Tara Donnelly

It Looks Like a School Bathroom Smoke Detector. A Teen Hacker Showed It Could Be an Audio Bug A pair of hackers found that a vape detector often found in high school bathrooms contained microphones—and security weaknesses that could allow someone to turn it into a secret listening device.

A vape detector used in high school bathrooms and public housing units is packed with microphones; hackers found it easy to turn it into a real-time audio surveillance device due to security vulnerabilities. This is a @wired.com / @404media.co collaboration (fun!).

IL-09 ROAD TRIP 12 HOUR STREAM AUGUST 9, 2025 8 AM - 8 PM CT

We've got two days to go til our 12-hour stream through the entire Ninth District — from Crystal Lake to Chicago!

Join us on Twitch, YouTube, or Instagram from 8 AM to 8 PM this Saturday. It's going to be a lot of fun!! Come hang: www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH6P...

The right is trying to deploy its usual terror tactics against Texas Democrats and the state of Illinois. It won’t work.

With millions of people’s voting rights on the line, the stakes couldn’t be higher. This is the type of bravery and fight we need from Democrats:

Patient, sobbing: But Doctor, I AM Pagliacci!
ChatGPT: Apologies. I didn't realise when recommending Pagliacci's epic show to cure your depression that you were the genius himself. I'm impressed! With regards to your initial question, I can recommend seeing the Great Clown Pagliacci.

Happening now: protesters in Chicago are interrupting a hiring fair at the Congress Hotel, where U.S. Customs and Border protection is recruiting today.

Banner reads, "stop kidnapping our neighbors!"

It's quite the scene in here, and the DHS table has been blocked for several minutes already.

Ron Deibert is absolutely the voice that the infosec industry needs to be listening to right now. We are in a moment where fascism is consolidating power and most of the infosec industry is either playing along or is busy bragging about how much AI they've shoved into their products.

In Delhi and New York, Hindu Right Wing Lines Up Against Mamdani

Striking just how much pro-Hindutva political factions in the US are borrowing from pro-Israel factions: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/01/w...

Washington Post: “Is fascism bad? The answer may surprise you”

Teen Vogue: “Here are three fun tips you can use this summer to disable an armored personnel carrier”

I kinda thought so!!! Excellent taste!!!

OMGGGGG they have outfits!!!!! SOOOOO CUUUTEEEEE

Hello. The president's continued insistence that the BLS numbers are rigged, political, or otherwise manipulated is a lie. Please stop saying 'baseless claim.' Thank you.

Earlier this month I did an AMA facilitated by @stickydoodler.bsky.social with indie TTRPG designers who want to learn about how some libraries with TTRPG collections collect and process indie titles. This is a thread with notes and photos of the games in the collection at my academic library.

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A basic tenet of eugenics is that mental capacity or talent -sometimes called natural ability- is biologically inheritable and immutable. By extension, quality-or its supposed lack---is similarly assumed to be based in biological heredity, and high or low innate ability (sometimes called capacity) as measured by some predetermined metric is considered to be a marker of innate high or low quality. ... when discussing the types of education that should be made available to individuals and groups, he, like other eugenicists, assumed that ability- and hence quality- resides in the body rather than being a cultural construction reflecting a society's needs, values, desires, and fears. The terms "fit," "fitness," "unfit," and "unfitness" were elements in the eugenics lexicon... Eugenicists conceptualized three broad domains in which quality or fitness can be manifest: physical, mental, and moral. The fittest of the fit were of high quality in all three domains. Capacity was understood to be biologcally inheritable and immutable, but fitness, which was grounded in heredity, needed to be maintained. Capacity needed to be accessed and cultivated to maintain fitness. The use of "fit" and "unfit" was loose, however, sometimes referring to innate, constitutional characteristics and at other times to acquired characteristics. Thus, quality was to be maintained by maintaining fitness. The Boy Scout Oath, in which boys promise to keep themselves "physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight," came to mind as I considered eugenicists' tripartite conception of the fitness of the supposedly superior. I subsequently found evidence suggesting that the resemblance is not coincidental. In his book The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought, Marouf Arif Hasian Jr. reports that eugenicists strongly supported the Boy Scout movement. He quotes the British eugenicist Caleb Saleeby who maintained that scouting was a boon to eugenics.

This isn't about how the presidential fitness test is eugenics in action, and yet it is.

[from Destined to Fail by Eklund Koza)

Every AI evangelist makes it sound like I’m basically gonna be a witch in a decade because I can still tell time, make change, write cursive, read/write/speak multiple languages, read maps, hold focus for longer than two seconds, do math in my head, engage with culture

How a public library's summer game took over a Michigan city Summer in Ann Arbor, Mich., means thousands of people hunting for hidden codes around the city and reading books to earn points. It's part of a popular game organized by the public library.

"This summer, we have 16,000 active players and more than half of them are adults," says library director Eli Neiburger.
www.npr.org/2025/08/04/n...

Perhaps unpopular opinion — if you’ve been covering business and the economy for 25 years, you don’t have to cite “economists say” to state the truth — that firing the commissioner of the BLS is a bad thing.

Crockett: My former colleagues from the Texas House—decided to get the hell out of Texas… breaking quorum is where they’re at right now. And they didn’t just do it by themselves—they went to Illinois, where there is a governor that gives a damn. This fight is going to take all of us.

Dozens of people gathered in the parking entrance of the Broadview Detention Center Facility.

A woman holds a sign reading “IMMIGRANTS NOW / CITIZENS NEXT” but “NEXT” is crossed out and edited with red marker to say “Also Now!”

At least 70 people have already showed up to protest against ICE at the Broadview Detention Facility.

This is what showing up for your community looks like. Stand for your neighbors. Abolish ICE.

CAMPAIGN 4 IS COMIN' ATCHA! 🎲🔥

Join us in a new world for a whole new story led by Game Master Brennan Lee Mulligan on Thursday, October 2nd. We can't wait to share more with you in the coming weeks!

WATCH THE FULL UPDATE TODAY AT youtu.be/mEuwZbNde2s?...

on one hand i am not and never could be the youngest tenured prof at harvard law school and no one is going to make a movie about my work. on the other, a cop has never been like “sir i’m going to have to ask you to leave the pierogi stand”

If you're ruthless for the right, you get money put behind you. If you're ruthless for the left, you get money put against you.

America First Legal got >$50 million in funding. A left version of the same would get attacked by Dem orgs and donors, and everyone associated with it blacklisted forever.

They have school librarianed public broadcasting. The wealthier schools have parents who donate or replace professionals with volunteer book handler outers. The poor schools are sol. “We don’t have the money to give the entire public a public good!”

Counting things is, actually, political. It’s laden with choices about what to count, who gets to count and who gets counted, how to display numbers in ways that shape the possible frames for interpretation or which are more or less accessible, etc

“Both of them.”

A Democratic message that leaned in HARD into uplifting the idea of the commons and re-teaching people about importance of PUBLIC GOODS and the fact that they are GOOD and FOR EVERYONE would be an easy place to mobilize lots of people towards a project of building.

Too much "we're cooked" & not enough "we're not gonna take this shit"

It's funny to think that my preference for urban living in areas with dense, mixed-used, walkable neighborhoods, multi-family housing, small businesses, and diversity probably stems from Sesame Street. Like an early education in Jane Jacob's urbanist theories.