"Age and wisdom don’t necessarily go together. Some people just become stupid with more authority."

- Sir Terry Pratchett

Online Age Verification, the Trojan Horse for Digital Identity, Hits Resistance in France

Across the world countries are adopting policies that threaten to radically transform the Internet. 

How many federal datasets have been terminated since January 2025?

Former federal data officials answer the question. “Since the 2025 change in presidential administrations, disappearing federal datasets have drawn widespread attention, generating both concern and confusion about what has actually been terminated. Different media outlets, academics, and nonprofits are reporting data losses ranging up to the thousands. Professional organizations are documenting cuts to federal staff, contracts, and advisory committees and raising concerns about the politicization of federal data. 

Adding to the confusion, some datasets are being pulled down only to return later. Today, dataindex.us, the nation’s leading resource for monitoring changes to federal data, published the Federal Data Terminations Tracker—the most policy-relevant, verified source of federal datasets terminated since January 2025. Having evolved from the crowdsourced Dearly Departed Datasets published in October 2025, the tracker combines community reporting with expert identification and review to provide a regularly updated record of terminations. 

“Data are the central nervous system of modern government,” said Denice Ross, former U.S. Chief Data Scientist, co-founder of dataindex.us, and Director of the Data Policy Institute at the Federation of American Scientists. “The termination of federal data – whether related to food security, drug abuse, or hate crimes – has far reaching impacts. Many of these terminations occurred behind closed doors and without opportunity for public input, so we’re bringing visibility to what’s been lost through a rigorous tracking process.”

 The team identified dozens of federal datasets and hundreds of data elements that have been terminated – significantly fewer than other reports, but more tailored to informing effective public engagement and future data policies needed to run a modern society. These are data that have long underpinned policymaking, journalism, advocacy, and research that improve American lives and livelihoods. 

“Disruptions to federal data are hard to monitor, yet they affect our nation’s ability to address issues ranging from climate risks, to maternal and infant health, to immigration enforcement,” said Christopher Dick, former Chief of Population Evaluation at the U.S. Census Bureau, former statistician at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and co-founder of dataindex.us. “We’re committed to publicly documenting what has changed and why it matters.”

• View the tracker at dataindex.us/terminations-tracker, and read more about the methodology and why quantifying data terminations is so challenging here.

Ordinary WiFi can now identify you with near-perfect accuracy Science Daily

Ordinary WiFi can now identify you with near-perfect accuracy

“Everyday WiFi networks could potentially identify and track people without cameras or special equipment, using signals already being transmitted by nearby devices. Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT): 

“Ordinary WiFi networks could quietly become powerful surveillance tools, allowing people to be identified without cameras, special sensors, or even carrying a connected device. Researchers showed that unencrypted signals routinely exchanged between WiFi devices and routers can be used to create radio-based images of people and recognize them within seconds. 

In tests involving 197 participants, the system identified individuals with nearly 100% accuracy, even from different angles and regardless of how they walked…The researchers say the findings reveal a potentially serious privacy risk because WiFi networks are already widespread in homes, offices, restaurants, and public spaces.

This technology turns every router into a potential means for surveillance,” warns Julian Todt from KASTEL. “If you regularly pass by a café that operates a WiFi network, you could be identified there without noticing it and be recognized later — for example by public authorities or companies.”…

To Save Higher Ed, Professors Need to Get a Little Weird

What Do Students Lose 

When They Stop Writing?

Educators are worried that many 

students can no longer write essays

 without A.I. And it’s costing more

 than just grammar skills…

To Save Higher Ed, Professors Need to Get a Little Weird

 I read “The Brothers Karamazov” for the first time last semester. For someone in my line of work — I’m a professor in a great books program — having failed to read one of the greatest novels ever written is embarrassing, close to professional malpractice. So when my co-teacher, Alan, proposed we assign this thousand-page saga to our third- and fourth-year students, I eagerly agreed.

“The Brothers Karamazov” consumed me in a way I hadn’t experienced in years, maybe decades. I could think of little else. Emails went unanswered. I repeatedly read well past my strict, middle-aged 10 p.m. bedtime. I was once so absorbed I forgot to pick up my daughter at ballet. I lost interest in my phone.

And I wasn’t alone. As my profession underwent a largeand public meltdown over the future of education in the A.I. age, I was having one of the best semesters of my career. When I’d enter our seminar room, I’d hear my students chattering excitedly about Dmitry Karamazov’s wild love life and self-destructive partying as if he lived in the dorm with them; there were debates — wrongheaded, in my view, but sincere — about which books might help the obdurate intellectual brother, Ivan, overcome his despair.

That my students — regular 20-somethings at a public college in one of Canada’s poorest provinces — fell in love with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s strange little town might look like a miracle from the outside, but as the narrator of “The Brothers Karamazov” puts it: “Miracles never bother a realist.” To be a realist about higher education is to acknowledge that the challenge of our moment is not primarily intellectual, but sentimental — spiritual, if you will. In the algorithmic age, effective teaching is affectiveteaching.

Today’s educational problems are often attributed to a deficit of focus or attention, but attention is an anemic way to understand what allows education to transform people. We’re really talking about passion, inconvenient and unfashionable as that is to acknowledge. Passion creates a unity of purpose and urgency that is the antidote to the feckless, superficial distraction of the algorithmic age. Lots of us pay very close attention to our phones, but what we lack is the sustaining passion that endures difficulty and shapes a life.

When I asked my students why they thought Dostoyevsky was such a hit, they routinely said two things. First, they were moved by the passions of the characters in the novel. As one student put it to me, the characters in “The Brothers Karamazov” approach life “head first, heels last”; they dash to extremity, grab what’s there, and bring it back to this otherwise insignificant village, where it explodes into fierce little human dramas that take on cosmic significance. The novel is an extravagant convergence of form and content in this sense: It shows us what real, life-shaping passion looks like, but also awakens something similar in its readers.

Second, the students explained that my own enthusiasm helped stoke theirs. When I asked how they were managing to keep up with the brisk pace of the reading assignments, one of them candidly said: “Well, it really helps that you’re so into it.” Since Alan knew much more about the novel than I did and mostly led discussions, I had the pleasure of becoming a student myself, proposing thrilling but wildly unscholarly theories about the ultimate fate of Father Zosima, or the motivations of the novel’s mysterious narrator.

As far back as Plato’s irascible character Meno, would-be teachers have been confronting the problem that students must want to learn before learning is possible. For many decades, higher education has relied on a workaround to this problem — tying access to good jobs to success in school. In some cases, a desire for money and prestige leads to real, if incidental, learning. But large language models have broken this arrangement by making it possible for students to skip straight to an effortless A without doing any meaningful learning. Technology has exposed the limits of our mercenary approach to education.

Over the course of last semester, I became convinced there is a way out of this moribund strategy: We teachers must remain students — and model what we want to see. We need to recover the passion that drove us to our books, to the lab. We need to embody love of learning for its own sake against the pervasive message that higher education should be vocational, and we need to clarify the basic questions that make our subjects worth studying.

Keeping a certain youthful enthusiasm or undergraduate idiosyncrasy is difficult when you’re contending with day care colds, spirit-rending administrative work, worries about the state of the world and the future, or simply the kind of routinized structures that bear the weight of bourgeois life. Being a good teacher requires being sort of odd, even a bit immature. Some of my favorite professors married scholarly expertise with considerable eccentricity — my dissertation adviser insisted her students take up social dance like polka, line-dancing and zydeco; another of my former professors would alight at 4 a.m. to teach himself Japanese, before undertaking woodworking projects like making a life-size chess set. The passions are nonconformist. To be moved is to be a little bit weird.

What I discovered anew in my encounter with “The Brothers Karamazov” last term was that if you want students to be passionately engaged, not worried about the future, grasping, careerist or disengaged, you must transmit the spark of passion in your deeds, your mien — let’s face it, in your own soul. If you expect your students to choose books, ideas and genuine learning over shortcuts and distraction, you must be a bit courageous, too. Return to the basics. Cut through the haze of abstraction, the webs of scholarly terminology, the pretense of professionalization, and attempt to recover the basic human experiences that can move us. Remain a student in earnest.

Near the end of “The Brothers Karamazov,” the novel’s hero, the youngest Karamazov, Alyosha, is trying to win over an intelligent boy named Kolya, who confuses skepticism with maturity. Alyosha’s passionate appeal doesn’t involve rhetorical fireworks or hysterics. Instead, he takes the young man very seriously. He treats him like an adult. We forget, at our peril, how life-changing it can be for a young person to have an unrelated adult treat them with seriousness and respect. Alyosha is present to Kolya, and painfully earnest. For the most part, he asks questions rather than gives speeches. And eventually Kolya can’t deny that there is something about “Karamazov,” abandoning his prematurely world-weary cynicism for a more expansive embrace of life.

As educators the world over look toward the coming school year, perhaps, with a hint of dread, we should focus on what we can control. The challenges of our algorithmic age are real, but it has always been true that good teachers need to be exemplary students to help others learn. For Dostoyevsky, worldly common sense can make us unwitting fools. As Alyosha memorably notes, all capable people “are awfully afraid of looking ridiculous, and it makes them unhappy.” Remaining a passionate student yourself may well feel ridiculous, nowadays, but it is ultimately nothing more than realism about what education requires.

Matt Dinan is the director of the Great Books program at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. He writes the newsletter Prefaces.

More on education in the A.I. age

Opinion | Shael Polakow-Suransky

The High Cost of Silent Classrooms

June 8, 2026

Opinion | Rebecca Winthrop

What 370,000 College Essays Tell Us About A.I.’s Effects on Creativity

May 27, 2026

Opinion | Jessica Grose and Jill Frank

America’s First A.I. High School Is Great. But Not Because of A.I.

May 30, 2026

Lawsuit: Early access fee for Trump Truth Social posts unconstitutional

 "If you feel pain, You are alive. If you feel other people's pain, you are a human being."

- Leo Tolstoy

To be included in the offsetting process, an individual had to be under 70 and have taxable income or a tax loss of $50,000 or more. In December 2022, the ATO removed both criteria.

After Robodebt, why did the ATO remove a protection for people over 70?

The US Is Implementing The NATO 3.0 Concept In Asia Through AUKUS+

“Peace through strength” continues its disastrous world tour.

Whistleblower Brendan Lyon’s court win clears path to challenge big four liability shield

Trump Administration Is Interfering in the 2026 Midterm Elections To Entrench the Imperial Presidency

“The Center for American Progress publishes a new report by Michael Sozan and Ben Olinskyon Trump’s efforts to meddle in upcoming elections. They detail 15 specific tactics, including “installing election deniers in key government positions,” “gutting key agencies and essential election security programs,” “sharply curtailing voting by mail,” preparing to “purge” voters by “weaponizing federal databases and demanding personal voter information,” and more.

In the 18 months since Inauguration Day, President Donald Trump and his administration have seized unprecedented executive branch power to implement extremist and unpopular policies. Now, to lock in that power and escape accountability, the administration is waging an unconstitutional effort to subvert voters’ will in the November 2026 midterm elections. 

For decades, political scientists who study backsliding democracies around the world have identified a crucial tactic used by would-be authoritarians: Once they have dismantled traditional checks and balances and weaponized government against their perceived political enemies, they move to disrupt and control elections to ensure that they and their allies remain in office. The right to freely and fairly vote for elected leaders is the most fundamental feature of a democratic republic. It is the mechanism through which all other rights are ultimately protected and through which the government derives its legitimate authority. 

As the United States marks 250 years of democratic self-governance, that right—and the republic it sustains—faces the gravest threat from within. This report is the third in a Center for American Progress series documenting how the Trump administration planned and then built an imperial presidency. 

This report revisits earlier analyses, which detailed the steps that the administration was taking to aggregate power, create a strongman presidency, and implement a far-right policy agenda. The report then documents how the administration, through a multipronged plan across 15 interlocking tactics, is working to subvert elections and manufacture victories in the midterms—all in service of consolidating the administration’s unprecedented power. 

These tactics include, but are not limited to, weaponizing federal departments controlled by loyalists, erecting massive hurdles for eligible Americans to register to vote and to cast their ballots, triggering a mid-decade gerrymandering crisis that severely disadvantages Black and Latino voters, assailing state and local election administrators, and musing publicly about deploying National Guard troops and federal agents to polling places or demanding that state officials not certify elections. The stakes are stark: 

A sitting president and his administration have created a near-constitutional crisis involving the very elections that have sustained U.S. democracy.”

Lawsuit: Early access fee for Trump Truth Social posts unconstitutional

Freedom of the Press Foundation: “New York, Aug. 12, 2026 — President Donald Trump’s scheme to charge $100,000 per month for advance access to official government announcements on Truth Social violates the First and Fifth amendments to the Constitution, according to a lawsuit filed today in federal court by Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) and The Intercept.

The plaintiffs — represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic, the Public Integrity Project, and Altshuler Berzon LLP — are asking the court to bar Trump and White House employees from carrying out this unconstitutional plan. In 2021, Trump launched Trump Media & Technology Group. In 2022, Trump Media released Truth Social, a social media platform over which Trump could exercise complete control.

 Since returning to office, Trump has used his Truth Social account as his primary means of communicating with the public and making official announcements, encompassing everything from agency appointments and firings to military actions and foreign policy.

 Last month, the CEO of Truth Social’s parent company announced Truth API, a service that would provide investors early access to “market-moving” messages from the president and other officials on the platform for up to $100,000 per month. At the same time, its CEO announced that the company would take steps to stop users from systematically gathering posts from the platform. 

Truth API launched Aug. 1 and has already signed up 10 customers. Granting preferential access to Trump’s public statements to paid subscribers violates the First Amendment, which guarantees Americans equal access to the president’s public announcements. The Fifth Amendment prohibits the government from imposing extortionate or unreasonable conditions on the availability of government benefits.

A president selling priority access to news he himself generates for the benefit of a private company he controls is so blatantly corrupt and unconstitutional that it would have been hard to even fathom just a few years ago,” said FPF Chief of Advocacy Seth Stern. “Trump’s crooked scheme is particularly outrageous because, as documented by our Trump Anti-Press Social Media Tracker, he frequently uses his Truth Social account to berate journalists and even to announce his plans to sue them and criminally investigate them. Then, he makes them wait in line behind paying customers to find out about it unless they’re willing to subsidize the platform he uses to attack them. This brazen grift targets not only the markets but the First Amendment. It cannot stand.” “Nothing could be more antithetical to the free, independent press than the president charging for early access to his public announcements,” said The Intercept’s Chief Legal Officer David Bralow. “Through this litigation, The Intercept and its journalists are proud to hold the line on a fundamental proposition: Public information belongs to the public.”

Dulwich Hill - I had no idea my suburb was so incredible, until the New York Times told me

 I had no idea my suburb was so incredible, until the New York Times told me by Amanda Simon 

AUGUST 17, 2026

My suburb was a sleepy backwater until 2007, when we woke up one morning, shocked to find ourselves featured in the travel pages of The New York Times.

In a piece entitled “In Dulwich Hill, Sydney, Finding the World in a Few Blocks”, reporter Jennifer Gampell wrote that while “Dulwich Hill is just 10 minutes south-west of Newtown, yet it retains a charming ‘Old World’ simplicity and sense of community long since gone from nearby Sydney neighbourhoods”.

If only The New York Times had asked us, we would have said: “We know”. Successive generations of migrants have arrived in my suburb since World War II, transforming it into a multicultural oasis. At the 2021 census, 60 per cent of the residents reported having one or both parents who were born overseas. Other than English, the top languages spoken at home are Greek, Arabic, Vietnamese, Portuguese and Spanish.

Dulwich Hill shops on Marrickville Road.STEVEN SIEWERT

A house on Weston Street, Dulwich Hill.STEVEN SIEWERT

The other defining event of this inner-west suburb, just seven kilometres south-west of the CBD, was the arrival of the light rail in 2014. The L1, which connects Dulwich Hill to Central in just 36 minutes, triggered a rush to buy one of the area’s well-loved Victorian, Federation or art deco houses and apartments. Now, within a few months, the new Sydenham to Bankstown metro line will open, making any city commutes even faster. Not that we’re keen on leaving our area – not for nothing do locals proudly wear T-shirts depicting Dulwich Hill landmarks with the caption “Dully Chill”.

Today, there is a small collection of shops around the railway station, but the suburb’s main retail centre is on the top of the “hill”, or ridge that runs through the suburb. These shops are found around the intersection of Canterbury and Marrickville roads, running back down Marrickville Road for several blocks. Bursting at the seams with cafes, fruit stores, a florist and bars, this area has really come into its own.

A delicatessen on Marrickville Road.STEVEN SIEWERT

A view of the Marrickville Road shops.STEVEN SIEWERT

Johnny Gio’s pizzeria on Marrickville Road.STEVEN SIEWERT

Our much-lauded eateries map the suburb’s migratory waves. There are Greek restaurants serving mouth-watering yeeros and other varieties of meat on the spit. Charcoal chicken is another popular staple, with both Lebanese and Greek varieties available. The popular Greek-run Honey and Walnut Patisserie exists to satisfy your sweet tooth. A boy I know swore it was called “Honey and Warm Up”, which would have been an apt alternative. The award-winning Gleebooks bookshop opened 16 years ago, and there’s been an explosion of new eateries, including the Lucky Chinese, Mali Ston Wine Bar, Tamaleria & Mexican Deli, Goldie’s, Abla’s Pastries, The Eate and Sushi Sapporo. There’s live music almost every night at Butchers Brew Bar.

The much-loved Gleebooks.STEVEN SIEWERT

Dulwich Hill

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The numerous parks in Dulwich Hill have recently been transformed by the GreenWay, which links many of them and allows residents to walk, jog, skate, scooter or cycle for exercise and recreation to neighbouring areas such as the Bay Run and the Cooks River path. It runs alongside the light rail.

Johnson Park on the GreenWay.STEVEN SIEWERT

A tunnel on the GreenWay.STEVEN SIEWERT

Johnson Park on the GreenWay.STEVEN SIEWERT

Walkers on the GreenWay. STEVEN SIEWERT

Of course, nothing’s perfect. A pub without pokies, as can be found in the neighbouring suburbs of Petersham and Marrickville, would be nice. And the supermarket, while well used and generally well stocked, is – to be brutally honest – grungy and daggy, perhaps aiming to fit in with the retro hipsters infiltrating the area. Parking is also becoming increasingly tight around the retail strip, especially on Saturdays – the two open-air 1950s carparks tucked in behind the shops can’t cope with the influx of SUVs.

Big Mama and Sexy Soul All Star Band at Butchers Brew Bar.STEVEN SIEWERT

Big Mama and Sexy Soul All Star Band at Butchers Brew Bar.STEVEN SIEWERT

Another downside is that the greenness of the suburb attracts some unwelcome wild life and I’m not referring to the Saturday-night kind. My block is home to a colony of possums. They may look cute with their come-hither eyes, but in truth they are garden vandals, having killed two magnolia trees in my garden, a neighbour’s mango tree, another neighbour’s maple tree and other plants too numerous to mention. Nurseries do great business from me, buying nets and little huts to protect my plants as well as frequent replacements.

I have lived in the suburb for 30 years. The things that attracted me to the area back then continue to draw in new residents today. Proximity to the city, parks, good public transport links and Victorian and Federation housing have always been major drawcards. Being in my 20s and coming from the lower north shore, relatively affordable real estate was also a big motivating factor. Some north shore friends and relatives struggled with the idea of me setting up house on the “wrong side of the bridge”.

“Why Dulwich Hill?” one asked my mother with enforced brightness. Real estate prices – Sydney’s well-known obsession – have rocketed in my time here. An acquaintance informed me in awe that a house a few doors from me had recently sold for well over $5 million. Beyond my wildest dreams in the 1990s.

An apartment block near the light rail.STEVEN SIEWERT

A house on Denison Road. STEVEN SIEWERT

Cat on a window ledge in Weston Street.STEVEN SIEWERT

A house on Grove Street. STEVEN SIEWERT

Despite the well-meaning misgivings of my circle, Dulwich Hill has a close and caring community. With time, the ageing population of the ’90s, including many Greek, Lebanese and Vietnamese people, has evolved into a younger to middle-aged one, many of whom have sympathetically highlighted the architectural features of the old homes. In our first house we were blessed with a wonderful neighbour, a middle-aged man with a collection of cats all named after different animals; one was called Toad and another, Frog. He would climb over the fence and collect the washing if we were out when it started to rain, and we would arrive home to find our basket of washing on the front porch.

The neighbours at our next house were Con and Poppy. Every Sunday, the smell of barbecued souvlaki wafted into our garden as their family got together, with foil-wrapped offerings passed to us over the fence. Con would enjoy the afternoon sun on his front veranda, listening to Greek music and news that played on community radio.

Recently, I visited Dulwich Hill’s leafy namesake, Dulwich Village in south London. This may be contentious, but I find that the Sydney counterpart is often a poor relation to its English one. Dulwich Village boasts large houses in big gardens, an exclusive private school and a lovely Sir John Soanes-designed art gallery and cafe among independent eateries and shops. While Dulwich Hill is unlikely to ever fully resemble its namesake, it has many charms of its own; it’s well worth coming over the Harbour Bridge.