The Death of the Mind

 
Thanks in large part to pandemic social spending, employment recovered from the 2020 recession in record time (Chart: Apricitas Economics, 4/8/23).
A ban on evictions. Required paid leave. Continuous Medicaid coverage. Free school meals. Emergency SNAP allotments. An extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits. Child tax credit expansion. Thousands in stimulus checks.
These measures were part of a suite of policies the US government passed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic fallout it precipitated. They were meant to blunt the damage, to protect the population from a much darker alternative.
And they were remarkably successful. The government boosted incomes of the worst-off in a way that would have appeared totally alien in 2001 or 2008….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://fair.org/home/nyt-blames-american-public-for-collapse-of-pandemic-safety-net/

The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years before giving up.
But that was just the start.
After its tactical retreat, AT&T spun off Time Warner into an entirely new company, Warner Media. Warner Media then immediately turned around and announced a blockbuster merger with Discovery, creating the creatively named Warner Brothers Discovery.
This new company has been a blistering mess as well. Executives there have been so cheap they’ve refused to pay residuals to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/12/congress-urges-doj-to-review-the-time-warner-discovery-merger-mess-amidst-chaos-and-ongoing-layoffs/

California passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) nominally to protect children’s privacy, but at the same time, the AADC requires businesses to do an age “assurance” of all their users, children and adults alike. (Age “assurance” requires the business to distinguish children from adults, but the methodology to implement has many of the same characteristics as age verification–it just needs to be less precise for anyone who isn’t around the age of majority. I’ll treat the two as equivalent).
Doing age assurance/age verification raises substantial privacy risks. There are several ways of doing it, but the two primary options for quick results are (1) requiring consumers to submit government-issued documents, or (2) requiring consumers to submit…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/12/recent-case-highlights-how-age-verification-laws-may-directly-conflict-with-biometric-privacy-laws/

Mobian is a project that aims to bring the Debian distribution to mobile devices such
as smartphones and tablets. By building on the flexibility, stability, and community-driven
development of Debian, Mobian aspires to create a powerful and
user-friendly alternative to existing mobile operating systems. The project
is actively working on reducing the delta between Mobian and Debian, and its
ultimate goal is to be absorbed back into its parent distribution and to
make it easy to run Debian on mobile devices.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/928211/

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/