Tootfinder

Sources: Trump officials expect Elon Musk to spend $100M to $200M in the November midterm elections, with a focus on voter turnout in key races, including Texas (Hugo Lowell/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-is-expected-to-point-his-money-mac…

Elon Musk Is Expected to Point His Money Machine at Texas
Sources tell WIRED that Elon Musk is expected to spend up to $200 million in the midterms. It could be a big boost for GOP Senate candidate Ken Paxton, who’s struggled to raise cash.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts says it’s releasing an online toolkit this week for criminal defense attorneys
designed to uncover whether police used surveillance technologies
—facial recognition, automatic license plate readers, gunshot detection systems, and more
—to build the cases against their clients in secret.
The toolkit, which the group describes as the first of its kind, is built around handcrafted legal motions that, when granted by a judg…

The ACLU Is Arming Lawyers to Expose State Surveillance Secrets
A new toolkit for attorneys in Massachusetts targets the technologies police use—and conceal—to build criminal cases, from facial recognition to AI-written police reports.

from my link log —
The smell of rain: how Aussie scientists invented a new word in 1964.
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/All/Articles/2015/March/the-smell-of-rain-how-our-scientists-invented-a-new-word
saved 20…

Government strategy is shaping the global brain-computer interface race https://neurotechreports.com/news/government-strategy-is-shaping-the-global-brain-computer-interface-race

Government Strategy Is Shaping the Global Brain-Computer Interface Race   - Neurotech Reports
Three events converged this year to turn brain-computer interfaces from a research curiosity into a subject of government strategy. China moved a product to market, having already built the machinery to pay for it. The U.S. funded a founder. The European Union asked its regulators to study a problem. This is not an accident of timing. It reflects fundamentally different beliefs about what a government should do when a new technology can read, and may soon write to, the human brain.  

new Nepali language textbook from a great team including Indigenous Himalayan scholars. the article is worth a read --
"working in a team where none of us had Nepali as our only or first language, but where all of us still had strong connections to it in different ways. That mix shaped a collaborative process drawing on different experiences and approaches to the language. More importantly, bringing those different relationships to  language into the same space helped us create s…

Unsealed docs: the DOJ sought phone records of NYT reporters and their relatives in an extraordinary attempt to unmask sources of NYT's Air Force One coverage (Michael M. Grynbaum/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/20/business/me…

Trump Administration Sought Phone Records of Times Journalists and Their Relatives
The government is aggressively seeking the confidential sources of Times reporters who wrote about the president’s new Air Force One. The Times has asked a judge to quash the subpoenas.

Just finished "Snake-Eater" by T. Kingfisher (@…). I'd read and thoroughly enjoyed her "Digger" webcomic, and found this book to be quite enjoyable too. There's something indelibly heartwarming about an anxious character growing to feel more comfortable and self-assured, especially when escaping and unlearning emotional abuse, and I'm certainly a sucker for heartwarming characters. I like the way that Kingfisher has taken time to talk about and try to avoid cultural appropriation, in a way that I feel is reasonable, although of course I'm not an expert judge of the nuances and I'm biased by having liked the book, so I'm willing to be told things are complicated in that regard it others judge differently. I also really liked the window dressing of a vaguely solarpunk future society, in a book that's not at all about that society. I'd love to see Kingfisher write something focused on how that society could work (or maybe she already has?).
Probably going to look up some of Kingfisher's fantasy books soon.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Memo: the Army CIO reinstates limits on Army members' AI token usage; docs show the DOD's Ask Sage tool can access 100M tokens via an annual "enterprise pack" (Vittoria Elliott/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/the-army-is-burning-through-its-ai-toke…

The Army Is Burning Through Its AI Tokens
Members of the Army received an email informing them that they were rapidly depleting their AI tokens, and needed to limit use.

Officially an engraver and accorded the lowly status thereof,
William Blake devoted his labors to realizing his elaborately idiosyncratic visions using images and words together in ways that no artist had done before.
Blake swam against the current “of modern human understanding, whose bedrock is the principle of specialization.”
Today, nearly two centuries after his death, that principle still obtains -- and in some ways more rigidly than ever.
But his work remains,

The Radical, Unclassifiable Art of William Blake
William Blake is a household name, or not far from it, but things get more complicated when it comes to professional description. He was a poet, a painter, and a printmaker, at least insofar as he wrote poetry, painted paintings, and made prints.

ShinyHunters hijacked the dark web site of cybercrime gang Cl0p, set an eight-figure extortion demand, describing the amount as "2.333%" of Cl0p's net worth (Alexander Martin/The Record)
https://therecord.media/shinyhunters-clop-cyberattack-website

ShinyHunters cybercrime gang takes over Cl0p ransomware site, demands extortion payment
The ShinyHunters extortion group hijacked the dark web leak site of the prolific Cl0p ransomware gang, according to material posted on the site over the weekend.