Wago connectors are somewhat controversial in the electrical world—beloved by some, decried by others. The company knows it has a dedicated user base, though, and has established the Wago Creators site for that very community.

The idea behind the site is simple—it’s a place to discover and share unique little tools and accessories for use with Wago’s line of electrical connectors. Most are 3D printed accessories that make working with Wago connectors easier. There are some fun and innovative ideas up there, like an ESP8266 development kit that has a Wago connector for all the important pins, as well as a tool for easily opening the lever locks. Perhaps most amusing, though, is the project entitled “Hide Your Wago From Americans”—which consists of a 3D-printed wire nut lookalike designed to slide over the connectors to keep them out of view. There’s also a cheerful attempt at Wago art, that doesn’t really look like anything recognizable at all. Oh well, they can’t all be winners.

It’s great to see Wago so openly encouraging creativity among those that use its products. The sharing of ideas has been a big part of the 3D printing movement, and Wago isn’t the first company to jump on the bandwagon in this regard. If you’ve got some neat Wago hacks of your own, you can always let us know on the tipsline!

[Thanks to Niklas for the tip!]

hackaday.com/2025/12/02/wagos-…

Oggi a Torino è stato arrestato Filippo Blengino, segretario dei Radicali Italiani, durante un’azione dimostrativa in cui ha ceduto cannabis CBD non drogante. Un gesto di disobbedienza civile che mette in luce l’assurdità dell’articolo 18 del Decreto Sicurezza, una norma che equipara prodotti non stupefacenti allo spaccio e espone le persone a pene fino a vent’anni di carcere.

«Solidarietà da parte di tutta Possibile a Filippo Blengino, arrestato a Torino sulla base di norme inutili e proibizioniste che non producono alcun risultato se non criminalizzare cittadini e imprenditori della cannabis CBD. È un’impostazione anti-scientifica e repressiva, pienamente fatta propria dal governo e dal ddl Sicurezza. Speriamo che la determinazione di Blengino porti l’articolo 18 davanti alla Corte Costituzionale: saremo al suo fianco», dichiara Francesca Druetti, Segretaria nazionale di Possibile.

“Quello che è accaduto a Blengino accade ogni giorno in tutta Italia: anche in Piemonte, da Cuneo in giù, negozi di cannabis legale vengono perquisiti, prodotti sequestrati e persone denunciate come spacciatori, con danni enormi a un intero comparto economico che opera nella legalità”, commenta Giulia Marro, Consigliera Regionale del Piemonte AVS.

Come Possibile e come consigliera regionale del Piemonte di Alleanza Verdi Sinistra, ribadiamo che questa norma va cambiata. Serve una legislazione basata su evidenze scientifiche, non sulla propaganda proibizionista. Serve tutelare chi lavora onestamente, non criminalizzarlo.

L'articolo DRUETTI-MARRO: ARRESTO BLENGINO, UNA NORMA ASSURDA CHE COLPISCE CHI LAVORA NELLA LEGALITÀ proviene da Possibile.

Druetti (Possibile): ONU critica i centri per migranti in Albania, Meloni abbandoni il progetto

“Mentre Meloni continua a dire che “funzioneranno”, i campi per le persone migranti di Gjadër in Albania sono finiti al centro delle preoccupazioni e critiche del comitato ONU contro la Tortura e Comportamenti Disumani e Degradanti. E la notizia già si commenta da sola sottolineando il fallimento e lo scempio etico e politico di questo progetto.”

Lo dichiara la Segretaria Nazionale di Possibile Francesca Druetti, commentando il report del Comitato ONU, disponibile qui: ohchr.org/en/press-releases/20…

“Il Comitato ONU — continua Druetti — ha espresso dubbi sul Protocollo Italia-Albania, in particolare sulla mancanza di chiarezza sulla giurisdizione e sul rispetto del divieto di refoulment (principio fondamentale del diritto internazionale).

Ha inoltre evidenziato dubbi riguardo la conformità alla Convenzione contro la tortura così come l’assenza di dati affidabili su torture, maltrattamenti e uso eccessivo della forza da parte della polizia. La detenzione delle persone migranti è una violazione della dignità umana, come dimostrano chiaramente le numerose prove dai nostri CPR. Deportare le persone contro la propria volontà perlopiù in un paese con cui non hanno legami, non può in alcun modo essere considerato ragionevole o sostenibile.

Noi continueremo a chiedere la chiusura non solo del CPR di Gjader ma anche di tutti quelli presenti in Italia, perché rappresentano luoghi in cui i diritti umani vengono calpestati quotidianamente.”

L'articolo Druetti (Pos): ONU critica i centri per migranti in Albania, Meloni abbandoni il progetto proviene da Possibile.

Michigan’s Grand Blanc Township thinks it has discovered a trick to weasel out of accountability: charging a reporter more for government records than most people earn in two years.

Independent journalist Anna Matson filed two requests for records about the township’s fire chief, Jamie Jent, being placed on administrative leave. That decision — later lifted after outcry from residents and firefighters — reportedly came after he raised concerns about staffing issues following the tragic September shooting at the township’s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The government told her she’d have to pay a combined $164,000 in labor costs ($100,000 for her first request and $64,000 for a second) for finding and reviewing the records in order for them to respond to the request. That’s ridiculous. Michigan’s legislature should act to ensure that other local governments don’t get any ideas.

There’s nothing unusually burdensome about Matson’s requests. If the township’s recordkeeping is so shoddy and its search capabilities so lacking that it costs six figures’ worth of employee time to find some emails and documents, that’s the township’s problem, not Matson’s. If anything, it begs another Freedom of Information Act request to figure out how the township reached that level of incompetence, and what officials are spending money on instead of basic software.

The township doubled down on evasiveness when Matson showed up to a board meeting last week to contest the fees, and it made nonsensical excuses to enter into closed session so that it could discuss its secrecy in secret.

Maybe the township thinks the fees will discourage the press from trying to hold it accountable. More likely, it will do the opposite: inspire reporters to keep digging. Intrepid journalists see obvious obstruction tactics like these and think, “I must be on to something.” We’re confident Matson will eventually uncover whatever the township doesn’t want her and her readers to see.

Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act, like the federal FOIA and state public records laws across the country, was intended to let everyone — not just rich people — find out what their government is up to and how their money is being spent.

The law allows agencies to charge reasonable fees — copying costs, mailing expenses, and limited labor charges calculated at the hourly wage of the lowest-paid employee capable of doing the work. Agencies aren’t permitted to charge for the first two hours of labor, and they can only charge for search and review time if not doing so would result in “unreasonably high costs.”

Officials are taking advantage of the media’s weak financial position to hold accountability for ransom.

We’re not fans of charging any labor costs for FOIAs. Tax dollars already pay for agencies to maintain public records. Allowing the public to access them is a basic government function. But putting that aside, how does finding records about one employee during a limited time frame — which was all her first request sought — cost six figures? The $64,000 price tag for the second request for departmental records is equally absurd and also shows the arbitrariness of the whole thing — how does the broader request cost less than the narrower one?

This obstruction tactic is hardly a local innovation. Last year, Nebraska’s legislature had to step in after the state’s Department of Environment and Energy tried charging the Flatwater Free Press more than $44,000 to review environmental records. It claimed figuring out what exemptions to the public’s records law applied would be time-consuming — essentially making the press pay for their time figuring out legal arguments to not give it the records it wanted.

The Trump administration — which has attempted to close FOIA offices and fired officials who released embarrassing information pursuant to FOIAs — recently demanded journalist Brian Karem pay a $50,000 bond just to expedite a lawsuit for documents about the classified records Trump took to Mar-a-Lago. It’s far from the first instance of fee bullying by the federal government, regardless of who is president.

Trump, of course, claims he did nothing wrong by taking those documents, but doesn’t want to let the public be the judge. The situation in Grand Blanc Township is similar — the same government that may have punished a fire chief for speaking up about public safety wants to punish a journalist for asking questions about it. It’s secrecy stacked on secrecy.

It’s no coincidence that so many of these overcharging cases involve requests by independent journalists or small local outlets. The government knows the news industry is struggling economically. That’s no secret. Officials are taking advantage of the media’s weak financial position to hold accountability for ransom. If they get their way, transparency will become a luxury only affordable to major media outlets that are unlikely to have much interest in public records from Grand Blanc Township in the first place.

The township needs to rescind its invoice, apologize to Matson, and get her the records she’s entitled to right away. Beyond that, state legislators need to put politics aside and follow Nebraska’s example by narrowing what the government can charge the public for its own records and making those limits unambiguous (and of course, they should also remove absurd provisions exempting the governor and legislature from transparency).

And if agencies have the nerve to defend these shakedowns in court, judges should hold government lawyers accountable for whatever frivolous legal arguments they concoct to justify charging well over the cost of a house in Detroit for basic transparency.

freedom.press/issues/censorshi…

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

The White House has launched a media bias tracker to catalog instances of supposedly distorted coverage by the press. Predictably, the site is long on hyperbole and short on substance.

The following statement can be attributed to Seth Stern, director of advocacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF):

“If Trump thinks the media is getting stories wrong or being unfair to him, he should release the public records, correspondence, and legal memoranda that prove it, instead of wasting time and taxpayer money on silly websites.

“He’s got more power than anyone to correct the record with documented facts and has countless platforms on which to do so. Instead, he calls reporters ‘piggy’ and posts empty rants that don’t refute anything, while doing everything in his power to hinder Americans’ access to public records containing verifiable facts.

“Trump’s anti-speech antics are highly unpopular, and I doubt many people take his ramblings about ‘fake news’ seriously at this point. He has made it extremely clear that his beef is not with media bias but with journalists not flattering him and regurgitating his lies. It’s a safe bet that his bias tracker will not have anything to say about the influencers and propagandists he favors over serious journalists.

“People understand the obvious conflict inherent in an image-obsessed presidential administration appointing itself the arbiter of media bias. I expect that after the initial wave of publicity, few Americans will be paying attention to this latest stunt, let alone consulting it when deciding what news to consume. The gimmick is wearing thin.”

Please contact us if you would like further comment.

freedom.press/issues/white-hou…

404 Media

2025-08-13 21:53:37

Trump Administration Outlines Plan to Throw Out an Agency's FOIA Requests En Masse

The Department of Energy (DOE) said in a public notice scheduled to be published Thursday that it will throw out all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests sent to the agency before October 1, 2024 unless the requester proactively emails the agency to tell it they are still interested in the documents they requested. This will result in the improper closure of likely thousands of FOIA requests if not more; government transparency experts told 404 Media that the move is “insane,” “ludicrous,” a “Pandora’s Box,” and “an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible.”

The DOE notice says “requesters who submitted a FOIA request to DOE HQ at any time prior to October 1, 2024 (FY25), that is still open and is not under active litigation with DOE (or another Federal agency) shall email StillInterestedFOIA@hq.doe.gov to continue processing of the FOIA request […] If DOE HQ does not receive a response from requesters within the 30-day time-period with a DOE control number, no further action will be taken on the open FOIA request(s), and the file may be administratively closed.” A note at the top of the notice says it is scheduled to be formally published in the Federal Register on Thursday.

The agency will send out what are known as “still interested” letters, which federal agencies have used over the years to see if a requester wants to withdraw their request after a certain period of inactivity. These types of letters are controversial and perhaps not legal, and previous administrations have said that they should be used rarely and that requests should only be closed after an agency made multiple attempts to contact a requester over multiple methods of communication. What the DOE is doing now is sending these letters to submitters of all requests prior to October 1, 2024, which is not really that long ago; it also said it will close the requests of people who do not respond in a specific way to a specific email address.

FOIA requests—especially complicated ones—can often take months or years to process. I have outstanding FOIA requests with numerous federal agencies that I filed years ago, and am still interested in getting back, and I have gotten useful documents from federal agencies after years of waiting. The notion that large numbers of people who filed FOIA requests as recently as September 2024, which is less than a year ago, are suddenly uninterested in getting the documents they requested is absurd and should be seen as an attack on public transparency, experts told 404 Media. The DOE’s own reports show that it often does not respond to FOIA requests within a year, and, of course, a backlog exists in part because agencies are not terribly responsive to FOIA.

“If a requester proactively reaches out and says I am withdrawing my request, then no problem, they don’t have to process it,” Adam Marshall, senior staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me. “The agency can’t say we’ve decided we’ve gotten a lot of requests and we don’t want to do them so we’re throwing them out.”

“I was pretty shocked when I saw this to be honest,” Marshall added. “I’ve never seen anything like this in 10 years of doing FOIA work, and it’s egregious for a few reasons. I don’t think agencies have the authority to close a FOIA request if they don’t get a response to a ‘still interested’ letter. The statute doesn’t provide for that authority, and the amount of time the agency is giving people to respond—30 days—it sounds like a long time but if you happen to miss that email or aren’t digging through your backlogs, it’s not a lot of time. The notion that FOIA requesters should keep an eye out in the Federal Register for this kind of notice is ludicrous.”

The DOE notice essentially claims that the agency believes it gets too many FOIA requests and doesn’t feel like answering them. “DOE’s incoming FOIA requests have more than tripled in the past four years, with over 4,000 requests received in FY24, and an expected 5,000 or more requests in FY25. DOE has limited resources to process the burgeoning number of FOIA requests,” the notice says. “Therefore, DOE is undertaking this endeavor as an attempt to free up government resources to better serve the American people and focus its efforts on more efficiently connecting the citizenry with the work of its government.”

Lauren Harper of the Freedom of the Press Foundation told me in an email that she also has not seen any sort of precedent for this and that “it is an underhanded attempt to close out as many FOIA requests as possible, because who in their right mind checks the federal register regularly, and it should be challenged in court. (On that note, I am filing a FOIA request about this proposal.)”

“The use of still interested letters isn't explicitly allowed in the FOIA statute at all, and, as far as I know, there is absolutely zero case law that would support the department sending a mass ‘still interested’ letter via the federal register,” she added. “That they are also sending emails is not a saving grace; these types of letters are supposed to be used sparingly—not as a flagrant attempt to reduce their backlog by any means necessary. I also worry it will open a Pandora's Box—if other agencies see this, some are sure to follow.”

Marshall said that FOIA response times have been getting worse for years across multiple administrations (which has also been my experience). The Trump administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have cut a large number of jobs in many agencies across the government, which may have further degraded response times. But until this, there hadn’t been major proactive attempts taken by the self-defined “most transparent administration in history” to destroy FOIA.

“This is of a different nature than what we have seen so far, this affirmative, large-scale effort to purport to cancel a large number of pending FOIA requests,” Marshall said.

Limitations on Use of “Still-Interested” Inquiries

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