The Death of the Mind

Kris Holt Contributor Kris Holt is a contributing writer at Engadget. More posts by this contributor Twitch will ban streamers who frequently share misinformation Panasonic will start making Tesla’s higher-capacity EV batteries by March 2024
Twitch has updated its misinformation policies and says it will ban those who frequently share falsehoods. Under the new rules, the platform will block “harmful misinformation superspreaders who persistently share misinformation on or off of Twitch,” as The New York Times first reported.
“Every day, people come together on Twitch to build communities that celebrate a variety of interests, passions, and talents,” Twitch wrote in a blog…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/03/twitch-will-ban-streamers-who-frequently-share-misinformation/

Copyright maximalists just don’t know when to stop. Having failed in their 2020 attempt to use U.S. law to force GitHub to permanently cut off access to youtube-dl, an open source tool that allows users to download and preserve videos, on the theory that the tool can also be used for infringing purposes, the music publishers have turned to the German courts instead. But one small German hosting provider, represented by the German Society for Civil Rights (GFF), is fighting back.
The saga started two years ago, when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to demand that GitHub take down the repository for youtube-dl, claiming that the software breaks…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/campaign-shut-down-crucial-documentary-tool-youtube-dl-continues-and-so-does-fight

As the world’s leading free distributor of millions of oftentimes ‘paywalled’ research papers, Sci-Hub is often described as “The Pirate Bay of Science”.
While this status warms the hearts of many researchers, academics and students around the world, especially those with limited resources available to access education, Sci-Hub has also accrued many high-powered enemies.
These are not limited to major publishing houses angry at their content being distributed for free. Founder Alexandra Elbakyan is also a person of interest to elements of the US government’s intelligence and security services, which appear to be conducting an investigation into the computer security expert.
Elbakyan’s Apple Account Compromised
In May 2021, Elbakyan received an email from Apple (via her Gmail account) advising…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/fbi-gains-access-to-sci-hub-founders-google-account-data-220303/

Last month, I appeared before the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs to discuss Bill S-210, a bill that aims to limit minors’ access to pornography sites by implementing age verification and website blocking requirements. I warned that face recognition technologies, which are often used for age verification, raise serious privacy risks and that website blocking would have negative consequences for freedom of expression. Further, I emphasized how incredibly broadly the bill is drafted. While the Senators were focused on some well-known pornography sites, widely used sites and services such as Twitter or Reddit are also captured by the bill, raising the possibility of age verification to send a tweet or read a Reddit…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2022/03/crtc-calls-for-more-powers-to-take-a-more-interventionist-approach-on-internet-content/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=crtc-calls-for-more-powers-to-take-a-more-interventionist-approach-on-internet-content

A campaign of censorship against Russian state-backed media sources has been led by the European Union and embraced by tech companies, social media platforms and cable television providers.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/04/cens-m04.html

Back in December, we wrote about how the major book publishers had teamed up to sue the state of Maryland over a fairly tame law concerning ebooks and libraries. As we’ve been detailing, over the last few years, the big book publishers have been working overtime to abuse copyright law to destroy libraries. Whereas, historically, a library could just buy a book like anyone else, and then lend it out, with ebooks, the publishers demand ridiculous prices for libraries and then put nonsensical restrictions on how libraries can lend out those ebooks. This is because publishers hate libraries — and, while they want to insist to you that copying a digital file is “theft,” they will…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/03/unfortunate-not-surprising-court-blocks-marylands-library-ebook-law/

Automated enforcement may ease the burden on law enforcement agencies and direct more officers towards serious crime, but nearly every device given that job has tended to perform poorly. Red light and speed enforcement cameras often get things wrong while simultaneously depriving falsely accused drivers of the opportunity to confront their accusers. And, because cities directly benefit from issued tickets, city officials have tinkered with things like yellow light timing to increase the number of tickets handed out.
Another entry in the law enforcement tech field — ShotSpotter — uses mics and sensors to detect noises suspected to be gunshots and issues alerts to law enforcement officers. Like the tech listed above, ShotSpotter is sometimes wrong. It’s…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/02/cities-are-turning-to-automation-to-enforce-vehicle-noise-ordinances/

The Free Software Foundation has announced that Zoë Kooyman will be the
organization’s new executive director.

Kooyman was appointed by the FSF board following a careful selection process that included a review by a FSF staff committee and evaluation criteria such as management, fundraising, business and finance, legal, and technical skills. She succeeds John Sullivan, who served as executive director for twelve years.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/886490/

If you’ve accessed the MDN website today, you probably noticed that it looks quite different. We hope it’s a good different. Let us explain!
MDN has undergone many changes in its sixteen-year history from its early beginning as a wiki to the recent migration of a static site backed by GitHub. During that time MDN grew organically, with over 45,000 contributors and numerous developers and designers. It’s no surprise that the user experience became somewhat inconsistent throughout the website. 
In mid-2021 we started to think about modernizing MDN’s design, to create a clean and inviting website that makes navigating our 44,000 articles as easy as possible. We wanted to create a more holistic experience for our users, with…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2022/03/a-new-year-a-new-mdn/