Leftovers

• FOSS United Foundation ☛ Tech report - Oct 2026

  After a month as loud as IndiaFOSS, October was meant to be quiet. On the codebase, it mostly was. This was an upgrade month.

• Ruben Schade ☛ You could just do it yourself

  I do appreciate I’m in a privileged position here, but time is precious, and specialisation is a thing.

  I could “just” do this stuff myself, or…

  I could “just” pay someone who knows what they’re doing.

• Robert Birming ☛ Bear Halloween upvote button

  As you may know, I made a Bear Halloween theme last year. It still holds up, which is almost a shame, since I love making things like that.

• Loura ☛ A Sea of Faces (Well, Seven)

  So, in a way, starting the blog category has already had an effect even if I haven’t written much. It made me feel like I could just say it… as something about myself, to others. I don’t know if I’ll ever be comfortable with it, but it’s nice to know I can.

• Leon Mika ☛ Inktober 2026 Wrapped

  This was my first Inktober and I’m really glad I did it. It was fun trying something new. I don’t consider myself a drawer, and while I wouldn’t say this turned me into one, I feel like I did better than what I was expecting. Also came up with a few techniques: [...]

• Atharva Raykar ☛ disgraceful in aggregate

  The whole is never just a sum of the parts. There are lots of things that I find to be disgraceful only when taken in aggregate. But any individual instance of it seems okay, and so I look odd when I object to any of these things.

• Science / Mathematics / Computer Science

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Scientists made a pattern in light that survives a broken quantum bond

    Now, in a new study, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have demonstrated an intriguing way to preserve a particular property of quantum light even after this connection breaks down.

    Using a mathematical concept called topology, they transferred a distinctive pattern between photons and found that the pattern remained intact even after the photons lost their quantum connection (entanglement).

  • Wired ☛ White Dwarfs Aren’t Just White. Scientists Discover Dying Stars Turning Pink and Green

    Astronomers find that a white dwarf’s density and the kind of material it absorbed from its surroundings can produce a rainbow of shades in the star’s atmosphere.

  • Hackaday ☛ Voyager 1 Briefly Goes Silent, Scaring Everyone

    From the diagnostic data that the team obtained after communications were restored it’s clear that a group of thrusters went offline with backup units kicking in, indicating that the onboard computer detected some kind anomaly with the former. Whether this is a recurrence of the clogged fuel lines that has been observed before will have to be investigated.

  • Didier Stevens ☛ Quickpost: WT20 Welding Electrodes & Radiation

    These are tungsten welding electrodes with 2% thorium. Thorium is a little bit radioactive and shows up in the spectrum that I measured over a period of 3 hours with a Radiacode 103 device: [...]

• Career/Education

  • Atharva Raykar ☛ why physical books are better than ebooks

    Readers are faced with one of the most complex decisions: to read a physical book or to read an ebook. Now, both probably have their pros and cons. But, I am here to tell you physical books are far superior to ebooks and as someone who owns over 3 books and a Kindle, I know I am a trustworthy source.

    To put it simply, you can do a whole lot with books that you simply cannot with ebooks.

  • Andrew Shell ☛ Missing Printed Magazines

    Earlier this week, I was at one of our large grocery stores, one that still has a magazine aisle, and was sad to discover that there wasn't a single magazine I was interested in buying.

    I regularly go to Barnes & Noble. They still have a whole magazine section, and sometimes I'll find one or two that look interesting, like the current copy of 2600 or one of the Linux magazines.

• Hardware

  • Ruben Schade ☛ Living in the future with a big screen

    My main work area has a 27-inch 4K Dell monitor. Not as good pixel density as the 21.5-inch true 4K LG I used to have, but it’s perfectly serviceable as a Retina/HiDPI screen.

    Point is, I sat down in front of it, and did a double take. This monitor is huge. And the resolution is so high. I can fit so much on it.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Vox ☛ Tainted candy won’t hurt your kids on Halloween. Cars will.

    But what happens on Halloween isn’t an isolated incident. After gun injuries, motor vehicle injuries are the second leading cause of death among children in the US overall. And with pedestrian fatalities (both adult and child) at a 40-year high in the US, it’s worth asking why children roaming the streets is so inherently deadly, and what can be done about it.

  • 404 Media ☛ Scientists Analyzed Thousands of Psychedelic Trips. They Found Something Disturbing

    Researchers have amassed a trove of more than 25,000 calls to a support hotline for people during and after psychedelic trips, making it “the largest dataset of psychedelic support interactions ever assembled—exceeding the combined sample sizes of all published psychedelic clinical trials by an order of magnitude,” according to a study published on Friday in Science Advances.

  • Erik Johannes Husom ☛ Glimpses of growth season

    We have in total tried around 20 different types of vegetables, and we are now beginning to converge on the types that both have high nutritional density, high crop density, require less work to grow, and that we actually like to eat. Cucumbers, for example, are very tasty and easy to grow, but the plants don't provide that much yield, so now we prioritise something else.

  • Didier Stevens ☛ “A Ring Tone That I Cannot Hear” – Twenty Years Later

    My first post for this blog was in June 2006, 20 years ago: A Ring Tone That I Cannot Hear.

• Proprietary / Vendor Lock-in / Malware

  • Dark Reading ☛ Devs Hit by Trojanized Claude Code Extension for Cursor

    Anthropic's official Claude Code extension for the Cursor VS Code Marketplace was hijacked and swapped out for a malicious version with a persistent backdoor.

  • 404 Media ☛ Apple Is Entering Its Slop Era

    Flailing from crackgate, Apple announced the launch of a touch-screen laptop, an idea Steve Jobs extensively tested and said “doesn’t work,” an idea Cook once compared to combining a toaster with a refrigerator. What’s next? What if the toaster-refigerator folded? Ternus has been trying to make an 18-inch foldable iPad happen for years. Maybe Apple will solve the screen cracking issues by then. Or maybe Ternus will continue to try to put a hat on a hat.

  • Forza Motorsport Head Resigns Following Turn 10 and Playground Games Merger

    It seems as though nobody's future at Xbox is particularly certain after this year's intense layoff spree at the Microsoft-owned gaming giant, but some game studios have been hit harder by Asha Sharma's Xbox Reset plans. In the late-September restructuring that saw Activision take over the Halo franchise, Microsoft also merged Turn 10 and Playground Games into a single studio, in what many saw as the last nail in the coffin for the Forza Motorsport franchise.

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

    • Pariganaka ☛ Cognitive Offloading: How AI is Rewiring Our Brains

      The Decline of Critical Thinking A recent study from MIT revealed that people who relied heavily on AI assistants for tasks like writing essays showed decreased brain activity in areas crucial for critical thinking and problem-solving. The core issue is not that AI is making us less intelligent, but that it discourages us from engaging deeply with problems. When an AI generates a stunningly complex and convincing answer, many users accept it without question. This over-reliance stops us from considering alternatives and evaluating other possible solutions, effectively dulling our human critical thinking skills.

    • El Constitucional ☛ Deepfake porn: the violence against women created by Artificial Intelligence

      In 2003, when Mark Zuckerberg was still a student at Harvard University. That year he created FaceMash, a website that allowed users to compare photographs of two female students and vote on which one they considered more attractive. To create FaceMash, Zuckerberg used photographs of Harvard students without permission for users to compare and vote on which one they considered more attractive. The page reached more than 22,000 visits in four hours, but was shut down by the university due to the violation of the students' privacy. A few months later, Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook, a platform that allowed students to create profiles and share photographs. Over time, that project would become Facebook, one of the most important social networks in the world.

    • The Atlantic ☛ AI-Generated Articles Are Flooding Academic Journals

      Weak articles now arrive on my desk with fluent prose, plausible-sounding arguments, neatly organized sections, and citations that pass initial AI checks. Only with a deeper look does the AI use become apparent. There are sentences that have all of the trappings of real arguments, but that rarely make sense—like, say, “Algorithmic triage functions less as a clinical tool than as an infrastructure of deferred accountability.” There are citations that refer only to open-access or highly cited articles, because the most popular LLMs can’t readily access paywalled journal articles, so they rely on what’s either free or described at length elsewhere.

      Unfortunately, the scholars submitting papers aren’t the only ones using AI. So are many of their peer reviewers. One recent peer review that my journal received—from a senior scholar—read like an unedited cut-and-paste job from an LLM. The giveaway was that it criticized the authors for failing to cite a particular text—in this case, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—when the paper did indeed cite it.

    • MIT ☛ Inventing ELIZA: how the first chatbot transforms perceptions of AI

      Inventing Eliza is an interdisciplinary book with a team of eight authors, including cognitive scientist Jeff Shrager, literature professor Mark Marino, philosopher Peter Millican, and “software archaeologist” Arthur Schwarz. Weil stressed that the book is “multimedia.” She opened a copy, pointing out the blocks of code — complete with detailed in-line comments — among the pages.

      Inventing Eliza “isn’t exactly light reading,” she explained with a laugh. “You’re not necessarily meant to read the book from beginning to end.” She turned to a new page: another snippet of code, along with ELIZA’s dialogue in large, red font. “Code as literature,” she said.

    • Salon ☛ Elvis borrowed from Black artists. Now his songs’ owners are suing AI

      The lawsuit, filed earlier this month in a San Francisco federal court, accuses Anthropic of engaging in “copyright infringement at a scale never seen before.” The owners of Elvis’ catalog claim that Anthropic used their songs as training data without permission or payment. They make the point that Presley’s music isn’t unique in this regard, alleging that Anthropic has done pretty much the same thing with all manner of recorded music, in blatant defiance of copyright law. Anthropic software could never have created songs that sound so similar to Presley’s out of whole cloth, the plaintiffs say, and instead relied on ill-gotten data.

    • Sancho Panza ☛ AI is a coup by the tasteless

      They can't hear the difference between Suno trash and real music. They can't see the difference between real art and AI style transfer slop. They love to show off shiny demos with no depth. They pay their assistants to buy something impressive to hang on the wall. They will never understand what drives someone to make art without a profit motive. They don't believe that is worth understanding.

      So why are they pushing the taste narrative? Because they want to manufacture the one kind of status they couldn't buy. They have wealth but nobody likes them. They're not cool at parties. They can't understand why she dates that weird guy with no money. They don't get why your work is art so they want to pretend that their work is art.

    • Niels Provos ☛ Price of Insecurity: Why Most Companies Choose To Be Insecure

      We already know how to secure our systems. Deploy security invariants: infrastructure properties that eliminate attack surface and are enforced without humans or AI in the loop. Treat AI agents as insider risk.

    • Pivot to AI ☛ Proton Mail goes full AI slop, Tuta starts going AI slop

      If you’ve ever been in an online discussion of Proton, you’ll have seen fanboys who post like weird shills. These may well have been literally Proton employees, shilling because their boss ordered them to.

      Pivot to AI was calling out Proton’s AI nonsense as far back as July 2024. We got an earful from ardent Proton fans, some of who may not have been literally employees. Who knows? Amy and I look forward to their apologies. Any day now.

      Trusting Proton is trusting an AI-addled CEO who is cutting any corner he can to save a buck. Security is job number three at best. Where do you go now for secure email?

      [...]

      Tuta used dislike for AI as a marketing point for years, they put a no-AI policy on their codebase — and then they went chatbot anyway.

      Now Tuta’s acting surprised their paying customers see this as a rugpull.

    • NPR ☛ Your writing was flagged as AI. What does that actually mean?

      "I was floored because I had not used AI to generate the text," McGraw said. "I'd written it all myself."

      Having spent more than 20 years as a professional nonfiction writer, McGraw said she was angry that her work had been dismissed as AI-written.

  • Social Control Media

    • Cailin O'Connor ☛ It’s now official, tech is the new tobacco

      Yesterday saw reporting on new, internal Meta documents released through the ongoing lawsuit. Meta had been using a favored industry strategy of including their attorneys on any risky internal correspondence so that this correspondence would be protected by attorney-client privilege. The judge called bullshit.

      The resulting documents reveal:

      1, Explicit plans by Meta to discredit psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has been raising alarms about social media and youth mental health.

    • Luke Davis ☛ Break

      I’ve reached another limit. Over the last few weeks, I’ve felt a spike in my growing disdain for social media. This is nothing new as it’s been on and off for years now. When Twitter started going downhill, I left and found a new place on Bluesky but that’s gradually fallen too.

    • Vitalik Buterin ☛ Digital minimalism

      Physical minimalism, however, was an idea that came of age in the 2000s and 2010s and was responding to the challenges and the opportunities of the 2000s and 2010s. I continue to believe that it is valuable - though I recognize some arguments in the other direction, notably that having the right kinds of physical things can make more practical to have more self-sovereignty over your life. But I also think that in the modern era, we need a new kind of minimalism: digital minimalism.

      Digital minimalism is about being intentional about ways that you access digital technology, making each use a conscious choice rather than something that you get sucked into by default. In this post, I will describe some experiments that I've done in this direction.

• Security

  • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

    • Dark Reading ☛ Undead Software Projects Continue to Raise Security Risks

      The risk of domains that are dropped by a legitimate service and then picked up again, or bought by a gray-market or criminal operator — sometimes called "dropcatch domains" — have become an increasing issue as developers have stopped updating, or sold off, legacy software infrastructure. In February 2025, for example, exposure management firm watchTowr discovered 150 Amazon S3 buckets that had been abandoned, so they registered and found that more than 8 million HTTP requests from government and companies came in for resources that had been hosted at those addresses.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • PC Mag ☛ Facial Recognition Could Be Coming to a Starbucks Near You

      In its latest earnings call, Starbucks implied it could be exploring the deployment of facial recognition technology. The company is “exploring experiences that recognize participating customers as they arrive, present personalized digital menus and make payment more effortless," said CEO Brian Niccol.

• Defence/Aggression

  • TruthOut ☛ Billionaires Captured Ohio’s Supreme Court. Now They Want a Fully GOP Court.

    Ohio’s state court election has been a circus of corporate and dark money campaigning.

  • Pro Publica ☛ Five Takeaways From ProPublica’s Midterm Election Coverage

    Our reporters have spent much of this year covering Trump’s efforts to exert more federal control over elections. Here are five takeaways from their reporting.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Military airspace surveillance to get boost, reveal aircraft's position

    The four deployable Ground Controlled Approach Radar Systems will provide air traffic controllers with precise, real-time information on aircraft position relative to the runway centreline and glide path, supporting approaches and recoveries when visual references are limited. This will enable Romanian Air Force personnel to safely manage aircraft movements in demanding operational environments, including at locations where fixed infrastructure may not be available or sufficient.

  • Mike Brock ☛ An Oasis in the Desert

    As long as there are authoritarian states on the planet, no free state is safe. I didn’t come up with that. Franklin Roosevelt said it in several ways during the war, and the plainest version came on Flag Day in 1942, when he closed a radio address with a prayer Stephen Vincent Benét had written for the occasion: “If their freedom is taken away, our freedom is not secure.” A year earlier, at Hyde Park, he had warned that the United States “will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.”

• Transparency/Investigative Reporting

  • The Nation ☛ Why Is the Media Ignoring the Stunning New Trump-Epstein Allegations?

    I have been made to understand that many people do not know about the Judiciary Comittee report—and the fact that five women have accused Trump of sexual assault while in or near the presence of noted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. I have been made to understand that this is because the mainstream media finds former president Barack Obama’s comments about the [checks notes] Cheesecake Factory more worthy of their attention than the current president’s abuse of multiple women.

  • New Republic ☛ Elon Musk Made Off With $16 Billion of Taxpayer Money

    In addition to being a megadonor, Musk is a mega federal contractor, largely through his aerospace company, SpaceX. According to a new report by Democracy Defenders Action, a nonprofit legal group co-founded by Norm Eisen (co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during President Donald Trump’s first impeachment), Musk has “won at least $10 billion in contracts since he left the government.” That was a mere 17 months ago, amid a heavily publicized feud with the president. That $10 billion is actually in addition to the $38 billion that Musk suckled from the federal teat before 2025, and it doesn’t count the $6.3 billion that Musk extracted while he was running Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE was supposed to cut government spending, but instead it ran up a bill of $517 billion, not counting the $6.3 billion in federal contracts Musk pocketed at the same time, nor the $10 billion Musk pocketed later. With enemies like this, who needs friends?

• Environment

  • New Republic ☛ U.S. Oil Industry Reports Blowout Profit as Trump Brags About It

    American households have spent $1,100 on fuel alone since the war began. That’s an extra $147 billion all together, according to Brown University’s Climate Solutions Lab.

    Once again, it is massive corporations that stand to gain the most from violence and conflict.

  • Interesting Engineering ☛ Why can't data centers simply move to the Arctic or beneath the ocean?

    But there is a difference between building in a cold country and building in the Arctic wilderness. The farther north a facility goes, the harder it can be to access reliable electricity, high-capacity fiber-optic networks, skilled workers, and transport infrastructure. A data center may need less energy to cool its servers, but it still needs enormous amounts of electricity to run them.

  • NPR ☛ Plans for a data center threaten scenic wilderness and dark skies in West Virginia

    Light pollution is a common complaint from residents living near data centers. Chapman says the company will use "well-designed" lighting to help minimize the effects of sky glow, in an effort not to jeopardize nearby Blackwater Falls State Park's pursuit of an official dark-sky certification.

  • Energy/Transportation

    • ABC ☛ Billions stolen as Binance targeted in largest cryptocurrency hack in history - ABC News

      [Cryptocurrency] watchers are reporting up to $US6.3 billion ($8.9 billion) in digital funds were stolen this morning, with more than $US3 billion currently frozen.

      It appears the funds were moved after attackers compromised a staff member's laptop.

  • Wildlife/Nature

    • Futurism ☛ Palantir Cofounder Announces Cruel Plan to Breed Thousands of Lab Monkeys for Medical Experiments

      As Forbes reports, Lonsdale’s venture capital firm 8VC has invested $20 million in Safer Human Medicine, a company which is working to breed some 30,000 macaques destined for medical experiments at the hands of America’s freshman bio-tech startups.

    • Digital Camera World ☛ I was at a busy park when I spotted a rare river otter. The only camera gear I had with me was for portraits. I took the photos anyway

      Only wildlife photographers will understand the mix of wild excitement at spotting an unusual animal mixed with the imminent dread of being wildly unprepared for such an encounter. I had a bag full of single-digit megapixel kid cameras – and my Fujifilm X-T4 with the 90mm f/2 R LM WR lens.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Eesti Rahvusringhääling ☛ Is Estonia about to have a surplus of IT specialists?

    Microsoft recently offered voluntary severance packages to around 60,000 employees to cover the costs of AI and data centers. Amazon has cut around 30,000 office jobs in a year, while social media giant Meta has laid off 10 percent of its employees. The International Monetary Fund warned that AI would affect around 40 percent of jobs.

  • Techdirt ☛ The Trump Admin Isn’t Bright Enough To ‘Ban’ Foreign Robots And Drones, And The Press Should Stop Pretending Otherwise

    So instead we get corruption-fueled protectionism run by a bunch of racist, and incompetent clowns who gutted most of our federal regulators, then saddled them with an elaborate new policy ask that’s impossible to implement, even if the admin were competent.

    Which it isn’t.

  • Stars And Stripes ☛ Syrian [cracker] gets US prison time for spree that included takeover of Marine Corps site | Stars and Stripes

    Agha spent more than a decade as a fugitive, according to the Justice Department statement, which does not say when he was caught or extradited to the U.S.

  • TruthOut ☛ AI Techno-Utopianism and Doomsday Threats Distract From Big Tech’s Current Harms

    Absent meaningful government oversight, Big Tech has been left to police itself. Take the moral panic over fake news after the 2016 Presidential Election, when politicians warned that election meddling in the form of disinformation online was harming a defining feature of the U.S. experiment: democracy. One would think such a realization would prompt serious regulation to protect democratic processes. Rather than holding tech companies accountable for the harm caused by online misinformation, lawmakers have routinely refrained from imposing legal liability. Instead, both parties have resorted to back-channel requests for content removal — Democrats following the January 6 insurrection, and Republicans following Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

  • Apollo Global Management Inc ☛ No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector | The Daily Spark

    The bottom line is that the AI story will be decided in the S&P 493, not the Mag 7, and so far, there is no evidence that revenue growth or margins are improving outside the tech sector.

  • The Verge ☛ Here’s why you can’t shake those unhinged political texts

    There’s some good news and some bad news about these messages, says PIRG consumer watchdog director Teresa Murray. “The bad news is that political calls and political texts are exempt from the do-not-call-list rules,” Murray says. “The good news is that the election is next Tuesday, and hopefully within a few days after that, we’ll know what the results are and there won’t be any need to have any texts, or calls, or emails anymore after that.”

  • Wired ☛ I Spent 30 Minutes With Apple’s CEO. Now I Know Why John Ternus Got the Job

    I first met Ternus in 2015, when I spent a day with him at Apple’s Input Design Lab, a testing facility in Cupertino. He’d risen to VP for Mac, iPad, Ecosystem, and Audio Engineering, and he struck me as affable and knowledgeable. (He spent four years right out of college at a virtual reality company, but he’s been at Apple ever since.) The peg to my story at the time was how this unknown manager conducted a Javert-like investigation to fix the weird sound a redesigned mouse made when sliding on a table.

  • Sean Goedecke ☛ Fast and slow ways to improve your reputation

    Of course it’s a vicious cycle. The more you rely on one person, the more reliable they become and the less reliable their colleagues become, since they aren’t getting the relevant experience. It’s not very sustainable. However, the average manager tenure in big tech is only a couple of years. Given that, it’s rational for individual managers to take the long-term risk in exchange for mitigating the short-term risks of project failure.

  • Jan van den Berg ☛ The most successful CEO

    We can discuss about these definitions and classifications. And we can have different opinions about them. Because: what is success? What is value?

  • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

    • The Kyiv Independent ☛ Fact check: Inside Russia's campaign to undermine France's pro-Ukraine candidates

      Viginum, the French agency that counters foreign interference, has already detected hundreds of disinformation operations targeting the vote, whose outcome will have major ramifications for Ukraine and Europe.

      Moscow-linked campaigns have spread false claims that center-left Raphael Glucksmann helped set up torture prisons in Ukraine, that President Emmanuel Macron's protege Gabriel Attal inherited a drug empire, or that the centrist candidate Edouard Philippe suffers from dementia.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • Meduza ☛ Pentagon urges Baltic NATO allies to tone down rhetoric about Russia, citing remarks likening Putin to a ‘rat in a corner’

    At another recent meeting, the Pentagon urged the Estonian delegation to be “measured” in its public statements, according to a source. It was not specified whether Pentagon officials objected to any particular statement.

  • Latvia ☛ Report: U.S. pressures Baltics not to say nasty things about Russia

    One source told Reuters that Colby recently told an official from one of the Baltic states that Russia should not be provoked. As an example of unhelpful rhetoric, Colby reportedly cited public statements by Europeans comparing Russia to a cornered rat.

  • The Revelator ☛ The Hidden Climate Danger of Authoritarian Neighbors

    The signs are not positive. After the recent massive floods on the Nepal-Tibet border, Chinese state media tightly controlled reporting with a focus on rescue attempts, rather than devastation. It also heavily censored unofficial accounts.

    Handheld and security camera footage that showed the destruction at the border appears to have vanished from Chinese media platforms.

  • Nick Heer ☛ Meta Executives Met to ‘Get the Academic Community to Disavow’ Jonathan Haidt

    Two things can be true, though. Meta could have attempted to sway opinion among academics and media — one executive hoped they could “get Gellman to write a take-down piece”, referring presumably to Andrew Gelman, who says he has “never been contacted by anyone at Facebook or Meta regarding Jonathan Haidt or his work”. Even if Meta is not getting positive coverage from this “whisper campaign”, the public knowledge of it will poison the waters of this debate. That is unfortunate because of the second thing that can be true: Haidt’s research might not be as solid as he and others believe. But good luck having that conversation now.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Meduza ☛ Can Russia’s independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta rise from the ashes a third time? Editor Sergey Sokolov discusses what comes next.

    Novaya Gazeta’s editor-in-chief, Sergey Sokolov, has worked at the newspaper since its founding in 1993. In an interview with the outlet Bereg, he spoke about how the staff had weathered the past few years, what the final straw was, and what the journalists plan to do next. Meduza is publishing the interview in full.

  • RFERL ☛ 'They Killed Us': Muckraking Russian Newspaper Novaya Gazeta Announces Closure

    "Independent journalism in the country has faced mounting restrictions and pressure for many years, but these have intensified significantly since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, through increasingly restrictive legislation, tighter State controls and the harassment and persecution of journalists," UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said.

    Founded in the early 1990s and partly funded by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Novaya Gazeta drew renown for its investigative work, eschewing a mass-market tabloid journalism model for serious long-form reporting and dirt-digging.

• Civil Rights / Policing / Accessibility

  • Digital Camera World ☛ He posed as a Bible salesman to sneak his camera into factories. It was risky, but Lewis Hine’s photos eventually helped end child labor in America

    These are some of the photographs taken by Lewis Wickes Hine, a teacher-turned-photographer who spent 1908 to 1924 travelling the United States to document child labor.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘His honesty gave courage to survivors’: domestic abuse charities praise Patrick Stewart’s legacy

    He was moved to speak out about his childhood in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, after his 79-year-old brother said that “what happened had blighted his life”, and was spurred by a conviction that “violence must be controlled. If you fail to raise your hand in protest, you are part of the problem.”

  • David Bushell ☛ Tangled, hire a front-end accessibility expert

    I quiped on Bluesky: “keen eyed? eagle-eyed maybe!” — the new font size is exceedingly tiny. It’s coded as 12px with 16px line height. Tangled is practically unusable for me at this size. It was small before but I could zoom in. The way the new front-end is designed and built doesn’t leave much room for personal remedy. This is not just a subjective opinion there are real accessibility failures here.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Electrocutions, disease and no pay: how workers risk exploitation in Europe’s datacentres

    In dozens of interviews we found evidence of debilitating injuries, squalid living conditions, an unreported infectious outbreak, unpaid wages and exploitative employment practices.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Federal News Network ☛ Air Force kicks off effort to provide free Wi-Fi to Airmen in dorms

    The service has rolled out free, high-speed Wi-Fi to its Airmen living in unaccompanied housing at 28 initial locations.

    The initial rollout includes the U.S. Air Force Academy and installations within Air Education and Training Command.

• Digital Restrictions (DRM)

  • TechRadar ☛ Most data centers and servers on the planet could be vulnerable to dangerous UEFI firmware flaw — here's what we know

    Just like other UEFI vulnerability exploits, this one would be difficult to remediate in the wild. Deploying malicious code before security solutions, or even the operating system for that matter, means that whatever anti-malware or endpoint protection solutions are installed won’t be able to spot, or remove it. Reinstalling the operating system won’t help, and neither would replacing the hard drive.

  • Ars Technica ☛ Code-execution flaw in UEFI firmware affects most servers on planet Earth

    The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-97631, is a memory-corruption flaw in an ICMP component that attackers can exploit to execute malicious code that runs before the operating system and firmware can implement defenses like Secure Boot, which establishes a chain of trust for all code, including the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), loaded during boot. While final payloads delivered by CVE-2026-97631 have no persistence—meaning they run only once—they can give attackers a wide opening to install other payloads that also run each time early in the boot process.

• Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Robert Reich ☛ Halloween Monopoly

    One of the most important initiatives — if Democrats regain control over Congress — will be to revive strong antitrust (anti-monopoly) laws and enforcement.

  • Matt Stoller ☛ Anthropic Isn't Just a Company, It's a Payoff

    The trillion dollar Anthropic IPO will enrich Google and Amazon, who are ostensibly competitors. How does that make sense? It doesn’t, unless Anthropic is four flailing monopolies in a trench coat.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Ex-Meta Researcher Torrented Pirated Books Dataset, Deleted It 'Due to All This Litigation'

      A former Meta researcher has testified that he downloaded an AI training dataset via BitTorrent, including the pirated Books collection. According to various rightsholders, this happened while he worked at the company, and he later deleted his copy "[d]ue to all this litigation." Meta, which admitted training AI models on Books3 but said it didn’t believe it torrented the dataset, disputes the researcher’s account.

    • CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: Formalities (31 Oct 2026)

      It's not often that I find myself on the same side as the US Copyright Office. In fact, I think this is the first time in 25 years that I've found myself cheering on the office's official actions as good for art and good for free expression, taking the side of creative workers over our bosses.

      The source of our miraculous accord: the US Copyright Office's position on AI. The CO has taken the (entirely correct) position that copyright law exists to incentivize human acts of creative expression, which means that only works of human authorship are eligible for copyright.