First-time U.S. passport applicants will soon be able to apply online
First-time U.S. passport applicants will soon be able to apply online Mark Frauenfelder 11:03 am Fri Oct 2, 2026 BlueRockThrush, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons New U.S. passports are coming, and first-time applicants can apply online. Digital selfies will also be allowed, making the process easier than ever. Passports are currently mailed in paper envelopes.
- ▪First-time U.S. passport applicants will soon be able to apply online Mark Frauenfelder 11:03 am Fri Oct 2, 2026 BlueRockThrush, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons New U.S. passports are coming, and first-time applicants can apply online.
- ▪Digital selfies will also be allowed, making the process easier than ever.
- ▪Passports are currently mailed in paper envelopes.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/10/02/fountain-pen-new-us-passports-online.html |
| Publication time | Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:03:32 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-02T18:51:15.777Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-02T18:51:15.777Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | Oh7XzpGNjQ-i · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
First-time U.S. passport applicants will soon be able to apply online Mark Frauenfelder 11:03 am Fri Oct 2, 2026 BlueRockThrush, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons New U.S. passports are coming, and first-time applicants can apply online. Digital selfies will also be allowed, making the process easier than ever. Passports are currently mailed in paper envelopes. New ones will come in a white box with the golden seal.From The Washington Post: "That is where the maze starts," Rubio said at an event launching the government chatbot America.gov. "You have to know which form to print, you have to schedule an appointment, then you have to go wait in line." Rubio also showed images of an eagle on the right-hand side of pages that bear images from American history.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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