Techrights

Links 16/07/2025: Fascist Slop Takes "Intelligence" Clothing, New Criminal Case Against MElon

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 16, 2025

GNOME bluefish

Contents

• LeftoversCareer/EducationHardwareProprietaryPrivatisation/PrivateeringSecurityIntegrity/Availability/AuthenticityPrivacy/Surveillance Defence/AggressionTransparency/Investigative ReportingEnvironmentEnergy/TransportationWildlife/Nature AstroTurf/Lobbying/PoliticsCensorship/Free SpeechFreedom of Information / Freedom of the PressDigital Restrictions (DRM)Monopolies/MonopsoniesTrademarksRight of Publicity Copyrights

* ### Leftovers

Career/Education

Daniel Lemire ☛ Rebels on campus

Want to see innovation on campus ? Look for the rebels.

Marcy Wheeler ☛ John Roberts Subjects America's School Children to the Whims of a Wrestling Promoter

Every time the Supreme Court does something outrageous to empower Trump’s fascism, as it did yesterday by letting Trump shut down a statutorily-mandated agency, Department of Education, I try to think of an area to politically organize around and push back on the action.

Raspberry Pi ☛ The Computers that Made the World — out now!

This book transports you back to a time when computers were not mass produced, but lovingly built by hand with electromechanical relays or thermionic valves (aka vacuum tubes). These were large computers, far bigger than a desktop computer. Most would occupy (and warm!) a room. Despite their size, and despite the fact that some of them would help win a war, they had a minuscule fraction of the power of modern computers: back then, a computer with one kilobyte of memory and the ability to process one or two thousand instructions per second was on the cutting edge. The processor in your mobile phone probably processes billions of instructions per second, and has a lot more than one kilobyte of main memory.

Robert Birming ☛ The lost art of listening

Sadly, in today’s society, it feels like that kind of listening has become rare. We’ve grown so caught up in “me, myself, and I” that listening has almost turned into a lost art.You can see it in people’s eyes — they’re just waiting for the first chance to jump in and say their piece. It’s like they’re hearing, but not really listening.

Bridge Michigan ☛ Opinion | Smartphones don’t belong in schools

Instead, Michigan should enact a ban like New York state’s: no smartphones at school from bell-to-bell. Class time, breaks between classes and lunchtime should all be phone-free. Entire countries, such as France and Brazil, have implemented bell-to-bell bans and reported fewer distractions and less cyberbullying. A student in Australia reported that their ban meant, “You’re paying attention to the teacher at the front explaining the things to you, not trying to focus on when your phone buzzes.” His experience is backed up by the research: If kids have a smartphone in their pocket, they are often thinking about it, even if they look like they’re listening to their teacher. In fact, a review of academic studies found that smartphone usage is negatively correlated with grade point averages.

Maine Morning Star ☛ Maine university system approves accelerated degree programs to address workforce gaps

While a traditional bachelor’s degree typically requires four years of full-time study and at least 120 credit hours of college coursework, the newer 90-credit degree programs have been tested across the country as a faster, more affordable alternative. Last year, a few states participated in a pilot collaboration called the College-in-3 Exchange to begin considering how they could offer three-year programs.

Hardware

Drew D Saur ☛ The Commodore 64 Made a Difference

I was fourteen when the Commodore 64 came out, and I want to convey — in as brief a form as I can — why it captured so many hearts during the 8-bit era.The best machines of those days assisted young whippersnappers like me to program our own video games with wonderful color, sound, and graphics.

GonzaloR ☛ Panasonic + OpenBSD = <3

In conclusion, my experience with Japanese laptops has been nothing short of exceptional. The meticulous attention to detail and the emphasis on functionality in their design truly set them apart. The Panasonic Let's Note CF-MX5, with its lightweight build and robust features, exemplifies this philosophy. Additionally, it serves as a good and affordable option for using OpenBSD, providing a full set of hardware and functionalities that enhance the overall user experience.

Tom's Hardware ☛ New Rowhammer attack silently corrupts AI models on GDDR6 Nvidia cards — 'GPUHammer' attack drops AI accuracy from 80% to 0.1% on RTX A6000

Until now, this was mostly a concern for DDR4 system memory, but GPUHammer proves it can happen on GDDR6 VRAM too, which is what powers many modern NVIDIA cards, especially in AI and workstation workloads. This is a serious cause for concern, at least in specific situations. The researchers showed that even with some safeguards in place, they could cause multiple bit flips across several memory banks. In one case, this completely broke a trained AI model, making it essentially useless. The scary part is that it doesn’t require access to your data. The attacker just needs to share the same GPU in a cloud environment or server, and they could potentially interfere with your workload however they want.

Proprietary

Simone Silvestroni ☛ Handshake

Observing the way I've used my tech over the last year or so, one thing is clear: it has drastically changed. I don't feel a problem using Mac OS — even though my deep hate for Apple is not going anywhere — mostly because I've been moving away so much from their way of doing computing that it's now just another Unix distribution to me.

The Register UK ☛ UK F-35 fleet poorly supported, can't use vital weapons

The F-35 stealth fighter is not meeting its potential in British service because of availability issues, a shortage of support personnel, and delays in integrating key weapons that are limiting the aircraft's effectiveness.

Darren Goossens ☛ Pegasus Mail — email without admin privileges – DSPACE

I note that the computer I ran the installer on is Windows 10, the one I am running it on is Windows 11.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) / LLM Slop / Plagiarism

The Register UK ☛ Curl creator mulls nixing bug bounty awards to stop AI slop

The problem has worsened in the past year and a half, compounded by "human slop" - low-quality submissions where it isn't obvious whether the submission came from a person or an AI model.

The Register UK ☛ AI creeps into the risk register for America's biggest firms

According to a report from research firm The Autonomy Institute, three-quarters of companies listed in the S&P 500 stock market index have updated their official risk disclosures to detail or expand upon mentions of AI-related risk factors during the past year.

Scoop News Group ☛ Why skipping security prompting on Grok’s newest model is a huge mistake

An AI red-teaming company found that xAI’s Grok 4 is “not suitable for enterprises” without substantial security prompting.

CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: When Google’s slop meets webslop, search stops

Google's a very bad company, of course. I mean, the company has lost three federal antitrust trials in the past 18 months. But that's not why I quit Google Search: I stopped searching with Google because Google Search suuuucked.In the spring of 2024, it was clear that Google had lost the spam wars. Its search results were full of spammy garbage content whose creators' SEO was a million times better than their content. Every kind of Google Search result was bad, and results that contained the names of products were the worst, an endless cesspit of affiliate link-strewn puffery and scam sites.

Tom Renner ☛ The sound of inevitability

I’m not convinced that LLMs are the future. I’m certainly not convinced that they’re the future I want. But what I’m most certain of is that we have choices about what our future should look like, and how we choose to use machines to build it.Don’t let inevitabilism frame the argument and take away your choice. Think about the future you want, and fight for it.

Futurism ☛ Restaurant Uses AI for Menu, Accidentally Describes Appetizer in Way So Disgusting That We May Never Recover

Though Zomato later instated a ban on AI images in 2024, no such ban has been brought down for AI-generated menu descriptions, which means that incorrectly-digitized dish summaries may well still be up on the site.

The Register UK ☛ xAI's Grok's lurch into right-wing insanity

Really? It was Grok's fault? It's a program. It does what Musk's programmers told it to do. They, in turn, might say they were doing what Musk had asked for.

The Register UK ☛ Simular: AI agent startup founded by ex-Google DeepMinder

Machine learning methods are based on statistics, said Li, and they assume a static dataset."But in the real world, this assumption doesn't hold," he explained. "In the real world, for example, on YouTube, you have videos being uploaded every day. In ads, you have search queries coming every day. And this distribution of data keeps changing. That's actually the core reason why machine learning doesn't work in production."

MIT Technology Review ☛ AI’s giants want to take over the classroom

OpenAI and Anthropic say AI can help students learn—not just cheat—even if real-world use suggests otherwise.

Andy Bell ☛ Introducing pay per crawl: Enabling content owners to charge AI crawlers for access

The way it works is a Cloudflare-served site — just like this one — can return a 402 status code, indicating that a payment is required for a crawler to access a page. Along with that, the publisher can set a crawler-price header, indicating how much a crawler needs to pay to crawl that content.

Social Control Media

International Business Times ☛ What Is the Gen Z Stare? The Silent Look That Shows People Don't Know How to Talk Anymore

What may have started as a way for millennials to flip the script on Gen Z, who ridiculed them for the 'millennial pause,' has garnered real concern from employers who see the Gen Z stare as a sign that they lack face-to-face communication skills.The Gen Z stare is a blank, vacant expression given typically in response to everyday questions, particularly in the service industry. It's a look you may have received while ordering a coffee or when asking questions about the menu at a restaurant.

404 Media ☛ The Hyperpersonalized AI Slop Silo Machine Is Here

For a while, I have said that the AI slop endgame, for social media companies, is creating a hyper personalized feed full of highly specific content about anything one could possibly imagine. Because AI slop is so easy to make and because social media algorithms are so personalized, this means that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube can feed you anything they perceive its users to possibly want. So this means that AI slop makers are exploring ever more niche areas of content.

Windows TCO / Windows Bot Nets

Security Week ☛ Ransomware Group Claims Attack on Belk

The incident was identified on May 8 and prompted Belk to disconnect affected systems, restrict network access, reset passwords, and rebuild impacted systems, which disrupted the chain’s online and physical operations for several days. The company’s online store is still offline at the time of publication.

Privatisation/Privateering

Task And Purpose ☛ Army bids farewell to laundry specialists

The changes come as the Army has shifted laundry and shower operations to private contractors over the years.

Security

Tom's Hardware ☛ Critical UEFI vulnerabilities found in Gigabyte motherboards — allow attackers to bypass Secure Boot and install firmware backdoors

Security researchers warn of persistent firmware threats affecting hundreds of models.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

Scoop News Group ☛ Login.gov looks to accept mobile driver’s licenses in ‘near future’

Luigi Ray-Montañez, the head of engineering for Login.gov, the identity authentication and secure sign-on service developed by the GSA, said Monday that he hopes the development will make it easier for users to verify their identities and prevent fraud on the platform.

Privacy/Surveillance

The Register UK ☛ Uber to roll out thousands of robo-cabs from China’s Baidu

The two companies on Tuesday announced “a multi-year strategic partnership” to introduce the robo-cars outside the USA and China, starting later this year in unspecified countries across “Asia and the Middle East”.

The Verge ☛ Now Microsoft’s Copilot Vision AI can scan everything on your screen

Unlike Recall, which can automatically take regular snapshots of what’s on your computer screen, using Copilot Vision is more like screen sharing during a video call: you can activate the feature by clicking the glasses icon in the Copilot app and selecting the desktop you want it to see.

Don Marti ☛ Before surveillance capitalism and surveillance advertising, there was surveillance marketing

Before Surveillance Capitalism and Surveillance Advertising there was Surveillance Marketing. The earliest published use of "surveillance" to describe cross-context behavioral advertising term that I can find is an article in Marketing Mag by a marketing company CEO.

International Business Times ☛ Reddit, PornHub Set UK Age Restriction: How Will This Affect Your Browsing?

Reddit has said it will soon require UK users to complete age checks to access its NSFW (Not Safe For Work) communities, using Persona, a third-party identity verification tool. PornHub and other adult sites are also preparing to introduce UK-specific systems, which may include credit card checks, photo ID, or facial recognition software approved by the government.

The Verge ☛ The EU is testing a prototype age verification app

The European Union is piloting a blueprint for age verification apps in Denmark, Greece, Spain, France, and Italy that aims to make it easier for online platforms to comply with rules that require them to protect minors. The app prototype was announced on Monday alongside guidelines that online platforms are recommended to adopt in order to comply with the bloc’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

The Verge ☛ Reddit is rolling out age verification in the UK

The age verification process is performed by Persona, a third-party provider that won’t have access to users’ Reddit data or retain photos for longer than seven days. Reddit says it also won’t have access to uploaded photos, and that it will only store birthdates and verification statuses so that users don’t need to re-verify their account. I managed to complete the process myself this morning using a selfie in under a minute, though the photo tool had some difficulty detecting when my face was correctly framed.

Defence/Aggression

International Business Times ☛ Shock as 20,000 Afghans Set to Arrive in Britain on Taxpayer-Funded Flights: What Is 'Operation Rubicon'?

A covert UK government evacuation programme for Afghan nationals has come to light, following the lifting of a super-injunction related to a catastrophic Ministry of Defence data breach that exposed thousands of allies to Taliban reprisals.

The Telegraph UK ☛ Taliban: We had the ‘kill list’ all along – and are hunting them down

The so-called “kill list” contains the names of 25,000 Afghans who were applying for asylum – soldiers who had worked with the British Army, and their family members.

teleSUR ☛ Al Shabaab Seizes Strategic Town of Tardo in Somalia, Displacing Thousands - teleSUR English

Local elder Ali Hussein and clan fighter Ahmed Moallim confirmed the takeover, noting that control of the crossroads could facilitate Al Shabaab’s push toward larger towns such as Mahas, which has remained outside militant control for over a decade.

The Local SE ☛ Sweden considers calling up 70-year-old officers to active military duty

After the end of the Cold War, Sweden drastically slashed its defence spending as it focused its military efforts on international peacekeeping missions.But it reversed course following Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, and begun increasing military expenditure.In 2017, the country reintroduced compulsory military service, seven years after abandoning it.

The Zambian Observer ☛ Elon Musk hit with fresh criminal case, facing 10 years imprisonment

The investigation is due to an alleged algorithm manipulation and fraudulent data extraction aimed at “foreign interference.The probe, led by the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office and conducted by the French gendarmerie, follows complaints filed in January 2025 by a lawmaker, Éric Bothorel from Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble party, and an unnamed senior official.

The Kyiv Independent ☛ Denmark to provide European-produced satellite communication services to Ukraine's military

"Denmark has now contributed to strengthening Ukraine's satellite-based communications in their defense against Russia. There is a very large potential in space-based solutions that can contribute to both Ukrainian, Danish, and European defense," Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

Wired ☛ The FBI's Jeffrey Epstein Prison Video Had Nearly 3 Minutes Cut Out

Metadata from the “raw” Epstein prison video shows approximately 2 minutes and 53 seconds were removed from one of two stitched-together clips. The cut starts right at the “missing minute.”

Rolling Stone ☛ What Trump Has Said About Jeffrey Epstein Over the Years

Trump has spoken plenty about Epstein, too, both lauding the disgraced financier and, more recently, trashing him and teasing conspiracy theories about his death. Now, he wants the MAGA base, which has long thirsted for the government to release the Epstein files, to simply forget about it.Here’s a brief history of the president’s comments about Epstein: [...]

The Atlantic ☛ Why Trump Can't Make the Epstein Story Go Away

Not only did this new line blatantly contradict the repeated promises to release the files that Trump’s allies had made, but it was not even internally consistent. Barack Obama had concocted the Epstein files to smear Trump … but Democrats had refused to make them public, for some reason? And because the “Radical Left Lunatics” had kept them secret, Trump needed to do the same thing?But whatever. Trump’s lies often lack even the veneer of plausibility. His devotees have generally not made him work very hard to maintain their trust. You could almost picture Trump lazily mouthing the same tropes—“fake news,” “Russia, Russia, Russia”—expecting the same result.

The Zambian Observer ☛ Trump’s new Epstein claim fuels rumors of president’s involvement

Donald Trump’s new claim about Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal files has observers wondering if the president is indeed somehow connected to the documents.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

The Verge ☛ Trump announces billions in investments to make Pennsylvania an AI hub

Pennsylvania is a leading gas-producing state and an epicenter of the US fracking boom; some of the largest investments linked to the initiative were from energy companies, including “a $25 billion investment in data center and energy infrastructure development in Northeast Pennsylvania” from Blackstone, and $15 billion in expansions announced by First Energy.

Axios ☛ Where Americans walk and bike most often

The bottom line: "As cities and counties across the U.S. aim to reduce traffic congestion, lower emissions, and promote public health, understanding the current landscape of active travel is essential for supporting effective safety and infrastructure initiatives," the report says.

LRT ☛ Rail Baltica completion by 2030 a ‘very big challenge’, project leader says

The multibillion-euro Rail Baltica project, which aims to connect Poland and the Baltic states with a European standard-gauge railway, is scheduled for completion by 2030 – but meeting that target will be a major challenge, according to the project’s top official in Lithuania.

Tom's Hardware ☛ Meta plans multi-GW data center that's nearly the size of Manhattan — Zuckerberg promises enormous AI splash as company uses 'tents' to try and keep up with rate of expansion

They will also leverage pre-fabricated power and cooling modules and will draw power from on-site meta substations, with smart workload management tools helping to maximize the power available to each datacenter. That can also include on-site natural [sic] gas generation, too, with Meta already building two 200MW natural gas plants in Ohio.

The Register UK ☛ Meta reveals plan for several multi-GW datacenter clusters

“We're actually building several multi-GW clusters,” he wrote. “We're calling the first one Prometheus and it's coming online in '26. We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years. We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan.”

404 Media ☛ [Crackers] Can Remotely Trigger the Brakes on American Trains and the Problem Has Been Ignored for Years

Many trains in the U.S. are vulnerable to [an attack] that can remotely lock a train’s brakes, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the researcher who discovered the vulnerability. The railroad industry has known about the vulnerability for more than a decade but only recently began to fix it.Independent researcher Neil Smith first discovered the vulnerability, which can be exploited over radio frequencies, in 2012.

Terence Eden ☛ Petrol Stations 🆚 Car Charging Locations

Journalists love context-free numbers - things that sound large and scary, but without any helpful information to allow you to judge their significance.

The Telegraph UK ☛ Zuckerberg to spend hundreds of billions on AI data centres

Technology analyst firm Semianalysis said Meta had started building a natural [sic] gas plant in Ohio “when the local power grid couldn’t keep up” with its plans.Mr Zuckerberg has been betting tens of billions of dollars on Meta’s AI efforts after its attempts to gain ground on OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, fell flat.

Wildlife/Nature

The Revelator ☛ The Trinity River: Lessons in Restoration

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Tom's Hardware ☛ U.S. earmarks $1B for 'offensive cyber operations' despite broader efforts to slash cybersecurity spending

TechCrunch reported Monday that H.R. 1—a bill so sprawling that Congress.gov warns that attempting to load it with XML/HTML "may take several minutes or possibly cause your browser to become unresponsive"—is vague about how this $1 billion will be spent. All we know is "that the money will go toward enhancing and improving the capabilities of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command" and is meant to be spent over the course of four years.

International Business Times ☛ Intel to Cut Over 2,300 Jobs at Oregon Plant in Bid to Become 'Leaner, Faster and More Efficient'

In mid-June, the company hinted at its plan to reduce its workforce by approximately 15 to 20 per cent. Considering Intel's global headcount of 109,000, this could lead to 16,350 to 21,800 employees losing their jobs. The company recently stated it employed over 20,000 individuals at its Hillsboro, Oregon facility.

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

Garry Kasparov ☛ The New York Times Runs Shameless Propaganda on Russia and Ukraine

Yesterday, Duranty’s old employer, The New York Times, published a feature critical of the 2024 Ukrainian counterattack into Russia’s Kursk Oblast. The correspondent who wrote the story concedes that she was escorted by Kadyrovtsy, Putin’s brutal Chechen shock troops.Call it a big win for the Walter Duranty legacy: His Stalin apologia is now only the second-most shameful propaganda-as-reportage to ever appear in the mainstream US press.

Censorship/Free Speech

The Hindu ☛ CBFC cuts ‘Superman’ in India: A short history of Hollywood films facing censorship

A swift wave of public outrage has since followed online, with exasperated fans pointing out the absurdity of censoring a kiss in a superhero flick while Indian films continue to get away with far sleazier depictions of women, often under the guise of tradition or mass appeal.

Baptist News Global ☛ Orwellian ‘newspeak’ and political censorship on social media

Just days after Donald Trump’s inauguration, I wrote an analysis piece examining the rising sentiments of fascism in the U.S. political climate. Social media users felt they were in the musical “Cabaret” — a play that portrays the rise of Nazism in Berlin presaging the Holocaust.Since then, many on social media have attempted to remain committed to telling the stories of oppression, minoritization and violence happening every day in our political climate. But they have faced challenges with algorithms intended to manage community dialogue, especially on TikTok.

Deccan Chronicle ☛ SC Grants Protection to Cartoonist Over Posts on PM Modi, RSS

The FIR mentioned various "objectionable" posts, including allegedly inappropriate comments on Lord Shiva as well as cartoons, videos, photographs and comments regarding Modi, RSS workers and others. Malviya's lawyer in the high court contended that he only posted a cartoon, but he could not be held responsible for the comments posted on it by other Facebook users.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

Press Gazette ☛ 'I get death threats all the time', CNN's Clarissa Ward tells conference

“I get death threats all the time, my children get death threats”, CNN journalist Clarissa Ward told a London conference on mental health and journalism.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

PC World ☛ Hundreds of Gigabyte motherboards vulnerable to Secure Boot attack

Crack open your desktop PC for a second. No rush, I’ll wait. Are you looking in there? Good. Do you see a Gigabyte motherboard? Okay, now peek under the CPU cooler. I’ll wait again. Okay, see that CPU? If it’s an Intel processor from 8th to 11th generations (2017 to 2021), you might need a new BIOS update… which may or may not exist. Oh dear.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

Michael Tsai ☛ Apple’s Browser Engine Ban Persists, Even Under the DMA

Trademarks

Right of Publicity

404 Media ☛ a16z-Backed AI Site Civitai Is Mostly Porn, Despite Claiming Otherwise

Data shows that the vast majority of images on Civitai were pornographic, and that the site hosted more than 50,000 AI models designed to recreate the likeness of real people.

404 Media ☛ Hugging Face Is Hosting 5,000 Nonconsensual AI Models of Real People

Users have reuploaded 5,000 models used to generate nonconsensual sexual content of real people to Hugging Face after they were banned from Civitai.

Copyrights

Society for Scholarly Publishing ☛ Confused and Ambivalent: Scholarly Authors and Creative Commons Licenses

Does anyone really understand how Creative Commons licenses work?It may seem like a flippant question – after all, at a certain level these licenses are admirably clear and easy to understand, and there are lots and lots and lots of convenient explainers out there (even if the details are often quite a bit more complex). It seems as if no one, whether author, publisher, funder, or reader, would really have an excuse for not knowing what they’re getting into when they choose — or are compelled — to adopt an open license for their work.And yet, here we are.

Torrent Freak ☛ Cloudflare Starts Blocking Pirate Sites For UK Users - That's a Pretty Big Deal

Cloudflare has become the first internet intermediary beyond local residential ISPs, to block access to pirate sites in the UK. Users attempting to access certain pirate sites are greeted with 'Error 451 - Unavailable for Legal Reasons'. In theory, ISP blocking should prevent UK users from even seeing this notice, but a combination of Cloudflare's blocking mechanism and choices made by some VPN users results in a piracy dead end.

Torrent Freak ☛ Record Labels: A "Safe Haven for Pirates" Disqualifies ISP from DMCA Protection

A coalition of nearly 50 record labels, including industry giants Warner and Sony, accuse Internet provider Altice of providing a safe haven for pirates. The companies request summary judgment in their ongoing lawsuit, arguing that Altice's repeat infringer policy is a "farce" and the "antithesis of reasonable." The ISP allegedly allowed piracy to flourish on its Optimum network, thus disqualifying it from safe harbor protection under the DMCA.

The Register UK ☛ EU report says GenAI's 'fair use' defense does not compute

The study finds [PDF] the current exception for text-and-data mining (TDM) in EU law "was not designed to accommodate the expressive and synthetic nature of generative AI training, and its application to such systems risks distorting the purpose and limits of EU copyright exceptions."

Techdirt ☛ Tackling The AI Bots That Threaten To Overwhelm The Open Web

It is a measure of how fast the field of AI has developed in the three years since Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was published that the issue of using copyright material for training AI systems, briefly mentioned in the book, has become one of the hottest topics in the copyright world, as numerous posts on this blog attest.