Today's links

• Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts: The big P only matters if the small p is in play.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Gilberto Gil v WIPO; Censored Apple wifi hacker talk; Wells Fargo crime-spree started in 1998; Stencils "may not be reproduced"; DVD Jon v Apple DRM; Unpaid diplomatic parking tickets as index of corruption; Tortured Canadian was not a terrorist; Decarbonization at a distance.
• Upcoming appearances: Brighton, Virtual, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, Vancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

Voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts (permalink)

Here's a funny thing about the right to vote: it wasn't won by voting.

From the Magna Carta to the US Constitution to the Emancipation Proclamation to 19th Amendment, voting rights (what you might call "Big P" Politics) were always downstream of protests, riots, petitions, mass movements, strikes and good, old fashioned community organizing (that is, "small p" politics).

Which is to say, Big P politics matter, but to make them matter, we need a lot of small p politics. That means that democracy isn't something you do every couple of years with a ballot paper (though that's an important aspect of the process). Democracy is continuous.

If you've ever wondered why your vote seems to accomplish so little, I think you can blame the near-abolition of small p politics by Big P politicians of every stripe. Indeed, Obama's genius was summoning up an army of door-knocking, phone-banking small p political activists and then euthanizing that organization after he won the election:

For Obama, the grassroots were useful for one thing: getting out the vote. The last thing he wanted was for millions of activated voters to turn into activists who'd flame him and harangue him and picket him if they didn't like his compromises. Boy, did Obama ever compromise.

https://theweek.com/articles/624777/obamas-biggest-failure

He shielded the CIA's torturers from scrutiny and prosecution:

https://journals.law.harvard.edu/ilj/2009/04/obama-publishes-torture-memos-immunizes-cia-staff/

He reneged on his promise to shut down Gitmo:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/obama-failed-close-guantanamo

And his promise to hold the phone companies to account for their complicity in the NSA's mass domestic surveillance:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/obama-on-mass-government-surveillance-then-and-now/

He stepped up secret drone warfare:

https://www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data

And unconstitutional domestic surveillance:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/01/obama-expands-surveillance-powers-his-way-out

Whenever I raise this, Obama's apologists come out of the woodwork to tell me that "the president isn't the Green Lantern," and that Obama couldn't act without help from Congress and the Senate, who wouldn't back his plays.

I think that Trump's presidency has shown us how much power the president really has even when the legislature won't play ball. But even if you accept the Green Lantern apologetics, the fact remains that Obama could have had a clamoring army of ardent supporters in the streets, defending his agenda against recalcitrants in his own party and wreckers in the GOP. He chose not to have that army. He sent that army home.

It's like Obama heard the story about post-election FDR telling civil rights leaders, "I want to do it, now make me do it," and concluded, "I don't want to do it, so I'd better not let anyone make me do it":

https://www.quora.com/Did-Franklin-Roosevelt-ever-say-I-agree-with-you-I-want-to-do-it-now-make-me-do-it

Of course, Trump is doing everything he can to extinguish both small p politics and Big P Politics. It's not just his wildly illegal voter suppression tactics. He's banning and prosecuting political groups, invoking anti-terror laws (which Obama supported and promised would only be used proportionately and wisely) to chase his grassroots opposition underground:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/designating-antifa-as-a-domestic-terrorist-organization/

Liberals are often contemptuous of grassroots movements (cf "basket of deplorables," "Green Lantern" scolding), but the right is terrified of them. The right's political leadership is terrified of its own grassroots, and rightly so, because those people are maniacs, and they're the reason the GOP has been pushed into its most extreme positions. The right's grassroots, meanwhile, are afraid of the left's grassroots. The last thing they want is a militant, organized, mobilized base pushing Dem politicians to take the stands that are wildly and widely popular in America, from Medicare for All to an end to ICE – the Mamdani agenda, in other words.

Mamdani is the anti-Obama. He shows what happens when a progressive candidate nurtures and co-governs with their base after the election, using millions of passionate, committed, everyday people to steamroller anyone who gets in the way of his agenda:

https://www.nyc.gov/content/100days/pages/

Of course the downside of this is that when Mamdani reneges on his pledges, he is loudly and furiously held to account for it:

https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/02/19/mamdani-budget-parks-libraries/

Mamdani understood that he would be corralled into compromises if he won the mayoralty and that when he made those compromises, his base would come after him with the unmistakable fury of betrayed idealists. He also understood that any comfort he enjoyed by sidelining his base while in office would come at a price far higher than being yelled at by his supporters: it would cost him the ability to get anything done.

Voting for Mamdani was important. It got him elected. But staying organized – in unions, neighborhood clubs, affinity groups, DSA chapters and mutual aid groups – is what's letting him get stuff done, and stopping him from bailing on his promises as politically infeasible.

In other words, voting only matters if it's the final stage of a sustained campaign to build and mobilize popular power. Without that, voting will get you precious little. The right's leadership understands this very well, which is why they've spent years attacking unions, community organizers like Acorn, and activist institutions like Planned Parenthood. We must defend voting rights – Big P Politics – to the bitter end, but we need to defend organizing – small p politics – just as ferociously.

The reduction of politics to voting is part of the 50 year neoliberal project whose foremost goal is to make you think of yourself as an atomized individual and not as a member of a polity. Turning "politics" into "voting" is absolutely in line with Margaret Thatcher's dictum that "there is no such thing as society." It's the same move that convinced workers that the answer to bad working conditions is looking your boss in the eye and threatening to change jobs (not forming a union and…

This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside. The rest of the channel is loaded of similar (and similarly long) atmospheric videos: thunderstorms, blizzards, rain, wind & fog, winter storms, etc.

The most recent videos are prominently labeled “No AI” because there are so many AI-generated videos like these on YT that are just kinda lifeless and juiced with keywords to show up as related videos.

Tags: video

Last week, Rep. Darrell Issa formally introduced his long-awaited site blocking bill: the American Copyright Protection Act.

Update September 22: The text of the bill has been posted on Congress.gov.

VPNs Join the Blocking Parties

The bill allows copyright holders to ask a federal court to determine that a website is a ‘foreign piracy site’. With that declaration in hand, they can then petition for a blocking order that requires specific service providers to prevent people from accessing the site.

These providers exclude domain name registries and root nameservers, but virtual private networks are explicitly covered.

“The term ‘service provider’ includes providers of broadband internet access services, providers of domain name resolution services, and virtual private networks, but excludes root nameserver operators and top level domain registries,” the bill reads.

This VPN category is new. The discussion draft TorrentFreak reported on in June last year stated that “both internet service providers (ISPs) and DNS resolvers” would be covered, nothing more.

The bill doesn’t explain why VPNs were added, but it follows a European trend, including orders in France and Spain, where a broader set of intermediaries is required to block pirate sites.

Smaller services are exempt, as the proposed bill excludes “any entity that provides services to fewer than 100,000 monthly users or subscribers in the United States.” That means that it will target the larger providers.

Blocking ‘From the United States’

When an order is issued, providers have 14 to 30 days to “take all commercially reasonable steps to prevent users or subscribers from using its systems or networks to access the foreign piracy site from the United States.”

For a regular ISP, that requirement is pretty straightforward. However, for a VPN provider with servers in dozens of countries, it can be interpreted in more than one way, with varying consequences.

A VPN could block the pirate site on its U.S. servers only. That would mean that American subscribers are free to connect through servers in Amsterdam or Toronto, while a Canadian user who connects through New York would be blocked.

Alternatively, a VPN could block the site for everyone who connects from an American IP address, regardless of the server they choose. That should be technically possible without logging a user’s IP address.

The bill doesn’t explain how the technical implementation should work and a judge has no say in it either. The blocking orders can’t prescribe or require any specific blocking techniques, so this choice is left to the providers.

VPN providers can contest their inclusion in a blocking order. Before naming a provider, the court has to weigh several factors, including the “technical feasibility and efficacy” of the blocking.

VPNs raised similar objections in France, with little effect. Among other things, the Paris court concluded that a no-log policy doesn’t prevent VPNs from blocking sites.

Live Sports Fast Track

Not all blocking orders have to wait 14 days before being implemented. The court can shorten any deadline in the bill if it finds good cause. This includes blocking measures that target “time-sensitive events.”

Issa previously made it clear who this is for. At a House hearing in June, he said that enforcement has to be fast enough to make a difference during live sports broadcasts, which lose their value quickly.

“[W]hat is the reasonable speed? Can we do it at the speed of sound? Can we do it at the speed of light? More importantly, in a 45 minute or sometimes a fraction of that live sports broadcast, can we do it soon enough to make it no longer profitable for those who pop up and sell their clandestine wares?” he said.

In addition to sports, the “time-sensitive” carveout can also be used to protect movies and TV shows that leak online “not more than 24 hours after” their first authorized release in the United States.

To Be Continued

VPNs are not the only change since the first draft appeared last year. There are other nuances as well, which will be highlighted in future coverage.

Whether Rep. Issa will get the bill across the finish line is uncertain. He retires at the end of this year, so he won’t be around to reintroduce it if it doesn’t pass during the current session.

Notably, this is not the only U.S. site blocking bill that’s being prepared. As previously reported, Senator Thom Tillis and Rep. Zoe Lofgren are working on a bicameral site blocking bill of their own.

This means that, after the SOPA-ghosts were defeated, there’s now some internal site-blocking competition on the Hill.

—

A copy of the American Copyright Protection Act of 2026 (H.R. 10364) is available here (pdf).

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

The RP2350 is actually a pretty secure chip, all things considered. It has secure boot, ARMv8’s TrustZone to split secure and non-secure execution, and you can permanently disable debug — the Pi Foundation even included glitch detection, meaning the traditional ‘zap the chip until it obeys’ technique is blocked. That’s why the [Ledger Donjon] security team went full Bond Villain and strapped everyone’s favourite fruit-flavoured microcontroller to a table with a slowly-approaching laser beam.

Okay — movie clichés aside, the laser was in fact very carefully focused on target before they turned it on. That target was the register that enables the 2350’s debug features. Said register was located by decapsulating the chip and examining the die with photon-emission electron microscopy; the actual attack was carried out on a chip that had been decapped on the back side, with IR shining through the silicon wafer. There was probably more than a little trial-and-error to figure out exactly where on the die adjacent to the register to zap with the laser to flip those bits. But flip they did, restoring the debugger’s access to the secure execution zone. Then, after resetting the chip, [Ledger]’s team read the 128-bit secret the Pi Foundation hid in memory as part of the 2350 hacking challenge.

It’s long been accepted that once the black hats — or white hats, for that matter — have their hands on your hardware, they’re going to find a way in. The effort it takes to break into a simple microcontroller here is actually kind of impressive. We’ve talked about laser fault injection before; ironically, we’ve also featured Pi Pico-powered glitching attacks — the kind that this chip’s glitch detection thwarts.

The 2026 winners of the Ig Nobel Prize include papers on “a more precise definition of kissing”, “An Aerodynamic Study of the Nose Blowing”, and the discovery “that milk proteins from cockroaches pack 3X as much energy as milk proteins from cows”.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Global heating will reach at least 1.8C under even the most optimistic future, well beyond the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, according to a UN report that warns every fraction of temperature rise intensifies destructive extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and island and coastal city submersion. The report by the Nairobi-based UN Environment Program confirmed overshooting the 1.5C goal inscribed in the landmark Paris agreement of…

In 1999, Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett were the final crew to front the long-running movie-riffing series Mystery Science Theater 3000—Nelson as the human test subject of the same name, Murphy as the delightfully pompous Tom Servo, and Corbett as that wily rascal (you know you want him, baby) Crow T. Robot. Having formed a cohesive unit onscreen and behind the scenes on the show’s three Sci-Fi Channel seasons, the trio kept at the unique form of comedy perfected by MST3K following the show’s cancellation. In 2004, they released their first efforts as The Film Crew, before pivoting to (and going audio only as) RiffTrax in 2006.

But in their years of recording humorous commentary tracks for blockbusters and B-movie schlock alike, the Satellite Of Love was never far from their hearts. Their castmates and co-writers Mary Jo Pehl and Bridget Jones Nelson (the latter of whom is married to Mike Nelson) eventually joined the RiffTrax fold; Murphy and Corbett reprised the roles of mad-scientist second bananas Professor Bobo and The Observer for the first season of the 2010s MST3K revival headed up by series creator Joel Hodgson. And now they find themselves at the center of the search for the worst movie ever made once more, thanks to Mystery Science Theater 3000: The RiffTrax Experiments, the crowd-funded comeback that will subject Mike, Servo, and Crow to four new episodes of cinematic crud this fall. Before the premiere of the first Experiment—a riff of ’60s creature feature Sting Of Death that Fathom Entertainment is bringing to theaters September 9 and 13—Nelson, Murphy, and Corbett spoke to The A.V. Club about returning to MST3K’s not-so-distant future, the parts of the old show they wanted to maintain, and how they’ve managed to keep their creative collaboration going for multiple decades. (It probably has something to do with the way their natural, off-the-cuff banter just sounds and reads like Mike and the Bots going at it.) 

The A.V. Club: When the opportunity to do these episodes presented itself, were you surprised?

Kevin Murphy: I was absolutely surprised, because we were done. 1999, we closed up shop and we all moved on. And so for this to reappear was intriguing. All the stars aligned at the exact same time, and it seemed like, “Well, there’s never going to be another good time to do this.”

Bill Corbett: We didn’t say yes right away. I think it’s fair to say we had to really think “Is this a mistake? On any number of levels?” We just seem like old dogs returning to the farm to the die or something. That’s what they do, old dogs. 

How about you, Mike?

Mike Nelson: It is a weird thing to return to something that was formative in your life, but it was a long time ago. That is an odd thing, but there’s such a joy to it—like, “Wow. Hey, all these people!” It was weirdly, weirdly fun in a way that is hard to describe.

KM: The way I describe it is that we managed to get a big part of the old band back together. Our original director of photography. Two of our favorite prop people. Toolmaster Jef Maynard. Brad Keely, our editor. Beez McKeever, Patrick Brantseg—all these folks had worked in and day out to make this thing happen. We’d write these cockamamie scripts, and these people would just, like, move heaven and earth in order to get the stupid things we put on scripts onto the screen. That was the joy in it,…

Bayeux Go! A playable video game of the Bayeux Tapestry. “Thou art Harold. Win Thine Battle. Tap to starte.”

"Star Trek" marks its 60th anniversary today, September 8, six decades after the original series premiered in 1966 and went on to become one of the most successful science-fiction franchises in television history. Outlets across the web are commemorating the milestone with full health reports, hot takes, behind-the-scenes retrospectives, and reflections on the franchise's influence and what may lie ahead. The New York Times reports: As of 2026, the 60-year-old science fiction franchise boasts a…

[Makestreme] had always wanted to own a nice telescope, but found that budget would not stretch to anything above a cheap model with a limited 50 mm aperture. Wanting a better view of the heavens, the way forward was obvious—it was time to build a better telescope, instead!

The build is based around a 114 mm diameter mirror sourced from Amazon. It’s assembled inside a length of 5-inch PVC pipe of just under a meter to suit the 900 mm focal length of the concave reflector. 3D printed components are used to mount the mirror and control its position for proper focus and collimation. Traditionally, a reflector based telescope would use a mirror and eyepiece to provide a view to the user. However, [Makestreme] built this as a smart telescope, instead integrating a…

Like many of us, [Austin] finds writing code satisfying — especially if it is challenging. His latest challenge: shoehorn something that looks like Python into 512 bytes. Ok, that didn’t work out, but would you believe 1024 bytes of source code?

The goal was to properly execute a fizzbuzz program using a decidedly Python-like syntax. Since he is only interpreting Python, some things were simplified. In addition, he tried hard to minimize things like whitespace and variable names. Still, there were other things to do, and he borrowed from tips for code golfing.

The resulting code is essentially illegible, but it handles integer variables and literals, assignment, arithmetic, many control structures, functions, and even print. Not bad for 1 K.

Despite being tiny, the parser does a lot, but it does cut corners. No bytecode, no syntax tree, and no error handling. Variables have to be a single lowercase letter. So, ok, it isn’t really Python. But it is something.

Naturally, this reminded us of the obfuscated C code contest. If you really want to go small, we appreciate small Forth.

The final frontier has entered the kitchen.

[Gadget Industry] bills it as “a PC inside a Mouse“, but that depends on your definition of a “PC”. This is a Personal Computer inside a mouse, yes, but there’s nothing IBM-compatible about the tiny ARM board he squeezes inside what’s normally a peripheral — it actually started life as a smartphone, which only takes this build up a notch compared to starting with a single-board computer like a Pi.

Specifically, he starts with a Galaxy S21 5G. Starting with a Samsung means he can leave the stock Android alone and just take advantage of Samsung’s DeX desktop mode, rather than layer a Linux environment on top or replace the operating system entirely with something like Postmarket OS, which are both viable options.

With the battery compartment removed, the phone guts fit with shocking ease in the once-wireless mouse. Of course that’s not a great thermal environment, but that’s what the brass is for. It acts as a heat spreader, which is about as much thermal management as the phone had from the get-go, so it should work well enough. It seems to in the video, certainly. If thermal throttling is a concern, while it’d be hard to fit in a mouse, there’s no beating liquid cooling.

The United Nations has an announcement. "The UN General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly to encourage governments, schools and tech companies worldwide to stop using maps that make Africa look far smaller than it really is." By 164 votes to one, Member States on Friday endorsed a resolution promoting map projections that more accurately reflect the true size of continents — the culmination of an African-led campaign against the 16th-century Mercator projection, still the most widely used map…

California's Project Nexus bolted solar arrays over 1,400 feet of irrigation canals in Stanislaus County and measured a 70% drop in evaporation and an 85%

Source: ecoportal.net

Shared by

Dans la Central Valley en Californie, deux canaux d’irrigation ont été équipés de panneaux solaires : l’évaporation a été réduite de 70% et la propagation des végétaux et algues de 85%.

https://www.ecoportal.net/en/solar-panels-built-working-irrigation-canals/33890/

- Joachim (@joachim) Sep 02, 2026

Solar panels bolted over 2 working irrigation canals in California's Central Valley cut evaporation beneath them by as much as 70 percent, and the aquatic weed that fouls those channels dropped by about 85 percent https://www.ecoportal.net/en/solar-panels-built-working-irrigation-canals/33890/

- Fediverse Top Stories (@topstories) Sep 03, 2026

🔁 @MorpheusB:

#sustainability

https://www.ecoportal.net/en/solar-panels-built-working-irrigation-canals/33890/

- WearyBonnie (@3TomatoesShort) Sep 03, 2026

🔁 @shonin:

#Solar panels bolted over 2 working irrigation canals in California's Central Valley cut evaporation beneath them by as much as 70 percent, and the aquatic weed that fouls those channels dropped by about 85 percent

https://www.ecoportal.net/en/solar-panels-built-working-irrigation-canals/33890/

- Witchzilla (@msbw) Sep 02, 2026

Follow the entire discussion on Twitter

Check out the hottest stories shared on Murmel

For those wondering how beloved entertainer “Weird Al” Yankovic can continue to exist as the shining beacon of integrity, good vibes, and enduringly catchy parody songs about food, ponder no longer. Yankovic announced today that he’s finally cut through the no-doubt tangled red tape surrounding the release of Al’s Brain, an 11-minute educational short film he made in 2009. 

submitted by Pudutr0n to programming
493 points | 100 comments
https://files.catbox.moe/8rz9m7.mp4

Daddy needs a new pair of RAM!

edit: the fps are way better in smaller terminal windows with lower character count but then it’s hard to make out the dice. D:

edit2: code here (expires in 2 weeks)