- A lightweight “JSTOR liberator” web app (http://severe-samurai-6114.heroku.com) was shared; it uses client-side JavaScript to let users upload pay-walled papers to a public Heroku bucket, prompting discussion about US extraterritorial copyright enforcement and the Patriot Act’s reach into cloud data hosted by US companies.  
- Participants cited two news items: an Italian student facing US extradition for linking to copyrighted material (ITNews, 19 Sep 2011) and Microsoft’s admission that Patriot Act provisions allow US agencies to access EU-based cloud data (ZDNet, 28 Jun 2011).  
- A short legal thread reviewed the US Federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA, 18 U.S.C. § 103) and a court ruling that any transmission that “weakens” or “diminishes” a system counts as “damage,” prompting the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that shipping buggy software should itself be a felony.  
- Global biotech manufacturing dominance was noted: a New York Times article (19 Sep 2011) was quoted stating that Chinese and Indian firms now produce more than 80 % of active pharmaceutical ingredients worldwide.  
- Eric Drexler’s upcoming book “Radical Abundance” (expected 2012) was announced via a Metamodern.com post, framed as the next major statement on molecular manufacturing and post-scarcity economics.  
- Day-to-day hacker culture was evident: one participant celebrated returning from a week on Windows to Ubuntu for Rails and Arduino work, praising multiple desktops, command-line tools, and Git.