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Meta's new commercial terms will allow the scraping of news sites, legal experts say
Legal experts say Meta's updated commercial terms, effective Oct. 30, let the company scrape websites associated with business accounts—raising alarms for news publishers locked into Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
6 min · 1,455 words
AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software
Ars Technica covers research suggesting AI coding tools increase code volume without a matching rise in completed software deliverables, and what that means for productivity claims around agents.
2 min · 435 words
Margaret Hamilton, computing pioneer who led software development for the Apollo program, dies at 90
MIT News obituary for Margaret Hamilton, who led the software engineering team at MIT's Instrumentation Lab during NASA's Apollo program and died on September 30 at 90. It traces her work on the Apollo guidance software, her role in establishing software engineering as a discipline, her later career as a computing entrepreneur, and her many honors.
7 min · 1,590 words
Court Agrees with EFF: Utah’s VPN Law Demands a Technical Impossibility
A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah’s SB 73 anti-VPN age verification law. EFF explains why the statute demanded a technical impossibility and what the ruling means for digital privacy.
5 min · 1,044 words
One Piece of Flock Camera Data Put This Innocent Woman in Jail for 13 Days
An investigative account of how a single Flock ALPR hit led Palm Beach County deputies to jail Lindsey Isaacs for 13 days despite a mismatched car color and no damage.
6 min · 1,408 words
Unsealed Briefs: OpenAI Execs Knew Mass Book Piracy Was Illegal
Authors Guild summary of newly unsealed filings in Authors Guild v. OpenAI/Microsoft: internal messages on LibGen, fear of Hacker News “optics,” Project Clear deletions, and executives’ awareness that models would replace writers.
1 min · 343 words
AI: EU Member States plan “digital expropriation” of Europeans in the interest of AI companies
noyb reports on a leaked Irish Presidency document proposing that AI companies’ commercial interests should override fundamental rights protections for Europeans’ data.
6 min · 1,433 words
Singapore Is Paying People to Put Down Their Phones and Read Books
Singapore’s National Library Board is offering micropayments to build a reading habit—paying people small sums to put phones down and spend time with books.
4 min · 941 words
Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented
Researchers document a humpback whale appearing to grieve a stillborn calf, adding rare observational evidence to debates about cetacean emotion and maternal behavior.
2 min · 407 words
Over 10 years later, Gabe Newell's advice to devs still holds up
PC Gamer revisits Gabe Newell’s decade-old advice to game developers and argues why the core points on players, iteration, and shipping still apply in 2026.
3 min · 589 words
Oxford Paper: ChatGPT Would Have Told the Wright Brothers Not to Fly
A summary of Felin and Holweg’s “Theory Is All You Need”: LLMs predict from past data, while human breakthroughs start when someone refuses the consensus the data encodes.
3 min · 579 words
Spain Orders Blocks On Archive.today And Its Mirrors
Spain’s Second Section of the Intellectual Property Commission, a part of the country’s Ministry of Culture, has ordered the blocking of several domains of the Archive.today service, a web archiving service. It means that most Spanish internet users who try to access the site are redirected to a government page telling them that they are trying to access an “illegal” website.
1 min · 231 words
The shaky evidence that Flock cameras reduce crime rates
Flock has been promoting a recent study of its cameras' impacts on car theft. But the paper didn't demonstrate a causal effect. Do Flock cameras actually reduce crime? A new analysis by the Institute for Justice casts doubt on Flock Safety's claims that its automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) significantly reduce car theft and increase clearance rates.
2 min · 570 words
LWN covers Typst’s rapid progress as a modern typesetting system — package ecosystem, compiler work, and why more people are trying it as an alternative to LaTeX workflows.
10 min · 2,217 words
Unsealed NYT v. OpenAI/Microsoft filings show a Microsoft executive privately calling AI training-data scraping 'theft,' plus details on paywall bypass, stripped copyright notices, and publishers' existential risk.
4 min · 920 words