“A compromise peace, rather than the total defeat of Russia, is not a fair outcome. Nor would the details of such a settlement be fair; Ukraine would have to make more concessions than Russia. But the peace cannot be fair because the war was never fair: It wasn’t fair that the more powerful Russian army illegally invaded Ukraine, and it wasn’t fair that the West used Ukraine as a proxy to fight against Russia, rather than settling the war in its early weeks when the opportunity arose. Despite the fact that a peace deal would not be fair, it would save Ukraine and stop the war from getting worse. And although Ukraine would have to make the more painful concessions, Russia too would need to give way on some things.” (10/27/26)
Source: Electronic Frontier Foundation
by Mitch Stoltz
“The vast amount of information on the open web requires researchers and journalists to adapt with new tools to make sense of it all. Checking facts, gauging public opinion, and other lines of inquiry depend on being able to analyze the overwhelming amount of material posted online every day. Unfortunately, responding to the AI industry’s voracious appetite for data, companies stewarding this public data are looking to cash in and block access to the open web. This makes the web harder to navigate, and threatens all kinds of important research. Reddit’s lawsuit against SerpAPI and Perplexity threatens to do exactly that.” (10/26/26)
“A prisoner on Monday lost his challenge to an Australian state’s ban on inmates eating Vegemite after he argued in court that withholding the polarizing yeast-based spread breached his human right to ‘enjoy his culture as an Australian.’ Andre McKechnie, 55, who is serving a life sentence for murder, took his battle for the salty, sticky, black-brown byproduct of brewing beer to the Supreme Court of the state of Victoria last year. … Justice Claire Harris accepted prison authorities’ refusal to allow McKechnie Vegemite ‘limited his cultural rights’ under the charter. But she found the ban was justified in meeting authorities’ goals of removing illicit drugs and alcohol from the prison system. … Prison officials testified at a trial in July that Vegemite had been banned throughout the state’s 12 prisons for the past 20 years because it could potentially impair sniffer dogs’ ability to detect narcotics and could be used to brew alcohol because of its yeast content.” (10/27/26)
“Sal and Mark return with Joel Valenzuela on the Pirate Chain exploit, Dash’s new shielded asset pool, and why Dash’s privacy tech just hit a new watermark.” (10/27/26)
“Private market discipline is dynamic: prices adjust continuously as participants update their perceptions. Public prudential regulation is static: fixed rules define the playing field, and market participants optimize within those rules, arbitraging every gap. Once public regulation and ownership crowd out private discipline, political overseers add conflicting social objectives that further distort incentives. The 2008 crash was not a failure of free markets but the catastrophic consequence of unleashing Wall Street finance quants on a socialized housing market.” (10/27/26)
“Ofcom has a low batting average in collecting its extortionate fines. This is the UK agency enforcing the UK’s Online Safety Act. Ofcom’s mission includes forcing sundry websites to require all visitors to present proof of age — essentially, to ID themselves. The Act also lets Ofcom compel services that enable encrypted messaging to provide a way to tell whether anything illegal is being said or shown in the messages. That is, compel them to render the encryption pointless.” (10/26/26)
