Sollicciano, un piccolo centro di tortura nel verde, alle porte di Firenze.

Da sabato scorso è completamente allagato il reparto destinato ai detenuti con gravi disturbi psichiatrici (“Articolazione tutela salute mentale, ATSM”), sia al piano superiore, dove ci sono le celle, che a quello inferiore, dove si svolgono le attività riabilitative. Per giorni i detenuti sono stati chiusi in cella, senza poter uscire per attività e momenti di socialità

L’avvocato Enrico Helmut Vincenzini è osservatore delle carceri toscane e lombarde per l’associazione Antigone [...] "È una specie di grotta: le pareti trasudano acqua. Sono entrato in una cella della sesta sezione dove il muro del bagno era nero e schiumava sostanze bianche".

in molti reparti c’è un problema di cimici dei letti, nella struttura ci sono anche frequenti infiltrazioni, perdite d’acqua e umidità (anche se non dell’attuale entità), topi e sporcizia.

As hardware ages, it becomes harder and harder to keep it in service. Whether that’s because of physical aging or lack of support from the company who built it in the first place, time is not generally good for electronics, especially when it comes to our beloved retro gaming systems. The first Playstation, for example, is starting to see some of the deleterious effects of having originally been built in the 90s, and [LorentioB] has a new, third-party motherboard to bring to the table to keep these systems online as well as adding some features in that Sony removed.

The motherboard is known as the nsOne, meaning Not Sony’s One since this is the first motherboard built by a single person outside of Sony. It’s not based on any FPGAs or emulators and is completely compatible with all of the original hardware, chips, and other circuitry of the original Playstation. Based on the PU-23 series, it even revives the removed parallel port, which Sony removed after the first versions of the hardware because of region locking concerns and other pro-consumer issues. Every chip footprint and connector was reverse engineered manually, using optical sanding, scanning, and net-by-net tracing.

For such a complex piece of hardware this is quite the feat, and for anyone who wants to restore old hardware or add the parallel port back on to their system this could be a game changer. [LorentioB] is not quite finished yet but hopes to have a finished version shortly. As far as fully opening up the system goes, there are some software hacks to look at that allow more games to run on the system and some hardware hacks that open the system up as well.

hackaday.com/2025/07/27/a-non-…

Microsoft ha deciso di ridurre l’impatto ambientale della sua intelligenza artificiale ricorrendo a una risorsa apparentemente improbabile: i rifiuti umani e agricoli. L’azienda ha firmato un contratto con l’azienda americana Vaulted Deep, in base al quale pomperà quasi cinque milioni di tonnellate di carbonio nel sottosuolo nell’arco di 12 anni sotto forma di liquami organici composti da liquami, letame e scarti alimentari.

L’essenza del metodo è semplice e un po’ futuristica. Tutti questi resti poco invitanti vengono mescolati in un unico cocktail e pompati a una profondità di circa un chilometro e mezzo in speciali formazioni sotterranee, completamente isolate dalla superficie. Per ogni tonnellata di carbonio nascosta in sicurezza nelle profondità, Microsoft riceve crediti di carbonio, che contribuiscono a migliorare la rendicontazione e a migliorare l’immagine di un’azienda che sviluppa tecnologie ad alto consumo energetico.

La tecnologia, già in uso in luoghi come Los Angeles e Derby, in Kansas, non si basa su nuove invenzioni, ma sul riutilizzo di infrastrutture esistenti originariamente progettate per lo smaltimento di rifiuti industriali. Vaulted Deep sfrutta questa competenza per eliminare materiali organici che normalmente finirebbero nelle discariche, nei fiumi o nell’atmosfera sotto forma di metano.

Negli ultimi anni, Microsoft ha investito molto nelle tecnologie di rimozione del carbonio. Dal 2020 al 2024, l’azienda ha emesso oltre 75 milioni di tonnellate di CO₂ e ora punta non solo a ridurre le emissioni, ma anche a raggiungere l’obiettivo di emissioni di carbonio negative entro il 2030. Il piano per il 2050 è quello di compensare completamente tutti i danni ambientali accumulati dalla sua fondazione. Microsoft ha già acquistato oltre 83 milioni di tonnellate di crediti di carbonio, diventando uno dei maggiori acquirenti in questo mercato.

Vaulted Deep si discosta nettamente da altri approcci diffusi, come la riforestazione o la cattura diretta di CO₂. Queste soluzioni sono dilazionate nel tempo o richiedono nuove capacità. Vaulted Deep utilizza infrastrutture esistenti e affronta due problematiche contemporaneamente: la gestione dei rifiuti e la riduzione delle emissioni.

Microsoft sottolinea che questo approccio evita anche la reazione negativa del pubblico verso metodi più tradizionali, come la fertilizzazione dei campi con residui biologici. Secondo un rappresentante dell’azienda, tali pratiche spesso causano inquinamento delle acque e altri problemi, mentre lo smaltimento sotterraneo rende i rifiuti invisibili e sicuri.

Tuttavia, non tutti ritengono che la strategia sia ideale. Gli ambientalisti mettono in guardia dai potenziali rischi per le falde acquifere e dalla difficoltà di monitorare a lungo termine tali pozzi. Ciononostante, l’alleanza tra il gigante della tecnologia e i produttori di fanghi di depurazione sembra un passo avanti verso la riconciliazione tra ecologia ed economia, seppur in modo poco romantico.

La necessità di tali soluzioni sta diventando sempre più urgente, dato che l’intelligenza artificiale sta accelerando il riscaldamento globale e grandi progetti come Stargate richiedono gigawatt di energia per far funzionare i moderni data center.

L'articolo Microsoft riduce l’impatto ambientale dell’AI con rifiuti umani e agricoli proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

OpenAI ha raggiunto un nuovo traguardo nello sviluppo dell’intelligenza artificiale: il suo modello sperimentale ha ottenuto risultati da “medaglia d’oro” alle Olimpiadi Internazionali della Matematica, secondo Alexander Wei, ricercatore di OpenAI che si occupa di modelli linguistici e inferenza logica. Wei ha affermato che il modello ha completato cinque compiti su sei, ottenendo 35 punti su 42 possibili. Questo risultato è in linea con le prestazioni dei migliori partecipanti a una delle Olimpiadi più impegnative al mondo.

Le Olimpiadi Internazionali della Matematica riuniscono ogni anno studenti delle scuole superiori provenienti da tutto il mondo, ognuno dei quali si cimenta nella risoluzione di problemi di algebra e matematica pre-universitaria. Questi problemi sembrano semplici, ma richiedono un pensiero non convenzionale per ottenere il massimo punteggio. Quest’anno, solo 67 dei 630 partecipanti hanno ricevuto medaglie d’oro, circa il 10% del totale.

L’intelligenza artificiale è tradizionalmente abile nella gestione di big data e operazioni di routine, ma spesso si rivela carente quando si tratta di compiti che richiedono flessibilità di pensiero e creatività. Tuttavia, questa volta, il modello OpenAI, secondo i ricercatori, è stato in grado di dimostrare un comportamento simile al ragionamento umano. Secondo Wei, l’IA ha imparato a costruire dimostrazioni complesse e impeccabili al livello di un matematico professionista .

Detto questo, né Wei né il CEO di OpenAI, Sam Altman, si aspettano che tale funzionalità compaia in prossime versioni pubbliche. Anche la prossima versione del modello, GPT-5 , sarà probabilmente notevolmente più intelligente della precedente, ma è probabile che non raggiungerà ancora questo livello.

L'articolo OpenAI: il modello sperimentale vince la medaglia d’oro alle Olimpiadi della Matematica proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

The next “Brandung-Live” will be on 27.07.2025 at 20.00h CEST/DST.

News from Potsdam, Brandenburg, the Pirates of Germany and international news – in German.

If you want to join the conversation, just contact info@PiratesOnAir.net.

piratesonair.net/brandung-live…

You can buy all kinds of conventional clocks that have hands and numbers for easy reading. Or, like [Fabio Ricci], you could build yourself something a little more esoteric, like this neat shadow clock.

The heart of the build is an ESP8266 microcontroller, which gets the current time via Wi-Fi by querying an NTP time server. It also uses a DS3231 real-time clock module as a backup, keeping accurate time even when a network connection is unavailable.

Time is displayed via a 60-pixel ring of WS2812B addressable LEDs. These 60 LEDs correspond to the usual per-minute graduations that you would find on a regular clock. Current hour is displayed by lighting the corresponding LED red, while minutes are shown in blue and seconds in white. It’s called a “shadow clock” because of its method of activation. IR distance sensors are used to activate the time display when a hand or finger is placed near the clock. As Fabio puts it, “shadow play” will make the clock display the time. Otherwise, it switches to be a simple round device on the wall that displays colorful animations.

It’s a neat build that looks quite unassuming as a decor piece, and yet it also serves as an easy-to-read timepiece. We’ve seen LEDs put to all sorts of good uses in clock builds around these parts. Meanwhile, if you’ve found your own unique way to display the time—either in readable fashion, or totally oblique—don’t hesitate to let us know.

hackaday.com/2025/07/26/2025-o…

It’s hard to argue that Soviet-Era nuclear engineering may have some small flaws, what with the heavily-monitored exclusion zone around Chernobyl No.4. Evidently, their industrial designers were more on-the-ball, because [Alex] has crafted the absolute most stylish fallout monitor we’ve ever seen, with ESP32 and a vintage Soviet-designed plasma display to indicate radiation levels in the exclusion zone.

Since the device is not located within the zone, [Alex] is using the ESP32 to access sensor values published via an API at SaveEcoBot. He also includes a Geiger counter module for the background level at the current location. That’s straightforward enough– integrating the modern microcontroller with the vintage plasma display is where the real hacking comes in. Though they might not be as vintage as you think: apparently the Elektronika MS6205 remained in production until 2005, but 2005 is still vintage. [Alex] notes in the instructions on hackaday.io that we’re actually looking for a post-1995 model to follow along.

The Elektronika MS6205 is based on a 100×100 pixel plasma matrix, but it is operated as a text-only display with Latin and Cyrillic characters in ROM. The ROM also includes some extra symbols and Greek letters (the gamma will come in handy for this application) that can be unlocked by cutting a trace on the board and replacing it with a bodge wire. Igniting the display requires 250V, which will require more work for North Americans than it does in Ukraine. Driving the display requires interfacing with the 7-bit data bus and 8-bit address bus, but [Alex] has made the wiring and code available on the project site if you’re interested in these devices. If you want to watch it in action and get more background, check out the video embedded below.

These sorts of monochrome plasma displays have a lot of charm, and are absolutely worth reverse-engineering if you get your hands on different model. If you like the vibe of this display, you might also be interested in Vacuum Fluorescent Displays, which can be easier to find in the West.

Thanks to [Alex] for the tip. Like the tireless IEA workers at Chernobyl, we’re always monitoring the radiation level of our tips line.

youtube.com/embed/YcflcFGWDy8?…

hackaday.com/2025/07/26/vintag…

Indian Time, a newspaper that served the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, built and informed a loyal audience of Indigenous readers on the U.S.-Canada border for over 40 years.

Then, it vanished.

In late December 2024, the paper’s last edition was printed and website updates screeched to a halt. Indian Time’s hand was forced by the same pressures affecting newspapers nationwide — declining ad revenue and struggling finances. Despite breaking inimitable stories about the Mohawk Nation, the paper could not afford to keep the ink flowing.

“We thought the economic climate of Akwesasne could hold us,” said Marjorie Skidders, the longtime and last editor of Indian Time, “but it didn’t.”

Now, a population of over 10,000 people across two different countries is living under a tribal news blackout. With no paper of record, the community must rely on the local government, social media, and non-native news sources to piece together a broken portrait of Akwesasne life.

“There is no coverage of anything to hold anyone accountable, politically,” Skidders said. “There’s no coverage of meetings, there’s no coverage of gatherings.”

To better understand the demise of one of America’s oldest Indigenous newspapers and the impact on its community, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) hosted a webinar July 22 with Skidders, former Indian Time reporter and FPF contributor Isaac White, and U.S. Press Freedom Tracker Senior Reporter Stephanie Sugars.

youtube.com/embed/LCogo7I-zl8?…

Since the paper’s shuttering, no publication has stepped up to fill the void, White said. His frustration is compounded by the fact that he and Skidders are still the first points of contact for community members and sources they developed while at Indian Time, whom he has to remind “that the paper is closed” when they reach out to share a tip. It takes a “sensational” story, he said, to “draw outside reporters here.”

“A lot of us will say, ‘We are the invisible people,’” White said. “That’s one of the things that hurt so bad with Indian Time being gone. Who really cares about us, except for us? And I think that that’s a fair question to ask.”

He raised a couple of timely examples: Conservative commentator Ann Coulter recently posted on social media that, “We didn’t kill enough Indians,” a remark condemned by the Native American community but that drew little attention from national news outlets.

White also noted that, with all the coverage of the Trump administration’s “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center, there has been little mention of the fact the facility was built on land belonging to the Miccosukee Tribe.

These are stories White and Skidders would have loved to share their perspectives on, but no longer have a platform to do so, they said.

“I think that kind of encapsulates everything,” White said. “Those two instances are things that really highlight why coverage of Indian culture is not sufficient, not even close to sufficient — and why we need our independent news outlets, like Indian Time or any other ones.”

Indian Time’s uniqueness as an independent tribal publication made the loss sting all the more. Many Indigenous news outlets “fell under the wing of the tribal government,” Skidders said. That afforded Indian Time’s staff freedoms other tribal journalists often didn’t have, like reporting without fear or favor.

“We strived to work the best that we could and be independent. And we never satisfied anyone,” she added. “We were either too one way or too the other way, but we just worked to try and do the best that we could.”

Like anywhere else in the world, press freedom violations can and do occur on Indigenous lands. White himself was arrested while covering a Mohawk land claim dispute in May 2024, and a large number of arrests and assaults of journalists took place during Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2016 and 2017.

youtube.com/embed/gahHB69ED5A?…

But documenting these incidents requires additional sensitivity, Sugars said, as few tribal constitutions enumerate press freedom protections.

“There are a large number of things that we document in terms of denial of access, demands for prior review, tribal councils having control over funding, distribution, hiring, firing, decisions, things of that nature,” she said of the Tracker. “It is challenging for us to cover those things because we don’t want to be imposing our ideas about what is wrong or right.”

White also discussed cultural differences. The notion of objectivity becomes complicated in situations where Indigenous journalists are reporting on their own neighbors, to whom they are bonded outside the domain of a journalist-source relationship.

In the moments before White was arrested covering the land claim demonstration, for example, he said he helped community elders unload food and water from a cooler and prop up a canopy to shield them from the rain. “It was just a reflex,” he said, but after he was arrested, he was afraid outside journalists would see his common courtesy as unprofessional.

“I come from a longhouse. Margie comes from a longhouse. It’s something that you just do. If wood needs to be split, you just do it. If something needs to be cooked in the cookhouse, you help,” he said. “That’s just the way that we’re taught to do things.”

When White told Skidders what happened, she empathized with his moral conflict.

“It didn’t bother me,” she said. “Wherever he goes, whatever he’s doing, he’s a Mohawk first. And he’s going to behave honorably like that.”

The Akwesasne elders, like those White helped, treasured Indian Time, Skidders said. They were, after all, the “biggest population” of the paper’s readers, and they relished staying informed about the community.

“Now it’s gone,” she added about the paper. “I don’t know how we could do it again.”

White himself is trying to keep the flame alive. He runs a podcast available on YouTube called “Sage Against the Machine” (@SageAgainstTheMachinePod), which offers a more “unfiltered look” at Mohawk news. But its “raw” and conversational nature isn’t a platform to plumb deep topics like a newspaper, and it is no replacement for the dedicated work of Indian Time.

“By the book, as a journalist, you cannot do it part time,” he said. “It’s just not feasible. It’s a loss.”

freedom.press/issues/radio-sil…

Dear Friend of Press Freedom,

It’s the 122nd day that Rümeysa Öztürk is facing deportation by the United States government for writing an op-ed it didn’t like, and the 41st day that Mario Guevara has been imprisoned for covering a protest. Read on for more.

Paramount makes its capitulation official

President Donald Trump announced this week that he’d received CBS News parent Paramount Global’s $16 million payment to settle his frivolous lawsuit. Just days later, Trump’s FCC issued its long-delayed approval of Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media, confirming what we all knew — the payment has nothing to do with legal fees or liability risks and everything to do with greasing the wheels of a corrupt administration.

As Freedom of the Press Advocacy Director Seth Stern told Columbia Journalism Review, Paramount threw CBS journalists and the First Amendment under the bus, while making itself a punchline. “People can’t trust a news outlet that is bribing the same officials it’s supposed to hold accountable,” Stern said. But we’re not done fighting back against the enablers of this shakedown of a settlement — more on that soon. Read more in CJR.

Journalists starve in Gaza

Reuters, the Associated Press, BBC News and Agence France-Presse jointly expressed their alarm about the terrible plight of journalists in Gaza, and particularly the risk of starvation. As one journalist put it, “I used to chase the truth. Now I chase calories.”

“Journalists endure many deprivations and hardships in war zones. We are deeply alarmed that the threat of starvation is now one of them. We once again urge the Israeli authorities to allow journalists in and out of Gaza. It is essential that adequate food supplies reach the people there,” their statement said.

We told CJR that “no matter what else they do while in power, governments and presidents that supported these horrors, and tolerated the killing of journalists who reported on them, will be remembered first and foremost for their complicity.” We also published a profile of the journalist who wrote our article, in collaboration with the Intercept, about the dire situation facing journalists in Gaza, Neha Madhira. Read it here.

Radio silence on the reservation

Indian Time, a newspaper that served the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne, built and informed a loyal audience of Indigenous readers for over 40 years.

But in late December 2024, the paper printed its last edition. Indian Time’s hand was forced by the same pressures affecting newspapers nationwide — namely, declining ad revenue. The paper could not afford to keep the ink flowing.

To better understand the demise of the newspaper and the impact on its community, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) hosted a webinar with Indian Time editor Marjorie Skidders, former Indian Time reporter and FPF columnist Isaac White, and U.S. Press Freedom Tracker Senior Reporter Stephanie Sugars. Read more and watch the discussion here.

ICE must stop harassing journalists

According to a recent report by AMNY, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents making arrests in New York City immigration courts are harassing journalists by photographing journalists’ press credentials and falsely telling them that common areas of the courthouse are “restricted areas” from which they can’t report.

These intimidation tactics can chill constitutionally protected reporting. That’s why FPF and other press freedom groups wrote to the New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment and to the Federal Protective Service asking that they reaffirm that journalists have the right to report the news in New York courts without intimidation and that they develop policies to end ICE’s harassment of journalists.

Read the full letters here and here, and a follow-up report from AMNY here

Comey cellphone tracking points to privacy erosion

You may remember that the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security launched an investigation into former FBI Director James Comey for posting a picture on Instagram during his beach vacation of seashells spelling out “8647.”

Since then, the government has apparently been exercising emergency authority to warrantlessly track his real-time cellphone location, despite the absence of anything resembling an emergency. This abuse of power is also a threat to journalists and sources. Read more here.

Kentucky prosecutors must drop charges

Two Cincinnati journalists were arrested in Kentucky for documenting a protest, despite zero evidence that they did anything wrong.

The absurd felony rioting charges against them were dropped this week after we, along with the Society of Professional Journalists and National Press Photographers Association, wrote a letter to prosecutors expressing our concerns. But the misdemeanor charges against them are still pending, and they shouldn’t be. Read the letter here.

What we’re reading

Hypocrisy on display (Press Club of Southwest Florida). If the Trump administration hates interview editing enough to shake down CBS for $16 million over its Kamala Harris interview, why is it prosecuting journalist Tim Burke for exposing far more significant edits by Tucker Carlson of his interview with Ye?

Trump White House removes WSJ from Scotland trip press pool over Epstein report (CNN). “Hopefully the Journal reporters who were planning to join Trump for his golf trip are relieved that they can spend their newfound free time investigating more important stories, from Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein to his unprecedented efforts to bully the press,” Stern told CNN.

This bill would fine social media companies $5 million every day for not fighting ‘terrorism’ (Reason). “The idea that the federal government even talked to social media platforms about their moderation was a major scandal … A bipartisan bill, however, would make it mandatory for social media companies to work with the federal government.”

Family, supporters urge release of Spanish-language journalist in ICE custody (The Associated Press). “Growing up, I didn’t always understand why my dad was so obsessed with his work, why he’d jump up and leave dinner to chase down a story. But now I do,” said Mario Guevara’s son, Oscar, who now works as a photojournalist.

FBI spied on journalists and activists who organized ‘Russiagate And WikiLeaks’ panel (The Dissenter). The surveillance was revealed by documents the FBI turned over to Defending Rights & Dissent as part of ongoing litigation under the Freedom of Information Act.

freedom.press/issues/theyre-no…