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I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27
Bogomil Shopov invites developers, researchers and activists to the Digital Dissident Devroom at FOSDEM 2027, a track on free software for censorship circumvention, secure communication and whistleblowing, and lays out its scope, the kinds of talks wanted and the call-for-participation dates.
4 min · 1,009 words
Elon Musk Just Gave Europe a Reason to Replace American Technology
Writing from London, Steve Blank argues that the reported throttling of Starshield to Ukraine, apparently ordered by Elon Musk, has convinced European policymakers that U.S. technology carries a kill-switch risk, and that AI now makes building sovereign alternatives to American software feasible, at a long-term cost to U.S. companies.
3 min · 624 words
Indian government sites are serving revoked eMudhra certificates
After eMudhra revoked 9,356 certificates on its emSign RSA hierarchy on 19 October 2026 (separate from the compromised G3 intermediates), Nemo scanned Indian government hosts and found many, including MeitY bodies like STPI, Bhashini, UIDAI and the CCA's India PKI site, still serving revoked certificates days later, contradicting MeitY's claim of limited impact.
16 min · 3,696 words
Canadians Are Running Out Of Time To Oppose The Dangerous C-22 Surveillance Bill
EFF's Joe Mullin warns that Canada's Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, has passed the House of Commons and now sits before the Senate, and urges Canadians to oppose its expansion of surveillance powers and cross-border data sharing with US police.
2 min · 395 words
Local Democracy’s Business Model is Broken
Jeff Fong argues that US local governments, which control zoning, permitting, and building codes, are funded in ways that reward restricting growth, and that land value return would realign their incentives toward abundance.
14 min · 3,316 words
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez announces a court order requiring Facebook to pay $25 billion in civil penalties after a jury found 43,899,725 violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act in its Cambridge Analytica case.
3 min · 587 words
Climate: The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable
UNRIC summarises UNEP's Emissions Gap Report 2026, which finds overshooting 1.5°C is now inevitable, sets out the emissions cuts needed to stay below 2°C and return to 1.5°C by 2100, and lists the UN Secretary-General's levers for action.
3 min · 674 words
US inequality is getting worse in ways you might not expect
Markus Schneider explains why US wealth inequality is accelerating, from decades of less progressive taxes and 2025 tax cuts for the wealthy to lapsed ACA subsidies, energy price spikes and tariffs that hit low- and middle-income households hardest, arguing these are policy choices rather than inexorable forces.
5 min · 1,129 words
How the Fed Is Quietly Inflating the AI Bubble While Hiking Your Electric Bill
Matt Stoller argues that Federal Reserve rate hikes raise electricity bills, property taxes, mortgage and auto costs and the price of working capital while favouring cash-rich AI giants, and that it is time to drop illusions about the central bank as the only answer to inflation.
8 min · 1,887 words
Go Piss, Girl: The plight of the public potty
Kate Wagner reviews Bryant Simon's For Customers Only, a history of American public bathrooms, arguing that the scarcity of public toilets is a long-running policy failure tied to inequality, privacy, race, gender and the limits of architecture.
13 min · 2,995 words
Mistral AI co-founder and CEO Arthur Mensch argues it would be a fundamental mistake for Europe to leave frontier AI models to the US and China. Pointing to the €260B+ Europe pays yearly to American cloud and software providers, he says whoever controls a model sets the terms, that open models only partly help, and that frontier AI is now a matter of security and science.
4 min · 864 words
AI Safety Is Not A Corporate Plot
Scott Alexander rebuts the claim that AI companies' existential-risk warnings are a ploy for hype, distraction or regulatory capture, arguing that unaffiliated AI researchers are just as worried, that leaders like those at Anthropic and OpenAI voiced the same warnings long before they ran AI companies, and that such a plot would be self-defeating.
14 min · 3,142 words
Steering AI Beyond AutomationA Research Agenda and Plan for Action
Stanford economist Gabriel Unger and Princeton's Arvind Narayanan argue AI need not be mainly about automating human labor. They set out four research problems for collaborative agents, explain why the automation agenda dominates computer science culture, survey the economics and policy debate, and propose a bottom-up, market-driven path plus targeted policies to steer AI toward augmenting workers.
25 min · 5,650 words
A proposal for better informing the public about loss-of-control risks from frontier AI development
METR lays out the public evidence gaps on whether frontier AI developers could lose control of internal AI systems, covering alignment, control and monitoring, and acceleration from automated AI R&D, and proposes embedded independent assessments using internal data and staff access, with published findings, permitted redactions and stated limitations.
17 min · 3,872 words
America Didn’t Lose Its Rare Earth Industry. It Sold It.
Kirsten Asdal, Tom Koch and Tao Tan argue in Lawfare that the U.S. rare earth chokepoint was created by market logic, since China prices for control rather than profit, and that rebuilding American supply needs asymmetric financing where government absorbs downside risk and shares in the upside.
11 min · 2,592 words
Geoff Huston examines the fragility of the ~1.5M km of subsea communications cables underpinning global telecoms — from Taiwan's Matsu Islands outages to repair capacity, sabotage risks and what resilience really requires.
16 min · 3,769 words
My Reddit AMA on the Law of Web Scraping
Law professor Eric Goldman shares his introduction to a Reddit AMA on US web scraping law: the social benefits and harms of scraping, why trespass-to-chattels law is a mess, and why a scraping campaign must survive many doctrines, from contracts to copyright, to be legal.
8 min · 1,825 words
The Politics of the “Non-Political”
Yibin Fan introduces a conceptual review, co-authored with Yufan Guo in Political Communication, of how researchers define the boundary between political and 'non-political' content as political information seeps into everyday life and media.
4 min · 959 words
Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking?
Edaqa Mortoray argues that recent unauthorized-access incidents by AI agents from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta are not unpredictable accidents: they follow foreseeably from deliberate design choices, which establishes the intent that hacking laws require.
10 min · 2,289 words
The GNU Project urges developers not to host repositories on GitHub, arguing it promotes vague licensing, requires nonfree JavaScript, offers SaaSS 'dis-services', centralizes Git, and has other harmful practices, and explains the wrongs each one causes.
11 min · 2,419 words