The Death of the Mind

More than a decade ago, Congress tried to pass SOPA and PIPA—two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites based on allegations of piracy. The backlash was immediate and massive. Internet users, free speech advocates, and tech companies flooded lawmakers with protests, culminating in an “Internet Blackout” on January 18, 2012. Turns out, Americans don’t like government-run internet blacklists. The bills were ultimately shelved. 
Thirteen years later, as institutional memory fades and appetite for opposition wanes, members of Congress in both parties are ready to try this again. 
The Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act (FADPA), along with at least one other bill still in draft form, would revive this reckless strategy. These…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/07/site-blocking-legislation-is-back-its-still-a-terrible-idea/

NYU canceled a talk by
Joanne
Liu, former head of Doctors Without Borders, for reporting on
casualties in Gaza and on the persecutor’s cuts to US foreign
aid.

I have not seen the slides, but this seems like a very stretched
instance of the
“Israel exception“.

Can anyone find NYU’s allegedly “clear” guidelines?
Have they been posted anywhere?

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2025-jan-apr.html#3_April_2025_(University_speaker_canceled,_NYU)

In a move that threatens to constrain online communication, congressional Democrats are partnering with their Republican counterparts to repeal a niche but crucial internet law.

According to tech trade publication the Information (3/21/25), Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) has allied with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to reintroduce a bill that would repeal Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 dictates that when unlawful speech occurs online, the only party responsible is the speaker, not the hosting website or app or any party that shared the content in question.

The post With Section 230 Repeal, Democrats, Media Offer New Censorship Tools appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/with-section-230-repeal-democrats-and-media-offer-trump-new-censorship-tools/

I couldn’t leave it alone. This AI was going to write some Lisp code if I had to force it. This isn’t &lquo;vibing” anymore. We’re going to be pecise, exact, and complete in our instructions, and we’re going to check the results. Again, I’m taking on a Minesweeper clone as the problem. All the code was to be written in a single file using a single package. The AI simply didn’t understand the problem of forward references to symbols in other packages. Perhaps a game loop is beyond the ability of the AI. I wrote a basic game loop that initializes all the required libraries in correct order with unwind-protects to clean up in reverse order….

External feed Read More at the Source: http://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/04/vibe-coding-final-word.html

by Sharon Lerner and Lisa Song ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Although it was too late for him to benefit, Daniel Kinel felt relieved in December when the Environmental Protection Agency finally banned TCE. The compound, which has been used for dry cleaning, manufacturing and degreasing machines, can cause cancer, organ damage and a potentially fatal heart defect in babies, according to independent studies and the EPA. It has also been shown to greatly increase people’s chances of developing Parkinson’s disease. Kinel and three of his colleagues were diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. They all worked in a…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/tce-ban-cancer-parkinsons-trump-republicans

At the exact moment when Donald Trump and his MAGA allies are actively dismantling democratic institutions and working to silence critics, a group of Democratic Senators have decided to collaborate with Trump’s supporters to make it easier to censor speech online.
As reported in The Information (paywalled), several Democratic Senators are teaming up with some of Trump’s strongest Senate allies to repeal Section 230 — the law that both enables content moderation and protects websites from being sued into oblivion for hosting user speech.
They appear to be doing this out of a deep misunderstanding of how the law works combined with an astounding naiveté about how this process will be used by the MAGA faithful.

As early as…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/21/democratic-senators-team-up-with-maga-to-hand-trump-a-censorship-machine/

Clearview AI is in the midst of a court battle to recover money it paid to a data broker for a collection of arrest records from all 50 U.S. states. Documents shared by 404 Media show that the company has filed a petition for a court order in a bit to recover the $918,000 it paid to Investigative Consultant, Inc. (ICI) President Donald Berlin in July, 2019. In return, Clearview was expecting 690 million arrest records. The records Clearview attempted to purchase included social security numbers, phone numbers, dates of birth, email addresses, home addresses and 390 million photos to add to its facial recognition database, documents filed in court state. Clearview’s database is now…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202503/clearview-seeks-refund-for-failed-bulk-purchase-of-ssns-facial-photos

An Update Regarding the 2025 Open Source Initiative Elections I’ve explained in other posts that I ran for the 2025 Open Source Initative Board of Directors in the “Affiliate” district. Voting closed on MON 2025-03-17 at 10:00 US/Pacific. One hour later, candidates were surprised to receive an email from OSI demanding that all candidates sign a Board agreement before results were posted. This was surprising because during mandatory orientation, candidates were told the opposite: that a Board agreement need not be signed until the Board formally appointed you as a Director (as the elections are only advisory —: OSI’s Board need not follow election results in any event. It was also surprising because the deadline was…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2025/03/19/a-sign-board-agreement.html

On December 16, 2024, the Georgia Libertarian and Green Parties filed a new lawsuit against the Georgia campaign finance law that lets individuals give more contributions to Republican and Democratic candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor, than those individuals may give to other candidates for those two offices. Libertarian Party of Georgia v Carr, n.d., 1:24cv-05763. Here is the Complaint.

An earlier case filed by the Libertarian Party was dismissed on standing grounds. The new case shores up defenses against that happening again. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Mark H. Cohen, who also handled the last case.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/03/04/georgia-libertarian-and-green-parties-file-new-lawsuit-against-discriminatory-campaign-finance-law/