Techdirt. – Senator Brian Schatz Joins The Moral Panic With Unconstitutional Age Verification Bill

Apr 272023
 

Senator Brian Schatz is one of the more thoughtful Senators we have, and he and his staff have actually spent time talking to lots of experts in trying to craft bills regarding the internet. Unfortunately, it still seems like he still falls under the seductive sway of this or that moral panic, so when the bills actually come out, they’re perhaps more thoughtfully done than the moral panic bills of his colleagues, but they’re still destructive.
His latest is… just bad. It appears to be modeled on a bunch of these age verification moral panic bills that we’ve seen in both red states and blue states, though Schatz’s bill is much closer to the red state version…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/27/senator-brian-schatz-joins-the-moral-panic-with-unconstitutional-age-verification-bill/

 2023-04-27  Comments Off on Techdirt. – Senator Brian Schatz Joins The Moral Panic With Unconstitutional Age Verification Bill

Biometric Update – Clear accelerates growth in travel; expands into health, social media

Apr 272023
 

Clear has already seen success in the travel sector with its biometric authentication being used to streamline check-ins and security screening. Now, the company wants to expand into other industries, such as health and social media. It is still growing in travel, however. Pittsburgh International Airport is deploying Clear infrastructure. The airport is getting a $600,000 upfront payment from and a 10 percent revenue share from Alclear, maker of Clear, over a five-year contract. Clear is designed to enable enrolled travelers to bypass manual identification checks and instead walk directly to the front of the Transportation Security Administration screening line, the airport says. Membership in Clear costs about $16 per month, and confers priority screening….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202304/clear-accelerates-growth-in-travel-expands-into-health-social-media

 2023-04-27  Comments Off on Biometric Update – Clear accelerates growth in travel; expands into health, social media

Techdirt. – Wizards Of The Coast Sends Pinkerton Agency To Person That Bought Unreleased ‘Magic’ Cards In Error

Apr 272023
 

Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the company behind both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic The Gathering has been on our pages recently and not for good reasons. Most recently, the company kicked up a completely unnecessary shitstorm for itself by changing the OGL license under which it released D&D Fifth Edition in such a way that it essentially kneecapped the wider community’s ability to create off of the base content, as the community had for years and years. The public response to that change was almost universally negative.
But if that was bad, imagine what the response will be to WotC sending the literal Pinkerton Agency after a YouTuber who revealed a bunch of Magic The Gathering…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/26/wizards-of-the-coast-sends-pinkerton-agency-to-person-that-bought-unreleased-magic-cards-in-error/

 2023-04-27  Comments Off on Techdirt. – Wizards Of The Coast Sends Pinkerton Agency To Person That Bought Unreleased ‘Magic’ Cards In Error

jwz – Section 31 and the Normalization of the Security State

Apr 262023
 

“A Critical Division of Starfleet Intelligence” There’s no precedent for it in the franchise; nothing that its backstory is needed to unpack or explain. Indeed, it makes the whole thing more inexplicable: societies with unchecked, unaccountable black ops and secret police forces do not, typically, resemble paradises even on a surface level — something that DS9 itself readily understood when it came to worldbuilding for the Cardassians. […] But one can, perhaps, forgive DS9 this particular indulgence; it came in the midst of a larger arc about what happens when you throw Gene Roddenberry’s humanist utopia into a major war, and it can be read in the context of that story: To what extent is…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/04/section-31-and-the-normalization-of-the-security-state/

 2023-04-26  Comments Off on jwz – Section 31 and the Normalization of the Security State

Planet PostgreSQL – Ryan Booz: In defense of PostgreSQL MVCC and Vacuuming

Apr 262023
 

I just attended my fifth in-person conference of 2023, four of them PostgreSQL focused. I look forward to attending more in the coming months to share and learn about the platform, meet more community members, and continue to invest however I can. Unfortunately, between these conferences, several recent blogs, and the general attitude towards PostgreSQL … Continue reading “In defense of PostgreSQL MVCC and Vacuuming”

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5JJ

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Deeplinks – First Appellate Court Finds Geofence Warrant Unconstitutional

Apr 242023
 

The California Court of Appeal has held that a geofence warrant seeking information on all devices located within several densely-populated areas in Los Angeles violated the Fourth Amendment. This is the first time an appellate court in the United States has reviewed a geofence warrant. The case is People v. Meza, and EFF filed an amicus brief and jointly argued the case before the court.
Geofence warrants, which we have written about extensively before, are unlike typical warrants for electronic information because they don’t name a suspect and are not even targeted to specific individuals or accounts. Instead, they require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/first-us-appellate-court-decide-finds-geofence-warrant-unconstitutional

 2023-04-24  Comments Off on Deeplinks – First Appellate Court Finds Geofence Warrant Unconstitutional

Deeplinks – First US Appellate Court to Decide Finds Geofence Warrant Unconstitutional

Apr 242023
 

The California Court of Appeal has held that a geofence warrant seeking information on all devices located within several densely-populated areas in Los Angeles violated the Fourth Amendment. This is the first time an appellate court in the United States has reviewed a geofence warrant. The case is People v. Meza, and EFF filed an amicus brief and jointly argued the case before the court.
Geofence warrants, which we have written about extensively before, are unlike typical warrants for electronic information because they don’t name a suspect and are not even targeted to specific individuals or accounts. Instead, they require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/first-us-appellate-court-decide-finds-geofence-warrant-unconstitutional

 2023-04-24  Comments Off on Deeplinks – First US Appellate Court to Decide Finds Geofence Warrant Unconstitutional

Deeplinks – The STOP CSAM Act Would Put Security and Free Speech at Risk

Apr 212023
 

A new U.S. Senate bill introduced this week threatens security and free speech on the internet. EFF urges Congress to reject the STOP CSAM Act of 2023, which would undermine the viability of services offering end-to-end encryption, and force internet companies to take down lawful user content.   
The bill is aimed at removing from the internet child sexual abuse material (CSAM), also known as child pornography. Existing law already requires online service providers who have actual knowledge of “apparent” CSAM on their platforms to report that content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which is essentially a government entity.  NCMEC then forwards actionable reports to law enforcement agencies for investigation.  
The STOP…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/stop-csam-act-would-put-security-and-free-speech-risk

 2023-04-21  Comments Off on Deeplinks – The STOP CSAM Act Would Put Security and Free Speech at Risk

Boing Boing – Lost Simpsons’ joke recovered by pro editor

Apr 202023
 

Video editor Ewzzy Rayburn discovered the concealed gag in the 1992 Simpsons episode “The Otto Show.” In this episode, Homer’s tinnitus drowns out Marge’s words, leaving viewers uncertain about her dialogue. Rayburn carefully examined the audio and managed to isolate Marge’s line. — Read the rest

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2023/04/19/lost-simpsons-joke-recovered-by-pro-editor.html

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Planet Debian – Ian Jackson: The Rust Foundation’s bad draft trademark policy

Apr 202023
 

tl;dr
The Rust Foundation’s proposed new trademark policy is far too restrictive, and will cause (more) drama unless it is substantially revised.

Process
Substance
Values
Next steps
Echoes of a dispute from 2006

Process
“Rust” is a trademark owned by the Foundation.
The Rust Foundation still seems to be finding its feet. Evidently, one of the items on its backlog was to update the trademark policy. Apparently they have been working on this for some time, in an informal working group.
In August, there was a survey. (I saw it in This Week In Rust, the community-curated newsletter where most important stuff appears, and responded.) I don’t think the results of this survey have been published anywhere.
Last week (12th April) the Foundation published an official Inside…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/14929.html

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Techdirt. – ShotSpotter Attempts To Memory Hole Itself, Rebrands As ‘SoundThinking’

Apr 202023
 

You know you’re fucked when the only way out of your current SEO/PR nightmare is to distance yourself… well, from yourself. Some of this predates Google’s search engine stranglehold. But altering public perception sometimes means hoping someone will look at your shiny new logo, rather than your disturbing past.
After killing innocent people while providing security to government forces in Iraq in 2007, Blackwater rebranded several times, hoping to keep one step ahead of negative news cycles. It became Xe Services in 2009, Academi in 2011, and — after a merger with Triple Canopy (another private security firm) — Constellis.
The same thing happened with Taser. Taser — named after its foremost product (itself a loose acronym for…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/19/shotspotter-attempts-to-memory-hole-itself-rebrands-as-soundthinking/

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Planet Debian – PSA: upgrade your LUKS key derivation function

Apr 182023
 

Here’s an article from a French anarchist describing how his (encrypted) laptop was seized after he was arrested, and material from the encrypted partition has since been entered as evidence against him. His encryption password was supposedly greater than 20 characters and included a mixture of cases, numbers, and punctuation, so in the absence of any sort of opsec failures this implies that even relatively complex passwords can now be brute forced, and we should be transitioning to even more secure passphrases.Or does it? Let’s go into what LUKS is doing in the first place. The actual data is typically encrypted with AES, an extremely popular and well-tested encryption algorithm. AES has no known major weaknesses…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html

 2023-04-18  Comments Off on Planet Debian – PSA: upgrade your LUKS key derivation function

Planet Debian – Matthew Garrett: PSA: upgrade your LUKS key derivation function

Apr 182023
 

Here’s an article from a French anarchist describing how his (encrypted) laptop was seized after he was arrested, and material from the encrypted partition has since been entered as evidence against him. His encryption password was supposedly greater than 20 characters and included a mixture of cases, numbers, and punctuation, so in the absence of any sort of opsec failures this implies that even relatively complex passwords can now be brute forced, and we should be transitioning to even more secure passphrases.Or does it? Let’s go into what LUKS is doing in the first place. The actual data is typically encrypted with AES, an extremely popular and well-tested encryption algorithm. AES has no known major weaknesses…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/66429.html

 2023-04-18  Comments Off on Planet Debian – Matthew Garrett: PSA: upgrade your LUKS key derivation function

Ballot Access News – Request to Commenters

Apr 172023
 

It will make me very happy if future comments are confined to the subject of the blog post, or at least to the general topic of ballot access. In particular, comments about other commenters are not welcome and degrade the site. Thank you very much. There is a lot of drama this year in the struggle for fair ballot access laws. The year 2023 is a very bad year for ballot access, with truly repressive bills in danger of passing in Montana, Texas, and Minnesota. There is plenty to comment on that is relevant to the purpose of this website.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2023/04/16/request-to-commenters/

 2023-04-17  Comments Off on Ballot Access News – Request to Commenters

TorrentFreak – DMCA Robocops Give 20 Seconds to Comply, But Can’t Muster a Reply

Apr 152023
 

Faced with millions of instances of copyright infringement every day, many rightsholders use anti-piracy companies to help stem the tide.
More often than not, that involves sending DMCA takedown notices on an industrial scale, in the hope that Google and Bing delist infringing URLs from search results before the cycle begins again.
Huge volumes of DMCA notices and similar requests are handled directly by companies including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. And that’s just a part of a very large iceberg, much of it completely and permanently hidden, and almost all of it automated.
Trust the Machines
For years TorrentFreak has documented the most newsworthy takedown demands from the billions of notices sent to Google and other platforms with…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/dmca-robocops-give-20-seconds-to-comply-but-cant-muster-a-reply-230415/

 2023-04-15  Comments Off on TorrentFreak – DMCA Robocops Give 20 Seconds to Comply, But Can’t Muster a Reply

The Register – The return of the classic Flying Toasters screensaver

Apr 152023
 

OK, here’s my question: Would you like to have it on x86 Linux?

Friday FOSS Fest  If you’re old enough to remember After Dark, you might appreciate this: a new screensaver. Yes, in 2023. It was never really about saving screens.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/04/14/return_flying_toasters/

 2023-04-15  Comments Off on The Register – The return of the classic Flying Toasters screensaver

Planet PostgreSQL – Laurenz Albe: EXPLAIN (GENERIC_PLAN): New in PostgreSQL 16

Apr 152023
 

© Laurenz Albe 2023
A while ago, I wrote about how difficult it is to get an execution plan for a parameterized query. The method suggested in that article works, but is still somewhat complicated. So I wrote a patch to support an EXPLAIN option GENERIC_PLAN, which provides native support for that. My patch got committed by Tom Lane in 3c05284d83, which means the new option will be available from v16 on. This article describes how the new feature works and how it can be useful.
The syntax of EXPLAIN (GENERIC_PLAN)
You can only use the new option in a parenthesized options list, like this:

EXPLAIN (GENERIC_PLAN) SELECT …;

Many people are still used to the old, simple way of writing…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5Jf

 2023-04-15  Comments Off on Planet PostgreSQL – Laurenz Albe: EXPLAIN (GENERIC_PLAN): New in PostgreSQL 16

World Socialist Web Site (en) – New York Times helps arrest source of documents showing US lies

Apr 142023
 

On Thursday, the New York Times publicly exposed the identity of the individual who allegedly shared classified documents that exposed lies by the Biden administration and media about US involvement in Ukraine.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/04/14/xfxa-a14.html

 2023-04-14  Comments Off on World Socialist Web Site (en) – New York Times helps arrest source of documents showing US lies
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