Transparency reports are standard practice across the tech industry, disclosing the nature, quantity and scope of all the law enforcement requests each company receives in a given year.

Louis Rossman is one of the highest-profile independent Apple repair technicians, famous in part for fixing devices that Apple has declared to have reached their end-of-life, diverting these devices from… Read the rest of the article: US Customs is seizing refurbished Apple batteries and calling them "counterfeits"

From the Open Markets Institute's Mat Stoller and Austin Frederick, who analyzed the FTC's panel, "The Current Economic Understanding of Multi-Sided Platforms," in which economic experts told the regulator that… Read the rest of the article: All the economists who told the FTC we shouldn't break up Big Tech are paid by Big Tech

In PrinTracker: Fingerprinting 3D Printers using Commodity Scanners (Scihub mirror), a paper to be presented at the ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security conference in Toronto this month,… Read the rest of the article: Security researchers identify "fingerprints" in 3D printed objects that can be used to trace their manufacturing

Ajit Pai is a member of the Ayn Rand/James Buchanan cult that says that any government regulation is an unfair attack on the "freedom" of business, which is why his… Read the rest of the article: After killing disaster-recovery rules, Ajit Pai can't understand why carriers aren't helping hurricane-hit Florida

Todd Bol died yesterday of fast-moving cancer at the age of 62, less than a month after receiving his diagnosis; he was the founder of the wildly successful Little Free… Read the rest of the article: RIP, Little Free Library founder Todd H. Bol

Circuitmess's fully funded Makerphone kickstarter is raising money to produce open source hardware smartphone kits to teach kids (and grownups) everything from soldering to programming.

Salim Fadhley writes, "Portals of London, an urban exploration blog, presents an alternative geography of London. It's a catalog of the weird, decrepit and slightly crumpled – things the author… Read the rest of the article: Portals of London: urban exploration to discover gateways to alternative universe

Repairnator is a bot that identifies bugs in open source software integration and creates patches without human intervention, submitting them to the open source project's maintainers under an assumed human… Read the rest of the article: A bot has been finding bugs and submitting patches for them, successfully masquerading as a human

The new parental controls in Ios 12 have all the same problems that all parental controls have: they overblock legit material (with a bias for sex-ed, especially sex-ed targeted at… Read the rest of the article: Apple's new parental control: Daily Stormer is in, sex-ed is out

Robin Sloan is a programmer and novelist whose books like Sourdough and Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore are rich and evocative blends of self-aware nerdy playfulness and magical speculation.

China's move into a "mixed economy" has created a wealth inequality crisis to rival any nation's; wildcat workers' strikes (aided by Young Communist movements) have become increasingly common, though they… Read the rest of the article: An interactive map of China's wildcat strikes

Tenants in California have received threatening letters from their landlords promising massive rent hikes if Proposition 10 (previously), which restores rent control, passes.

A batch of internal Harvard admission-related emails have come into the public domain as part of a lawsuit alleging that Harvard discriminates against Asian applicants, and they reveal that the… Read the rest of the article: Wanna get into Harvard? Just ask your parents to donate a building.

More than 40% of US federal judges have attended Manne seminars, a notionally "bipartisan" educational conference presented by a Florida "Law and Economics" institute whose invited ideological allies explained to… Read the rest of the article: A data-driven look at the devastating efficacy of a far-right judge-education program

Helm is a startup making a $500 home gadget that replaces Gmail and Google Calendar, letting you control your own email and coordination; its founders have deep information security backgrounds,… Read the rest of the article: Helm: A home network email server appliance to redecentralize the web

Pete Warden (previously) writes persuasively that machine learning companies could make a ton of money by turning to data-compression: for example, ML systems could convert your speech to text, then… Read the rest of the article: Compression could be machine learning's "killer app"

The mercenary squads who carry out targeted assassinations in Yemen on behalf of the autocratic rulers of the UAE are composed of US veterans from elite units like the Green… Read the rest of the article: US veterans operate in Yemen as mercenary assassins for Middle Eastern autocrats

Two bedroom apartments in Phnom Penh start at $260,000 — equivalent to 2,000 years' worth of average annual wages for Cambodia's workers.

Facebook is the poster-child for the techlash, the worst offender in the monopolistic bunch, and recent books like Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy by Siva Vaidhyanathan… Read the rest of the article: Deleting Facebook is not enough: without antitrust, the company will be our lives' "operating system"