in July when he was summoned to an interrogation by State Security agents in Marianao, in south-west Havana, as part of an investigation into “crimes against State security” under Decree 370, which outlaws independent journalism. He was detained for five hours in August where he was given the option of going to prison or leaving the country within two months.

  • 404 Media ☛ How Schools and Universities Try to Censor Student Journalists

    Student journalists, their advisors, and legal advocates say colleagues and administrators are attempting to undermine student reporting on Jeffrey Epstein, Gaza, and other issues that public institutions would rather not have their reputations connected to.

  • Richard J Tofel ☛ The White House Press Corps Needs to Stop Compromising with Trump—and On Its Own Integrity

    As the Declaration of Independence was being signed in Philadelphia in July 1776, Benjamin Franklin may not have actually said that “We must all hang together, or most assuredly we will all hang separately.” But the sentiment was apt to the occasion—the signers were either declaring independence or committing treason, depending on how things were going to turn out.

    Now the same choice metaphorically applies to the White House press corps, and, unlike the founders, they are wavering in the moment. This week I want to explain why I think that could be a big mistake.

  • Rolling Stone ☛ Trump Explodes on Reporter During 'Time' Interview

    The rest of the interview portrayed a frustrated president cocooning himself in an alternate reality [sic] as the nation turns on him.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Matt Stoller ☛ McDonald's Caught Cheating Consumers for Profit as Rage Over Cost of Living Burns

    I’m one of the many experts who Waylon spoke to for his story. And what I’ve seen, not just with this story, but with AI-enabled pricing games I’ve written about for years, is a righteous and justified anger in this country over the fact that prices are becoming less predictable, less transparent, and less fair.

    For much of our history, stable, public pricing was the binding agent of a shared social contract. A few months ago, BIG pointed out that the longest running game show in history, The Price Is Right, which would be inconceivable without it. So the violation of that contract by an institution as American as McDonald’s, with its iconic Golden Arches, has understandably fostered rage.

    This violation of the social contract is masked by the takeover of commercial discourse by economists, with their dry view that supply and demand curves are all that matters. But buying and selling are social experiences, too. Historically, if you wanted to know if a vacuum cleaner was worth its price, you asked a friend, family member or coworker, confident that their understanding of its value was based on the same price.

  • Jamie Zawinski ☛ It's not illegal if you buy new laws

    But then in 2020, they spent $200 million to make that fraud legal, so now they won't have to pay that again in the future!

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • New York Times ☛ How to Listen to Your Favorite Music, Online or Off the Grid

    Streaming services have long provided the most popular way to listen to music, but downloading things digitally has its perks. That’s why some people still prefer to buy their music instead of renting it.

    Downloaded files will eat into your device’s available storage space, but you don’t have to worry about inconsistent playback from an unstable internet connection or chewing through megabytes on a metered data plan. And, with some online stores, buying music directly puts more money in the artist’s pocket.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Copyrights

    • Glyn Moody ☛ 2026-09-19 [Older] US government argues that fair use applies to OpenAI’s training of LLMs in key copyright case

    • EFF ☛ 2026-09-16 [Older] Victory! Appeals Court Rejects Expansive New Copyright Claim

    • International Business Times ☛ 2026-09-22 [Older] Microsoft Director Warned AI Training Could Be 'Largest Theft of Labor in Human History', Filing Says

    • The Record ☛ OpenAI software attempted to secretly scrape data from dozens of prominent websites

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