Alvaro Lopez Ortega / 2026-07-21 Briefing

Created Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:06:39 +0000 Modified Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:07:18 +0000
5433 Words

Law enforcement dismantled the Kratos phishing kit, arresting its developer in Indonesia and taking down 200+ servers. Suno data breach exposed 55 million users, per Have I Been Pwned. Intel’s foundry landed Fortinet as a customer for custom ASICs. Meta’s AI mistakenly deleted accounts, including a teacher with 1M followers; Meta claims fewer errors. UK’s £8.35B Skynet satellite upgrade faces red rating due to supplier and staffing problems.

🤖 AI & Machine Learning

Users say Meta’s AI deleted accounts; Meta says AI makes 13% fewer errors, 10% more violations

Meta’s AI moderation mistakenly deleted accounts belonging to multiple Instagram and Facebook users, including a teacher with nearly one million followers, an influencer, and a Juneteenth organizer. While Meta claims its AI makes 13% fewer errors and finds 10% more violations than human moderators, affected users reported being unable to successfully appeal the automated decisions.

Meta releases StoryKit: AI app for personalized kids’ stories with illustrations & music in Mexico

Meta has quietly released StoryKit, a new iPhone app in Mexico that uses AI to generate personalized children’s stories with illustrations, narration, and original music. The app appears to be an experimental regional test, offering formats like picture books, audiobooks, and printable PDFs.

Altman to brief Trump admin, lawmakers next week on new OpenAI models

Sam Altman will brief the Trump administration and US lawmakers next week on OpenAI’s upcoming AI models, coinciding with the development of a US safety review framework for cutting-edge AI. The meetings will cover the new model family and its impact on work.

Samsung to beta launch AI Health Assistant and Vitals overnight heart tracking tools in August

Samsung will launch an AI-powered Samsung Health Assistant and new heart metrics tools like Vitals in a beta test next month, requiring opt-in. The assistant uses data from Galaxy smartphones, smartwatches, and smart rings to provide personalized wellness insights, differentiating itself by integrating with the broader Galaxy ecosystem and considering calendar and travel data.

Sony Music Entertainment filed a second copyright infringement lawsuit against AI music company Udio, alleging that 30,117 sound recordings were copied without permission to train its AI models. The action follows a June 29 court ruling that denied Sony’s bid to add those recordings to its original case. Sony seeks statutory damages up to $150,000 per work and an injunction, while Udio has licensed with other major labels but not Sony.

Claude Not a Compiler

Claude is not a compiler but surpasses one by operating vertically across the entire software development stack—from strategy to machine code—making integrated decisions across layers without requiring meetings or permissions. In contrast, a compiler only handles the narrow source-to-binary conversion, lacking the ability to coordinate cross-layer decisions. This vertical integration makes Claude more valuable despite potentially not excelling at individual tasks compared to experienced humans.

Meta’s AI Models Are Powering the First Wave of Genesis Mission Projects

The Advanced Light Source and other DOE facilities now generate tens of petabytes of data annually, far outpacing manual analysis capabilities. In response, the White House launched SYNAPS-I, which uses Meta’s SAM 3 and DINOv3 AI models to automate image segmentation, reducing analysis from weeks to real-time.

OSS Cross-Harness self hosted registry and analytics for AI Agents

Observal is a self-hosted control plane and system of record for internal AI components, addressing the lack of discoverability that causes duplicated efforts across siloed repositories and the missing feedback loop that leaves developers without visibility into usage or subtle AI failures.

Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber

Gemini 3.6 Flash improves coding and knowledge work with 17% fewer output tokens and lower cost than 3.5 Flash, while 3.5 Flash-Lite offers the fastest speed at 350 output tokens per second for agentic workflows. Additionally, 3.5 Flash Cyber pairs a specialized model with the CodeMender agent for cybersecurity applications.

Gemini 3.6 Flash

Google Cloud Console is experiencing a failure to load JavaScript from www.gstatic.com. Possible causes include network-level blocking of the domain or a temporary block by Google due to excessive automated requests. Users are advised to contact their network administrator for assistance.

🔒 Security & Privacy

Kratos phishing-as-a-service kit loses its battle with international law enforcement

Law enforcement dismantled the Kratos phishing-as-a-service operation, arresting its alleged developer in Indonesia and taking down over 200 servers.

AI music platform Suno hits bum note as 55M users exposed in data breach, claims infosec expert

A security expert claims that AI music platform Suno suffered a data breach exposing 55 million users. Have I Been Pwned has confirmed the scale of the breach for the first time.

Apple Fixes Hide My Email Flaw

Apple fixed a vulnerability in its Hide My Email feature that could expose users’ real email addresses, deploying a patch on July 3, 2025, only after 404 Media reported the flaw despite Apple having known about it for over a year. A class-action lawsuit has since been filed over the issue.

IRGC claims destroyed Amazon data center in Bahrain with cruise missiles; Amazon unconfirmed

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claimed it destroyed Amazon’s central data infrastructure in Bahrain and targeted US air defense systems with cruise missiles. Amazon, Bahraini, and US officials have not responded to the claim.

Firefox Containers Preview

Firefox 153 introduces a native Containers Preview, allowing users to isolate different online activities (e.g., work, shopping, banking) in separate tabs with distinct cookies and ad tracking. This feature, previously available as the Multi-Account Containers extension, is now built directly into the browser by default, with options to customize container names, colors, and icons, and manage settings from Firefox settings.

France’s Anssi Will Block PQC-Free Products from Certification Starting 2027

France’s ANSSI will stop certifying security products that lack quantum-resistant encryption starting in 2027, barring non-compliant products from French government and critical infrastructure markets. The policy responds to growing risks of Harvest Now, Decrypt Later attacks, and industry demand for post-quantum cryptography is accelerating ahead of the deadline.

NPM’s release cooldown is security theater

NPM’s release cooldown is ineffective security theater that relies on nonexistent community vetting and fails to stop malicious code from being merged via CI/CD pipelines. The article argues that passive waiting does not work and recommends active measures such as static analysis, sandboxing, and LLM-assisted audits instead.

ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

The Department of Homeland Security will pay Thomson Reuters $125 million for access to personal data, including names, Social Security numbers, and geolocation, to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement in investigating voter fraud and immigration fraud. The contract enables ICE to continuously monitor millions of people and entities of interest.

Apple Defeats Liability for Not Scanning iCloud for CSAM

A court dismissed a lawsuit against Apple for failing to scan iCloud for child sexual abuse material, ruling that Section 230 immunity shields Apple because the claims treat it as a publisher. The judge noted that requiring CSAM detection would force Apple to monitor third-party content, which is protected under Section 230. The case is now heading to the Ninth Circuit.

Reverse-engineering is cheap now

Coding agents have significantly lowered the cost of writing code, making it economical to reverse-engineer and automate home devices where the effort and maintenance burden were previously prohibitive. The reduced cost of trial and error, along with less psychological baggage about future upkeep, has changed the return-on-investment equation for such projects.

Europe’s No.1 carpooling platform BlaBlaCar was breached, hackers claim

Hackers claim to have breached BlaBlaCar, offering 140 million user records for sale that include emails, phone numbers, password hashes, and vehicle details. Researchers warn the exposed data could enable phishing scams and credential stuffing attacks. BlaBlaCar has not confirmed the breach.

🛠️ Developer Tools

Valve’s Steam Frame pushes Arch Linux toward official Arm64 support

Valve’s Steam Frame initiative is advancing Arch Linux toward official Arm64 support. Collabora’s Holo Core port establishes the foundation for running SteamOS 3 natively on the headset.

Block’s Buzz combines chat, AI, and code

Block has launched Buzz, an open-source collaboration workspace built on the Nostr protocol that unifies team chat, AI agents with cryptographic identities, and Git hosting under one system. The platform aims to reduce reliance on tools like Slack and GitHub by treating AI agents as members and integrating a software forge, though it is still early-stage and lacks mobile support. Buzz is available for self-hosting or via Block’s hosted version under an Apache 2.0 license.

GitHub: Over $100M via Sponsors since 2019, $10M in past 5 months

GitHub Sponsors has facilitated over $100 million in contributions to open source maintainers and projects since its 2019 launch, with the most recent $10 million raised in just five months—compared to nearly two years for the first $10 million. The program now supports more than 70,000 maintainers and includes over 280,000 sponsors, from individual developers to Fortune 500 companies.

Web-based Jujutsu revset explorer & debugger

A web-based tool lets users explore and debug jj revsets by editing a graph and evaluating revsets. The playground also supports sharing specific setups through a permalink.

Capture Clauses as Effects

The article critiques the proposed move($expr) feature for Rust, arguing that explicit capture clauses offer a simpler model despite being clunky to write. It proposes making the conversion of references to owned values a first-class language feature to reduce boilerplate in clone-heavy patterns common in async Rust and Bevy. The post illustrates multiple closure capture scenarios that need ergonomic improvement.

lazy-tmux: restore tmux sessions lazily, with scrollback

lazy-tmux is a Go-based tmux session manager that saves sessions as a tree and restores them lazily—only loading a session’s processes and scrollback when you open it, rather than restoring everything eagerly. It uses regex-based allow/denylists to control which commands are re-run, enabling server relaunch while preventing destructive commands. The tool supports tmux 2.9–3.7b and offers a one-line install.

git –end-of-options

Git’s --end-of-options flag, introduced in version 2.24.0, separates options from revisions because Git had repurposed the traditional -- to separate revisions from pathspecs. The article also highlights argument injection vulnerabilities (CWE-88) in Git and other version control systems, where untrusted strings starting with a dash are parsed as options, illustrated by CVEs such as CVE-2019-13139 and a 2017 coordinated disclosure across four VCS tools.

Thoughts On Integers (2023)

Most popular languages like C, C#, Go, and Swift provide a default int type and implicit conversions, encouraging lazy use and neglect of appropriate integer sizing. In contrast, Rust requires every integer to specify both size and signedness, forcing developers to choose the most fitting type, thereby preventing bugs and conserving memory.

GitHub SSH Key .pub Fix

GitHub unexpectedly began rejecting SSH keys that lacked a corresponding .pub file because OpenSSH uses a different authentication flow without one. Generating the .pub file from the private key resolved the issue, as confirmed by repeated tests. The change appears linked to new GitHub SSH server software (banner 6a2c000) that rejects direct-signed publickey requests without a prior probe.

Escape IntelliJ: Scala and Kotlin LSPs on Emacs Eglot

The author presents a production-ready Eglot configuration for Emacs, arguing it is a faster, more hackable alternative to IntelliJ IDEA for JVM languages like Scala and Kotlin. The setup leverages Emacs Lisp for customizations instead of IntelliJ’s monolithic interface, using hooks for automatic language server activation, consistent keybindings, and auto-formatting on save.

Linux Kernel $ORIGIN Support

The Linux kernel will support $ORIGIN in PT_INTERP and shebangs via a new eBPF-based mechanism in binfmt_misc, developed with VFS maintainer Christian Brauner. This allows small eBPF programs to dynamically derive interpreter paths from a binary’s location, enabling relocatable binaries for Nix, Buck, and Bazel. The patch series is expected to enter the kernel’s -next branch soon.

GGG – Declarative SVG badge generation using Guile Scheme and SXML

GGG (Guile Glyph Generator) is a Lisp-based tool that uses Guile Scheme and SXML to generate highly customizable SVG and PNG badges with one to three parts. It features automatic text width estimation, vector optimization, and simple badge configuration via Scheme data structures. The tool supports custom text, colors, and logos, producing pixel-perfect, crisp vector graphics.

Why l (new runtime for k and q)

The author created “l,” a new runtime for the K and Q languages, rebuilding the execution engine without altering the language itself. It is built on four core ideas: SIMD as a default primitive, automatic parallelism, transparent fusion to eliminate intermediate allocations, and first-class runtime compression. This enables existing K/Q code to efficiently utilize modern hardware with multiple cores, GPUs, and specialized execution units.

30 to 70 PRs a Day: How We Managed to Not Wreck Our Systems

Honeycomb Engineering more than doubled peak weekday merges from ~30 to ~74 by mid-2026, with AI-attributed lines rising to 82.6% of new code, while incidents grew linearly. The gains came in three phases—slow experimentation, tooling-driven adoption, and a delegation step-change after Opus 4.6—and the team kept systems stable by focusing on continuous delivery, fast CI, observability, and feature flags. The core lesson is that AI amplifies existing practices, making high-autonomy teams faster without lowering quality standards.

Imagin Raw – A 9MB Open-Source Alternative to Adobe Bridge for Mac

Imagin RAW is a lightweight, open-source macOS app (≈9 MB) that offers faster performance and lower memory usage than Adobe Bridge for browsing and organizing RAW photos, with features like multi-root folder support, real-time file monitoring, and XMP-compatible rating/labeling. However, it lacks Camera Raw–processed previews. An iOS companion app is in development for browsing and backup.

Laguna S 2.1

Laguna S 2.1 is a 118B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 8B activated parameters per token, trained in under nine weeks. It scores 70.2% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and 40.4% on DeepSWE v1.1, holding its own against models many times its size on long-horizon coding benchmarks, making it the most capable agentic coding model in its weight class.

Uhubctl – control USB power per-port on smart USB hubs

uhubctl is a utility that controls USB power per-port on smart USB hubs implementing per-port power switching. The article lists many compatible USB hubs from various manufacturers, noting that not all hubs correctly support this feature.

PCjs Machines

PCjs is an open-source browser-based emulator that recreates classic hardware and software from the 1970s and 1980s, including IBM PCs, minicomputers, calculators, terminals, and arcade games. It allows users to experience vintage computing with slow CPUs, low-resolution displays, and primitive sound effects. The project is hosted on GitHub and offers an Explorer for browsing various machine combinations and related documentation.

Running Doom on Our Custom CPU and Going Viral

They designed a custom CPU from logic gates and adapted Doom’s source code to run on an FPGA in real time. To overcome memory and speed limitations, they integrated DDR3 memory with a cache and implemented a five-stage pipeline. The project required significant modifications to handle variable latency and complex memory operations.

A PHP server that can handle 10x as many concurrent requests as Nginx+PHP-fpm

Qbix Server is a pure PHP web server that replaces the nginx + php-fpm stack, using process forking and copy-on-write memory sharing to handle up to 1,600 concurrent PHP requests on 8GB RAM compared to ~160 with php-fpm, reducing per-worker memory from 30–60MB to ~5MB and eliminating bootstrap overhead. While its static file throughput is 56–73% of nginx, it dramatically improves PHP scalability and includes built-in WebSocket, access-controlled file streaming, and intelligent caching, with the option to place nginx or a CDN in front.

Best Coding Fonts for Developers in 2026

The article reviews 13 top coding fonts for 2026, emphasizing readability, ligature support, and clear character distinction to reduce eye fatigue and improve bug detection. It highlights popular options such as JetBrains Mono, Berkeley Mono, Geist Mono, Fira Code, Cascadia Code, IBM Plex Mono, and Iosevka, each with distinct strengths for different developer workflows.

OpenCircuitX

OpenCircuitX is a free, open-source EDA platform for VHDL and Verilog that combines an HDL editor, circuit canvas, RTL schematic viewer, waveform viewer, and FPGA toolchain into a single window. It targets FPGA design for iCE40 and ECP5 devices with a modern, vendor-lock-in-free interface, available on Windows with Linux/macOS builds from source. The platform also plans to add analog and mixed-signal design support in the future.

☁️ Cloud & Infrastructure

Intel fortifies Foundry with an actual customer: Fortinet

Intel’s foundry business has secured a customer in Fortinet, which plans to use Intel’s manufacturing for its custom ASICs to safeguard firewall production.

AI accelerators overheat datacenters; two-phase cooling may chill them.

Accelsius claims it can reduce GPU temperatures by up to 14°C by converting a liquid-cooled Dell PowerEdge server to run on refrigerants, using two-phase cooling to address overheating in AI accelerators.

OVH’s semi-secret plan for critical Januscape bug: mass reboots with Aussie crash-test dummy

OVH addressed a critical Januscape hypervisor bug by backporting a patch into Debian and performing mass reboots without customer consent, despite the risk of downtime. The plan, described as semi-secret, also involved using an Australian crash-test dummy to test the fix.

BlackRock leads $12B+ debt sale for Meta’s El Paso data center; Meta leases PA project

BlackRock is leading a debt sale of at least $12 billion for an El Paso data-center project, in which it holds an 80% stake and Meta owns the remaining 20%. The complex, to be used by Meta, is expected to have around 1 gigawatt of capacity.

Using Nagios for small business infrastructure monitoring

The author selected the open-source tool Nagios for monitoring their community newspaper’s infrastructure, citing its reliability and low cost of $4/month despite an outdated interface and complex initial setup. After evaluating alternatives like Zabbix, Prometheus, and Datadog, they preferred Nagios for its scalability, low maintenance, and lack of per-seat or per-monitor limits. The system currently monitors 54 hosts and 104 services on a single Digital Ocean droplet.

KDE for Enterprise Needs a Strong PIM Infrastructure

The Sovereign Tech Fund’s investment in KDE aims to boost enterprise and public institution adoption by strengthening the PIM suite (Kontact, KMail, Korganizer) and its Akonadi infrastructure. The work focuses on building an integrated test suite to uncover bugs, modernizing support for IMAP4rev2, CalDAV, and iTIP protocols, and simplifying autoconfiguration for users.

Cheap Self-Hosted Kubernetes on Hetzner Cloud

The article introduces terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzner, an open-source Terraform project for deploying a production-ready K3s cluster on Hetzner Cloud, using openSUSE MicroOS as a container-optimized, immutable operating system with atomic updates. It integrates Hetzner’s native tooling like the CSI driver and Cloud Controller Manager to automate load balancers and storage, balancing ease of use, reliability, and cost efficiency.

Don’t add a read replica until you’ve read this

incident.io moved all possible read queries to read replicas to reduce load on their primary database, especially during high-traffic events like AWS outages. They overcame challenges such as read-after-write consistency and increased complexity, while gaining benefits like horizontal scaling and a smaller blast radius for operational queries.

🚀 Space & Defense

Viking 1 landed on Mars 50 years ago

Viking 1 landed on Mars 50 years ago, but its mission was cut short due to software errors that caused the code to access unintended memory locations.

Judgment day looms for UK’s £8.35B Skynet military satellite comms upgrade

The UK’s £8.35 billion Skynet military satellite communications upgrade faces a “red” delivery rating due to supplier stumbles and Ministry of Defence staffing shortages. The program’s judgment day is approaching amid these challenges.

Army CIO reinstates AI token limits; DOD’s Ask Sage accesses 100M tokens via enterprise pack

The Army CIO reinstated limits on AI token usage after the entire year’s token pool was exhausted within a month. The Army’s Ask Sage tool, which provides access to various LLMs, had an annual enterprise pack of 100 million tokens, but usage far exceeded expectations. The DOD continues to emphasize AI adoption despite the depletion and unclear future renewal of tokens.

Men Walk on Moon

On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin landed the lunar module Eagle on the Moon’s Sea of Tranquility, becoming the first humans to walk on another world. Armstrong described the surface as fine and powdery, and the crew spent over two hours collecting rock samples, planting an American flag, and deploying scientific experiments. President Nixon congratulated them in a historic phone call, marking a milestone in human exploration.

The Space Force is now seeking to buy up to $30B in rocket launches

The US Space Force has tripled the maximum value of its National Security Space Launch Phase 3 contract to $17 billion due to rising demand for military satellite launches. The program is divided into Lane 1, which is open to more commercial providers for risk-tolerant missions, and Lane 2, reserved for high-priority strategic missions using only certified rockets from SpaceX and United Launch Alliance.

🌍 Tech & Society

Windows 11 Start menu changes trickle into Beta, movable taskbar still MIA

Windows 11’s Start menu changes have reached the Beta channel, but the long-requested movable taskbar is still missing. While users seek greater flexibility, a leaner OS tailored for older PCs may become more critical as hardware costs continue to climb.

Meta adds Xbox Game Pass starter edition to Horizon Plus ($60/yr, 10 hrs/mo)

Meta is adding an Xbox Game Pass starter edition to its Horizon Plus subscription for Quest VR headsets, offering 10 hours of cloud gaming per month for $60/year or $8/month. The company is also updating its Touch controllers to mimic Xbox game inputs, eliminating the need for a separate controller.

Apple Upgrade leasing for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch with Klarna in US next week

Apple Inc. will launch Apple Upgrade, a device leasing program for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, in partnership with Klarna in the U.S. on July 28. The program marks a major shift in how the company sells its products.

Washington blocks Kalshi sports betting

A Washington judge has temporarily blocked Kalshi from offering sports-related event contracts, ruling that the platform constitutes illegal gambling under state law and that the federal Commodity Exchange Act does not preempt that law. The preliminary injunction takes effect after August 5, adding to a series of state-level setbacks for Kalshi, which has faced similar injunctions in Michigan and Nevada.

S Korea: chip exports up 180.6%, computer product shipments up 232% in 20 days of July vs 2025

South Korea’s exports hit a record for the first 20 days of July, driven by surging AI demand for semiconductors. Chip exports rose 180.6% year-over-year, while computer-related product shipments climbed roughly 232%. Overall exports adjusted for working days increased 62.9% from a year earlier.

Five moments in snapping history

The article highlights five “snapping” features in Bear, Finder, macOS, and Figma that provide subtle, automatic alignment—such as resizing images to match neighbors or matching window heights—without requiring explicit menu options. These quiet design choices enhance direct manipulation by adding invisible structure, making alignment feel effortless and preventing the frustration of near-perfect alignment.

How did the H1B visa become the ‘Indian’ visa

The H-1B visa, initially a minor provision in the 1990 Immigration Act, has become dominated by Indian IT workers, with about 71% of visas going to India. Despite a statutory cap of 85,000, USCIS approved nearly 400,000 petitions in FY2024, and when combined with OPT and H-4 workers, roughly 1.28 million people are working in the U.S. on these pathways—approximately two-thirds of the entire U.S. software workforce.

The World’s 2,400 Castles

Castlemap is a free interactive atlas of 2,435 castles, fortresses, and palaces across 129 countries, built entirely from open data (Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia). Each landmark includes a photo, founding century, story, exact coordinates, and a fame score based on Wikipedia language editions. The map refreshes from Wikidata, allowing users to add castles by improving their open-data entries.

Amid nurse shortage, a university rolls out the welcome mat for men

Amid a nursing shortage, only 1 in 8 nurses are men, but the University of Alabama at Birmingham has outpaced the national average by enrolling nearly 1 in 6 male nursing students through intentional recruitment and marketing. The school features men in promotional materials, sends recruiters to high schools, and has a support group for male nurses, aiming to erode stereotypes and attract more men to the profession.

Long presumed dead, a thriving coral reef is discovered in West Africa

After 60 years, Beninese scientists rediscovered a healthy coral reef off Benin’s coast, first hinted at by fishing surveyors in the 1960s. The reef, now classified as a mesophotic coral ecosystem, hosts at least eight coral types and eight fish species. The rediscovery was led by Gérard Zinzindohoué using sonar and a deep-sea camera funded by a National Geographic grant.

Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)

The article critiques games like Age of Empires for failing to depict actual empires, defined as states where a core population extracts resources from a culturally distinct periphery. It argues that these games feature peoples who had empires rather than representing the mechanics of imperial structures themselves.

The Great Steam Deck Crash of 2026: How the New Pricing Decreased Demand by 80%

Valve raised Steam Deck prices by approximately 40-46% in May 2026 and eliminated the cheaper LCD model, causing an estimated 82% decline in weekly unit sales. Sales dropped from 11,000–18,000 units per week in 2025 to just 1,400–3,000 units per week by July 2026.

New US homeownership measure puts people first

The article explains that the commonly cited 65% US homeownership rate is actually the owner-occupancy rate, which measures housing units rather than individual adults. It introduces the homeowners-to-population ratio (HPOP), which counts all adult homeowners and yields a rate of 53%, using a cul-de-sac example to illustrate how HPOP provides a more accurate picture of homeownership.

Zoom is now Chrome only

Zoom has announced that its platform now exclusively supports the Chrome browser. Users must use Chrome to access Zoom meetings and test their connections. For assistance, Zoom’s Support Center is available.

Ex Situ – Open-source spatial index of displaced cultural artifacts

Ex Situ is an open-source spatial index that maps over 100,000 museum artifacts from their origin sites to Western institutions, currently indexing eight collections including the Met, V&A, and SMB Berlin. Built with Next.js, Deck.gl, and Python ETL, it functions as a connector between archives, allowing researchers to download provenance data while keeping images as source URLs to avoid duplicating institutional data. The project, started as a 2022 MA thesis, is AGPL-3.0 licensed and seeks community contributions for scaling and additional museum API integrations.

VTubing: How a Japanese Phenomenon Is Going Worldwide

VTubing, originating in Japan, is an online activity where performers use animated avatars for livestreams and video creation, and it is expanding globally, particularly in the US. Participants often adopt distinct characters for privacy or creative expression, viewing VTubing as a valid form of content creation rather than a compensation for lacking something.

Flock Credibility Lost as It Repeatedly Lies to City Councils, Police, & Public

Flock Safety lied to the Oshkosh City Council by denying its ALPR system creates heat maps of vehicle movements, leading to a one-day contract that was quickly revoked after the lie was exposed. This is part of a broader pattern of the company misleading officials, including falsely claiming it had no federal contracts while running pilot projects with CBP and DHS. The article warns government officials to be extremely wary of trusting Flock’s statements about its products or commitments.