The doctor who claimed that vaccines cause autism lost his medical license for faking for the study. But his lies and the damage he did to public health persist long after his paper was pulled. This is why science communication is so difficult; all it takes is one grifter.
I spent the past few days going down various fascinating rabbit holes using a nifty new service called Decryptads.com, which scrapes a metric ton of adtech data from websites and apps about who they allow to collect data and serve ads.
A search in DecryptAds for the hugely popular sports network espn.com, e.g. reveals 143 ad partners and 19 registered data broker domains are listed within its ads.txt and app-ads.txt files. That data broker information is gradually becoming available because four states — California, Oregon, Texas and Vermont — have recently passed laws requiring data brokers to register if they buy or sell data on consumers from those states. DecryptAds reports that almost half of those data brokers are collecting geolocation data from espn.com visitors who aren’t blocking ads, while another three disclose that they collect device fingerprints and sensitive personal information.
DecryptAds also makes it easy to learn the beneficiaries and national origins of the advertising firms lurking in apps and websites, displaying a conspicuous warning when adtech partners of an app or website are based in “geo-risk” areas like China and Russia, or in countries with strong financial and political ties to both — such as Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
According to DecryptAds, espn.com works with four different advertising entities that are based in either Russia, China or the UAE, including the adtech firm Between Digital, which lists a New York address. However, the dossier on Between Digital flags them as a Russian firm, showing that their publisher offers (PDF) are processed through Alfa Bank, Russia’s largest private commercial bank and one of several financial institutions placed under U.S. sanctions in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.
A search for several top U.S. military news websites — including armytimes.com, airforcetimes.com, defensenews.com, navytimes.com, marinecorpstimes.com and federaltimes.com — shows they all allow Between Digital to serve ads and track users, as well as two entities in the UAE and another in the ownership secrecy haven of Panama. DecryptAds reports that Between Digital is collecting ad data on approximately 55,000 partner websites.
This service is a gold mine for security researchers, journalists and anyone interested in privacy, adtech, AI slop sites, residential proxies, malvertising, etc. Want to read more? Check out today's story:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/08/whos-tracking-you-use-this-new-service-to-find-out/
Truth.
So (sadly) the Fascist Frog has won the Clacton by election polling 22,239 votes but Count Binface came a respectable second poling 9,455 votes.
The Frog did no attend the declaration in person citing police advice that its dangerous (advice the BBC says Essex police have given no candidate); good way to start his next period as an MP, with a lie.
The protest vote was split, but would not have been sufficient to unseat the Frog; turnout (44%) for a by-election.
"Playboy founder Hugh Hefner notified the FBI of Jeffrey Epstein and reported that a Playmate was sexually abused and trafficked by the late financier, according to new court documents reported this week.
"The FBI reportedly ignored several of Hefner's tips about Epstein for 15 years, according to NewsNation."
https://www.rawstory.com/hugh-hefner-jeffrey-epstein
@2dollarsandtwentysevencents @DeliaChristina We've had decades of patronising know-nothings bullshitting us and changing their story every time we call them out. Many of us have had the misfortune to be married to them. Why the fuck would we want a machine to replicate that relationship?
RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@gregeganSF/117090457831768597
This is exactly the threat I predicted when warning folks to refuse AI medical note transcription.
I am so fucking tired of being right.
Hi everyone,
We are aware of a Gaza Verified member who has made multiple other accounts and is sending what appear to be automated direct messages.
We have spoken to him and asked him to delete these accounts and stop the automated messages by end of today and to confirm that he understands that this behaviour damages the reputation of the hundreds of other Palestinians on Gaza Verified and Gaza Verified itself and to promise not to do so in the future.
We apologise if you’ve been contacted in this way. Our verification verifies that someone is a Palestinian from Gaza. It is not a character reference (we can no more vouch for the character of every Palestinian than we can for the character of every USian). However, we have rules clearly set in our guide (https://gaza-verified.org/guide) and these are there to protect the accounts of our friends from Gaza from being reported and thus limited/suspended.
So, please, if you need to mute or block an account, do so. If you’re a server admin and you notice mass automated messages, you’re well within your rights to limit or suspend an account but if it’s not automated, please contact us so we can talk to them and explain why what they’re doing isn’t in their long term interests. Many of you already do and I thank you for it.
Please also realise that there are hundreds of Palestinians who are Gaza verified and they are all suffering through genocide and many are watching their families starve or die due to lack of access to modern medicine (again, because Israel has bombed all the hospitals and doesn’t let aid through as part of its ongoing genocide).
In many Western countries, our governments are directly complicit and, many times, profiting from Israel’s genocide.
Whatever you do, please don’t judge the entirety of something by the actions of a few and please try and keep things – namely Internet etiquette and genocide – in perspective and ask yourselves what you would do if you were in their shoes.
This was published 114 years ago Today
Sky News: Why did you stand here in Clacton?
Count Bin Face: That's where the election was, John.
The Black community in Berlin wanted a couple of hours of peace in a swimming pool for kids. Sadly some racist assholes did not want this to happen. And forced it to cancel.
https://taz.de/Volksbad-in-Berlin/!6204324/
I am so sad for those kids who just wanted fun in a pool without racism.
RE: https://mastodon.world/@anttipeltola/117092344692403567
I really like the Pentium 4 as an analogy here.
The NetBurst architecture in the P4 was designed to be able to scale to 10 GHz. It initially shipped in the 1-2 GHz range. The performance was not that impressive compared to even the previous generation but, Intel told us, that didn’t matter: it would rapidly reach clock speeds that were completely impossible with the P3.
On the face of it, this wasn’t unreasonable. The Pentium Pro and Pentium 2 shared a fairly similar microarchitecture (P2 added MMX and a few other things). The Pentium Pro was introduced at 150 MHz and scaled up to 450 MHz after process shrinks.
When the Pentium 4 was in early design stages, it was completely reasonable to expect that 3-5x clock speed increases were possible.
And, technically, they were. The clock speed for a part is determined by how long it takes a signal to propagate across everything in a pipeline stage. Make the things smaller and the signal goes further.
That kept happening. The thing that stopped (completely by about 2007, but it wasn’t an abrupt thing) was Dennard Scaling. Beyond a certain point, making the transistors smaller meant you had a lot more leakage current and so the power went up. And power was already polynomial in terms of clock speed.
All this meant that, yes, in theory, you could run a Pentium 4 at 10 GHz, as long as you didn’t mind all the fire. Someone did eventually run one at this speed with liquid nitrogen cooling, but that wasn’t appropriate for a consumer device. The range topped out at 4 GHz, and those parts had infeasible high cooling and power requirements (and were outperformed by other designs at lower speeds).
The entire ‘AI’ bubble is predicated on the same assumptions of scaling of something foundational that the people building the end systems are not really paying attention to.
Incredible Footage Shows Dolphins Hunting With Shells Off The East Coast of Australia – And Possibly Passing The Skill on
www.sciencealert.com/dolphins-fil...
Incredible Footage Shows Dolph...
Company Offering ‘100% Human-Written, Never AI’ Medical Research Is Entirely AI
·
Research Gold's team of human methodologists are either AI generated or using the identity of real people without their permission
https://www.404media.co/company-offering-100-human-written-never-ai-peer-review-is-entirely-ai/
USA: "Dog food sold in 11 states recalled over salmonella contamination"
🔸Oma's Pride has recalled 6-lb bags of Woof Complete Canine Chicken Recipe due to potential salmonella contamination.
🔸The affected lot was sold across 11 states: Arizona, California, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, Nevada, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.
Source: https://www.livenowfox.com/news/dog-food-sold-11-states-recalled-over-salmonella-contamination
When we adopted an 11 year old cat with 7 chronic illnesses, we thought ‘she doesn’t have long, let’s just spoil her rotten’
Turns out spoiling her rotten meant she lived another 8.5 years. She was with us until she was 19 and a half
Here’s a photo of her getting sashimi that I bought just for her.
I miss her every single day
The Guardian: US conducted ‘mass spying campaign’ against leftwing groups and anti-ICE protesters, records reveal
"...Newly disclosed records reveal the US government extensively spied on prominent leftwing organizations and on protesters as part of a vast operation into groups opposing the immigration crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year...."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/13/us-government-spied-anti-ice-protesters
This is a fascinating study.
I was on the briefing call yesterday and, y'all -- people (especially older women) HATE AI with the personal kind of passion one reserves for the villain who killed your father.
They HATE tech execs. Like, HAAAAATE.
And this sentiment does not change when folks 'get used to' AI. In fact, distrust has increased despite everyone using it.
They absolutely distrust AI boosters. No one believes the hype and an overwhelming majority believe this shit is bad -- because of personal experience of harm or they know someone who has been harmed.
People want AI *punished* they hate it so much. (This is me editorializing.)
And they want someone to wrap some chains around AI before it's too late. #RegulateAI
Duuuuude. Faaascinating.
Full report drops next week.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lKvEjvDK_zwIvGDdCdL8d74ov5eVFqkm/view?pli=1