So how did Lula come from behind to defeat Bolsonaro? In short, turnout. Bolsonaro's vote share barely moved. But Lula banked millions of votes from those who didn't vote in the first round & won eliminated candidates' votes. A remarkable mobilisation. Second round turnout is usually below first.

"Our thesis is a simple one: Campaign consultants are businesses that act to maximize profits, and this profit-seeking is often at odds with what’s best to defeat American authoritarianism."

Jake Grumbach@jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 4d ago

Just as a private equity firm buys out a corporation and strips it for parts, a consultant class is raiding the Democratic Party and getting “generationally wealthy” along the way New from me and @adambonica.bsky.social newrepublic.com/article/2163...

Surreal to be a part of such a talented group that’s been working on this. My contributions are some grubby city-based backgrounds (gong farmer and rat catcher). So excited to see it in person soon. www.kickstarter.com/projects/hil...

Fletchwind: Out of the Cities

System-agnostic tools for creating fantasy cities, plus urban adventures by Arnold Kemp, Wuggy, and Willem-Jan. Statted for Cairn 2e.

kickstarter.com

I feel like the entire digital ad industry should be up in arms about this company using ad-tech to deliver zero-click spyware. Is that happening in a filter bubble I’m not in? Or are we just not realizing how bad this is? Read this: pluralistic.net/2026/10/17/m... by @doctorow.pluralistic.net

Job-seeking teens are being asked to submit videos now

Job-seeking teens are being asked to submit videos now

What rights do they have once that footage has been submitted to a potential employer?

thespinoff.co.nz

No, really, these PHP vulns are quite serious and you should drop everything and patch. www.php.net/index.php

PHP

PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

php.net

BTW knowledge of the existence of this vulnerability enables a well financed malware group to use AI to find it, if you run PHP anything you should be taking the service down NOW until a patch is available. And then patch before bringing the service back up.

nightshade →home, for now@nightshade.technology · 6d ago

details leaked. this vulnerability is a full unauthenticated unconditional remote code execution exploit against any service running on a PHP version from 5.4 until latest yeah if anything deserves CVSS 11, this is it. this is CATACLYSMICALLY bad.

In honor of @masnick.com once again valiantly trying to convince people to actually read all 26 words of Section 230(c)(1) before confidently opining on its legal meaning, time to reup my finest scholarly work, the Section 230 Alignment Chart

It's Biketober and the spooky season! Register for a FREE, joyful night ride around in the central city, hosted by bike pals. Meet at Electric Bike Team at 6pm, and encouraging that you wear a costume. Check Biketober.nz for more details.

We won our case against DOGE for violating the privacy rights of current and former government employees! The case is AFGE v. OPM, Case 1:25-cv-01237-DLC Document 241 Filed 10/20/26 if you can't get it from the ECF link ecf.nysd.uscourts.gov/doc1/1271405...

NEW: After our reporting, Meta removed “train” from its upcoming commercial terms. But the terms still allow broad website scraping and could potentially supersede robots.txt. @andrewdeck.bsky.social and I followed up with the experts: www.niemanlab.org/2026/10/lega...

Legal experts warn Meta’s new terms still grant broad scraping permissions, despite language changes

Allowing scraped content to be used for all "advertising and business products" is a substantial expansion of Meta's permissions.

niemanlab.org

“ ‘This will be a massive cleanup job, bigger than Heartbleed,’ .. ‘There will be a very, very long tail, IoT devices, Docker containers, forgotten Linux machines, unmaintained CLI tools that shipped their own copy of the roots ..’ “ arstechnica.com/security/202... @arstechnica.com

The Internet goes on high alert after discovery of 8 compromised TLS certs

Intermediate certs allow anyone to mint web credentials for any Internet server.

arstechnica.com

Ars Technica@arstechnica.com · 6d ago

I'm delighted that my Article "The Rise, Fall, and Future of Internet Exceptionalism" is forthcoming in the Cornell Law Review next year. The paper is still very much under revision, and I welcome feedback on it. You can find it on SSRN here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

I directionally agree w/Mike that regulating this specific problem is hard, but “make sure you have communication channels that a third party can’t easily switch off” is only possible at any non-trivial scale with some public governance of channel operators and the infrastructure they rely on

Mike Masnick@masnick.com · 6d ago

Wrote a thing about how it doesn't really matter whether Zuck shut down the No Kings Insta on purpose or if it was an accident. The problem is relying on him in the first place. www.techdirt.com/2026/10/20/a...

For the first time I have witness the two link per month limit on a client's Facebook Page. The impact of this on nonprofits will be significant. When fully implemented every arts and cultural nonprofit will have to pay A$17.99 a month for Meta One. #Meta #MetaOne #Facebook #Instagram

When I was about six years old, the bones in my legs began to twist. By the time I was eight, I was walking with a profound misalignment; my feet were at a nearly sideways angle outward from my knees. My parents hated this and insisted that I walk with my feet straight ahead,

"We should be asking ourselves: When is civility useful and when is it a canard for oppression? When is anger a detriment and when is it a righteous tool?" www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

What’s Wrong With Civility?

Civility can be a tool of engagement. But history has shown it can also be used to oppress the powerless.

insidehighered.com

Something I really love is the way the movie constantly contrasts Nausicaä's emotional, naive, feminine-coded objections with the Hard Men Making Hard Decisions, and then repeatedly shows us that Nausicaä is the only person who has actually done the research to understand the logic of the world.

Nathan Goldwag@goldwagnathan.bsky.social · last wk.

goddamn this movie is so fucking good

When Virga has tried to chew the furniture, we have been using a redirect: offering him an appropriate chew, a toy, or SOMETHING else. Which he usually accepts. However, I have noticed recently that he now uses his teeth on furniture as a way of telling me to go get his bone, please.

When Grammy-winning musician Rhiannon Giddens begins playing “Old Corn Liquor,” a traditional Black American folk tune, acclaimed Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man recognizes similarities to Chinese pentatonic music and spontaneously joins in. The joy on their faces says it all.

were the machines in fact close to human-level consciousness in the mid-1960s? if not, why were so many people so convinced that they were, and why are we now immune from whatever tendency drove that view?

“It was the very strength of capital that provoked the social dislocations and political contradictions that gave rise to Trump. But the profitability of this order left capital unwilling to concede the kinds of reforms that might have restored legitimacy...”

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò@olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 2w ago

"The growing mobility of capital increasingly allowed it to avoid making concessions that might have supported legitimation, while the marginalization of parties, elections...weakened the state’s capacity to secure popular consent for accumulation." nonsite.org/triumph-of-c...

When you consider the scale of the economics and social impact of this, it’s genuine serious Hard Journalism being done here.

Morgan Johnson@poormojo.bsky.social · 2w ago

No joke. I think this is the most important video I have ever seen about mobile games. This guy breaks down how this game psychologically profiles you, and makes the game harder or easier in order to show you ads

I've written a series of basic neutral backgrounders on New Zealand telecommunications and closely related subjects. There are 13 in all. Let me know if you think there is a subject I should add to the list. This is the one on data sovereignty: billbennett.co.nz/data-soverei...

What data sovereignty means for New Zealand

What data sovereignty means for New Zealand organisations, why the US Cloud Act matters even for data stored locally and why 'local cloud' claims do not guarantee legal protection from foreign jurisdi...

billbennett.co.nz

Beautiful story by Michael O. Snyder about re-building Taiwanese communities' tea cultivation in the face of climate change, & their work on #adaptation with @preservinglegacies.bsky.social. #climateheritage

Photos: Taiwan’s tea revival blends ancient terraces with new climate adaptations

SHENKENG, Taiwan — Ten kilometers east of Taipei’s high-rises and dense traffic, the city gives way to a succession of steep, forested ridgelines sheltering villages in the valleys below. The subtropi...

news.mongabay.com

My doctor asked me if I minded his use of AI to summarize summary my appt yesterday, so first I told him why I mind and then I consented because I wanted to see the summary it generated. It listed a medication I don't take and have never taken on my list of current meds, so here we are.

India’s privacy law takes effect in May 2027, but broad exemptions for state institutions are already facing a constitutional challenge, writes Aravindan Anandan.

India’s GDPR-Inspired Privacy Law Leaves State Power Unchecked

India’s privacy law takes effect in 2027, but broad exemptions for state institutions are already facing a constitutional challenge, writes Aravindan Anandan.

buff.ly

“I think it’s important for a dog to experience the world in a sober state of mind” is going to enter my lexicon

Sobering but also reinforces that solving any of these problems is going to be structural. As long as emphasis is on grades and doing as much as possible, as long as universities call for "embracing" AI, as long as assessment trumps learning, it's going to be hard to solve this even as many/1