Flock Safety wants in on the law enforcement surveillance action. It began making inroads by appealing to the next best fascists: homeowners associations. Pitching its ALPRs (automatic license plate readers) to gated communities, Flock promises a crime-free future its pseudo-research can’t back up.
Not that any of that mattered to any of these suburban authoritarians. All they knew is they had cameras capable of surveilling unwanted “intruders,” even if these were just lost drivers, people passing through their “exclusive” neighborhoods on the way to their own less-exclusive neighborhoods, or just kind of “brown.”
Since the rich and the (predominately) white consider law enforcement to be little more than a customer service department, pitching to HOAs meant drawing in…
KDE developer Xaver Hugl has written a third blog post outlining some of the latest HDR and color management improvements that have been readied for KDE’s KWin compositor as well as ongoing improvements to Valve’s Gamescope compositor…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-HDR-Colors-Part-3

Usually when we see arcade cabinet builds, they’re your standard single-player stand up variety. Even one of them takes up quite a bit of room, so as appealing as it might be to link up two or more cabinets together for the occasional multiplayer session, the space required makes it a non-starter for most of us.
But this cleverly designed 4-player cocktail cabinet from [OgrishGadgeteer] goes a long way towards solving that problem. The circular design of the cabinet gives each player a clear view of their respective display in a much smaller footprint than would otherwise be possible, and the glass top allows the whole thing to double as an actual cocktail table when it’s not…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/05/11/gather-round-this-unique-4-player-arcade-cabinet/

Survivors of the October 7 attacks filed a lawsuit in U.S. federal court last week alleging links between Hamas and the pro-Palestinian student groups leading nationwide protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. The survivors claim the student groups are liable for monetary damages because of the purported terrorism links. “When someone tells you they are aiding and abetting terrorists — believe them.” That’s the opening line the suit filed Wednesday against the Palestinian advocacy groups American Muslims for Palestine and National Students for Justice in Palestine, the umbrella group supporting student organizers for Palestine, which supports more than 350 Palestine solidarity groups, including more than 200 campus organizations across the country. The lawsuit is part of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2024/05/10/october-7-survivors-lawsuit-palestine-hamas-sjp-protests/
Sperm whales are fascinating creatures. They possess the biggest brain of any species, six times larger than a human’s, which scientists believe may have evolved to support intelligent, rational behavior. They’re highly social, capable of making decisions as a group, and they exhibit complex foraging behavior. But there’s also a lot we don’t know about them, including what they may be trying to say to one another when they communicate using a system of short bursts of clicks, known as codas. Now, new research published in Nature Communications today suggests that sperm whales’ communication is actually much more expressive and complicated than was previously thought. A team of researchers led by Pratyusha Sharma at MIT’s Computer…
Kelly Merrill, Jill Stein, Jason Call with arrest charges. April 28, 2024. Photo by Barbara Chicherio.
After attacking Dr. Jill Stein, St. Louis police charged her with assaulting them. Stein is the presumptive Presidential candidate of the Green Party. On April 27 she spoke at a program of the Green Party of St. Louis and then went to support student protesters at Washington University. There, she was arrested along with Green Party campaign managers Jason Call and Kelly Merrill with about 100 others.
As students peacefully gathered in tents and on the lawn, they were soon confronted by police from four departments: University City, Richmond Heights, St. Louis City and St. Louis County. When Stein arrived at the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/30/presidential-candidate-jill-stein-attacked-in-st-louis/

Although the youth vote was integral in his victory against Donald Trump in the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s approval ratings have tanked amongst 18-to-27-year-olds. If President Biden is interested in winning back Gen Z voters, he’ll have to do the following things.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/what-biden-can-do-to-win-over-gen-z-1851427528
Seagate Technology has reportedly notified its customers abouts its plans to raise prices on new hard drive orders and for demands that exceed prior agreements, echoing a similar move by Western Digital, which increased its prices earlier this month. These changes come in response to a surge in demand for high-capacity HDDs and constraints in supply due to decreased production capabilities of both Seagate and Western Digital, reports TrendForce. According to industry insights reported by TechNews, the sector anticipates that the scarcity of high-capacity HDD products will persist throughout the current quarter and possibly extend over the entire year. It is forecasted that HDD prices will rise by 5% to 10% in Q2 2024 alone and…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21368/report-seagate-western-digital-hike-hdd-prices
Today’s links
The specific process by which Google enshittified its search: Ed Zitron has Prabhakar Raghavan bang to rights.
Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2024
Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
Recent appearances: Where I’ve been.
Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.
Colophon: All the rest.
The specific process by which Google enshittified its search (permalink)
All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/
Enlarge / Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan talks with guests during an event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 03, 2024 (credit: Getty Images | Chip Somodevilla )
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today announced that it has issued a final rule banning noncompete clauses. The rule will render the vast majority of current noncompete clauses unenforceable, according to the agency.
“In the final rule, the Commission has determined that it is an unfair method of competition and therefore a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act, for employers to enter into noncompetes with workers and to enforce certain noncompetes,” the FTC said.
The US Chamber of Commerce said it will…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2019469
The horrific discovery over the past 72 hours provides further evidence of Israel’s imperialist-backed genocide against the Palestinians, which is set to escalate imminently due to the looming assault on the more than 1.5 million Palestinians struggling to survive in Rafah.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/04/24/cvig-a24.html
Comics will be back when I have new comics for you. I currently have nothing upcoming scripted. At best it will be a few weeks. At worst it could be a few months.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://badmachinery.com/comic/announcement/

One week after it was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate has passed what Senator Ron Wyden has called, “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.” President Biden then rushed to sign it into law.
The perhaps ironically named “Reforming Intelligence and Security America Act (RISAA)” does everything BUT reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). RISAA not only reauthorizes this mass surveillance program, it greatly expands the government’s authority by allowing it to compel a much larger group of people and providers into assisting with this surveillance. The bill’s only significant “compromise” is a limited, two-year extension of this mass surveillance. But…
Enlarge / A cropped portion of a ca. 1980 ad for the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard, which allowed Apple II users to run the CP/M operating system. (credit: Microsoft)
Last week, chip manufacturer Zilog announced that after 48 years on the market, its line of standalone DIP (dual inline package) Z80 CPUs is coming to an end, ceasing sales on June 14, 2024. The 8-bit Z80 architecture debuted in 1976 and powered a small-business-PC revolution in conjunction with CP/M, also serving as the heart of the Nintendo Game Boy, Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Radio Shack TRS-80, the Pac-Man arcade game, and the TI-83 graphing calculator in various forms. In a letter to customers dated…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2018763
Click here to go see the bonus panel!
Hovertext:
The silver lining is due to cesium contamination.Today’s News:
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/good-news
On 3rd of April 2024, Tom Lane committed patch: Invent SERIALIZE option for EXPLAIN. EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, SERIALIZE) allows collection of statistics about the volume of data emitted by a query, as well as the time taken to convert the data to the on-the-wire format. Previously there was no way to investigate this without actually … Continue reading “Waiting for PostgreSQL 17 – Invent SERIALIZE option for EXPLAIN.”
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/6sY

I had understood in principle that printf is Turing complete, but I am still aghast at this interactive game of tic-tac-toe implemented with a single printf statement.
Computing the NOT of a single value is also easy:
printf("%1$255d%1$s%hhn", a, b)will compute
*b = (strlen(a)+255)%256 = strlen(a)-1and again, because strlen(x) is either 1 or 0 we have
*c = !bFrom here we can compute any binary circuit.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/04/the-turing-police-say-x-wins/
North Carolina has never had an independent candidate for U.S. House on a government-printed ballot. But in 2024, Shelane Etchison appears to have qualified in the Ninth District. Here is her website. She needed 7,460 valid signatures and the county election boards have verified 7,532.
The Ninth District is in central North Carolina, just west of Raleigh. It has a first-term Republican incumbent, Richard Hudson. He is running for re-election. In 2022 he won the general election in a two-person race with 56.5%.
Flock Safety — a relatively recent entrant to the surveillance tech arena — is branching out. It’s courting cops with cheap ALPR cameras, unproven claims about crime reduction, and a little lawbreaking of its own.
But it hasn’t abandoned its roots. It first hit the scene with plate readers it pitched to the Fun Police: homeowners associations and the even deeper pockets overseeing our nation’s many gated communities.
Flock tells HOAs and the heads of carefully curated communities things like “Flock Safety is the only security camera that stops property crime.” It’s a laughable claim. For one, Flock’s cameras are cameras and pretty much any security camera will have some effect on crime. Second, cameras don’t prevent crime….
The US cannot assure Britain that that the First Amendment will apply to Julian Assange outside
the US, because an old Supreme Court decision says it does not. This probably means that
Assange’s last appeal will proceed, and go on for a long time during the US election campaign.The article contends that Biden’s interest, as well as justice, argues for
dropping the charges
against Assange.To ask (even rhetorically) whether Assange has been “punished enough” is to normalize
horrible abuse. The conditions that Assange has suffered in Belmarsh prison are too cruel even
for the worst criminals. No one should be
kept alone in a cell
for 23 hours a day.
Giving Assange a plea bargain would be better than trying him as
a spy,…
Although the youth vote was integral in his victory against Donald Trump in the 2020 election, Joe Biden’s approval ratings have tanked amongst 18-to-27-year-olds. If President Biden is interested in winning back Gen Z voters, he’ll have to do the following things.

