Venezuela's foreign minister says a U.S. warship illegally boarded a Venezuelan fishing boat in Venezuelan waters

Archived version: archive.is/newest/independent.…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Venezuela says US marines raided a fishermen's boat in the Caribbean as tensions rise

^{Associated Press (The Independent)}

Tesla's board chair is defending a proposed 10-year, $1 trillion compensation package for CEO Elon Musk.

Tesla board chair calls debate over Elon Musk’s $1T pay package ‘a little bit weird’ | TechCrunch

^{Anthony Ha (TechCrunch)}

Photographer @blendan@lemmy.world

I took 55 1min exposures at f/2.2 ISO640 with my 24mm lens.
Sadly a lot of contrast is missing as the moon was out, so I hope I have another chance in the next days.

Alethea identified a network of at least 400 X accounts exhibiting inauthentic behavior and coordinated narrative promotion. The network used large language models (LLMs) to generate subtly varied copypasta-style content—a technique Alethea terms PromptPasta—to amplify messages aligned with key figures and policy positions associated with the second Trump Administration. The outputs of PromptPasta are nuanced, with variations in phrasing among the posts that correspond to each LLM prompt, making them harder to detect than identical posts shared via copypasta tactics.

This investigation reveals how generative AI is being used to execute sophisticated influence operations that blur the line between authentic and inauthentic public opinion. Communications teams can no longer rely solely on traditional sentiment analysis or media monitoring—narratives are now shaped by coordinated networks using LLMs to seed doubt, amplify polarizing messages, and hijack conversations in real time. Understanding these evolving tactics is critical for identifying emerging risks to brand reputation, public trust, and message integrity before they escalate or mislead key audiences.

The number of Japanese centenarians rose to 99,763 in September, with women making up 88% of the total.

Archived version: archive.is/20250913145737/bbc.…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Japan sets new record with nearly 100,000 people aged over 100

^{Jessica Rawnsley (BBC News)}

Romanian F-16 jets shoot down Russian Shahed drone that crossed into country's airspace from Ukraine's Odesa, prompting emergency alerts for civilians

Archived version: archive.is/newest/turkiyetoday…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Russian drone shot down over Romania as Poland raises air defense alert

^{Newsroom (Türkiye Today)}

Ukrainian drones strike another major oil refinery deep inside Russia.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/kyivpost.com…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Spotify sent a warning to stop data sales, but developers say they never got it.

Spotify peeved after 10,000 users sold data to build AI tools

^{Ashley Belanger (Ars Technica)}

One environmental attorney said that the EPA proposal "prioritizes chemical industry profits and utility companies' bottom line over the health of children and families across the country."

Trump EPA Seeks to Reverse Rules Protecting Drinking Water From Carcinogenic 'Forever Chemicals'

One environmental attorney said that the EPA proposal "prioritizes chemical industry profits and utility companies' bottom line over the health of children and families across the country."

^{brett-wilkins (Common Dreams)}

Ronak Singhal will be moving onto better and brighter opportunities at the end of the month

Intel talent bleed continues as Xeon chip architect heads for the escape hatch

: Ronak Singhal will be moving onto better and brighter opportunities at the end of the month

^{Tobias Mann (The Register)}

The streaming star on how to reject political violence while staying honest about Kirk's rhetoric.

Hasan Piker was set to debate Charlie Kirk. Now he's warning of a "Reichstag fire moment."

^{Mother Jones}

The Halcón 2.1 — 100% designed and manufactured in Mexico — has received certification to go into production.

After 70 years, 100% Mexican-made airplane is ready for takeoff

^{MND Staff (Mexico News Daily)}

"Looking forward to the contortions of people whose paychecks are dependent on denying that any of this is the case," said one observer.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/commondreams…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

'We Took the Gloves Off': Former Israeli Military Chief Admits 220,000 Gaza Casualties

^{brett-wilkins (Common Dreams)}

Citing US President Donald Trump's anti-climate executive actions, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled a proposal to end a program that requires power plants, refineries, landfills, and more to report their emissions.

In 'Latest Pro-Polluter Move,' Trump EPA to End Emissions Data Collection

"EPA cannot avoid the climate crisis by simply burying its head in the sand as it baselessly cuts off its main source of greenhouse gas emissions data," said one Sierra Club campaigner.

^{jessica-corbett (Common Dreams)}

As you will hopefully recall, that very strange patent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair over the latter’s hit game, Palworld, is ongoing. At the heart of that case is a series of overly broad patents for what are generally considered generic game mechanics that also have a bunch of prior art from before their use by Nintendo in its Pokémon games. These include concepts like throwing a capture item at an NPC to collect a character, as well as riding and mounting/dismounting NPCs in an open world setting. The result, even as the litigation is ongoing, has been PocketPair patching out several of these game mechanics from its game in order to protect itself. That it feels this is necessary as a result of these broad patents is unfortunate.

Newly Granted Nintendo Patents An ‘Embarrassing Failure’ By The USPTO, Says Patent Attorney

As you will hopefully recall, that very strange patent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair over the latter’s hit game, Palworld, is ongoing. At the heart of that case is a series of overl…

^Techdirt

Environmentalism has fallen by the wayside in the U.S. Not so in Mexico, where several important protections are in place.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/mexiconewsda…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

A green Mexico under a gray United States - Mexico News Daily

^{Sarah DeVries (Mexico News Daily)}

Tupac Shakur was murdered 29 years ago today. His status as a cultural icon is beyond dispute, but the legend that’s built up around his tragically short life has often overshadowed the radical political outlook that shaped his work.

The Socialist Politics of Tupac Shakur

^jacobin.com

Paedophile's best mate Mandelson may receive compensation from public funds for 'wrongful dismissal' as ambassador

Mandelson: Starmer knew about 'yum' yum' message before PMQs

^{Skwawkbox (The Canary)}

UN resolution calls for an end to the war in the Gaza Strip and for a just and comprehensive settlement for Palestine

Archived version: archive.is/newest/thecanary.co…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

UN resolution sees 142 countries support recognition of Palestine

^{Alaa Shamali (The Canary)}

Israel claimed that its bombing of a cabinet meeting in Yemen last month struck a “crushing blow” against the Ansar Allah movement. But the movement’s real leaders were not affected by the strike, and they have vowed to continue their attacks on Israel.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/jacobin.com/…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Israel Is Targeting Civilians in Yemen as Well as Gaza

^jacobin.com

This post is inspired by this prior post about a blog leaving the fediverse in favor of sticking to RSS:

Why do we advocate for, and pour hours of development into, ActivityPub rather than building clients which add a social layer to existing content distribution and communication protocols? I ask this in earnest, assuming that there is a comprehensive and well thought out array of reasons that I need to learn to fully grasp the project and it's motives.

It appears the fundamental design decision of Activity pub, shifting the hosting burden from a single host to a distributed network of server instances and user point of access to social content from a single host to any instance that will allow them to join and support the volume of content that they request to federate. This enables a more robust network, with instances holding content the users have interacted with regardless of if the original host instance goes down. It also reduces time to load for content after it has beed federated to a user's local instance, assuming it is closer in proximity and capable enough. At the same time, this dramatically increases the total storage burden (and to a lesser extent compute burden) of the network and makes content ownership and control a challenge.

Functionally the Fediverse is a public commons with content ownership practically distributed across the network of instances, whether copyright says so or not. Attempts to impose universal author controls on this framework face a lot of dissonance because it is fundamentally at odds with the underlying concept of federation as distributed hosting. The minute a host begins hosting content over which they have no control (such as encrypted posts) the potential for abuse skyrockets, and compromises between these priorities demand at minimum that users outside a host's instance maintain rights to delete and modify content on their instance whether or not they are otherwise at odds with the instance admin. Encryption also adds substantial compute burden to the network.

Since the popularization of the Distributed Social Network concept I have wondered whether pre-existing content distribution infrastructure like RSS/Atom might not be more advantageous as a backbone for social networking, with the development load shifted mostly to the client side and away from protocols. The IndieWeb project is playing with some of these ideas, and I have seen some prototypes online of RSS based social networks, so my question is, what is the fundamental advantage of ActivityPub over the combination of these other existing protocols with longer histories and broader existing implementation? RSS, Atom, email, XMPP, etc. Is lower latency really a good enough justification for widely redundant data distribution when the aggregation and discovery of content can be handled separately from hosting it?

This question becomes increasingly relevant when it comes to multimedia, and the minute that you offload multimedia to central servers by link embedding instead of hosting within the instance, boom you are back to the old centralized architecture and why are you federating?

So I am going to pose this question to the Fediverse myself, what is the reason that federated content distribution should be adopted for general use rather than distributed aggregation? That is to say of a client performed with the same features as a Fediverse front end, but all of the content was self-hosted and listed via RSS or Atom with comments handled via Webmention, direct messages via email or XMPP, and moderation and discivery handled at the level of aggregation via instances (meaning a user "joins" or "subscribes" to an instance, and that instance provides a ban list, list of feeds subscribed to by its users for discovery, provides a user directory) what would be the features that this type of system would lack that ActivityPub based systems have in place?

There are three advantages I see to AcrivityPub, and I'm not completely sure they justify mass adoption vs. the cost of broad redundancy of content and authorship issues. What am I missing?

1. Choosing local instance for faster loading, but this only is an advantage after content is brought in for the first time, in which case it actually is slower as first the instance has to pull the content and then serve it to the user.
2. "all" content in the protocol is of the same type, allowing for easier interoperability between clients and services. I'm thinking this is the root of what most people will say is the big advantage of ActivityPub vs. older protocols, but I'd like to hear more about why this is enough of a reason to overcome the inertia of existing mass adoption and support of the alternatives. Also, couldn't this also apply to a service built on an existing self-hosted protocol like Atom?
3. It isn't based in XML, and modern devs don't want to use XML. As I'm not a coder, I cant say how big an influence this has, but from what I have seen it seems to be a substantial factor. Can anyone explain why?

What am I missing? I know it must be a lot, and I thank you in advance for cluing me in.

A UN expert on Friday warned of the threat to human rights posed by growing economic inequality between the North and South, in a meeting at the 60th session of the Human Rights Council.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/jurist.org/n…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

UN expert warns of threat global inequality poses to human rights

A UN expert on Friday warned of the threat to human rights posed by growing economic inequality between the North and South, in a meeting at the 60th session of the Human Rights Council. The independe...

^{Lowri Thomas | New York U. School of Law, US (- JURIST - News)}

Ships setting sail from Italy have joined others from Greece, Spain and Tunisia, to deliver humanitarian aid into the Gaza strip.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/euronews.com…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

European aid flotilla sails to Gaza with four MEPs aboard

Ships setting sail from Italy have joined others from Greece, Spain and Tunisia, to deliver humanitarian aid into the Gaza strip.

^{Vincenzo Genovese (Euronews.com)}

Forever chemicals known as PFAS have turned up in an unexpected place: beer. Researchers tested 23 different beers from across the U.S. and found that 95% contained PFAS, with the highest concentrations showing up in regions with known water contamination. The findings reveal how pollution in municipal water supplies can infiltrate popular products, raising concerns for both consumers and brewers.

Archived version: archive.is/20250912181011/scie…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

Toxic “forever chemicals” found in 95% of beers tested in the U.S.

^ScienceDaily

Hollie Ridley and Teddy Ryan - the arms industry 'power couple'? Well, that certainly seems that way as a Declassified investigation shows

Hollie Ridley: Labour gen sec linked to arms industry via husband

^{Skwawkbox (The Canary)}

Can you say two-tier policing, Home Secretary? Because it seems that cops response to the Unite The Kingdom march was... odd...

Two-tier policing as only nine arrests at Unite The Kingdom march

^{Skwawkbox (The Canary)}

Free speech advocates fear a new bill could let the Secretary of State strip passports from US citizens based on their speech. "Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say," one said.

New 'Thought Policing' Bill May Let Rubio Strip Passports from US Citizens Over Political Speech

“Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” said one free speech advocate.

^{stephen-prager (Common Dreams)}

Unofficial mod lets classic Nintendo GameCube title use AI chatbots with amusing results.

Modder injects AI dialogue into 2002’s Animal Crossing using memory hack

^{Benj Edwards (Ars Technica)}

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/35862380

Guided by angels, pursued by chemtrails: the weird world of Florida health chief’s influential wife

Brianna Ladapo, the wife of Florida surgeon general Dr Joseph Ladapo, claims her husband won’t work with anyone she hasn’t vetted

^{Michael Sainato (The Guardian)}

The video circulated on X cuts one portion of Alter’s speech in half, during which he criticized “insurrectional anarchists” for their method of protesting, urging organization into a party to better reach people. In the full speech posted on YouTube, he notes that some anarchists have faced jail time for their methods of protest, praising their efforts but questioning whether they can achieve their goals.

“While their actions are laudable, it should be asked, to what purpose do they serve?” Alter said during his speech, which is not included in the video posted on X. The second portion of his statement is included. “Without organization, how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven, mad organization in the history of the world — that of the United States?”

Texas State professor fired for comments at socialism meeting

Thomas Alter is the second professor in the state to be terminated for allegedly violating university policy after a video was posted on social media.

^{Ayden Runnels (The Texas Tribune)}