As journalists are shut out of conflict zones, investigators are using satellite imagery, social media and 3D modelling to document atrocities. But evidence alone cannot deliver accountability.

The article is long but comprehensive, please see if for the full discussion.

Agencies tout very high success rates, but some experts compare it to “crime control theatre”

On Sunday, March 22 of this year, a large swath of the population in Quebec was woken up at 4:25 a.m. as cellphones lit up and screamed. An Amber alert had been broadcast. Less than four hours later, the two missing children were thankfully found, unharmed, and the alert was cancelled.

Amber alerts cast wide nets in an effort to find abducted children and teenagers, but each time one is transmitted in Canada, we go through a predictable cycle. Many complain that these alerts cannot be turned off or muted, even in sleep mode, and that waking people up in the middle of the night to help them find a specific car that was last spotted 200 kilometres away is unnecessarily disruptive—with some even calling 911 to complain. Meanwhile, law enforcement officials remind us through the media that these alerts are only used when necessary and that they save lives.

Any subject tied to the safety of children is bound to evoke the deepest emotions. In fact, the crime that led to the creation of Amber alerts—and to their name—was monstrous enough that it’s no wonder it rallied influential people into building a system that could potentially prevent this kind of crime.

But warranted emotions aside, do Amber alerts even work? What little data we do have point to a system that has likely been oversold to us.

Source: https://poorlydrawnlines.com/comic/check-this-out/

French President Emmanuel Macron has been the global leader in promoting a ban on social media for kids, consistently welcoming countries that propose such measures with a “thanks for joining the movement” tweet. That includes Canada, which received its congratulatory tweet after a ban was included in Bill C-34. As I argued last month, however, I believe the Canadian ban is vulnerable to constitutional challenge on at least two fronts: freedom of expression, since blocking an entire cohort of Canadians from accessing information and expressing themselves on social media infringes Section 2(b) of the Charter, and privacy, since enforcing the ban will require millions of Canadians to verify their age to use social media services with the promised safeguards nowhere in place when the ban takes effect. Last week, France became the first major jurisdiction to have such a ban reviewed by its highest constitutional court, and it proceeded to strike down the law on substantially the same two constitutional concerns.

The French Parliament adopted a social media ban for kids under 15 on July 21st, with the law scheduled to take effect in September. But France’s system of constitutional review led the ban to be reviewed by the constitutional court, resulting in it being assessed and rejected before ever taking effect. Macron responded to the ruling by instructing Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu to rework the legislation to address the court’s concerns, with the government now targeting spring 2027 for a revised law.

Orion Browser has officially moved its Linux version into beta, with Flatpak builds now available for both x86_64 and ARM64 systems.

Spice up your August garden with a bit of colour. Consider trying the many varieties of hibiscus, writes gardening expert Brian Minter

For context, FreshetNews is an independent news co-op in Metro Vancouver, Canada. The articles may be focussed on the climate of this region.

TLDR on the history side of the article

In 1804, a French weaver named Joseph-Marie Jacquard patented a loom that could weave intricate patterns using punch cards — paper cards with encoded holes.

Once they pass through the loom, the presence or absence of a hole tells the loom which warp thread to raise or lower, acting as the earliest form of binary code programming. Weaving that once required a master weaver and an assistant could now be done by craft hobbyists.

This feels like bad design

Smart pet-feeder company Petlibro suffered an outage on Tuesday, giving users a harsh reminder of the risks of relying on smart devices.

Petlibro makes pet feeders that connect to Wi-Fi and, for setup with Petlibro’s mobile companion app, Bluetooth. Users can set the feeders to automatically dispense food at scheduled times, which is handy for pet care when the owner is out of the home.

In a statement to The Verge, Petlibro CEO York Wu said this week’s outage was “related to how the Petlibro app communicates with devices through its online servers.”

Some user reports have also conflicted with Petlibro’s claims about offline functionality. As The Verge pointed out, various users online claimed that during the outage, their devices did not perform any scheduled feedings, performed some feedings but not others, or performed feedings late (examples here, here, here, here, and here).

Where a student lives can shape how much time they have to study, how easily they can participate in campus life and whether they have access to academic and social support. A lack of affordable housing can affect student mental health and reinforce social hierarchies on campus.

Terabytes worth of credentials, many belonging to the world’s biggest and most sensitive organizations, have been exposed in a supply-chain attack on LiteLLM, an open source tool that streamlines A- driven software development. Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Samsung, and Salesforce are only a handful of the entities whose access secrets were exposed.

The revelation was posted on Tuesday and Wednesday by security firms CloudSEK and Hudson Rock. CloudSEK said it found cloud keys, repository tokens, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, package publishing credentials, environment variables, and AlI provider keys that could allow attackers to gain access to more than 2,500 organizations.

The credentials were extracted during a 40-minute window in March while the victims used compromised versions of LiteLLM downloaded from the package’s official location in the Python Package Index repository. Hudson Rock said it made the discovery after analyzing a 195TB file that it obtained. Neither firm identified the source of the information.

A staggering amount of free produce given away in Metro Vancouver over the weekend has officially set a new Guinness World Record.

Photos of the event show rows of bins packed with produce like potatoes, carrots, apples, and more. Twenty-five farms donated to the event, and 70 per cent of the “ugly” fruits and vegetables were from local growers.

Taalas is the latest in a growing list of promising early-stage Canadian semiconductor startups snapped up by larger US players.

Exactly 20 years ago, Canadian chipmaker ATI was snapped up by American giant AMD. ATI was, at the time, a dominant player alongside Nvidia—the kind of company that could have anchored a Canadian AI hardware industry.

Now, AMD has acquired Toronto-based Taalas—yet another hot, high-potential chipmaker. And Taalas is just the latest in a growing list of promising early-stage Canadian semiconductor startups snapped up by larger US players, alongside Hyperlume, Untether AI, and chip-adjacent CentML. Later-stage peers Alphawave Semi, GaN Systems, and Tenstorrent have also redomiciled, sold to foreign firms, or both.

Paul Slaby, managing director of Canada’s Semiconductor Council, called the Taalas acquisition “a real vote of confidence” in domestic talent. “AMD does not buy a team like Taalas unless the people here are world-class,” Slaby told me. But, stacked with these other deals, he said, a pattern emerges.

The CSC, which has called for chips to be included as a pillar in Canada’s AI strategy, would rather see Canada grow more of its best semiconductor companies into anchor firms and create its own AMDs than witness “a steady stream of early exits,” Slaby said.

While industry leaders I spoke with congratulated Taalas on the outcome, they also agreed Canada needs a targeted strategy to break this cycle. “If we keep producing world-class talent and IP without a plan to scale the companies that own them, we will keep handing our best work to someone else,” Slaby said.

Autonomous weapons are transforming the battlefield. Ottawa wants to be ready

First few paragraphs:

When rogue fighters abandoned their months-long siege of Tripoli in the spring of 2020 and scattered into the Libyan desert, something pursued them from above, hunting them across the open terrain: drones. Built by Türkiye, these machines were designed to keep flying even if they lost contact with their human handlers. In other words, they could identify and attack targets on their own.

The episode came to light a year later in a 548-page report submitted by a United Nations panel of experts to the Security Council. The panel had been investigating Libya’s descent into chaos after the 2011 overthrow of long-time dictator Muammar Gaddafi created a power vacuum that unleashed years of fighting between rival governments, militias, and warlords. UN reports rarely generate global headlines. This one did because it appeared to offer the first documented case of a supposedly lethal autonomous weapons system—the kind of killer robot that until then was confined to science fiction. Whether this function was ever used on the Libyan fighters remains a mystery, but it portended how armed combat was about to evolve.

Kyiv first fielded fully autonomous drone capabilities—“Terminator mode”—against Russian soldiers in 2024. The conflict’s front lines have since become a laboratory for relentless automation. Quadcopter first-person view drones—cherished by wedding planners and travel influencers—have morphed into marauding executioners hurtling themselves toward enemies at 150 kilometres an hour.

Ukraine is retaking chunks of its territory from Russia by launching all-robot assaults, posting videos of Russian infantry staring into the camera as they surrender to drones and unmanned ground vehicles. The Kremlin has established its own military branch dedicated to autonomous systems as well. Russia’s hulking war machine may be battered, but it also now has more expertise in high-tech combat than any of its autocratic peers or Western adversaries.

Elsewhere, Israel has deployed intelligent military systems in Gaza and plans to do the same along its borders with Lebanon and Syria. Chinese killer robots were openly paraded through the heart of Beijing last September. The Donald Trump administration in the United States is demanding Congress greenlight $54.6 billion (US) in 2027 for the Pentagon’s new Defense Autonomous Warfare Group. Autonomous defence tech firm Anduril (a darling of Silicon Valley venture capitalists) wants Washington to ease export restrictions and allow it to set up branch plants abroad.

It’s a race for arms now small enough to fit in the palm of a soldier’s hand. In 2023, an Indian defence start-up unveiled three variants of nano drones, each weighing about 200 grams, or roughly the same as a large apple. Once programmed, a kamikaze model is capable of identifying an enemy’s hideout and self-detonating upon arrival.

“It used to be that only the strongest countries could use drones—because they were expensive and complex,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told the UN General Assembly last fall. He warned a future of fully autonomous machine warfare is inevitable. “Now, even simple drones can fly thousands of kilometres. War tech doesn’t care about geography anymore—it’s now reshaping it.”

The consequences could be phenomenally grim. The international community is grappling with how to mitigate the risks. Efforts to craft even imperfect safeguards—similar to those placed on nuclear warheads, chemical agents, anti-personnel mines, and cluster munitions—are essentially deadlocked. Civil society groups and human rights organizations are pushing for idealistic prohibition treaties. Military heavyweights want a maximalist approach.

Most countries sit in the middle, hedging their bets in a geopolitical environment that is reverting to the law of the jungle. Canada is no exception. Ottawa’s Defence Industrial Strategy is funnelling billions into the sector, pledging to expand the domestic capacity of unmanned systems and establish a Drone Innovation Hub. Several major barriers stand in the way. But if they can be overcome, Canada has a rare opportunity to show what the responsible use of the technology looks like in practice. For Branka Marijan, a military researcher specializing in emerging technologies, that means creating “safeguards other countries can actually adopt.” It’s the kind of leadership in desperately short supply.

Edward Jeep had been carrying his Canadian passport for barely a month when the government told him it was no longer valid.

The fifty-five-year-old Washington, DC–based US military retiree was travelling in Europe. He had flown from Cardiff to Amsterdam and entered the Schengen Area using the Canadian passport issued to him in May. While he was abroad, two messages arrived from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. The first, on June 13, said IRCC had placed the proof of citizenship issued to him under review and required him to surrender his certificate. A week later, another notice said his passport had been revoked and had to be returned within fifteen days.

Jeep’s was one of 100 similar cases that were flagged, with the number of those whose proof of citizenship was revoked remaining unclear. The suspensions came as IRCC’s proof-of-citizenship processing has been under strain. The department’s public processing-time tool recently showed a projected wait of about nineteen months, with nearly 100,000 people in line for a decision.

Jeep returned to the United States using his American passport. “Nobody has given me a conclusive answer whether there’s some database someplace that thinks I’m still in Europe,” he told me. He worried the mismatch—with him having entered the Schengen Area as a Canadian but having left an American—could create problems if Canada later issued him another passport.

Jeep had applied for and gotten citizenship under a recent law. Since 2009, Canada’s Citizenship Act had limited citizenship by descent to the first generation born abroad. A Canadian born or naturalized in Canada could pass citizenship on to a child born outside the country. But if that person, too, later had a child outside Canada, the offspring could not claim citizenship by descent. That rule became known as the first-generation limit. After an Ontario court found parts of that limit unconstitutional, Parliament passed Bill C-3, which came into force on December 15, 2025, expanding citizenship by descent to people who had previously been excluded.

There’s a peculiar new sight along Cameron Street, the arterial road of Cannington, Ont. In a courtyard beside the old Cannington Convenience lies what looks like a big, glowing phone booth sitting atop a stone bench.

The glowing phone booth, it turns out, is actually a giant battery. Built by Toronto-based startup Civic Grid on behalf of The Nourish and Develop Foundation (TNDF), it helps power the neighbouring food bank for cheap while providing residents with a mini town square to gather and recharge. For Civic Grid, the pilot project is a demonstration of a new kind of community infrastructure.

“This square provides … lighting, shelter, seating, [and] an open courtyard to be an extension and to strengthen the TNDF’s existing programming,” Civic Grid founder and CEO Max Fine told BetaKit in an interview on Thursday. “Having these spaces within these communities, big or small, I think, are really essential as we electrify our systems and we go through this energy transition.”

The courtyard’s 60 kWh energy system charges during the cheap, off-peak night hours, then powers the TNDF’s two buildings for six hours the following day. That keeps its fridges and community kitchen running at less cost, while also providing insurance if the power goes out.

“The idea that people can come and fill up, and take it home, [it’s] a more modern version of that well,” Fine said. “You have basic access to a life-saving amount of water; you’re not taking a bath in a public water fountain, you’re just getting a drink.”

From the article

As you already know, Open Food Facts calculates and displays the Green-Score (the environmental footprint) for food products in its open database.

But what if you want to know the Green-Score of a recipe prepared at home, in a restaurant or in a canteen?

Thanks to support from ADEME (The French Agency for Ecological Transition) as part of a ‘Call for Commons’ initiative to accelerate the ecological transition, Open Food Facts is embarking on the development of a tool to assess the environmental impact of recipes – which will be free and open source!

I am posting this to a woodworking community and a cooking community, because he does both in these videos. The tree goes into the food, and it is used to make tools that are used to prepare or enjoy the food.

From the description:

A lot of you have been asking me if I could venture into the world of making savory tree flavored stuff, so when I had an entire dead pear tree on my hands, …

I’m not sure when I’d use this, but its a neat concept

Decimen is an open-source web app that moves files between devices through an animated QR stream, requiring no direct network connection, pairing, account, or native app.