Monthly Archives: September 2025

Study Directly Links Emissions from Fossil Fuel Producers to Devastating Heatwaves

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A new study directly links hundreds of major heatwaves since 2000 to the emissions from fossil fuel and cement producers. Among its fundings, the researchers conclude that as many as a quarter of all heatwaves since the start of this century would have been “virtually impossible” without emissions from any of the world’s 14 largest fossil fuel and cement producers.

The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, shows that greenhouse gas emissions from 180 of the world’s biggest cement, oil, and gas producers have significantly contributed to climate change over the last two decades.

They linked the emissions to 213 heatwaves, finding the pollution made the extreme heat more likely and intense. Of those 213 events, 53 were made 10,000 times more likely as a result of the emissions, according to the researchers.

The fight for climate accountability

The findings could bolster legal efforts to hold the world’s biggest polluters responsible for the consequences of their emissions, experts said. In July, the International Court of Justice ruled that states that fail to prevent climate harm may have to pay compensation, and in May, a German high court ruled that major emitters can be held liable for climate impacts. And some U.S. states have passed similar laws.

Still, despite dozens of lawsuits filed since 2004, no court has penalized emitters for causing climate change, researchers wrote in an accompanying viewpoint.

[…]

Quilcaille and his colleagues assessed the historical greenhouse gas emissions from 180 “carbon majors,” a group that includes fossil fuel companies, state-owned entities, and fossil fuel and cement emissions produced by nation states.

In all, these sources were responsible for nearly 57% of historical global emissions between 1850 and 2023, the analysis revealed.

The researchers then used climate models to compare global temperature trends in a world with greenhouse gas emissions to temperatures in a world without those emissions. Then, they estimated the impact of human-driven global warming on 213 heatwaves recorded between 2000 and 2023, finding direct links to top emitters and these extreme weather events.

“For a while, it was argued that any individual contributor to climate change was making too small or too diffuse a contribution to ever be linked to any particular impact. And this emerging science, both this paper and others, is showing that that’s not true,” Chris Callahan, a climate scientist at Indiana University who was not involved in the study, told The Associated Press.

Source: Study Directly Links Emissions from Fossil Fuel Producers to Devastating Heatwaves

Albania appoints AI bot as minister to tackle corruption

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PRISTINA – A new minister in Albania charged to handle public procurement will be impervious to bribes, threats, or attempts to curry favour.

That is because Diella, as she is called, is an AI-generated bot.

Prime Minister Edi Rama, who is about to begin his fourth term, said on Sept 11 that Diella, which means “sun” in Albanian, will manage and award all public tenders in which the government contracts private companies for various projects.

“Diella is the first Cabinet member who isn’t physically present, but is virtually created by AI,” Mr Rama said during a speech unveiling his new Cabinet. She will help make Albania “a country where public tenders are 100 per cent free of corruption”.

The awarding of such contracts has long been a source of corruption scandals in Albania, a Balkan country that experts say is a hub for gangs seeking to launder their money from trafficking drugs and weapons across the world, and where graft has reached the corridors of power.

That image has complicated Albania’s accession to the European Union, which Mr Rama wants to achieve by 2030 but which political analysts say is ambitious.

The government did not provide details of what human oversight there might be for Diella, or address risks that someone could manipulate the artificial intelligence bot.

[…]

Source: Albania appoints AI bot as minister to tackle corruption | The Straits Times

Japanese Warship Fires Railgun At Target Vessel For The First Time

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Japan’s Acquisition Technology & Logistics Agency (ATLA) has released new pictures from testing of a prototype electromagnetic railgun aboard the testbed warship JS Asuka earlier this year. ATLA also asserts that it is the first time anyone has successfully fired a ship-mounted railgun at an actual target vessel. Japan continues to push ahead with railgun development, a technology the U.S. Navy notably halted work on in the early 2020s, despite showing promise, due to significant technological hurdles.

JS Asuka, a one-of-its-kind dedicated experimental vessel with a 6,200-ton-displacement belonging to the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF), was first spotted with the railgun in a turret installed on its stern flight deck in April, as TWZ reported on at the time. Additional views of the ship in this configuration emerged afterward.

A picture ATLA released yesterday of the turreted railgun installed on JS Asuka‘s flight deck earlier this year. ATLA
A picture of JS Asuka from around the time of the railgun testing that ATLA also released yesterday. White shipping containers associated with the weapon mounted on the ship’s stern flight deck are visible. ATLA
An earlier picture offering a clearer view of the railgun turret installed on JS Asuka’s stern flight deck. @HNlEHupY4Nr6hRM

“ATLA conducted the Ship-board Railgun Shooting Test from June to early July this year with the support of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force,” according to a post yesterday on the agency’s official Instagram page. “It’s the first time that a ship-mounted railgun was successfully fired at a real ship.”

One of the pictures accompanying ATLA’s Instagram post, seen at the top of this story, which was also shared on the agency’s other social media accounts, shows the railgun being fired. What looks to be a radar array and an electro-optical and/or infrared camera system are also seen in the image on a separate turret.

A close-up of what looks to be a turret with a radar array and an electro-optical and/or infrared camera system seen in the new picture of the railgun being test fired. ATLA

Another, seen below, shows a tug-like ship in the crosshairs of a targeting system. Additional pictures of the tug have now also emerged clearly showing target boards on the port and starboard sides of its funnel, as well as one facing the stern.

ATLA

So far, ATLA has not released any imagery of target vessels actually being struck by projectiles fired from the railgun mounted on Asuka. The agency says more details will be provided at its upcoming Defense Technology Symposium in November.

Back in 2023, ATLA said it had conducted the first-ever successful firing of a railgun from any ship. The agency did not name the vessel used in those tests.

[…]

Source: Japanese Warship Fires Railgun At Target Vessel For The First Time

We beat Chat Control but the fight isn’t over – another surveillance law that mandates companies to save user data for Europol is making its way right now and there is less than 24 hours to give the EU feedback!

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Please follow this link to the questionnaire and help save our future – otherwise total surveillance like never seen before will strip you of every privacy and later fundamental rights you have as a EU citizen

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Information

The previous data retention law was declared illegal in 2014 by CJEU (EU’s highest court) for being mass surveillance and violating human rights.

Since most EU states refused to follow the court order and the EU commission refused to enforce it, CJEU recently caved in to political pressure and changed their stance on mass surveillance, making it legal.

And that instantly spawned this data retention law that is more far fetching than the original, that was deemed illegal. Here you can read the entire plan that EU is following. Briefly:

they want to sanction unlicensed messaging apps, hosting services and websites that don’t spy on users (and impose criminal penalties)

mandatory data retention, all your online activity must be tied to your identity

end of privacy friendly VPN’s and other services

cooperate with hardware manufacturers to ensure lawful access by design (backdoors for phones and computers)

prison for everybody who doesn’t comply

If you don’t know what the best options for some questions are, privacy wise, check out this answering guide by Edri(european digital rights organization)

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1neecov/we_beat_chat_control_but_the_fight_isnt_over/

Don’t forget the politicians when you look at who fucked up tech

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The epigram for my forthcoming book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It is a quote from Ed Zitron: “I hate them for what they’ve done to the computer” (Ed even recorded a little cameo of this for the audiobook):

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/enshittification-the-drm-free-audiobook/

Ed’s a smart and passionate guy, and this was definitely the quote to sum up the rage I felt as I wrote the book. Ed’s got a whole theory of who “they” are and “what they did to the computer,” which he calls “the Rot Economy”:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-rot-economy/

The Rot Economy describes the ideology of bosses, starting with monsters like GE’s Jack Welch, who financialized companies, optimizing them for making short term cash gains for investors, at the expense of their workers, their customers, their products and services, and, ultimately, their long-term health.

For Ed, these bosses (especially tech bosses) are the sociopaths who destroyed “the computer” (a stand-in for tech more generally). I don’t disagree at all. The there is a direct, undeniable line from the ideas and conduct of tech bosses and the tech hellscape we live in today. A good read on this subject is Anil Dash’s scorching post from yesterday, “How Tim Cook sold out Steve Jobs”:

https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

I find the Rot Economy hypothesis entirely compelling, but also, incomplete. Ed’s explaining why we should hate the players and why we should hate the game, but the enshittification thesis goes even further and explains why we need to hate the umpires – the policymakers, enforcers, economists and legal theorists who created the enshittogenic environment in which the Rot Economy took hold.

Some early reviews of Enshittification have expressed dissatisfaction with book’s “solutions” section, complaining that all the solutions are policy oriented, and there’s nothing suggested for us to do in our capacity as individual consumers:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

Those criticisms are correct: there is nothing we can do as individual consumers. Agonizing about your consumption choices will not fight enshittification any more than conscientiously sorting your recycling will end the climate emergency. Enshittification isn’t caused by “lazy consumers” who choose “convenience” or are “too cheap to pay for online services”:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/12/give-me-convenience/#or-give-me-death

The wellspring of enshittification isn’t poor consumption choices, it’s poor policy choices. The reason monsters are able to destroy our online lives isn’t their personal moral failings, it’s the system that rewards predatory, deceptive and unfair commercial practices and elevates their foremost practitioners to positions of power within firms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

And here’s the kicker: we know where those policy choices came from! The people who made these policy choices did so in living memory. They were warned at the time about the foreseeable consequences of their choices. They made those choices anyway. They faced zero consequences for doing so, even after every one of the prophesied horrors came to pass. Not only were they spared consequences for their actions, but they prospered as a result – they are revered as statesmen, lawyers, scholars and titans of economics.

As Trashfuture showrunner Riley Quinn often says, the curse of being a leftist is that you have object permanence – you actually remember the stuff that happened and how it happened. You don’t live in an eternal now that has no causal relationship to the past.

It’s not enough to hate the player, nor the game – we’ve got to remember the crooked umps who rigged the match. We have to say their names, because that’s how we root out their terrible ideas and ensure that our policy interventions make real change. If Elon Musk OD’ed on ketamine tomorrow, there’d be ten Big Balls who’d tear each others’ throats out in the ensuing succession fight, and the next guy would be just as stupid, racist, and authoritarian. Musk, Cook, Zuck, Pichai, Nadella, Larry Ellison – they’re just filling the monster-shaped holes that policy-makers installed in our society.

Start with Robert Bork, the jurist who championed the “consumer welfare” theory of antitrust, which promotes monopolies as efficient and counsels policymakers not to punish companies that take over markets, because the only way to really dominate a market is to be so good that everyone chooses your products and services. Wouldn’t it just be perverse to use public funds to shut down the public’s favorite companies? Bork was a virulent racist, a Nixonite criminal, and he was dead wrong about the law and the economics of monopoly:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

Bork’s legacy of pro-monopoly advocacy is, unsurprisingly, monopolies. Monopolies that make everything more expensive and worse: from athletic shoes to microchips, glass bottles to pharmaceuticals, pro wrestling to eyeglasses:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

These monopolies did not arise because of the iron laws of economics. They are not the product of the great forces of history. They are the direct and undeniable consequence of Robert Bork convincing the world’s governments to embrace his bullshit, pro-monopoly policies.

Satan took Bork to hell in 2012, but you know who’s still with us? Bruce Lehman. Bruce Lehman was Bill Clinton’s copyright czar, the man who, in his own words, “did an end-run around Congress” by getting an UN treaty passed that obliged its signatories to ban reverse engineering:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16145640-ctrl-ctrl-ctrl

Lehman’s used the treaty to get Congress to pass the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and section 1201 of the DMCA made it a felony to break DRM. Bruce Lehman is why farmers can’t fix their own tractors, hospitals can’t fix their own ventilators, and your mechanic can’t fix your car. He’s why, when the manufacturer of your artificial eyes bricks a computer that is permanently wired to your nervous system, no one else can revive it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/12/unsafe-at-any-speed/

Bruce Lehman is why you can’t use the apps of your choosing on your phone or games console. He’s why we can’t preserve beloved old video games. He’s why Apple and Google get to steal 30 cents out of every dollar you send to a performer, software author, or creator through an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/01/its-not-the-crime/#its-the-coverup

Yeah, Tim Cook is a venal billionaire who owes his wealth to the Chinese sweatshops of iPhone City, where they had to install suicide nets to catch the workers who’d rather end it all than work another day for Tim Apple, but Tim Cook’s power over those workers is owed to Bruce Lehman and Robert Bork.

Then there’s the ISP sector, whose Net Neutrality violations and underinvestment mean that people who live in the country where the internet was invented have some of the slowest, most expensive internet in the world. Big ISP bosses are some of the worst people on Earth. Take Thomas Rutledge, who CEO of Charter/Spectrum when covid broke out. At the time, Rutledge was America’s highest-paid CEO. He dictated that his back-office staff could not work from home (imagine a telco boss who doesn’t believe in telework!), and those back-offices all turned into super-spreader sites. Rutledge’s field workers – the people who came to our homes and upgraded our internet so we could work from home – did not get PPE or danger pay. Instead, they got vouchers exclusively redeemable at restaurants that had shut down during the pandemic:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/22/filternet/#thomas-rutledge-murderer

Fuck Thomas Rutledge and may his name be a curse forever. But the reason Thomas Rutledge – and all the other terrible telco bosses – were able to reap millions by supplying us with dogshit internet while literally murdering their employees was that Trump’s FCC chairman, an ex-Verizon lawyer named Ajit Pai, let them get away with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/12/ajit-pai/#pai

Ajit Pai engaged in some of the most flagrant cheating ever seen in American regulation (prior to Jan 20, 2025, at least). When he decided to kill Net Neutrality, he accepted obviously fraudulent comments into the official record, including one million identical comments from @pornhub.com email addresses, as well as millions of comments whose return addresses were taken from darknet data-dumps, including the email addresses of dead people and of sitting US senators who supported Net Neutrality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

Pai – and his co-conspirators – are the umps who rigged the game. Hate Thomas Rutledge to be sure, but to prevent people like Rutledge from gaining power over your digital life in future, you must remember Ajit Pai with the special form of white-hot rage that keeps people like him from ever making policy decisions again.

Then there’s Canada’s hall of shame, which is full of monsters. Two of my least favorite are James Moore and Tony Clement, who, as ministers under Stephen Harper, rammed through a Canadian version of the DMCA, 2012’s Bill C-11, despite their own consultation, which found that Canadians overwhelmingly rejected the idea:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Clement (now a disgraced sex-pest) and Moore (still accepted into polite society as a corporate lawyer) are the reason that Canada’s Right to Repair and interop laws are dead on arrival. They’re also why Canada can’t retaliate against Trump’s tariffs by jailbreaking US products, making everything cheaper for Canadians and birthing new, global Canadian tech businesses:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

In Europe, there’s Axel Voss, the man behind 2019’s “filternet” proposal, which requires tech platforms to spend hundreds of millions of euros for copyright filters that use AI to process everything posted to the public internet in Europe and block anything the AI thinks is “copyrighted”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/03/26/article-13-will-wreck-the-internet-because-swedish-meps-accidentally-pushed-the-wrong-voting-button/

For years, Voss maintained that none of this was true, that there would be no filters, and dismissed his critics as hysterical fools:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/04/03/after-months-of-insisting-that-article13-doesnt-require-filters-top-eu-commissioner-says-article-13-requires-filters/

But then, after his law passed, he admitted he “didn’t know what he was voting for”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/14/father-of-the-catastrophic-copyright-directive-reveals-he-didnt-know-what-he-was-voting-for/

Fuck the media lobbyists who spent hundreds of millions of euros to push this catastrophic law through:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/12/13/clash-of-the-corporate-titans-whos-spending-what-in-europes-copyright-directive-battle/

But especially and forever, fuck Axel Voss, the policymaker who helped turn those corporate bribes into policy.

Ed Zitron is right to hate the people who implement the Rot Economy for what they did to the computer. But those people are only doing what policymakers let them do. Corporate monsters thrive in an enshittogenic environment.

But political monsters are the ones create that enshittogenic environment. They’re the ones who are terraforming our planet to sideline human life and replace it with the immortal colony organisms we call “limited liability corporations.”

Source: Pluralistic: Hate the player AND the game (10 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

My blue is your blue: different people’s brains process colours in the same way

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Is the colour you see the same as what I see? It’s a question that has puzzled both philosophers and neuroscientists for decades, but has proved notoriously difficult to answer.

Now, a study that recorded the brain activity of 15 participants suggests that colours are represented and processed in the same way across different people. The findings were published in the Journal of Neuroscience on 8 September1.

“Now we know that when you see red or green or whatever colour, that it activates your brain very similarly to my brain,” says study co-author Andreas Bartels, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. “Even at a very low level, things are represented similarly across different brains, and that is a fundamentally new discovery.”

[…]

The pair used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare activity in the brains of a group of people while they viewed different colours.

Source: My blue is your blue: different people’s brains process colours in the same way

They could then predict what colour people were seeing based on the scans.

Launch Your Name Around Moon in 2026 on NASA’s Artemis II Mission

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NASA is inviting the public to join the agency’s Artemis II test flight as four astronauts venture around the Moon and back to test systems and hardware needed for deep space exploration. As part of the agency’s “Send Your Name with Artemis II” effort, anyone can claim their spot by signing up before Jan. 21.

Participants will launch their name aboard the Orion spacecraft and SLS (Space Launch System) rocket alongside NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen.

“Artemis II is a key test flight in our effort to return humans to the Moon’s surface and build toward future missions to Mars, and it’s also an opportunity to inspire people across the globe and to give them an opportunity to follow along as we lead the way in human exploration deeper into space,” said Lori Glaze, acting associate administrator, Exploration Systems Development Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

The collected names will be put on an SD card loaded aboard Orion before launch. In return, participants can download a boarding pass with their name on it as a collectable.

To add your name and receive an English-language boarding pass, visit: 

https://go.nasa.gov/artemisnames
 

To add your name and receive a Spanish-language boarding pass, visit:

https://go.nasa.gov/TuNombreArtemis

 
As part of a Golden Age of innovation and exploration, the approximately 10-day Artemis II test flight, launching no later than April 2026, is the first crewed flight under NASA’s Artemis campaign. It is another step toward new U.S.-crewed missions on the Moon’s surface that will help the agency prepare to send the first astronauts – Americans – to Mars.

To learn more about the mission visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission/artemis-ii/

Source: Launch Your Name Around Moon in 2026 on NASA’s Artemis II Mission  – NASA

Plex tells users to reset passwords after new data breach. Again.

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Popular media streaming platform Plex has informed its users of yet another data breach, urging them to change their passwords as soon as possible. 

Criminals often target media streaming platforms because they deal with sensitive information. Plex has fallen victim to a similar intrusion in the past, and a couple of years ago went through a very similar situation.

Now, Plex has revealed that an unauthorized third party gained access to one of its databases, exposing information on a limited number of customers.

The compromised data may include email addresses, usernames, securely hashed passwords, and authentication information. The company underlines that no credit card information has been affected because that type of information is not stored on those kinds of servers.

It’s a relief that the passwords are hashed because it means they are not readable, but it’s still a good idea to change the Plex passwords as quickly as possible.

Containment and response

 

According to Plex, the breach was contained quickly, and the method the attacker used was identified and addressed.

“We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this situation may cause you. We take pride in our security systems, which helped us quickly detect this incident, and we want to assure you that we are working swiftly to prevent potential future incidents from occurring,” said the company.

Plex has outlined two actions users must take, depending on their sign-in methods:

Password-based login: Users have to reset their Plex account password immediately via ‘https://plex.tv/reset’. The company recommends checking the option to “Sign out connected devices after password change,” which will log out all devices and require reauthentication with the new password.

SSO login: Users should log out of all active sessions through ‘https://plex.tv/security’ and sign back in as normal.

Plex is also strongly encouraging users to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) for added protection if they haven’t already done so.

Source: Plex tells users to reset passwords after new data breach

Maker of remote working software Teams orders employees back to office

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Microsoft is rolling out a new return-to-office policy that will see first Redmond, then US, and then global staff getting back on-prem at least three days a week.

“How we work has forever changed,” Microsoft’s Chief People Officer Amy Coleman told staff in a blog post. And that change will start in Redmond by the end of February. If you work within a 50-mile radius of the office, Microsoft has already emailed you if it expects your attendance, she said.

The changes will spread across the rest of America and then internationally on an unspecified timescale. We’ve asked for clarification and will update this article if it comes in.

Coleman’s note looked to get ahead of possible criticisms that mandatory RTO policies serve as a backdoor way to reduce headcount, as employees who’d moved far away from offices to take advantage of companies’ remote work policies may find it difficult or unpalatable to uproot again.

“Importantly, this update is not about reducing headcount,” she wrote. “It’s about working together in a way that enables us to meet our customers’ needs.”

[…]

Source: Microsoft employees ordered back to office • The Register

So… Microsoft Teams doesn’t work very well? Or is it just American Micromanagement at its best?

Judge rejects Anthropic’s record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement for AI book piracy lawsuit because it looks like a publisher and lawyer grab

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Judge William Alsup has rejected the record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement Anthropic has agreed to for a piracy lawsuit filed by writers. According to Bloomberg Law, the federal judge is concerned that the class lawyers struck a deal that will be forced “down the throat of authors.” Alsup reportedly felt misled by the deal and said it was “nowhere close to complete.” In his order, he said he was “disappointed that counsel have left important questions to be answered in the future,” including the list of works involved in the case, the list of authors, the process of notifying members of the class and the claim form class members can use to get their part of the settlement.

If you’ll recall, the plaintiffs sued Anthropic over the company’s use of pirated copies of their works to train its large language models. Around 500,000 authors are involved in the lawsuit, and they’re expected to receive $3,000 per work. “This landmark settlement far surpasses any other known copyright recovery,” one of the lawyers representing the authors said in a statement. However, Alsup had an “uneasy feeling about hangers on with all [that] money on the table.” He explained that class members “get the shaft” in a lot of class actions once the monetary settlement has been established and lawyers stopped caring.

Alsup told the lawyers that they must give the class members “very good notice” about the settlement and design a claim form that gives them the choice to opt in or out. They also have to ensure that Anthropic cannot be sued for the same issue in the future. The judge gave the lawyers until September 15 to submit a final list of works involved in the lawsuit. He also wrote in his order that the works list, class members list and the claim form all have to be examined and approved by the court by October 10 before he grants the settlement his preliminary approval.

Source: Judge rejects Anthropic’s record-breaking $1.5 billion settlement for AI copyright lawsuit

Of course this was only a small part of the actual lawsuit, which sought to establish that copyright precluded AIs from reading books without permission. This was struck down by the judge. The idiocy of Anthropic in using pirated books to train their AI beggars belief, but that is what they were punished for.

The reason the copyright lawsuit was put up was so that the copyright holders (the publishers, not the actual writers of the books – although that is what these publishers are telling you) could win megabucks. Now that the settlement has gone for piracy, the publishers and lawyers still want the megabucks, without sharing it with the actual writers. The judge says no.

Scientists figure out why the flu is deadly for older patients

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Scientists have discovered why older people are more likely to suffer severely from the flu, and can now use their findings to address this risk.

In a new study, which is published in PNAS, experts discovered that older people produce a glycosylated protein called apoplipoprotein D (ApoD), which is involved in lipid metabolism and inflammation, at much higher levels than in younger people. This has the effect of reducing the patient’s ability to resist virus infection, resulting in a more serious disease outcome.

The team established that highly elevated ApoD production with age in the lung drives extensive tissue damage during infection to reduce the protective antiviral type I interferon response.

[…]

They identified ApoD as an age-related cell factor that impairs the activation of the immune system’s antiviral response to influenza virus infection by causing extensive breakdown of mitochondria (mitophagy) resulting in greater production of virus and lung damage during infection. Mitochondria are essential for cellular production of energy and for induction of protective interferons.

ApoD is therefore a target for therapeutic intervention to protect against severe influenza virus infection in the elderly which would have a major impact on reducing morbidity and mortality in the aging population.

[…]

Source: Why the flu turns deadly for older adults, and how scientists found the cause | ScienceDaily

Microsoft software reselling dispute heads back to UK court

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Microsoft’s tussle with UK-based reseller ValueLicensing over the sale of secondhand licenses returns to the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal this week, with the Windows behemoth now claiming that selling pre-owned Office and Windows software is unlawful.

ValueLicensing’s representatives say this week’s trial – due to start tomorrow – will “address whether the entire pre-owned license market was lawful – with Microsoft arguing that it was not lawful to resell pre-owned Office and Windows software at all.”

This stems from a May 2025 agreement that the scope of copyright issues now central to Microsoft’s defense needs to be determined.

The case has the potential to blow a hole in the European reselling market. According to ValueLicensing, “if Microsoft’s argument is correct, it would mean that the entire resale market in Europe should not exist.”

The ValueLicensing case has rumbled on for years, beginning with allegations that Microsoft stifled the supply of pre-owned licenses by offering attractive subscription deals to public and private sector organizations in return for the surrender of perpetual licenses. ValueLicensing (and companies like it) operated a business model based on organizations selling their perpetual licenses and resellers selling them on to customers at a discount.

ValueLicensing alleged that Microsoft added clauses to customer contracts aimed at restricting the resale of perpetual licenses. In return for accepting those contracts, customers were given a discount.

Judging by the case so far [PDF], it appears that this practice was a policy at Microsoft.

According to ValueLicensing, Microsoft’s allegedly anti-competitive antics and attempts to eliminate the secondhand software license market have cost it £270 million in lost profits.

Microsoft’s argument [PDF] is that it owns the copyright to the non-program bits of Office – the graphical user interface, for example – to which rules around software reselling (the European Software Directive) do not apply.

ValueLicensing boss Jonathan Horley noted the timing of the copyright claim. “It’s a remarkable coincidence that their defense against ValueLicensing has changed so dramatically from being a defense of ‘we didn’t do it’ to a defense of ‘the market should never have existed,'” he said.

Microsoft’s contention is not without precedent. The Tom Kabinet judgment drew a line between the secondary market for software programs and e-books. Reselling a software program isn’t a problem, while reselling something like an e-book is. Microsoft’s argument for its software appears to be similar.

The tech giant is facing other actions before the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal. Alexander Wolfson has brought a similar claim against Microsoft, potentially worth billions, regarding the purchase of certain licenses for specific products. Dr Maria Luisa Stasi has brought another regarding the cost of running Microsoft software on platforms like AWS and GCP compared to Azure.

Source: Microsoft software reselling dispute heads back to UK court • The Register

So if Microsoft wins, it means you don’t actually own a copy of the software you paid for.

Yes, Google Meet Is Down

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If you’re trying to use Google Meet and failing, it’s not your fault. Google is reportedly investigating the outage, and DownDetector has seen tens of thousands or reports about Google Meet not working properly since around 1:25 p.m. ET.

“We are experiencing an issue with Google Meet beginning at Monday, 2025-09-08 10:25 PDT,” Google reported on its Workspace updates page.

“Our engineering team continues to investigate the issue. We will provide an update by Monday, 2025-09-08 11:30 PDT with current details,” the tech giant explained.

There is no reportedly workaround, at least according to the company.

[…]

Source: Yes, Google Meet Is Down

ASML invests €1.3B to become the largest shareholder in Nvidia-backed Mistral AI

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Mistral AI, the Paris-based startup rapidly establishing itself as Europe’s leading AI company, has secured a €1.3 billion investment from Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML in its ongoing Series C funding round. This round, totalling approximately €1.7 billion, values Mistral at around €14 billion, with ASML emerging as the largest shareholder in the company.

With Google and Amazon funnelling billions into their AI ventures, this move places ASML as a critical player in the global semiconductor industry. Other investors in Mistral include Nvidia, Microsoft, Andreessen Horowitz, and General Catalyst. Mistral’s revenue has surged from €10 million in 2023 to €60 million by 2025, fueled by enterprise adoption and strategic partnerships.

[…]

Source: ASML invests €1.3B to become the largest shareholder in Nvidia-backed Mistral AI — TFN

Smartphone Sensors Unlocked: Turn Your Phone Into A Physics Lab

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These days, most of us have a smartphone. They are so commonplace that we rarely stop to consider how amazing they truly are. The open-source project Phyphox has provided easy access to your phone’s sensors for over a decade. We featured it years ago, and the Phyphox team continues to update this versatile application.

Phyphox is designed to use your phone as a sensor for physics experiments, offering a list of prebuilt experiments created by others that you can try yourself. But that’s not all—this app provides access to the many sensors built into your phone. Unlike many applications that access these sensors, Phyphox is open-source, with all its code available on its GitHub page.

The available sensors depend on your smartphone, but you can typically access readings from accelerometers, GPS, gyroscopes, magnetometers, barometers, microphones, cameras, and more. The app includes clever prebuilt experiments, like measuring an elevator’s speed using your phone’s barometer or determining a color’s HSV value with the camera. Beyond phone sensors, the Phyphox team has added support for Arduino BLE devices, enabling you to collect and graph telemetry from your Arduino projects in a centralized hub.

Thanks [Alfius] for sharing this versatile application that unlocks a myriad of uses for your phone’s sensors. You can use a phone for so many things. Really.

 

Source: Smartphone Sensors Unlocked: Turn Your Phone Into A Physics Lab | Hackaday

Russian Drones Repeatedly Crossing into NATO’s Eastern Flank. No reaction from NATO.

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Repeated drone incursions into Polish airspace show that Russia and Belarus are testing NATO and EU defenses. These incidents are not isolated but part of a wider hybrid warfare strategy that combines military pressure, information operations, and electronic warfare. The challenge for the Alliance is how to respond effectively without escalating into open conflict.

In recent nights, Polish airspace has been violated twice by unmanned aerial vehicles. Small, cheap, and difficult to detect, drones are ideal tools for hybrid warfare. Moscow and Minsk use them not to strike directly but to probe reactions, overload defense systems, and accustom societies to constant pressure. Each new violation risks becoming „the new normal” on NATO’s eastern border.

These incursions are not random. They are often synchronized with Russian missile barrages against Ukraine, creating a double layer of military and psychological impact. By observing how quickly Poland and NATO allies respond, and how coherent the communication between government and armed forces is, Moscow draws conclusions about the Alliance’s readiness. If the reaction is slow or chaotic, the pressure seems to work. If NATO fighters, such as Dutch F-35s currently stationed in Poland, are deployed, the costs of escalation for Russia increase.

The technical challenge is formidable. Small, low-flying drones evade traditional radars and are too cheap to be countered with expensive missiles like Patriot or CAMM-ER. A saturation scenario—dozens of drones attacking simultaneously—could overload command systems and force difficult prioritization between protecting critical infrastructure and intercepting minor threats. This is why layered defense, from Pilica+ and Piorun to Patriot, must be complemented with cheaper effectors such as programmable ammunition for AG-35 cannons and expanded radar coverage in the east.

[…]

Source: Russian Drones Challenge NATO’s Eastern Flank

Anything that crosses over the border should be intercepted, warned via radio and then shot down. The only language Putin understands is force, as he has shown with his opportunistic invasions time and again.

Critical, make-me-super-user SAP S/4HANA bug being exploited

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A critical code-injection bug in SAP S/4HANA that allows low-privileged attackers to take over your SAP system is being actively exploited, according to security researchers.

SAP issued a patch for the 9.9-rated flaw in August. It is tracked as CVE-2025-42957, and it affects both private cloud and on-premises versions.

According to SecurityBridge Threat Research Labs, which originally spotted and disclosed the vulnerability to SAP,  the team “verified actual abuse of this vulnerability.” It doesn’t appear to be widespread (yet), but the consequences of this flaw are especially severe.

“For example, SecurityBridge’s team demonstrated in a lab environment how an attacker could create a new SAP superuser account (with SAP_ALL privileges) and directly manipulate critical business data,” the researchers said in a Thursday write-up alongside a video demo of the exploit.

It’s low-complexity to exploit. The bug enables a user to inject arbitrary ABAP code into the system, thus bypassing authorization checks and essentially creating a backdoor that allows full system compromise, data theft, and operational disruption. In other words: it’s effectively game over.

[…]

Source: Critical, make-me-super-user SAP S/4HANA bug being exploited • The Register

Europe must reach for the bazooka‚ or be humiliated

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Last week, Donald Trump issued a stark warning: European states that enforce EU law against American tech giants risk trade tariffs. This is not a negotiation tactic. It is an assertion of power‚ a demand that Europe surrender its legal order to foreign influence.

This is not a negotiation. It is a test.

Europe possesses a “trade bazooka” designed for this precise scenario. The Anti-Coercion Instrument is designed to respond to the kind of threats and actions that Trump now alludes to. To delay its use is to invite further encroachments. 

But the current crisis is not merely economic, nor is it confined to tariffs and subsidies. It is a confrontation over the very foundations of democratic governance: the rule of law, the capacity of nations to govern themselves without foreign interference, and the protection of our children in the digital age.   

The U.S. understands that power is not only measured in military might or economic output, but also in control over information and infrastructure and the conditions under which democracy can survive. By threatening sanctions for upholding European law, Washington is testing whether Europe will tolerate coercion in the name of the alliance.

We should now know the risk of inaction. A decade ago, the General Data Protection Regulation was enacted to put power over data back into the hands of citizens. But Ireland, as a jurisdiction of choice for multinationals, became a conduit for regulatory evasion. And the European Commission turned a blind eye.

Over the same period, our fragmented single market and the Commission’s narrow view of competition enforcement handed our digital market to foreign firms. The result is that we became dependent on foreign technology firms, most of them American, which are now accustomed to operating with impunity. They shape our public discourse and influence our elections.   

Consequently, authoritarianism has risen again in our midst. Proxies who serve foreign interests before their own are algorithmically pushed into people’s feeds by giant American and Chinese social media companies. Those same algorithms push self-harm and suicide onto our children’s feeds. And yet we hesitate. 

If we do not stand by our laws then we will not merely lose a trade dispute. We will lose the authority to govern ourselves. We will signal that democratic sovereignty can be traded for security promises that may not be kept. We will expose ourselves to unrelenting assault by algorithms directed to impose home-grown authoritarians upon our people.  

President von der Leyen committed to keeping inviolate Europe’s rules on digital media and market power in an interview in April. She must now go further and actively protect those rules. Speaking last week, Chancellor Merz said Europe will not allow itself to be pressured. Those words must be backed up by action.  

But the signs are not good. Take the Commission’s competition case against Google, in which the EU executive has not only backed down from its plan to break up Google’s ad business by instead issuing a mere fine, it has even dropped the fine for fear of offending Trump. The case concerns market violations that have been proven against Google in a U.S. court. Such timidity undermines the hope of a level playing field in the relationship with our American partners.

We are not blind to the risks of confrontation with Donald Trump. But if we do not stand by our laws and use the Anti-Coercion instrument to defend them, then we will not merely lose a trade dispute. We will lose the authority to govern ourselves.  

Source: Europe must reach for the bazooka‚ or be humiliated – Euractiv

Did Apple do an Anthropic? Faces lawsuit over alleged use of pirated books for AI training

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Two authors have filed a lawsuit against Apple, accusing the company of infringing on their copyright by using their books to train its artificial intelligence model without their consent. The plaintiffs, Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, claimed that Apple used a dataset of pirated copyrighted books that include their works for AI training. They said in their complaint that Applebot, the company’s scraper, can “reach ‘shadow libraries'” made up of unlicensed copyrighted books, including (on information) their own. The lawsuit is currently seeking class action status, due to the sheer number of books and authors found in shadow libraries.

The main plaintiffs for the lawsuit are Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson, both of whom have multiple books under their names. They said that Apple, one of the biggest companies in the world, did not attempt to pay them for “their contributions to [the] potentially lucrative venture.”

[…]

Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, recently agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action piracy complaint also brought by authors. Similar to this case, the writers also accused the company of taking pirated books from online libraries to train its AI technology. The 500,000 authors involved in the case will reportedly get $3,000 per work.

Source: Apple faces lawsuit over alleged use of pirated books for AI training

Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website

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Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai stood smiling in a leafy-green California garden in September 2020 and declared that the IT behemoth was entering the “most ambitious decade yet” in its climate action.

“Today, I’m proud to announce that we intend to be the first major company to operate carbon free — 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year,” he said, in a video announcement at the time.

Pichai added that he knew the “road ahead would not be easy,” but Google “aimed to prove that a carbon-free future is both possible and achievable fast enough to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change.”

Five years on, just how hard Google’s “energy journey” would become is clear. In June, Google’s Sustainability website proudly boasted a headline pledge to achieve net-zero emissions by 2030. By July, that had all changed.

An investigation by Canada’s National Observer has found that Google’s net-zero pledge has quietly been scrubbed, demoted from having its own section on the site to an entry in the appendices of the company’s sustainability report.

Genna Schnurbach, an external spokesperson for Google, referring to its Environment 2025 report, told us: “As you can see from the document, Google is still committed to their ambition of net-zero by 2030.”

By tracing back through the history of Google’s Sustainability website, however, we found that the company edited it in late June, removing almost all mention of its lauded net-zero goals. (A separate website referring to data centres specifically has maintained its existing language around net-zero commitments.)

Five years ago, Google’s climate action ambitions were the gold standard for Big Tech. Then, with power demand spikes from AI data centres, in July it scrubbed its sustainability website of its 2030 net zero pledge.

The page on Operating Sustainably has been rebranded to Operations, and the section on net-zero carbon was deleted. In its place is a new priority area: Energy.

[…]

Source: Google deletes net-zero pledge from sustainability website | Canada’s National Observer: Climate News

Google hit with $3.45 billion EU antitrust fine over adtech practices where US judge also found guilt but refused to punish

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Alphabet’s Google was hit with a 2.95-billion-euro ($3.45 billion) European Union antitrust fine on Friday for anti-competitive practices in its lucrative adtech business, a sharp sanction that riled up U.S. President Donald Trump.

The fine, the fourth penalty Google has faced in its decade-long fight with EU competition regulators, follows bubbling trade tensions between major global powers and U.S. threats of retaliation over EU scrutiny of American tech firms.

Trump said in a post on Truth Social that the action was “unfair” and “discriminatory” and later told reporters he will take the matter up with the EU directly.

“We cannot let this happen to brilliant and unprecedented American Ingenuity and, if it does, I will be forced to start a Section 301 proceeding to nullify the unfair penalties being charged to these Taxpaying American Companies,” Trump said.

Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 allows the United States to penalize foreign countries that engage in acts that are “unjustifiable” or “unreasonable,” or burden U.S. commerce.

The European Commission’s action was triggered by a complaint from the European Publishers Council. Trump, who has hit Europe with trade tariffs, has threatened to retaliate against the EU for any pushback against Big Tech.

“I will be speaking to the European Union,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday.

While Google plans to appeal, the Commission has warned of stronger remedies – including potential divestitures – if the company fails to address its conflicts of interest. The case underscores growing transatlantic friction over digital market regulation and the EU’s push to rein in dominant platforms.

The EU competition enforcer had originally planned to hand out the fine on Monday but opposition from EU trade chief Maros Sefcovic on concerns about the impact on U.S. tariffs on European cars derailed EU antitrust chief Teresa Ribera’s plan.

The Commission said Google favoured its own online display technology services that reinforced its own ad exchange AdX’s central role in the adtech supply chain and allowed Google to charge high fees for its service, to the detriment of rivals and online publishers.

Google has abused its market power since 2014 until today, the EU watchdog said.

It ordered Google to stop the self-preferencing practices and take measures to cease its inherent conflicts of interest. The company has 60 days to inform the Commission how it plans to comply with this order, and another 30 days to do so.

The Commission reiterated its preliminary view that Google should divest part of its services but said it wants to first hear and assess Google’s compliance efforts, confirming a Reuters story last year.

[…]

Source: Google hit with $3.45 billion EU antitrust fine over adtech practices

It is good to see that at least the EU has the guts to do something about these monopolistic practices.

See also: EU Google antitrust penalty halted by low level commissioner amid Trump’s tariff threats

Judge who ruled Google is a monopoly says no need for punishment.

The worst possible antitrust outcome – unless you are Google

Scientists tap fresh water under the sea, raising hopes for a thirsty world

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Deep in Earth’s past, an icy landscape became a seascape as the ice melted and the oceans rose off what is now the northeastern United States. Nearly 50 years ago, a U.S. government ship searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area drilled into the seafloor to see what it could find.

It found, of all things, drops to drink under the briny deeps — fresh water.

This summer, a first-of-its-kind global research expedition followed up on that surprise. Drilling for fresh water under the salt water off Cape Cod, Expedition 501 extracted thousands of samples from what is now thought to be a massive, hidden aquifer stretching from New Jersey as far north as Maine.

The sun sets behind the Liftboat Robert platform, home of Expedition 501, a global research expedition drilling for fresh water, in the North Atlantic, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
The sun sets behind the Liftboat Robert platform, home of Expedition 501, a global research expedition drilling for fresh water, in the North Atlantic, Saturday, July 19, 2025. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

It’s just one of many depositories of “secret fresh water” known to exist in shallow salt waters around the world that might some day be tapped to slake the planet’s intensifying thirst, said Brandon Dugan, the expedition’s co-chief scientist

[…]

They’re out to solve the mystery of its origins — whether the water is from glaciers, connected groundwater systems on land or some combination.

The potential is enormous. So are the hurdles of getting the water out and puzzling over who owns it, who uses it and how to extract it without undue harm to nature.

[…]

Why try? In just five years, the U.N. says, the global demand for fresh water will exceed supplies by 40%. Rising sea levels from the warming climate are souring coastal freshwater sources while data centers that power AI and cloud computing are consuming water at an insatiable rate.

[…]

Source: Scientists tap fresh water under the sea, raising hopes for a thirsty world | AP News

Anthropic Agrees to $1.5 Billion Settlement for Downloading Pirated Books to Train AI

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Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers over its use of millions of copyrighted books to train the models for its AI chatbot Claude, according to a legal filing posted online.

A federal judge found in June that Anthropic’s use of 7 million pirated books was protected under fair use but that holding the digital works in a “central library” violated copyright law. The judge ruled that executives at the company knew they were downloading pirated works, and a trial was scheduled for December.

The settlement, which was presented to a federal judge on Friday, still needs final approval but would pay $3,000 per book to hundreds of thousands of authors, according to the New York Times. The $1.5 billion settlement would be the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright law, though the amount paid per work has often been higher. For example, in 2012, a woman in Minnesota paid about $9,000 per song downloaded, a figure brought down after she was initially ordered to pay over $60,000 per song.

In a statement to Gizmodo on Friday, Anthropic touted the earlier ruling from June that it was engaging in fair use by training models with millions of books.

“In June, the District Court issued a landmark ruling on AI development and copyright law, finding that Anthropic’s approach to training AI models constitutes fair use,” Aparna Sridhar, deputy general counsel at Anthropic, said in a statement by email.

[…]

Source: Anthropic Agrees to $1.5 Billion Settlement for Downloading Pirated Books to Train AI

Just to be clear: using books to train AI was fine. Pirating the books, however, was not. Completely incredible that these guys pirated the books. With mistakes of this idiocy, I would not invest in Anthropic ever, at all.

BMW kills home assistant integration access to paid ConnectedDrive API to “protect security”

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So you pay hundreds yearly for access to the Connected Drive API. You use Home Assistant to set the charging times of your BMW depending on when the price of electricity is low. BMW shuts you down (no re-imbursement, of course) and forces you to use one of their Charge Point providers. BMW then says it’s because of security.

I guess things are going very badly for BMW when they are making deals like this one as well as charging you subscriptions to use stuff in your car that you already paid for.

18 popular VPNs turn out to belong to 3 different owners – and contain insecurities as well

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A new peer-reviewed study alleges that 18 of the 100 most-downloaded virtual private network (VPN) apps on the Google Play Store are secretly connected in three large families, despite claiming to be independent providers. The paper doesn’t indict any of our picks for the best VPN, but the services it investigates are popular, with 700 million collective downloads on Android alone.

The study, published in the journal of the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), doesn’t just find that the VPNs in question failed to disclose behind-the-scenes relationships, but also that their shared infrastructures contain serious security flaws. Well-known services like Turbo VPN, VPN Proxy Master and X-VPN were found to be vulnerable to attacks capable of exposing a user’s browsing activity and injecting corrupted data.

Titled “Hidden Links: Analyzing Secret Families of VPN apps,” the paper was inspired by an investigation by VPN Pro, which found that several VPN companies each were selling multiple apps without identifying the connections between them. This spurred the “Hidden Links” researchers to ask whether the relationships between secretly co-owned VPNs could be documented systematically.

[…]

Family A consists of Turbo VPN, Turbo VPN Lite, VPN Monster, VPN Proxy Master, VPN Proxy Master Lite, Snap VPN, Robot VPN and SuperNet VPN. These were found to be shared between three providers — Innovative Connecting, Lemon Clove and Autumn Breeze. All three have all been linked to Qihoo 360, a firm based in mainland China and identified as a “Chinese military company” by the US Department of Defense.

Family B consists of Global VPN, XY VPN, Super Z VPN, Touch VPN, VPN ProMaster, 3X VPN, VPN Inf and Melon VPN. These eight services, which are shared between five providers, all use the same IP addresses from the same hosting company.

Family C consists of X-VPN and Fast Potato VPN. Although these two apps each come from a different provider, the researchers found that both used very similar code and included the same custom VPN protocol.

If you’re a VPN user, this study should concern you for two reasons. The first problem is that companies entrusted with your private activities and personal data are not being honest about where they’re based, who owns them or who they might be sharing your sensitive information with. Even if their apps were all perfect, this would be a severe breach of trust.

But their apps are far from perfect, which is the second problem. All 18 VPNs across all three families use the Shadowsocks protocol with a hard-coded password, which makes them susceptible to takeover from both the server side (which can be used for malware attacks) and the client side (which can be used to eavesdrop on web activity).

[…]

 

Source: Researchers find alarming overlaps among 18 popular VPNs