Tootfinder

Three factors make the fascist threat very real.
1) The still serious electoral threat of the far right.
2) Megadonations from super-rich individuals “competing with each other to buy reactionary, racist influence in British politics” .
3) The link between the emerging far right and a global movement backed by the government of a great power, which has troops on our land, from which it launches bombing raids.
Big money, the far right and the US empire | Morning Star

thom hogan: I’ll put it bluntly: some of the best innovation in camera design is now coming out of China. Because that relies upon communication (radio waves) to mobile devices, it’s now possible US citizens will not see the next great future camera. This is the way empires die: they try to wall themselves off from competition. <-- same with renewables and a whole bunch of other things

POL-OL: Nachtrag zum Einbruch im Prinzessinweg: Fund des Tablets - Täterschaft weiterhin unbekannt Oldenburg (ots) - Vergangenen Freitag berichteten wir über den Diebstahl eines Tablets und eines Computers aus einer Wohnung im Prinzessinweg in Oldenburg, https://www.presseportal.de/blaulicht/pm/6

Empirical likelihood confidence regions for ordered bivariate means
Naresh Garg
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12174 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.12174 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.12174
arXiv:2608.12174v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Let $\boldsymbol{X}_i=(X_{1i},X_{2i})^\top$ be independent and identically distributed observations with mean $\boldsymbol{\mu}=(\mu_1,\mu_2)^\top$ constrained by $\mu_1\leq\mu_2$. We study empirical-likelihood inference for a fixed mean vector and distinguish it from the previously known test of equality against an ordered alternative. At a fixed interior point, the constrained empirical likelihood ratio has the usual $\chi^2_2$ limit. At a fixed boundary point $(m,m)^\top$, its limit is the chi-bar-square distribution $\tfrac12\chi^2_1 \tfrac12\chi^2_2$. By contrast, profiling the unknown common mean in the equality-versus-order test yields $\tfrac12\chi^2_0 \tfrac12\chi^2_1$, the $k=2$ ordered-mean case of El Barmi (1996). We give an exact reduction of the latter statistic to the empirical likelihood of the paired differences, establish the localization step needed for the fixed-boundary expansion, and derive a local-to-boundary limit showing that interior calibration is not uniform over $n^{-1/2}$-neighborhoods of the boundary. Monte Carlo experiments under Gaussian, Student $t_5$, and shifted log-normal sampling examine fixed, boundary, and local regimes with explicit numerical-failure accounting. Illustrative paired-data analyses show the practical distinction between fixed-candidate confidence regions, directional equality tests, and ordinary scalar empirical-likelihood intervals truncated to the nonnegative parameter space.
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Flock CEO Garrett Langley acknowledges the company "got this one wrong" and is assuming greater responsibility for preventing US law enforcement misuse (Lauren Feiner/The Verge)
https://www.theverge.com/policy/979339/flock-ceo-audits-data-retention…

Flock CEO: ‘We got this one wrong’
Flock, which makes surveillance tools like automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) used by police, is rolling out new guardrails to combat abuse of its data.

Growing geopolitical competition is accompanying environmental disruption.
Countries including Russia, China, and the United States are investing in the Arctic
and consolidating their interests in strategic access, resource exploitation, and alliance-building.
 
The consequences of this emerging Arctic Anthropocene are truly global
—from rising sea levels due to melting glaciers
to tensions between great powers determined to protect their territory and resou…

Unfrozen
A vital account of the state of the Arctic today—emphasising the twin dangers of climate change and geopolitical competition   Nowhere is the dual threat ...

YAVIN: A Unified Architecture for Secure Edge Processing in Memory
Shouzhi Fang, William C. Tegge, Md Omar Faruque, Peipei Zhou, Endadul Hoque, Alex K. Jones
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13496 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2608.13496 https://arxiv.org/html/2608.13496
arXiv:2608.13496v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Secure, private multi-tenant execution spanning processors, memory, and accelerators remains one of the most significant challenges in modern edge computing systems. Simultaneously, processing-in-memory (PIM) has emerged as an effective approach for reducing the Von Neumann bottleneck by moving computation closer to data. Existing trusted execution environments (TEEs) establish trust only within the processor, protecting data while it traverses untrusted resources such as the memory bus. Consequently, trusted computation cannot be performed directly within memory. We present YAVIN, a unified trusted computing base (TCB) that extends the TEE beyond the processor to encompass both processor execution and a dedicated memory region supporting trusted processing-in-memory execution while treating the memory bus as untrusted. Leveraging the dedicated protected memory regions already established by conventional TEE architectures, YAVIN enables data to be decrypted, processed, and re-encrypted by either processor or PIM execution while remaining within the TEE. To realize this unified TCB, YAVIN presents the first PIM implementations of the LightSaber KEM post-quantum cryptosystem and ASCON-128 authenticated encryption, co-designing both algorithms for efficient DRAM execution to establish and maintain shared cryptographic state. Finally, we demonstrate how cryptography-PIM co-design for tensor-based workloads reorganizes computation to satisfy the ordering constraints imposed by authenticated encryption with minimal performance overhead while simultaneously enabling bit-sliced ordering that limits temporary plaintext exposure. Compared to the latest PIM AES implementation, YAVIN achieves more than a 20x speedup while incurring only 34% and 9.3% overhead when executing INT8 and INT32 quantized edge-class LLMs, respectively, relative to plaintext execution.
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Well, fuck. I’m just gonna guess here and say it’s probably illegal for a civilian to wear or even possess something like this. https://apnews.com/article/ice-electric-shock-gloves-85ff746d3e0ee5f39e7a9a3f1f576252

ICE plans to give officers gloves that can deliver electric shocks
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers may soon be outfitted with gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks that are intended to gain compliance from combative individuals. A notice published Monday by the Department of Homeland Security says ICE plans to spend up to $20 million to purchase thousands of “conductive distraction and de-escalation devices” for officers and agents by March. The devices are known as the G.L.O.V. E. That stands for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter…

Here are 42 #Positive #Environmental and #Climate headlines from #August to help bring some

42 Positive Environmental Success Stories — August 2026
The media has an important role to play in combatting climate doom. Therefore, this monthly news round up of positive environmental and climate change news, is designed to spark joy and show that progress is being made. We pick two positive headlines a day, ranging from renewable energy and preservation

Sources: some Google researchers have grown frustrated over AI compute access for ambitious projects while Google Cloud sells TPUs to customers like Anthropic (MacKenzie Sigalos/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/05/google-is-expandin…

Google is expanding its AI empire — and losing the people who built it
Google’s cloud boom is testing the company's commitment to frontier AI as commercial returns take priority.