The Death of the Mind

The legal saga of News-Service Europe (NSE) and anti-piracy group BREIN has taken another dramatic turn.
Once a titan in the Usenet world, NSE was forced to shut down in 2011 after BREIN took legal action on behalf of the movie and music industries.
In its initial verdict, the Court of Amsterdam concluded that NSE willingly facilitated online piracy through its services. As a result, the company was ordered to remove all copyrighted content and filter future posts for possible copyright infringements.
According to the Usenet provider, this filtering requirement would’ve been too costly to implement so it shut down its service but appealed the case.
NSE Wins Appeal
After several more years of litigation, the Amsterdam appeals court ruled…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/destroyed-usenet-provider-sues-anti-piracy-group-for-millions-in-damages-241223/

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. Months before voters went to the polls in November, a group of election skeptics based in North Carolina gathered on a call and discussed what actions to take if they doubted any of the results. One of the ideas they floated: try to get the courts or state election board to throw out hundreds of thousands of ballots cast by voters whose registrations are missing a driver’s license number and the last four digits of a Social Security number….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/jefferson-griffin-north-carolina-supreme-court-challenge-election-integrity-network

A few years ago, on a whim, I wrote YAIOUOM. YAOIOUM was a static analyzer for Rust that checked that the code
was using units of measures correctly, e.g. a distance in meters is not a distance in centimeters, dividing meters
by seconds gave you a value in m / s (aka m * s^-1).
YAIOUOM was an example of a refinement type system, i.e. a type system that does its work after another type
system has already done its work. It was purely static, users could add new units in about
one line of code, and it was actually surprisingly easy to write. It also couldn’t be written within the Rust
type system, in part because I wanted legible error messages,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://yoric.github.io/post/rust-refinement-types/

Today’s links

Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate: A new bumper crop, with many more to come!

Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014, 2019

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.

Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate (permalink)
In 1976, Congress set fire to the country’s libraries; in 1998, they did it again. Today, in 2024, the flames have died down, and out of the ashes a new public domain is growing. Happy Public Domain Day 2025 to all who celebrate!
For most of US history,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/17/dastar-dly-deeds/

In 2022, Etsy’s earnings topped $109 million in consolidated net income. “Despite significant macroeconomic headwinds, we maintained the vast majority of our pandemic gains and delivered double digit revenue growth and excellent profitability for the year,” Etsy CEO Josh Silverman said in a press release.

Days later, Silverman announced that the marketplace platform would raise the transaction fee Etsy takes from each sale from 5% to 6.5%. In response, some 14,000 Etsy sellers closed their shops and went on strike for eight days.

The post These Artisans Built A Co-op Alternative To Etsy appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/these-artisans-built-a-co-op-alternative-to-etsy/

News media commentary has reflected the fear within the corporate and financial elite over the unsympathetic and scathing public response to the murder of Brian Thompson on a New York City street on Wednesday.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/09/xvdj-d09.html

Kamala Harris stayed silent during the election as big Democratic donors attacked chief antitrust regulator Lina Khan — at the same time Khan’s agency launched an investigation into the employer of Harris’s brother-in-law and top advisor.
Lina Khan on May 15, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images) When Democratic donors attacked the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris administration’s chief antitrust regulator, Lina Khan, during this year’s election, Vice President Harris declined to defend her, prompting some critics to say Harris was abandoning a populist message during a heated campaign.
At the time, the public did not know what was just revealed: Khan’s agency had launched a probe of the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2024/12/harris-khan-antitrust-west-election/

This may not mean much in the grand scheme of things but it’s good to see these objections on the record. It’s incremental, but in these times, every increment helps, especially when the Supreme Court seems actively disinterested in discussing cases in which government officials might be found to be in the wrong.
Cert has been denied to Vicki Baker, a McKinney, Texas resident whose house was basically razed to the ground by police officers looking to arrest a kidnapping suspect. Without a doubt, kidnapping is a serious crime and this incident involved a 15-year-old. But the events that unfolded following a high-speed chase turned Vicki Baker’s home into the PD’s own private Afghanistan as they…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/12/03/justices-maybe-the-takings-clause-doesnt-cover-destroying-an-innocent-persons-home-to-arrest-a-suspect/

During 2023 and early 2024, No Labels was trying to get on the ballot in as many states as possible, so as to run a centrist (not yet chosen) presidential candidate. Although it abandoned that effort on April 4, 2024, it is now suing Third Way and Investing in U.S., two groups that tried to interfere with its efforts. See this ElectionLawBlog post, which quotes from a Washington Post article.
In response, No Labels spokeperson Dan Webb said, “The Post reporter pulled public documents from an ongoing court case, showing political operatives – who were doing the bidding of senior Democratic operatives and funders – plotting to “dstroy” No Labels and make us “devastatingly toxic” to citizens…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/11/24/no-labels-is-suing-groups-that-tried-to-sabotage-its-petition-efforts/