Then, as usually happens, I needed a picture, so I dragged one straight from my desktop into OpenStation. No downloading, no extra tabs needed, no extra spaces in the editor, no more “in which tab was the image!?”… I just dragged it from my desktop…
Done!
And then I thought the post was already descriptive enough to tell how much we enjoy creating content in OpenStation… But I missed the preview. I wanted to see what the post would look like and edit it in real time. And it happened, I just had to click on the eye icon in the title bar of this editor.
This is probably my favourite kind of productivity, the boring stuff becoming pleasantly simple…
And yes, this whole post was written while recording the video
But I thought that a quick sanity review from one of my bots would make the post nicer for SEO. So I just saved the draft, and gave it to my agent
And the best part, is that EVERYTHING that my Agent did, is traceable.
Dividing voters into red and blue states fails to capture the reality of politics in America. mphillips007/Getty Images Plus
“Better dead than red.”
Cold War conservatives used to say that, and they meant it: Better to suffer nuclear annihilation, they believed, than endure a “red” victory. And by “red” they meant anyone on the left of the political spectrum – from the Soviet communists to their “fellow travelers” in the U.S.
It’s strange, then, that America’s conservative party, the Republican Party, is now the red one. There’s no ideology behind the switch, no founding decision by either party to claim a color as its own. The whole red-state/blue-state vocabulary is much newer than most people assume. It dates almost exactly from the 2000 election.
And in many cases, it fails to capture the reality of politics in America.
Note the red-blue shading in the CBS News broadcast of the vice presidential debate between U.S. Senator and GOP candidate JD Vance and Minnesota Governor and Democratic candidate Tim Walz on Oct. 1, 2024. Nathan Morris/NurPhoto via Getty Images
When nobody could agree on a color scheme
Television networks needed to distinguish two candidates on a map, and for decades they just picked whatever looked good that year.
In 1976, NBC colored GOP presidential candidate Gerald Ford’s states blue and Democrat Jimmy Carter’s states red. Four years later, that same scheme meant Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan’s landslide victory painted the map almost entirely blue, which is a strange thing to picture now, given how thoroughly Reagan became the patron saint of the red party.
That wasn’t just a one-network quirk, either. The Washington Post was still assigning red to Democrats and blue to Republicans in graphics used during the 2000 campaign.
If you go looking for the decision that gave American politics its colors, you won’t find one. You’ll find almost a quarter-century in which nobody had settled on today’s version.
Bush v. Gore
That inconsistency ended in 2000 with the fight over Florida’s presidential votes, though nobody at any TV network decided it should.
The networks covering the presidential contest between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat – and sitting Vice President – Al Gore happened, that year, to converge on red for Bush and blue for Gore. NBC’s Tim Russert is often credited with popularizing the phrase “red states” during the campaign, though the exact origin is disputed.
Under normal circumstances, none of this would have mattered much. Four years later, some other combination might have taken hold, the way it always had before.
But 2000 wasn’t normal.
The election stayed unresolved for five weeks while Florida’s votes were counted, contested in court and counted again. Night after night, on every channel, Americans watched the same map, colored the same way.
By the time the U.S. Supreme Court ended it and Bush was certified the winner by 537 votes, the color scheme – red for Republican Bush and blue for Democrat Gore – had become familiar enough to stop looking like a choice at all. Nobody argued anyone into it; the map just stayed in front of the country long enough to seem inevitable.
The labels started doing more work
Once red and blue attached themselves to the parties, they didn’t stay confined to maps.
By the 2002 midterms, journalists were already writing about “two Americas: red and blue,” as though the country had sorted itself into two coherent cultures overnight.
By the 2004 campaign, the vocabulary was everywhere, carrying connotations that nobody had assigned it on purpose. Red became associated with rural America, religiosity, the South and the interior West; blue with cities, more secular electorates, the coasts and college towns.
There’s truth buried in that shorthand: American political geography really has sorted itself along those lines – more than it used to, at least.
But the language hardened fast, turning a graphics convention into shorthand for identities it was never built to describe. Within a couple of election cycles, pundits were talking about red America and blue America as though they were two different countries with two different sets of values, rather than two loose clusters of states that happen to vote differently.
The 2000 contested presidential election cemented the red-blue America convention.
What the map doesn’t show
I’m a political scientist, and here’s the problem I see with this crude way of presenting voter preferences. A state decided by 2 percentage points gets colored exactly the same solid shade as a state decided by 30. Pennsylvania in a close year and Wyoming in a landslide show up looking identical, even though one of them is split down the middle.
The map doesn’t lie about who won – it just can’t show you how close it was. The result, after 20-some years of maps built that way, is a picture of the country that looks more neatly sorted than the electorate actually is.
The red-blue convention didn’t invent regional political differences. Those are real, and they’ve been growing for decades.
What the convention does is magnify them. A standard election map colors each state by who carried it, not by the margin – a state won by 4 points gets the same solid shade as one won by 26. That’s not a limit of the medium; color could run on a gradient just as easily. It’s a choice, and one that tracks the actual mechanics of the election: The Electoral College is winner-take-all, so a map showing only the winner in each state is reproducing the same either/or logic that decides who gets the electoral votes.
A third color exists for exactly this problem. Princeton’s Robert Vanderbei built the first “Purple America” map after the 2000 election, shading each county somewhere between true blue and true red according to its vote split. Landslide counties are rare, so most of the map came out some shade of purple. The technique got wider attention after 2004 – Vanderbei’s map was Newsweek’s “click of the day” on its website, though it never ran in the magazine itself – and others built their own versions afterward.
But purple never became the convention. It turns up in academic work and the occasional data-journalism piece built to correct a flatter map – but rarely on the graphic behind a network anchor, and almost never in a candidate’s own description of the country.
By the time anyone offered the correction, red and blue were no longer just colors on a map. They were the language.
A reputation never quite earned
America’s conservative party ending up red is a decent trivia fact, the kind of thing that makes for good conversation at dinner. The real oddity runs deeper than that irony, though.
An arbitrary graphics convention, repeated for five weeks during a contested recount, hardened into a vocabulary that Americans now use to describe political geography, culture and identity, as if the country had always divided itself this cleanly into two camps.
It never did.
Andrew Latham does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
What really happened at the end of the Revolutionary War? – Veda, age 11, Crystal Lake, Illinois
In the autumn of 1781, a tired Continental Army of American and French soldiers pushed the British army through the Carolinas to the coast of Virginia. For three weeks, the Continental Army trapped the British against the sea while the French navy fought the British navy.
Surrounded, the British surrendered on Oct. 19, 1781, at the Battle of Yorktown, the last major military fight of the American Revolution. America had won the war.
No one had expected that a handful of colonies could defeat the mighty British Empire. Once news of the American victory reached London, peace talks began in 1782, with the Treaty of Paris finally signed in 1783.
In the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution, the economy was in shambles, 25,000 Americans had died, and chaos erupted as over 60,000 Loyalists who had stayed devoted to Great Britain and George III, including more than 15,000 formerly enslaved people who had joined the British army, left the United States.
The question then became: “What’s next?” Building a nation was very different from fighting a war. And it didn’t happen overnight.
Setting up a new country
During the Revolutionary War’s six years of fighting, individual states wrote their own constitutions, which set up how their governments would work. Early on, in 1777, the newly named United States embraced the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. These laid out the first system that organized all the states under one umbrella in order to create a unified front of Americans during the Revolution. They were not a constitution because they didn’t create a formal government.
The Articles of Confederation set up a framework that was OK during wartime but too weak for building a new nation. They didn’t call for a president to lead, and they didn’t set up a court system to hear cases when laws were broken. They provided no way to establish foreign policy and didn’t say how states should trade with other countries or how to impose taxes on things Americans bought from abroad.
The new country fell into economic crisis, highlighting the weaknesses of the government. Before the American Revolution, white American colonists enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the Western world. But war debts, inflation and a temporary stop to profitable trade with the enormous British Empire left Americans scrambling to get by in the 1780s.
Attendees at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 drew up the documents that remain the foundation of the U.S. government today. GraphicaArtis via Getty Images
So, representatives from each state gathered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 to discuss how to improve the national government. They agreed on a government that would rely on checks and balances, with power spread out among different branches.
They called for a legislative branch with two houses – the House of Representatives and the Senate – to make laws. There would also be an executive branch with an elected president and vice president. And there would be a judicial branch with a Supreme Court of nine justices committed to upholding the newly written Constitution.
They laid everything out in the United States Constitution, which went into effect in 1789. Right away, the House of Representatives began drafting amendments outlining individual freedoms and protected rights for citizens, a hearkening back to the Declaration of Independence that had announced the colonies were breaking free of Great Britain back in 1776.
The Bill of Rights was approved in 1791, guaranteeing American citizens free speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, individual privacy and property, and the right to a public, speedy trial with a jury of peers, among other protections.
These rights are still the law of the land today.
Limitations of liberty
The Constitution called for a president to be elected, but who voted? You could vote in 1789 only if you were male, white, a landowner, over the age of 21, and not a Quaker, Jew or Catholic. These requirements excluded the majority of people in the new United States. The Naturalization Act of 1790 explicitly limited national citizenship to only white people. What about everyone else?
Using the language and promises of the Declaration of Independence, various groups advocated for rights after the American Revolution.
African Americans petitioned for freedom in the northern states, with varying success. States geographically above Maryland began the process of immediately or gradually abolishing slavery, beginning with Vermont in 1777 and culminating with New York, the longest holdout, in 1799.
It was not until the 13th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1865 that slavery ended, quickly followed by the 14th Amendment in 1868 that gave citizenship to “all people born or naturalized” in the United States. The 15th Amendment in 1870 extended the vote to all American men, regardless of race, but women were still left out.
Women had served in the American Revolution in a variety of ways: nursing, spying, organizing boycotts, following the camps to provide domestic support, as well as staying behind to maintain farms, businesses and homes. Although white women were considered citizens and received expanded educational opportunities after the Revolution, women of color were excluded. Women were not guaranteed the right to vote until 1920 with the 19th Amendment.
Native Americans faced enormous obstacles during and after the American Revolution. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 that formally ended the war extended the boundary of the United States to the Mississippi River and to Canada. That expansion meant Native Americans in those areas quickly lost lands and experienced extreme violence as American settlers flooded into the newly opened areas.
Delegations of Native Americans petitioned the federal government in Washington, D.C. Bettmann via Getty Images
Relying on the hopes outlined in the Declaration of Independence, Americans fought and continue to fight for freedom and representation. Promises made in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights reflect an ever-evolving America, always with the hope of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
Sandra Slater does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This week Robert Jacobi shared about the evolving landscape of open source and tech. Highlights include AI’s growing role in security, WordPress and Apache fortifying their processes, LibreOffice redefining productivity with privacy, LoopConf rethinking event funding, and Switzerland’s bold move toward digital sovereignty. Explore how accountability, control, and sustainability are shaping the future of open technology.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and President Donald Trump attend a dignified transfer on July 22, 2026, for casualties of the Iran war.Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images News via Getty Images
I’ve spent years studying the U.S. military and have written a book on diversity and military recruiting. In my assessment, Hegseth is building a military that fits a narrow ideological view at the cost of its service members’ safety and well-being.
Hegseth has attributed the success to “the belief (recruits) have in civilian leadership and military leadership.” According to a Pentagon spokesperson, “Americans everywhere are prouder than ever to serve.”
What Hegseth and others fail to acknowledge, however, is that recruitment is driven not by ideology but by market factors and need.
Since the end of the draft in 1973, according to my research, the success of military recruiting has largely hinged on young people’s perceptions of their chances for upward mobility. Many young people join the military because they are in need of the opportunities military service provides. This past year’s recruitment numbers are likely more a result of young Americans seeking steady pay, job training and educational benefits than agreement with Hegseth’s vision of the military.
Market research studies conducted in the past year have found that making money, paying for education, travel, work experience and medical benefits are the top motivators guiding young people toward military service. Recruits are guided by what military sociologist Charles C. Moskos called occupational appeals that frame enlisting as a smart economic decision rather than by patriotism or nationalism. These kinds of appeals have historically been successful in attracting the diverse recruits – women and people of color – who have been critical to the military’s ability to meet its personnel needs.
Recruiting data shows that Hegseth and other members of the Trump administration have little control over the composition of the enlisted ranks. However, Hegseth’s anti-woke campaign is changing what the military is like for those who serve.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, center, and U.S. military leaders listen to President Donald Trump speak at Marine Corps Base Quantico in September 2025. AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Recent firings and blocked promotions have further shaped a military leadership that has historically been almost exclusively white and male. All five service chiefs and 9 in 10 combatant commanders are white men. This year the lowest percentage of women in 25 years have been nominated to the rank of general and admiral.
This targeting of women and people of color has solidified the “brass ceiling” – a term used to describe the limited opportunities for promotion for women and Black service members – and is creating a military leadership that doesn’t reflect the service members they command or the nation they represent. The overwhelmingly white and male leadership commands an enlisted force in which 34% identify with a racial minority group and 17% are women.
By purging military leadership of women, Black service members and those who have supported opportunities for service members other than white men, Hegseth is creating a culture ripe for racial, sexual and gender discrimination and harassment.
Hegseth has also sought to restore tributes to Confederate soldiers and has attacked military diversity. These actions further erase and invalidate the contributions of women, Black service members and other service members of color.
Lessons from Vietnam
The military’s need for more equitable representation was born of the demands and costs of combat.
During the Vietnam War, disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino service members served in combat and were killed while under the command of a largely white officer corps.
The Defense Race Relations Institute – now known as the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute – was formed in 1971 to provide race relations education to every member of the armed forces to quell rampant racial unrest, including racial violence and fragging incidents. Fragging incidents – the killing of a fellow service member, often using fragmentation grenades – were rampant in Vietnam.
These efforts were based on the military adopting the idea that an efficient and lethal military should look like the nation it serves and that its leaders should look like the soldiers they command.
Hegseth’s purging of the officer ranks means the Americans who serve in the military won’t see themselves reflected in leadership or see a path to the top ranks. But they will continue to bear the costs of war: About half of the 18 service members killed in the Iran war between February and August were women and people of color.
Jeremiah Favara does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Because this is a security release, it is recommended that you update your sites immediately.
You can download WordPress 7.1.1 from WordPress.org, or visit your WordPress Dashboard, click “Updates”, and then click “Update Now”. If you have sites that support automatic background updates, the update process will begin automatically.
WordPress 7.1.1 is a short-cycle release. The next major release will be version 7.2 and is currently planned for December.
The security team would like to thank the following people for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities, and allowing them to be fixed in this release:
Stored cross-site scripting in wpautop() allows an unauthenticated visitor to inject script (subject to comment approval), reported by Rafie Muhammad (Awesome Motive, Inc.).
HTML API: set_modifiable_text() allows breaking out of a comment via abrupt-closing sequences, reported by Jeremy Felt of the WordPress Security Team.
Stored XSS in some themes that support custom headers, reported by Jeremy Felt of the WordPress Security Team.
Specially crafted URLs can automatically install and preview an inactive theme from WordPress.org, reported by Paulos Yibelo and pwn.ai.
Site Administrator can network-activate an installed Network-only plugin, reported by Jesse McNeil.
Authenticated Path Traversal in WP REST Templates Controller, reported by Anthropic.
XML-RPC can be used to publish customize_changeset posts that bypass checks for edit_css, reported by Ben Bidner of the WordPress Security Team.
Contributor+ Arbitrary Post Overwrite, reported by Anthropic.
Missing read_post check in attachment_submitbox_metadata() leaks a private parent-post title, reported by HDWSec.
Missing Authorization leads to Draft/Pending Post Slug Disclosure by Contributor+, reported by Jakub Herman.
Comments, including notes, can be reparented by any authenticated user, reported by Justin Hart, Viridis Security.
WordPress 7.1.1 would not have been possible without the contributions of the following people. Their asynchronous coordination to deliver maintenance and security fixes into a stable release is a testament to the power and capability of the WordPress community.
As a courtesy, the security fixes are being backported, where necessary, to all branches eligible to receive security fixes (currently through 4.7). As a reminder, only the most recent version of WordPress is actively supported. The backports are in progress and will ship as they become ready.
How to contribute
To get involved in WordPress core development, head over to Trac, pick a ticket, and join the conversation in the #core channel. Need help? Check out the Core Contributor Handbook.
The camera on a robot vacuum cleaner captured this cat. What else did it capture around the house? voorts/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
A husband in Taiwan suspected his wife of having an affair. In September 2023, he found a used toothbrush at their holiday home, and garage video showed an unfamiliar man driving his wife there. Three months later, he opened their robot vacuum’s app to speak with her and saw an intimate encounter through its live camera.
He recorded the feed and used it to win about US$16,000 from his wife and her lover for infringing on his marital rights. Then the Taoyuan District Court sentenced him to five months in jail and fined him roughly $4,700 for recording private activity without consent.
Both rulings are defensible. Together, they expose a troubling gap: Devices in homes now generate evidence continuously and often invisibly, while the governing law remains a patchwork. As faculty members in a school of interdisciplinary forensics, we see such cases where forensic practice meets law that has not kept pace.
In 2022, MIT Technology Review revealed images from development versions of iRobot’s Roomba J7, including a woman on a toilet. Test-household images had gone to a data-labeling contractor, where workers posted them in private social media groups. No hacking was required; the leak arose from the ordinary pipeline used to train object-recognition software.
Digital witnesses are already testifying
Courts have confronted household data for years. Arkansas prosecutors charged James Bates with murder after a friend died in his hot tub, then sought recordings from his Amazon Echo and cited smart-meter data suggesting overnight water use. Amazon resisted until Bates consented. However, prosecutors could not eliminate other reasonable explanations, and they eventually dropped the charge.
In Connecticut, Richard Dabate claimed that an intruder murdered his wife, Connie. Her Fitbit data contradicted his timeline and helped establish when she stopped moving. A jury convicted him, and in 2025, the Connecticut Supreme Court upheld the conviction and found the Fitbit evidence scientifically reliable.
In Ohio, Ross Compton’s pacemaker data was used to challenge his account of a house fire, raising a novel Fourth Amendment question: How much privacy protection should apply to intimate medical data generated by an implanted device? The court ultimately upheld the search warrant, finding probable cause and concluded that obtaining the data remotely was not an unreasonable search. Compton died before his arson trial date.
In short, household data can convict, exonerate or mislead. That makes digital forensics indispensable and demands careful guardrails.
First is consent and notice. The wife in Taiwan argued that small indicator lights gave no meaningful warning, a concern that extends to guests, children, domestic workers and estranged spouses. Unlike a mounted security camera, a roaming appliance may record people who never saw its privacy policy.
Second, legality and admissibility do not always align. The constitutional exclusionary rule restrains government, not private parties, so the Fourth Amendment generally does not bar evidence wrongfully obtained by a private actor. The Supreme Court established that principle in Burdeau v. McDowellin 1921.
How do the courts admit evidence potentially generated and extracted by private individuals? In the Taiwan case, what exactly was recorded? Where was it stored? Was it altered? These questions go beyond whether the video appears authentic; they determine what a court can reliably infer from a digital artifact whose chain of custody may begin with a participant in the dispute.
Congress created a different rule for aural communications. Under the federal Wiretap Act of 1968, illegally intercepted wire or oral communications may be excluded, and the interceptor may face criminal and civil liability. When the act applies to recorded sound, illegality and inadmissibility can travel together.
Courts also disagreed for decades about one spouse recording another at home. The 5th Circuit created an interspousal exception in Simpson v. Simpson in 1974, but most circuits rejected it, including the 10th in Heggy v. Heggy in 1988. The 11th Circuit overruled its inherited exception in 2003, leaving the Simpson ruling a conspicuous outlier.
A robot vacuum adds another twist: The Wiretap Act covers intercepted sound, not silent video. Camera-only recording therefore falls outside that federal regime. Liability and admissibility then depend on state laws that differ sharply in scope, consent requirements and penalties.
Third is reliability. Consumer devices were designed to clean floors, not withstand cross-examination; timestamps, firmware changes and retention policies can complicate interpretation. A remote-access log may identify an account without proving who used it.
Lawyers in the Dabate case challenged the Fitbit evidence on reliability grounds, although the court upheld its admission after expert review. Each new device category raises similar questions. Examiners need validated methods to acquire, authenticate and interpret data, as the Scientific Working Group on Digital Evidencerecommends for novel devices.
Charting a path forward
Consumers would have a better idea of their exposure if manufacturers disclosed at the point of sale what a device records, where the data goes and how long it persists. Federal trade regulators already urge clear prepurchase disclosures and data minimization for connected products. Those principles could be applied to remote viewing, not remain buried in terms of service agreements.
It would also help if manufacturers provided exportable logs showing when remote access occurred, which account connected and whether the camera or microphone was active. Federal vehicle event-data rules offer a model by standardizing records and retrieval. Existing internet-connected device guidance supports trustworthy time references, alteration protections, access controls and defined retention.
Legislatures could address intimate surveillance directly to prevent the current patchwork of laws from punishing betrayed spouses, enabling abusers and guiding neither clearly. Funding agencies and standards bodies could prioritize consumer-device forensics so that courts admit evidence because it is validated, not merely because it looks precise.
The vacuum in Taiwan did, in support of its primary function, exactly what it was designed to do: watch a room and report to the person holding the phone. The family and courts then improvised around evidentiary power that nobody had planned for. Congress and the states will need to decide what home robots may record, who may use the recordings and what they prove before words and actions in more homes end up as evidence in court.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
