Alongside armored vehicles, local police are getting surveillance technology with help from the federal government. Learn what tech law enforcement have in your area with EFF's Atlas of Surveillance, where we’ve documented thousands of examples: atlasofsurveillance.org/

Good round-up of current state of affairs on ICC, Microsoft and which EU state and sub-state entities have publicly abandoned US tech for open source solutions: "larger geopolitical trend of States and the UN embracing OSS as a critical tool for realising their digital autonomy and resilience."

There is a direct correlation between how fake your job is and how much value you see in AI

The Trump administration’s pressure on European regulators is having an impact, with fewer restrictions on Big Tech and canceled measures. wrd.cm/3XibTVd

I wish I didn’t have to share this. But the BBC has decided to censor my first Reith Lecture. They deleted the line in which I describe Donald Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.” /1

Don't think of an Enron

It’s widely known (and, I think, pretty uncontroversial) that learning requires effort — specifically, if you don’t have to work at getting the knowledge, it won’t stick. Even if an LLM could be trusted to give you correct information 100% of the time, it would be an inferior method of learning it.

BLAGE to become the 80th false flagged vessel to transit the Danish Straits without consequence, since NB8 said that there would be. I filed a FOI request to Danish authorities on how this work is coming along. After waiting almost 2 months, they are busy coming up with excuses not to let me know.

EFF teamed up with AV Comparatives to see how well anti-virus apps detect stalkerware on Android phones. www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

What a difference a day makes

Please do not refer to the CDC for health information or advice anymore. It has been bastardised and now full of misinformation. Very disheartening to see what was once a leading public health platform has turned into. A dangerous blunder to push horrid agendas with RFK led HHS & GOP led Govt.


Journalism is facing its deadliest moment since @pressfreedom began tracking in 1992. As democracy retreats and autocracy rises, attacks on a free press are surging – from killings and imprisonment to surveillance and exile. In Gaza alone, 240+ journalists have been killed.

LLMs give people with delusional belief systems a way to organise those beliefs. The model fills in gaps, supplies connective tissue, and wraps the madness in formal language. It doesn't make the claims more credible to us, it just tidies them up.

CDC has overhauled its website to assert that “the claim ‘vaccines do not cause autism’ is not an evidence-based claim”

three months ago all of these same people would have chided critics of the tech industry's funny math as "AI doomers"

Satire is hardly even funny anymore

ICIJ's latest investigation The #CoinLaundry is a collaboration of 113 journalists from 38 media partners in 35 countries that exposes how cryptocurrency companies have empowered a shadow economy that lavishly profits from crime. Here are our findings:

I Cannot Unsee the Photos of the Tortured Palestinian Hostages Returned by Israel @dianabuttu.bsky.social asks: Where is the outrage, the coverage even, of the mutilated Palestinian bodies that the Israelis finally released as part of this 'ceasefire' deal? zeteo.com/p/israel-ret...

1/ The US Government has quietly removed a memorial to Black soldiers who died in World War II from the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, South Limburg. The move follows a complaint from the right-wing Heritage Foundation to the American Battle Monuments Commission. ⬇️

This perfectly encapsulates how I feel living in the US. The republican party is an insane death cult, the democratic party is 3 corporations in a trench coat, and the "socialists" are just the completely normal left-wing capitalists you'd find in any of 2 dozen European nations.

Yep. I think it's pretty likely we're close to an AI crash. Bear Stearns starting the 2008 crash was poetic enough (especially, looking back, the Epstein ties). But if Palantir was the Bear Stearns of the AI crash, it'd be such poetic justice.

lmao

Rosalind Franklin was only 37 when she died of ovarian cancer and she had ALREADY discovered the shape of DNA. She did not live to see her erasure by the Nobel committee in 1962. Anyway, fuck this guy and restore funding to the cancer moonshot, so the next Rosalind Franklin can live.

I was laid off from Teen Vogue this week, alongside multiple other phenomenal team members. At our Summit, I was asked how it felt to be 1 of 2 Black women left and what that meant for representation. Now, there are no Black women at Teen Vogue and that is incredibly painful to think about.

Had missed this but MSFT earnings yesterday suggest OpenAI lost $11.5bn in the quarter. www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/m...

Private equity destroys 200-year-old book distribution company that libraries around the country rely on and now libraries are having trouble getting new books: www.404media.co/libraries-sc...

Can't overstate how fucked up it is that unraveling what is arguably the greatest achievement in the history of humanity is now a motivating issue of one of the two dominant parties in the U.S.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) will switch its internal work environment away from Microsoft Office to Open Desk, a European open source alternative, the institution confirmed to Euractiv. www.euractiv.com/news/interna...

Not a word from the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt on Tucker hosting Fuentes. Amazing. I just checked his Twitter feed and plenty on Mamdani and even Norway (!) but not a word about a top conservative podcaster hosting an infamous Holocaust denier. Greenblatt is beyond parody at this point.

Yes, Lord of the Rings is about how you must trust the “hard men.” Just as Narnia is about an evil lion. And the New Testament tells a tale of a wimp who wouldn’t fight back. Next week on “fascists read classics,” we’ll meet tech visionary George Orwell…

Zohran Mamdani caught lying that he understood Plato’s allegory of the cave, yet when asked to explain it, he seemed to instead explain Baudrillard’s theory of Simulacra and Simulation where reality has been replaced by symbols and signs, which seems similar to Plato’s theory but is not the same

Literally.

A President demolishing the White House is a little bit on the nose as a political metaphor

DR har opsøgt anti-transaktivisten Mille Sørensen for at få en kommentar på DBU Sjællands beslutning om at tillade personer med juridisk kønsskifte at spille breddefodbold med eget køn. Men de fortier så at Sørensen er aktivist og præsenterer hende som bare en tilfældig holdleder hos et kvindehold.

a functional press would, every single day, repeatedly, across numerous paragraphs in every story about him, make it clear that this is indisputably the most corrupt President in U.S. history

"How do you expect to win back men...?" We don't want those men. They are the hot dogs on the floor of humanity and we still have all these nice prepped hamburger patties if someone would just let them cook.

the latest letter against ai superintelligence is just further evidence we live in one of the dumbest possible timelines. all these people who think they’re so smart getting totally hoodwinked by some skilled grifters already tearing the social fabric to shreds.

Cops complimenting protesters, cats and dogs living together, MASS HYSTERIA

Good evening. We estimate that between 4.2 and 7.6 million people turned out for the No Kings Day demonstrations held around the country on Saturday. This makes Oct 18 very likely the biggest single-day U.S. protest event since 1970. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/second-no-...

It's kinda cool that Gary Larson is doing new cartoons because he picked up a digital tablet, taught himself how to use it, and it made him love drawing again. www.thefarside.com/new-stuff/

The New York Times, ladies and gentlemen

Ages ago, when I was still a student, I taught myself Ruby on Rails for my senior thesis and fell in love. Fifteen years later, and I’ve used Rails at every job I’ve ever held in the tech industry. Fifteen years, and I still love Rails! But there’s something rotten at its core, and we share a name.

Instead of halting exports of life-threatening pesticides banned within the bloc, the European Union has continued — and even increased — shipments to the Global South, despite its pledge to end the practice, Human Rights Watch says. www.occrp.org/en/news/eu-c...

The end of free Windows 10 support this Wednesday could be an environmental disaster, cutting off 400 million PCs from security updates and dooming millions of still usable computers. 🔗 www.404media.co/the-end-of-w...

We’ve met with Greta Thunberg and others in the flotilla. They describe hours-long scenes of torture and sexual harassment in Israeli captivity. Experts conclude that they have been subjected to serious crimes – Sweden’s foreign minister believes they have themselves to blame. tinyurl.se/crR

I've reactivated my old newsletter and gathered most of my published writings from the past decade in a single website using Ghost. I probably won't send out lots of newsletters and definitely not in a regular cadence, but if you're interested in receiving them, sign up here: asymmetric.henrikchu.lu

Oh, noes. Oh, no. Who could have predicted this would ever happen? We did! Everybody did! You know how I know? Because we said this. Everybody said this.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)