Paint.NET creator Rick Brewster says PCMag told him he would need to pay a licensing fee to quote one sentence from its coverage of the magazine’s 2026 Readers’ Choice awards and link to it from his own website. The awards included Paint.NET. Brewster initially described the price as $12,000, then corrected that figure: the fee was $10,000 for digital use or $15,000 for use across all media. He objected to being charged for a brief quotation and link, especially in connection with coverage recognizing his software.
Brewster argued that the quotation would be fair use, but said he deleted his public complaint because he did not want to risk spending time and money on a legal dispute, even one he believed he would win. He also said he was unsure whether the same licensing demand applied to social media and did not intend to find out. His broader criticism was that a publication should not demand a large payment for a short reference that could bring it attention and traffic. One commenter compared the situation to businesses being solicited for websites they never requested, characterizing the demand as an especially aggressive way to monetize coverage.
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Wearable devices from Meta, Google, Apple, Amazon, and others increasingly record and summarize people’s surroundings, conversations, and daily activities. The EFF argues these products make privacy a shared concern, because one person’s recording choices can affect everyone nearby. (eff.org)
A rogue Wikipedia editor, Jagged_85, made more than 87,000 edits that falsely credited Islamic Golden Age figures with inventions and discoveries. Those claims spread across the internet and even entered scholarly writing through repeated citation. (cremieux.xyz)
GNU Emacs maintainer Eli Zaretskii said the project would accept technically sound code even if it was knowingly produced through slavery. The author argues that this stance ignores how code is made and confuses software freedom with ethical responsibility. (flyingpenguin.com)
A daughter joins her father, grandmother, and uncle on a chaotic autumn road trip along China’s Yalu River border with North Korea. The journey brings family tensions and memories into focus against the region’s striking landscape. (longreads.com)
An interactive site compares all 13 versions of The Secret of Monkey Island side by side across 12 matching scenes. It uses emulator captures with consistent scaling and includes CRT effects and version details. (monkeyisland.pages.dev)
The US government will end efforts to restrict apps and Facebook groups that report Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The groups and apps share information about ICE activity with their users. (reuters.com)
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