The Death of the Mind

This year, legislatures in Montana, Minnesota and Texas are threatening to pass bills making it far more difficult for a ballot-qualified party to remain on the ballot, and making the new requirement go into effect before the 2024 election. This is shocking behavior. It has long been the custom that when a state makes it more difficult for a ballot-qualified party to remain on the ballot, the change does not take effect until after the next election, to give any affected party a chance to try to meet the new requirement.
The Minnesota and Texas bills raise the vote test to 10%, and the Montana bill raises it to 5% of the number of registered voters. The…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2023/04/05/link-to-federal-court-order-from-2014-that-says-states-cant-kick-parties-off-the-ballot-immediately/

Look, we all knew that there was going to be a lot of fuss about the upcoming public domaining (finally!) of Mickey Mouse nine months from now on January 1, 2024. I mean, we’ve already been talking about what next year’s public domain game jam is going to look like with Mickey as one of the options.
If you somehow have been living under a rock and never read anything on Techdirt before, let’s get you up to speed. Mickey Mouse debuted as Steamboat Willie in 1928. The character was a blatant animated copy of Steamboat Bill, a Buster Keaton silent film that came out… the same year. Disney, of course, also built up much of its…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/03/john-oliver-pokes-disney-with-a-big-stick-starts-using-1928-mickey-mouse-a-year-early/

Another FOIA lawsuit has paid off for the ACLU. But there are no real winners here, since the documents pried from the government’s grasp detail a bunch of stuff we all wish the government wouldn’t be doing with its time and our money. Here’s Drew Harwell with the details for the Washington Post:

The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government’s ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance.
[…]
Program leaders worked with…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/03/14/fbi-defense-department-worked-together-to-develop-facial-recognition-tech-for-drones-surveillance-cameras/

Under U.S. copyright law, Internet providers must terminate the accounts of repeat infringers “in appropriate circumstances.”
Many ISPs have been reluctant to take such drastic measures, which triggered a wave of copyright infringement lawsuits in recent years.
Internet provider RCN is among the targeted providers. In 2021, the company was sued by several film companies, including the makers of The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, London Has Fallen, and Hellboy.
The movie companies alleged that RCN wasn’t doing enough to stop subscribers from pirating on its network. Instead of terminating the accounts of persistent pirates, the Internet provider looked away, they argued.
The stakes in these liability lawsuits are high. Internet providers face damages claims reaching hundreds of millions of dollars, while…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/filmmakers-request-identities-of-reddit-users-to-aid-piracy-lawsuit-230218/

Three weeks after Manuel Esteban Paez Terán was shot and killed by Georgia police while protesting the construction of Cop City, two hours of body camera footage released on Wednesday night confirm police fired dozens of shots.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/10/hfmf-f10.html

Few things are harder to start than a narrative of the thing you “do” and what all the ramifications of it are. For people who don’t make it the center of their lives, your thing is already hopelessly complicated and gaining enough of a foothold to feign interest is olympic-level effort. For people who do make it the center, your description fills them with a never-abating dread that you’re going to get the explanation “wrong”, or that you’re going to give the Outsiders a bad impression. So let’s begin at the beginning, again. My parents’ divorce, taking place in the realm of the beginning of the 1980s, was not in any way friendly and in fact…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5443

What’s being presented by ShotSpotter as good news for people who feel they’ve been wrongly accused, doesn’t actually appear to be all that comforting.
ShotSpotter’s mic tech and AI combine forces to report possible gunshots to law enforcement customers. It’s very hit or miss, he said with all possible puns intended. ShotSpotter says it’s nearly 100% accurate and can play an important part in reducing gun crime.
Actual customers say something else:

A 2013 investigation of the effectiveness of ShotSpotter in Newark, New Jersey revealed that from 2010 to 2013, the system’s sensors alerted police 3,632 times, but only led to 17 actual arrests. According to the investigation, 75% of the gunshot alerts were false alarms.

97% accuracy? Not what…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/01/shotspotter-employees-not-only-have-the-power-to-alter-gunshot-reports-but-do-it-nearly-10-of-the-time/