The Tories are setting up a fund for investment in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, just three years after they eliminated the old one.

I think that was when Cameron was prime minister. Under his government, the Tories had an ideological policy of gradually eliminating investment in reducing global heating, even as as they pushed fracking. Apparently, they considered maximizing fossil fuel a priority comparable to reducing the income of poor people.

Some WiFi hubs have back doors which can control not only the router but devices connected to it.

From the details in the article, I think the back door is in the router's administrative web server, so it would have nothing to do with the specific physical platform or where that was made.

The people who found the back door present arguments that it was made intentionally.

There are hubs that run free software. That gives the community a way to try to check for, and get rid of, malicious functionality like this.

Textbook companies in the US are using various dirty tricks to stop college students from buying used textbooks and saving money. This includes corrupting professors with bribes that carry big labels saying "This is not a bribe."

But it also includes other trickery, such as making textbooks change in trivial ways from year to year or from school to school. And, of course, making students subscribe to access to an unjust ebook, which typically has all the injustices of other commercial ebooks.

When people talk about "open educational resources," or "open" textbooks that are "free to download," we cannot tell right away whether they are free/libre or not. That's because the definition of that term accepts some nonfree licenses.

But I think these "open" textbooks are in fact free/libre. The law that funds their development requires a license like CC-BY, and they are developed by an organization called LibreTexts which seems to recommend only free software tools.

However, cannot verify this. I was unable to find anything on libretexts.org which spoke about the licensing of their textbooks. The front page talks about the practical benefits, the things naive people would appreciate, but says nothing about freedom.

Perhaps there is information present which I could not find. Some of the home page's navigation does not work without running some nonfree JS code. I will ask them.

Arguing that giant quasi-monopolies are systematically capable of crushing unions, at least under current US labor law.

The Supreme Court ruled that local laws for curbing the spread of Covid-19 cannot restrict religious organizations more strictly than other, secular organizations. Based on that, it ruled New York State's restrictions on religious meetings unconstitutional.

The general policy seems legitimate to me. Although I don't respect the idea of faith, I believe in respecting people's right to practice their religions. This general decision is not the disaster some are painting it as.

However, the right-wing Supreme Court justices strained the facts badly to reach the conclusion that New York State's restrictions restrict churches more than secular establishments. The secular establishments that would have large numbers of people attend in a long session are closed entirely; churches are allowed to open.

I think New York State could redraft the restrictions so that they explicitly apply the same criteria to various kinds of establishments and result, in practice, in rules equivalent to the present ones. Maybe then the court would have to accept it — or else reveal that it is trifling with its duty.