We're finding "open" is usually a politically positive word. While marketeers think secret means "secret sauce", civilians think secret means "guilty secret".

#OpenSource #Policy

“Climate change is rampant, fascism on the rise, corporate greed uncontrolled, but despite it all, those 24 stick insects on a rock show us that it is never over until we give up.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/07/lord-howe-island-giant-stick-insect-tree-lobster-invertebrate-of-year-2026

#InvertebrateOfTheYear

Going against the bad-news trend, I am absolutely loving @TheGuardian "Invertebrate of the Year" feature this week. Every day is a little natural gem that brightens the day.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2026/aug/03/revealed-top-10-invertebrates-of-the-year

#InvertebrateOfTheYear

RE: https://eupolicy.social/@backontrack/117037436887323852

Interesting new service to #Ukraine, https://www.leoexpress.com/en/where-we-go/popular-routes/przemysl-prague-dresden-frankfurt-cheap-tickets

Congratulations to the @openhomefoundation on their success briefing the @EUCommission on the challenges they and other #OpenSource projects face in the #Android ecosystem.

https://www.openhomefoundation.org/blog/a-big-win-for-android-interoperability/

#DMA #Interoperability

Holy fuck!

On 27th of July 2026, BMW put a FULL SCREEN ad on all their cars at startup time for Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026).

Not loan cars or demo, on cars people had already purchased and fully paid for.

https://consumerrights.wiki/w/BMW_Spider-Man_in-car_advertising

#Evernote are doubling their price again for the fourth time in 5 years and it's time for us as a family to at least create a backup of our decades-old family records so we are ready when they cease to be viable.

Do I know anyone who would be willing to set up a self-hosted replacement system and export out 5000+ notes and 17000 attachments please? Happy to pay.

Not looking for general advice. Please reply via DM or e-mail!. Thanks!

"States are sovereign. Borders cannot be changed by force. Those principles are not new. Nor is there any ambiguity to them.

The ... problem was never the rules themselves, but Russia’s decision to disregard them."

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/russias-history-of-disregarding-the-sovereignty-and-territorial-integrity-of-its-neighbours-uk-statement-to-the-osce

#Ukraine

In his essay on Salvador Dali, Orwell argued that because Dali was a repulsive human being, the right wouldn't admit that he was a great artist; conversely, because he was a great artist, the left wouldn't admit he was a repulsive human being. I'm seeing the same thing with AI: because it's unethical, one side won't acknowledge that it's useful, but because it's useful, the other side won't acknowledge that it's unethical.

Time to make another cup of tea…

Get up to speed on the SWHID—the ISO/IEC international standard (18670) for software identification. Ambassador @toscalix wrote a 3-part guide:
1️⃣ Overview & Use Cases 2️⃣ Open Governance 3️⃣ Syntax & Format
👉 Start here: https://toscalix.com/2026/03/10/what-is-the-best-way-to-identify-software-introducing-swhid
#OSS #OpenSource #SWHID

It is putting it mildly to describe these people as a death cult

Half of the country is in "exceptionally serious drought" - putting us at more risk of wildfires and threatening our food security.

Meanwhile water companies are wasting a staggering 2.87 billion litres of water every day through leaky pipes.

Time to end water privatisation.

The Digital Commons EDIC invites open source communities to put forward experts for its Advisory Board. DC-EDIC is a European consortium with a mission to advance the digital commons. The Advisory Board of 10 experts is to give advice, support with strategy development & work with the the DC-EDIC community network.
Deadline for application is September 7
https://digital-commons-edic.eu/news/2026-07-01-advisory-board-call-for-experts/

#digitalcommons #FOSS #opensource

Has the #Amazon Blink team explicitly broken the ability of #OpenSource Home Assistant to log in to Blink?

https://github.com/home-assistant/core/issues/176836#issuecomment-5080466993

Coyote V. Acme

In The United States District Court, Southwestern District, Tempe, Arizona Case No. B19294, Judge Joan Kujava, Presiding

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1990/02/26/coyote-v-acme

(The New Yorker, Shouts & Murmurs, By Ian Frazier; February 19, 1990

The Strongest El Niño Ever

https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-strongest-el-nino-ever#footnote-anchor-1

With all the July runs in, dynamical models give a ~90% chance of a record-setting event

<- much bigger than 1877-1878. That killed ~50 million people.

The @EUCommission has just published guidance documents clarifying how the Cyber Resilience Act #CRA affects (among other things) #OpenSource. This is the result of the extensive engagement of many open source community members.

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/commission-publishes-new-guidance-support-timely-cyber-resilience-act-implementation

RE: https://dair-community.social/@alex/116977123749133116

I was a 911 dispatcher for a decade.

To really understand how absolutely terrible an idea it is to have AI answer 911 calls, I'll present you with a single real-life call:

Upon answer, the caller calmly began ordering a pizza. Large, pepperoni. Side order of chicken wings. To be delivered promptly.

The only sign the caller gave that things were amiss? She rather ignored the first few questions from the calltaker.

Because she was being physically abused, had already been beaten, and her abuser was *IN THE ROOM* listening to her order pizza.

Tell me how your AI is going to read between those lines.

Every AI system in the headlines today, whether proprietary or Open Source, exists because researchers shared their work openly. That openly shared research produced Open Source software: the frameworks used to train these models, the libraries used to evaluate them, the operating systems, orchestration layers, and inference engines used to run them....

https://opensource.org/blog/openness-made-all-of-this-possible

Having seen these thugs on the local streets (they also meet nearby to taunt refugees) I can't find any capacity for surprise at this finding. It would be fascinating to get demographic data on R-party supporters......

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jul/24/most-people-arrested-during-henry-nowak-protests-had-been-reported-for-domestic-abuse

#UKPol #Southampton