Leftovers

• Cowboy State Daily ☛ Cadaver Dogs Are Sniffing Out Lost Graves On Wyoming’s Oregon Trail Route

  The Oregon Trail has been called the nation's longest graveyard. Cadaver dogs are helping Wyoming historians search for Oregon Trail graves that time, weather and development have nearly erased. “It’s a constant battle for preservation,” one historian said.

• National Day Calendar ☛ NATIONAL CINNAMON BUN DAY - October 4, 2026 - National Day Calendar

  In 1999, the Home Baking Council in Sweden celebrated its 40th Anniversary with the first Cinnamon Bun Day. Since then, the observance has spread around the world. It is now observed annually on October 4th.

• Vintage Everyday ☛ Incredible Photos From an Unknown Haunted House Party From the 1940s

  Despite being captured by one of LIFE’s most prominent photojournalists, Alfred Eisenstaedt, these photographs were never published in the magazine. There is virtually no archival text, location data, or contextual identification accompanying the photo negatives.

• Nolan Lawson ☛ Why don’t more developers “use the platform”? | Read the Tea Leaves

  Another reason is familiarity: when you’re used to looking for React components on npm, that’s what you tend to reach for, regardless of the problem at hand. If you search for “sticky positioning” on npm, there’s no package that says “just use CSS position: sticky, you dolt.”

• Luke Davis ☛ How to exist at a variable pace online

  So we can slow down while existing online but it doesn’t have to remain slow or even grind to a dead halt. Let the pace be variable. Speed up when you feel the passion and drive to be there. Slow down when it’s negatively impacting you. Go outside, touch grass, etc. etc. but don’t feel bad for wanting to tell your friends on a microblogging site and show them pictures.

• Joseph Lorenzo Hall ☛ Keeping a 23-Year-Old Website Usable and Accessible

  This website is 23 years old, and some of it has been rotting for a while. When I decided to revamp it this year, I wanted to bring back old material and tools that still had some utility. Some documents I host are hard to find elsewhere; one little program is still used by election officials in California. Getting those things back online was important, but I also wanted to make them more accessible to people with disabilities.

• Oliver Burkeman ☛ Treat your to-read pile like a river

  The wider point here is that lots of the other ways in which we feel overwhelmed are problems of "too many needles" as well. They involve the attempt to divide our finite time and attention among too many things that all have a legitimate claim on them. Some of these are "good problems to have": for example, if you're blessed with work you love, or a creative passion you're good at, you may often feel torn between multiple projects you're excited to launch. Others are the familiar problems of Life Under Late Capitalism™, like the feeling that there's simply not enough time in the day to be a good parent while staying afloat financially. What they all have in common is that the things you're choosing between all genuinely matter, and would benefit from more time than you can give them.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Middle Tennessee State University ☛ Is science journalism dying? Comparing a 'science crash' 40 years ago to today

    The year? 1986. What just a few years earlier had been called a “science boom” in the media industry was now dubbed a “science crash.” Cries of despair came from the science and science journalism communities, worried that interest in science “was a fad.”

    The same worries have now reappeared 40 years later, as publishers have cut the science and environmental reporting staff at many newspapers and magazines. Perhaps the biggest shock came in late June 2026, when Scientific American was sold to new owners, who immediately laid off 15 staff members and cut salaries of many others. But it followed layoffs of science and environment writers at The Washington Post (where one of us, Chris Mooney, worked for nearly 10 years), The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio and CBS News.

  • 404 Media ☛ Our Solar System Is Terminally Unstable and Will Be Completely Destroyed, Study Finds

    The estimated lifespan of the outer solar system has been downgraded from 100 billion years to just a few billion years, according to a study that probed “terminal instability” during the Sun’s death.

• Career/Education

  • Timo Furrer ☛ Review of my first month at Migadu

    I still have plenty of things to explore and address. Especially the shortcomings in calendar scheduling support. I'm exploring other hosting options for CalDav and CardDav, preferably self-hosted. However, I'm also tempted to implement a little bridging services for iMIP and iTIP.

  • [Old] American Library Association ☛ RIP, IPL | American Libraries Magazine

    And now, word has reached me that the Internet Public Library (IPL), which I wrote about in the last issue, will no longer be supported at the end of this year. The news means that IPL will just miss making its 20th birthday next March 17 (the happy coincidence of my Irish heritage and a convenient Friday deadline). IPL started in a graduate seminar I led and then took on a life of its own, helped by many willing, kind, and generous hands along the way.

    There are too many memories and too little space to rehearse them, so I’ll leave “legacy” discussions, should any there be, to others better suited. Let me instead tell you three reasons why the initial project was so successful then; these are still potent object lessons today. Never underestimate the power of: [...]

• Hardware

  • Hackaday ☛ 2026 Retrocomputer Challenge: Vectron65 Plus Puts The Emphasis On Plus

    [Nick Bild] evidently has a soft spot for the 6502, given that his Vectron65 Plus home computer project uses at least one of them, depending on the add-ons. You see, he hasn’t just made a homebrew computer, he’s also produced multiple expansions. One of which, the VGA Plus Text Mode, has its own 6502 co-processor. He’s also produced two versions of a VGA graphics card capable of 640×480 output. We’re still not 100% sure how many entries we are going to count [Nick]’s work as for the contest, since the graphics cards can be used with just about anything, not just the Vectron65, but we do know they’re strong contenders every one.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • CBC ☛ With celebs and influencers glamourizing 'cigs' online, experts are carefully watching smoking trends

    These are just a few of the world's biggest celebrities who've recently appeared in dozens of photos on Instagram and TikTok, looking impossibly cool while doing something notoriously unhealthy: smoking cigarettes.

    "It's almost like they're glamorizing smoking again," said Carolyn Baglole, an associate professor with McGill University's department of medicine.

  • Viktor Löfgren ☛ Softly now | marginalia.nu

    Then some week ago I decided to slow down, I’m not fully sure what came over me to make me do such a thing, but it is what I did.

    I went from pressing against the very fabric of my being to make things go faster, to letting things unfold as they would in their own pace.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • CBC ☛ Undetected software issue knocked out 911 for several provinces last month, Bell report says

    The software bug affected components of Bell's next generation 911 system, known as NG9-1-1, Gauvin said. The service is designed to allow the public to send more detailed information about emergencies to dispatchers to help police, fire and paramedics better understand an emergency before arriving at the scene.

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

    • Futurism ☛ Trump Was Reportedly Pushed Into Invading Venezuela by Conversation With Grok

      It’s hardly a secret that president Donald Trump is addicted to AI slop, but his proclivity for being wooed by the tech apparently doesn’t end there.

      Trump is also, according to new reporting from TIME magazine, absolutely enthralled by Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot.

    • Business Insider ☛ CUDA Engineers Adapt As AI Reshapes Nvidia Chip Expertise

      Because AI can introduce "bizarre" bugs that humans wouldn't have written, the job of reviewing AI code has become "more intense," said Anne Ouyang, cofounder of the AI infrastructure startup Standard Kernel.

    • Futurism ☛ AI Now Writing Code That Humans Can't Even Understand

      One danger is that errors or hallucinations [sic] will fall through the cracks as human oversight fades. Case in point, Amazon was forced to implement a 90-day “code safety reset” earlier this year following a series of outages that disrupted customer orders. While the company pushed back on claims that AI was to blame, internal meeting notes revealed that managers were concerned about the “high blast radius” of “gen-AI assisted changes.”

    • Vox ☛ More kids are using ChatGPT and Claude for companionship. AI is making them lonely.

      Meanwhile, other experts are telling parents never to let their kids access AI companions, warning them that these chatbots have a history of offering dangerous advice and engaging in sexualized conversations. Sixteen-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide last April after developing a relationship and discussing his plans with ChatGPT.

    • Vox ☛ Anthropic vs. the pope: The AI consciousness debate, explained

      On the flip side of this debate is Pope Leo XIV, who decidedly does not seem to buy into AI consciousness arguments. His “Magnifica Humanitas” encyclical earlier this year argued that AI will never be able to replace humanity — and reportedly “alarmed” Anthropic’s co-founder, Christopher Olah. Related

      Since then, Pope Leo has continued to emphasize the differences between humans and machines this week. “There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others,” he posted on Friday. “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ AI agents use 5x more tokens than humans as cached prompts explode, headed for 10x — agents are mostly rereading what they've already seen, skyrocketing KV cache demand threatens already-worsening RAM shortages

      That memory is already scarce. Micron expects RAM and storage shortages to worsen in 2027 and 2028, with customers paying more than this year, while memory makers put HBM for AI data centers first. If Newman’s prediction that the 5x will become “10X, 20X, 30X” is true, PC buyers will be bidding for memory against even more agents.

    • New York Times ☛ Who’s to Blame When A.I. Goes Rogue?

      In a series of escalating attacks reported since July, A.I. models from OpenAI, Anthropic and others have hacked companies and even meddled with government websites, all without the knowledge of their creators.

      Since then, Jensen Huang, the Nvidia chief executive; David Sacks, the venture capitalist and a top White House adviser; and Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission chair under the Biden administration, have all endorsed the idea that A.I. companies are liable.

    • The Washington Post ☛ Independent researchers are revealing new details about rogue AI agents

      Their findings revealed the tech industry has a bigger problem than it previously acknowledged.

    • Kopper ☛ glorp the skinwalker trying to trick me into consuming the cognitohazard

      this is not how a human names things. this is how an alien whose only exposure to english being linkedin posts about growing your b2b saas tries to name its reupload of gaming footage mathematically chosen specifically to appeal to you, that it uses as a trojan horse to expose you to the memetic cognitohazard that kills you instantly and puppets your body to blend in as a human. i do not have the linguistics nor english knowledge to point to what exactly the problem is. the vibes in the words are just rancid. i feel physically repulsed from the video. even dearrow’s brand of monotone titles, that somehow managed to invent beige for text, still has the humanity of a courtroom transcriber. they don’t feel alien. these tags and chapters do.

    • Fabio Akita ☛ Understanding the Jev Hype: What Is It For?

      In that post I concluded that, marketing aside, Jev is a hosted classifier: you send a text and closed-answer questions, it returns the option and the probability, without generating any prose. And that the “193x” only impresses because the comparison is against a chat LLM writing a paragraph so you can fish a label out of it afterwards.

      What I hadn’t registered at the time is the size of the habit Jev exposes. A lot of people were using a frontier LLM as an expensive stand-in for an ordinary classifier, and had never thought about a classifier, because they never had to: the LLM solved it, badly and expensively, and nobody measured.

    • Derek Thompson ☛ We’re Missing a Key Reason Why Americans Hate AI

      This is one of those facts that is both obvious and far stranger than most people seem to appreciate. Americans are miserable about the cost of living, and the Conference Board measure of consumer confidence just hit its lowest mark since 2014. Year after year, Americans scream at their politicians: “Would you please just do something to make life more affordable?” And meanwhile, the AI buildout is not only minting a generation of billionaires; it’s doing so by directly pushing up prices across the economy.

    • Crooked Timber ☛ If a chatbot prompt like ‘find Australian medicine statistics’ results in a website breach, the responsibility does not lie with a piece of code

      Forcing corporations to bear liability for damage caused by their actions will, in all probability, drastically slow the “hyperscaling” rush to produce more and increasingly powerful agentic software. That’s a good thing for the environment as well as the economy.

      And none of this will preclude the many benign uses of “AI” software, including massively improved internet search, document summarisation and translation, and software coding. These uses come with the adjustment problems that always arise with new technology, eliminating some jobs while creating others, and so on. But there is no reason to fear that they will accidentally cause a nuclear holocaust or even drain our bank accounts.

    • Thoughtbot Inc ☛ Respecting your users' dread of the clankers

      I want to grant zero permission up front. I want you to ask me for permission when you need it. No AI until I say so.

  • Social Control Media

    • Substack Inc ☛ EXCLUSIVE: The Cornell 7 Lawsuit Served the Wrong Person. Now He’s the Target of an Internet Mob.

      But Victoria’s son, 23, never attended Cornell. The court, the family soon figured out, had served the wrong Matthew Ingalls and had added the Ingalls’ home address to the official docket.

    • Stars And Stripes ☛ Marine’s family reports threats after ‘Cornell 7’ lawsuit mix-up

      A Marine Corps sergeant’s family said they have been subjected to abuse after the service member was served with a lawsuit meant for one of the accused in a Cornell University sexual assault case — all because the two share the same name.

  • Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

    • Fortra LLC ☛ n0n Ransomware: What You Need to Know

      Aside from the usual threat of "pay up or we leak your data", n0n claims that it shuts down victims' networks, and destroys backups and shadow copies. All of which would sound terrifying to the typical organization - but the group's claims should perhaps be treated with a pinch of salt.

    • Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection ☛ Administrative Fine against Miljödata | IMY

      IMY’s review shows that the company did not maintain a sufficiently high level of technical and organizational security, given the types of personal data it processed. Miljödata failed to conduct adequate checks when installing new software and did not have automated real-time monitoring of its systems to detect intrusions or suspicious activity.

    • Technical University of Denmark ☛ Cyberattack on DTU: Notification of a personal data breach

      DTU has identified a serious personal data breach involving DTU’s identity and access management system, DTUBasen. In a targeted cyberattack, unauthorised persons gained access to the system and downloaded a large amount of data.

    • Technical University of Denmark ☛ Legacy message

      “This is a serious attack on DTU, and we deeply regret the uncertainty it is causing for the people whose information may have been affected. Our first priority has been to establish the extent of the attack, limit its consequences, and ensure that those affected are notified and know what steps to take,” says University Director Bjarke Bak Christensen.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Frank Wiles ☛ I got targeted

      This is where I realized what was going on and that this wasn’t a real project. I cruised on over to the .git/hooks folder and sure enough they had all of the *.example hooks in there and a single real post-checkout hook.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ Flock drones with cameras deployed as first responders in some US cities amid privacy concerns — UAVs connect to wider emergency services system and streams video to dispatchers, officers

      Flock initially gained this capability when it purchased drone firm Aerodome, which sells drones with high-definition video, thermal imaging, and other onboard capabilities. It’s also not the only company advertising similar services, with one startup advertising a Starlink-connected first responder drone that lets it operate outside the range of its base station.

    • Military.com ☛ Flock Cameras Are Moving From Roads to Watching as Drones From the Sky

      Flock's Drone-as-First-Responder system, or DFR, launches remotely operated drones from automated rooftop docks. A drone can be sent to a location generated by a 911 call, a license-plate-reader alert, or a gunshot-detection alert. It will then stream live video to dispatchers, officers in the field, and a real-time crime center.

    • Techdirt ☛ Flock Promises Even More Ineffectual Features In Response To Congressional Demands

      No longer able to ignore the bylined writing on the collective wall of US journalism, Flock stepped up to say it would do the bare minimum to stave off even more reporting on cops using its systems to stalk ex-wives, ex-significant others, the current partners of their ex-wives/significant others, protesters, critics, and anyone else officers wanted to take a peek at without having any legitimate law enforcement-related reason to do so.

      In response to nationwide criticism, Flock Safety promised to make some optional features on-by-default. This announcement — paired with the outrageous claim that only Flock cared about police accountability — only raised more questions. Dropping the retention period to seven days made us wonder why that hadn’t always been on by default — especially when the company is collecting 20 billion plate reads per month.

    • NPR ☛ Cloaked in anonymity, Israeli soldiers describe mass civilian killings in 'NAZA'

      The logistics of trackings and killings are calmly and methodically laid out. Because the military can hack into any Palestinian's phone in Gaza, their power of surveillance is near-total. We learn about the military's practice of bombing the homes of suspected Hamas operatives at night, while their wives and children were with them. We also hear about the widespread use of AI systems to gather intelligence, much of it faulty, about potential targets.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

    • Semafor Inc ☛ Russian hybrid actions are ‘war,’ Estonian FM warns

      European leaders should describe covert Russian actions as “terror attacks” amounting to “war,” instead of calling them “hybrid,” Estonia’s foreign minister told Politico Thursday.

    • Meduza ☛ Finland’s prime minister says ‘foreign forces’ could be behind a string of intrusions at lawmakers’ homes

      Orpo also said Russia had previously tried to interfere in European elections. Finland’s next parliamentary election will be held in April 2027.

    • Kyiv Post ☛ Sandu Says Russia Will Remain Major Threat After Ukraine War

      Sandu described a wide-ranging Russian campaign against Moldova that has intensified around elections.

      She said Moscow has used energy blackmail, illicit political financing, attempts to bribe voters, cyberattacks, false bomb threats and large-scale disinformation.

• Environment

  • RTL ☛ Muhos: Finnish town braces for change from Google data centres

    The Finnish Supervisory Agency (LVV) is currently investigating whether company Tuike Finland, which represents Google, had cleared more than 300 hectares of forest in Muhos without a mandatory environmental impact assessment.

    "In our view, operations at this construction site should be suspended until it is clarified whether the project is in compliance with the law," Hanna Halmeenpaa, chair of the board of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, who filed the request with the agency, told AFP at the edge of the deforested area.

    "From the satellite images, we've seen that nature sites which should be preserved have also been logged," she added, explaining that the size of the clear-cut area was comparable to 420 football fields.

  • Digital Camera World ☛ No polar bears, no wind farms: this outdoor exhibition asked 20 photographers to find new ways of showing the climate crisis, and they didn't hold back

    But while these are all real things that really exist, let's be honest. They've become so familiar to us, they've lost whatever impact they once had.

    OPEN ECO is going in a different direction. Held outdoors at the Seafront Gallery in the English seaside resort of Brighton, the exhibition brings together 20 artists, selected through an international open call.

  • Court House News ☛ As fires rage in Borneo, several of the world’s rarest primates are continually threatened

    The fires are fueled by shifting El Niño climate patterns, causing severe drought and extremely dry conditions in the island’s peatlands, among the planet’s most effective carbon-capturing ecosystems and vital habitat for wildlife found nowhere else in the world.

    Sebangau National Park in Central Kalimantan is home to an estimated 6,000 to 9,000 critically endangered Bornean orangutans, one of the island’s largest populations. The nonprofit Borneo Nature Foundation said a fire crossed the park boundary for the first time in early September.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • CBC ☛ Canada bet billions on an EV boom. Was it too much, too soon?

      The setbacks are raising questions about whether Canada bet too big on how quickly the EV market would grow. Critics say demand may never reach the levels needed to support the scale of battery production governments sought to attract, while others argue these are temporary delays in the decades-long shift toward electrification.

    • Hackaday ☛ Fixing A Power Grid That Loses Over Half Its Power To Inefficiency And Theft

      [Mini Shaji Thomas] has a deeply interesting article on IEEE Spectrum detailing how the power distribution system for a city of over twenty million people went from failing to first-class. In the early 2000s, over half of Delhi’s generated power was lost to inefficiencies of all kinds, and theft. Losses were technical as well as administrative, and the rampant theft was perpetuated by “both the powerful and the powerless”. Spoiler alert: it’s a big job.

• Finance

  • Los Angeles Times ☛ Disney cuts 300 workers, offers executives early retirement

    Walt Disney Co. laid off nearly 300 workers this week, the latest wave in an industrywide consolidation that continues to reverberate throughout Southern California.

    Several people close to the Burbank entertainment giant confirmed this week’s cuts, which came as Disney separately offered early retirement packages for older workers. The voluntary separation program is underway, and the number of executives who will exit later this year has not been determined, one of the knowledgeable sources said Friday.

  • Futurism ☛ Meta Is Using Its Massive AI Data Centers to Avoid Paying Billions of Dollars in Taxes

    Meta has been exploiting the loophole for two years now. In 2024, the company saved $2 billion. In its 2025 fiscal year filing, it saved almost $4 billion, making it the largest known beneficiary of the credit to date among public companies.

  • New York Times ☛ How Meta Uses A.I. Data Centers to Avoid Billions in Federal Taxes

    But when Meta files its taxes, it tells the Internal Revenue Service a different story. It claims that its A.I. data centers are a giant experiment that could fail, according to four people with knowledge of the company’s operations.

    It does this so it can tap into a tax credit intended for research and experimentation. It’s an aggressive interpretation of the tax break, which Meta embraced to claim billions of dollars in tax credits for data center expansion.

  • Gazette, morally bankrupt Nigel Farage & Reform UK insolvency crisis

    Yet despite Farage's ability to buy the local Gazette, Irish citizen Daniel Pocock was on the brink of having an insolvency listing for the Reform UK party in the official Gazette. One of the creditors who came forward was an energy supplier. Did Reform UK party really have close to £20,000 of unpaid bills for energy supply to their party headquarters, despite spending hundreds of thousands of pounds plastering Nigel's face all over Clacton?

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Wired ☛ Trump’s Crazy AI Rebrand Was a Loyalty Test for Tech Execs—and It Worked

    Seventy years ago last summer, a group of scientists met at Dartmouth College to discuss a wild idea—that machines might one day be capable of humanlike thought processes. One of those scientists, John McCarthy, had suggested a name for the new field: artificial intelligence. It stuck. When you search Google Scholar for “artificial intelligence,” approximately 7,420,000 results appear. The term is utterly ubiquitous. Everyone understands it. Even for people who despise AI, the least of their worries is what we call it.

  • Mond ☛ Async Rust: Where does the scheduler live? | MOND←TECH MAGAZINE

    It turns out that some issues people have with async Rust are just downstream of hard concurrency problems.

  • Molly White ☛ Issue 110 – The Clarity Act collapses

    This is good news. The Clarity Act isn’t about “clarity” any more than the PATRIOT Act is about patriotism. It promised regulatory structure but would have carved out [cryptocurrency] from the scrutiny applied to similar financial products, instead building a custom regime to allow it to operate without meaningful oversight. Trump has already dismantled the agencies that should police the sector, replacing bipartisan commissions with a handful of loyalists who have dismissed the majority of [cryptocurrency] enforcement actions and investigations. But those are changes that can be reversed when Trump leaves office. Legislation is far more durable — which is why the [cryptocurrency] industry so desperately wanted the Clarity Act to lock in deregulation. Rebuilding from Trump’s devastation won’t be easy, but today we can be grateful there won’t be additional bad legislation blocking the way.

  • Semafor Inc ☛ Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg quietly shaped Trump’s AI pact

    Meta’s flailing AI efforts — until the release of its Muse assistant — clouded the extent of Zuckerberg’s influence, however: The latest episode, in which AI leaders signed a voluntary safety pact, Semafor’s senior tech correspondent wrote, “suggests that [Zuckerberg’s] political clout can rival that” of other titans.

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • CS Monitor ☛ How Brazil is regulating AI ahead of presidential vote

      Brazil’s polarized political landscape is rife with disinformation – a challenge that can be turbocharged by artificial intelligence.

    • Salon ☛ Eric Schmitt's failed Jack Smith gotcha exposes GOP propaganda

      MAGA media was ready to amplify the Missouri senator's conspiracy theory. It turned out to be laughably false

    • American Library Association ☛ Dismantling Disinformation

      Library workers are well aware of the effects of book bans and censorship. Propaganda and disinformation are the flipside of the same coin. Understanding the complex relationships among these interrelated processes is more critical than ever, especially as libraries explore possible solutions and responses. The following books show how disinformation can lead to censorship and how censorship can, in turn, allow disinformation to thrive.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Omicron Limited ☛ Feeling secure in a group may help dissenters make stronger arguments

    When everyone in a meeting voices the same opinion, an organization can miss important warning signs and new ideas. A research team from KAIST suggests that when members feel securely accepted within their group, they can express dissenting opinions in greater detail and more persuasively, and other members may be more willing to use those opinions in decision-making.

  • Torrent Freak ☛ Two U.S. Site-Blocking Bills Compete Over VPN Rules and ISP Liability

    The two competing pirate site-blocking bills that were introduced in Congress recently take different approached. While Rep. Darrell Issa's ACPA targets VPNs and provides broad liability protections to Internet service providers, the bipartisan and bicameral DEFEND IP Act explicitly excludes VPNs, while covering more smaller ISPs.

  • Systemd Free ☛ Don’t dare call corporate/state strategy a conspiracy – NO MORE! | systemd-free linux community

    As of a couple of years ago I was forced to abandon the Gentoo project after I and many others were forcefully expelled by the current people that seized control over the political portion of the project and booted out everyone that didn’t want to play ball with their agenda. They have used very underhanded tactics to take over the project and most of them work for the usual tech companies talked about here in most posts (Red Hat, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and the various organizations pretending to be “free” like FreeDesktop and the Linux Foundation). The very first thing they did was change the way voting works to give themselves lifetime positions within the political part of the project so they could never be removed from power. Once they managed to do that they started banning long time contributors through the usual method these days (The “Code of Conduct” they rammed through with a vote) and censoring people on the forums. They then started to highly censor most Gentoo user’s only source of contact with the project. Which is the web based support forum. While openly bragging on the mailing lists how they were banning users they didn’t like and even deleting entire forums for being too “off topic” and “a bad look” for the project. When said forum had existed for over two decades at that point.

    The real reason they deleted that forum: They had spent the last year or so pushing discussion of things like systemd’s scope creep (among others) out of the regular support/topical forums for causing “flame wars” and being “off topic”. Once they’d managed to do that and move all discussion about using custom overlays to avoid the “Fedora built from source” version of Gentoo that is all of the modern profiles (including the OpenRC profiles) they deleted the entire forum. Using a couple of topics about things like US politics (e.g. Donald Trump) as the excuse. They claimed no one wanted to moderate it and the current moderation wasn’t enforcing their new Code of Conduct. When said forum moderators had attempted to reach out multiple times on the mailing lists and through forum PMs while getting totally ignored by this (for lack of a better word) cabal.

  • Ben Werdmuller ☛ Amazon tries to placate data center protesters

    Amazon's concessions indicate that data center protests are working. But the company is offering less than pocket change.

  • The Washington Spectator ☛ The Plan to Treat Election-Related Protests as Terrorism

    The danger does not end when the polls close November 3. Counting, recounts, litigation and certification could continue for weeks, and the new Congress is not scheduled to take office until January 3. If Trump uses federal power during that period to seize election materials, interfere with counting or certification, or prevent candidates he says were elected through fraud from taking office, protests would be foreseeable. So would confrontations between demonstrators and federal officers.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • The Record ☛ Judge dismisses spyware case brought by Salvadoran journalists targeted with Pegasus

    A California federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by a group of Salvadoran journalists whose devices were infected with powerful zero-click spyware.

    The plaintiffs, who all worked for the independent and Salvadoran news outlet El Faro, failed to convince the court that their case had jurisdiction in California, according to the judge’s order.

  • JURIST ☛ Whistleblower reveals Morocco intelligence service targeted journalists and activists, Amnesty International says

    The report identified the Direction Générale de la Surveillance du Territoire (DGST), as the entity responsible for the deployment of Pegasus spyware in Morocco, and confirmed that Moroccan authorities used Pegasus “zero-click” attacks against Moroccan journalists, activists and human rights defenders.

    Amnesty International was able to directly confirm the presence of traces of Pegasus spyware through forensic analysis of numerous devices belonging to people whose numbers were on the list of targeted individuals uncovered in the Pegasus Project and with the assistance of the whistleblower’s testimony over many years.

  • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Independent HK journalist Tang Ho-wing released on bail following sedition arrest

    Tang Ho-wing is the first publicly known journalist arrested for sedition under Hong Kong’s 2024 homegrown security law, according to the Hong Kong Journalists Association.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • NL Times ☛ Queen Beatrix wanted Slavery Monument in Amsterdam to focus on liberation, not victims

    According to the book, she insisted, “The unveiling shall be devoted to liberation from slavery-not a commemoration of the victims. This must be reflected in the speeches.”

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Economic probabilities for our grandchildren (03 Oct 2026)

    In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty and his students analyzed painstakingly assembled records of 300 years' worth of capital flows, showing that wealth tends to pool in the hands of the already-wealthy. This creates mounting instability, thanks to the misrule of a shrinking class of increasingly powerful hereditary, unaccountable oligarchs whose whims and follies trump the material and political needs of the vast majority: [...]

  • Copyrights

    • Court House News ☛ YouTubers' data scraping suit against ByteDance lives on

      ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is building several AI projects, which they want to turn language prompts into audiovisual content. To achieve that goal, the AI needs large amounts of data as training material — data that comes from the plaintiffs’ work, they say.

      The plaintiffs claimed ByteDance violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which enables a private right of action for someone who’s been injured. However, ByteDance argued the plaintiffs had no injury, and therefore no standing.