The Death of the Mind

Yesterday, Senator Thom Tillis helped ram through a gift for Hollywood: getting the felony streaming copyright bill that he’d only released a week earlier included in the must-pass omnibus funding bill despite literally no discussion or debate about the problems with the bill. This morning, he really doubled down. As announced last month, Tillis has now released a draft of his DMCA overhaul, which appears to be exactly what he had hinted at last month…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201222/09404045933/senator-tillis-releases-massive-unconstitutional-plan-to-reshape-internet-hollywoods-image.shtml

An Australian radio telescope picked up unusual signals back in 2019 and thinks they originated from Proxima Centauri, a scant 4.3 light years from our blue marble. Researchers caution that it almost certainly is a signal of human or natural origin and that more analysis will probably show it didn’t come from Proxima Centauri. But they can’t yet explain it. The research is from the Breakthrough Listen project, a decade-long SETI project. The 980 MHz…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/12/21/did-et-finally-call-us/

Over the last couple years, it’s become increasingly clear that facial recognition technology doesn’t work well, and would be a civil liberties and privacy nightmare even if it did. But that’s not stopping the Trump administration from moving forward with its dangerous plans to expand the technology’s use at U.S. airports and other ports of entry.U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has proposed a new rule that would massively expand the use of face surveillance…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/cbps-plan-to-expand-face-surveillance-at-airports-is-a-civil-liberties-disaster-in-the-making

The Socialist Workers Party candidate for Delegate to U.S. House from the District of Columbia, Omari Musa, polled 6,702 votes last month.  If he had polled as much as 7,500 votes, the SWP would now be ballot-qualified in D.C. Only once has the SWP been a qualified party in D.C.,  That was immediately after the 1976 election, when the SWP polled 11,237 votes for Dorothy Hawkinson, its nominee for City-Council-at-Large. Musa polled almost as many…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2020/12/19/socialist-workers-party-came-fairly-close-to-polling-enough-votes-in-district-of-columbia-to-be-ballot-qualified/

On September 29, 2020, Joe Biden and Donald Trump squared off in what would be universally agreed to be the worst presidential debate ever. They traded barbs with minimal refereeing in a “series of extended brawls.” The shameful display of eroding norms took center stage for a horrified international audience.  Meanwhile, a legal controversy that just might make things better in the future has been slowly working its way through the courts. The case, Level…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/fairvote_joins_open_debates_lawsuit_in_petition_to_the_supreme_court

Every day that emergency action is not taken to stop the pandemic means thousands of more deaths.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/16/pers-d16.html

In a recent post, I wrote about how the attention economy in use at big social networks hurts you. In this post, I’m going to suggest what to do about it. Mastodon and the Fediverse When you use email, you can send a message from an account at Google to one at Yahoo, Microsoft, or any of millions of businesses and organizations running their own mail server. Unlike, say, Facebook, email isn’t a single service,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10124-how-to-join-the-fediverse-and-cast-off-the-attention-economy

External feed Read More at the Source: http://catandgirl.com/signs-you-may-be-living-in-a-dystopia/