The Kansas Senate Committee on Federal and State Affairs has introduced SB 6, which would ban ranked choice voting in the state. No jurisdiction in Kansas currently uses ranked choice voting. Here is the text. … Continue reading →
External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/01/28/kansas-bill-to-ban-ranked-choice-voting/
This year’s edition of the Free and Open
Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) begins on
February 1 in Brussels. The event is widely regarded as one of
the most important open-source conferences. One of the reasons that
FOSDEM is held in high esteem by the community is its non-commercial
nature. It does accept sponsors, but
sponsorships come with few perks and no “pay-for-play” speaking
slots. Thus, the scheduling of a keynote by Jack
Dorsey—primarily known for his role in co-founding Twitter, and
currently CEO and chairman of FOSDEM sponsor Block, Inc.—raised eyebrows and led to plans for a protest. The
keynote has since been removed from the schedule, but there are still
a number of lingering questions.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/1006351/
The expansion of technological tools in immigration enforcement represents a dramatic shift in how the United States government approaches border security and the management of undocumented populations. Agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have amassed an arsenal of cutting-edge technologies that include real-time tracking devices, data analytics systems, and biometric tools. These advancements have not only reshaped the operational landscape of immigration enforcement, but they have also raised significant concerns about privacy, civil liberties, and the ethical implications of mass surveillance. This arsenal is unprecedented in scope. A detailed review by the New York Times of nearly 15,000 federal contracts revealed that since 2020, the federal government…
For three decades, hundreds of thousands of hikers, bikers, dog walkers, and other outdoor enthusiasts have enjoyed the hilly, densely wooded, nine-mile network of trails at Lake Crabtree County Park that sits on 330 acres between Interstate 40 and Lake Crabtree, in Morrisville. Local governments, including Wake County, formed partnerships and poured millions of dollars over the years into building the artificial lake and the park, as well as its trails, picnic shelters, roads, trailhead facility, and municipal greenways that link to it. Local recreational leagues hold races and mountain biking and trail running events. Youth sports and college groups use the trails to train. The planned-for Triangle Bikeway will run right alongside the park.“It’s decades of public…
by Doug Bock Clark ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. A Republican judge has spent more than two months trying to overturn his narrow defeat for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat by arguing that around 60,000 ballots should be tossed out. But many residents have only recently learned that their votes are in danger of not being counted and say they have done nothing wrong. ProPublica has heard from dozens of voters who expressed astonishment and anger at state appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin’s ongoing attempts to cancel…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/north-carolina-voters-jefferson-griffin-supreme-court-challenge
On January 16, New York State Senator James Skoufis gave up on trying to be elected Chair of the Democratic National Committee. See this story. He had said on December 27, 2024, that he wanted to dismantle the Green Party. … Continue reading →
CAMBRIDGE, MA—Revealing a precipitous decline in the nation’s access to a once-plentiful resource, an alarming study published Tuesday by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that only one in four Americans can get a motherfuckin’ “hell yeah.” “It’s no secret that peer enthusiasm is harder to come by than it was in previous decades, but even then, we were shocked to find a full 75% of Americans could only get a half-hearted ‘nice’ for situations that would have had people raising the motherfuckin’ roof just a decade ago,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jessica Landers, adding that weak-ass responses like “okay” and “whatever” had exploded in frequency while “hell yeah” equivalents such as…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theonion.com/alarming-study-finds-only-1-in-4-americans-can-get-a-motherfuckin-hell-yeah/
Lights, camera, action! It’s time to roll out the red carpet and celebrate Public Domain Day, Oscar-style! On Wednesday, we’re honoring all the legendary works that have entered the public domain in 2025. And what better way to do it than with a glamorous, Hollywood-inspired twist? Public Domain Day Celebration at the Internet Archive 6pm – 10pm Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco $15 – REGISTER NOW. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. This year, we’re honoring 1929 — the year of the very first Academy Awards, held at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, CA. So put on your finest attire and get ready for an Oscar Award winning evening. Sip on a classic French 75 or an Old-Fashioned as we savor the final moments of the Roaring…
Our bodies rely on their lymphatic system to drain excessive fluids and remove waste from tissues, feeding those back into the blood stream. It’s a complex yet efficient cleaning mechanism that works in every organ except the brain. “When cells are active, they produce waste metabolites, and this also happens in the brain. Since there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain, the question was what was it that cleaned the brain,” Natalie Hauglund, a neuroscientist at Oxford University who led a recent study on the brain-clearing mechanism, told Ars.
Earlier studies done mostly on mice discovered that the brain had a system that flushed its tissues with cerebrospinal fluid, which carried away waste products in a…
Version
3.2.0 of the Dillo
web browser has been released about a month after its 25th
anniversary. Notable new features in 3.2.0 include SVG support for
math formulas, optional support for WebP images, and more.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/1005640/
That Biden felt it necessary to pre-emptively pardon his family members and political allies belies Democrat claims that “democracy” has been affirmed by the peaceful transfer of power to Trump.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/21/fite-j21.html
Police have shown, time and time again, that they cannot be trusted with face recognition technology (FRT). It is too dangerous, invasive, and in the hands of law enforcement, a perpetual liability. EFF has long argued that face recognition, whether it is fully accurate or not, is too dangerous for police use, and such use ought to be banned.
Now, The Washington Post has proved one more reason for this ban: police claim to use FRT just as an investigatory lead, but in practice officers routinely ignore protocol and immediately arrest the most likely match spit out by the computer without first doing their own investigation.
Cities across the United States have decided to join the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/police-use-face-recognition-continues-wrack-real-world-harms
When the U.S. Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of a Texas law requiring porn websites to verify visitors’ ages on Wednesday, the justices will likely ignore some crucial context about such laws, which have been passed by more than a dozen states since 2022: In the words of one of their chief proponents, these age-verification laws are a “back door” to a full ban on explicit material, “starting with the kids.” Even taking legislators’ stated aim of protecting minors from “harmful” material at face value, there is little dispute most of these laws are unconstitutional, as free speech advocates have argued successfully to lower courts around the country. “This case is not close,” wrote a federal…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2025/01/15/supreme-court-porn-age-verification/
Age verification laws saw an unfathomable renaissance in 2024. It’s quite frightening to see a political class of predominately far-right Christian nationalists implement the anti-porn vision of Project 2025 without President-elect Donald Trump yet entering the White House.
These laws coming out of state legislatures are scripted like how Russell Vought, a controversial architect of Project 2025 and one of Trump’s closest Christian nationalist allies, described in a viral undercover video revealing how age verification laws serve as a “back door” ban on porn.
As of this writing, nearly 139 million U.S. residents live in states with age verification laws on the books that specifically target adult entertainment platforms like Pornhub.com or xHamster.com.
That is slightly over 41 percent of the…
Colorado’s ROC has announced a new public security deployment in Marion County, West Virginia, marking the launch of its Smart Cities offering to support law enforcement and first responders. A release says the firm is leveraging its Vision AI product, smart sensors and other edge devices to enable real-time security monitoring that will “enhance public safety, provide critical situational awareness and actionable intelligence, and improve emergency response times” in Marion County. ROC’s multimodal vehicle recognition, facial recognition, gun detection and other real-time data analysis capabilities will be integrated into existing security infrastructure, including license plate readers and bodycams. Applications include road safety enforcement, accident detection, parking and toll road monitoring, as well as crime prevention…
A central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) and this blog is that the copyright industry is never satisfied. Now matter how long the term of copyright, publishers and recording companies want more. No matter how harsh the punishments for infringement, the copyright intermediaries want them to be even more severe.
Another manifestation of this insatiability is seen in the ever-widening use of Internet site blocking. What began as a highly-targeted one-off in the UK, when a court ordered the Newzbin2 site to be blocked, has become a favored method of the copyright industry for cutting off access to thousands of sites around the world, including many blocked by mistake. Even more worryingly, the…
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Hovertext:
And the brain can be made into a fancy candlewax!Today’s News:
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sporting
I love that all of the billboards around town for “AI” companies have converged on an identical design aesthetic: sparse san-serif text on a solid-colored background, usually black, sometimes white, maybe a solid pastel if they’re feeling saucy.
It says, “We didn’t waste money by hiring a graphic designer, our CFO just knocked this out in Notepad! Good enough!”
This is morally consistent, as their business model is “Never pay an artist, or anyone else who does creative work.”
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/12/exterminate-all-rational-graphic-design/
On Thursday, the New York Times published a detailed account reporting the existence of official Israeli military documents authorizing the killing of 20 non-combatants for every “pre-emptive” attack on a single presumed Hamas supporter, with the ratio in some cases reaching 100 to one.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/27/gdhz-d27.html
[Den Delimarsky] had a Stream Deck and wanted to be free of the proprietary software, so he reverse-engineered it. Now, he has a Stream Deck Plus, and with the same desire, he reverse-engineered it as well.
The device has eight buttons, a narrow screen, and four encoder dials. The device looks like a generic HID device to the host machine, and once it has been configured, doesn’t need any special software to function. By configuring the device using the official software in a virtual machine under the watchful eye of Wireshark, it was possible to figure out how that initial setup worked and recreate it using a different software stack.
If you’ve never done this kind of thing…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/12/26/stream-deck-plus-reverse-engineered/
