Jacobin – The Quiet Merger Between Online Platforms and the National Security State Continues

Nov 092022
 

The Department of Homeland Security is helping to coordinate tech company censorship efforts according to recent reporting. The line between tech firms and the national security state is only getting blurrier.
President Joe Biden, appearing via teleconference, delivers remarks at a White House meeting. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sits in the foreground. August 3, 2022. (Win McNamee / Getty Images) The steady march of the post-2016 tech censorship campaign has been picking up pace lately, and we’ve just learned of another leap forward. According to recent major reporting from the Intercept, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been involved in efforts aimed at corralling what it…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2022/11/dhs-big-tech-surveillance-censorship-mdm/

 2022-11-09  Comments Off on Jacobin – The Quiet Merger Between Online Platforms and the National Security State Continues

Hackaday – Retrotechtacular: Programming by Card

Nov 092022
 

The recent Supercon 6 badge, if you haven’t seen it, was an old-fashioned type computer with a blinky light front panel. It was reminiscent of an Altair 8800, a PDP-11, or DG Nova. However, even back in the day, only a few people really programmed a computer with switches. Typically, you might use the switches to toggle in a first-level bootloader that would then load a better bootloader from some kind of storage like magnetic or paper tape. Most people didn’t really use the switches.
What most people did do, however, was punch cards.  Technically, Hollerith cards, although we mostly just called them cards, punched cards, or IBM cards. There were a lot of different machines you…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/11/09/retrotechtacular-programming-by-card/

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jwz – Coin mechs

Nov 092022
 

Dear Lazyweb, what coin mech should I buy for a 1982 Atari Millipede arcade cabinet? The original steel mechs, and some others I have tried of similar vintage, fill with jams that cannot be ejected. I tried these plastic Imonex 120 mechs which were recommended to me as “less validation but less headaches” but they suck. Every time you press coin return, they just disassemble themselves internally: the stretchy hinge thing pops off its axis. I am far less interested in “sometimes accepts a bad coin or rejects a good coin” than I am in “never get into a state where I have to open the thing up and fuck with it”. In case you are…

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Ars Technica – Redditor discovers legendary 1956 computer in grandparents’ basement

Nov 092022
 

Enlarge / The LGP-30 computer, from 1956, that a Redditor found in a basement. (credit: c-wizz)
On Monday, a German Redditor named c-wizz announced that they had found a very rare 66-year-old Librascope LGP-30 computer (and several 1970 DEC PDP-8/e computers) in their grandparents’ basement. The LGP-30, first released in 1956, is one of only 45 manufactured in Europe and may be best known as the computer used by “Mel” in a famous piece of hacker lore. Developed by Stan Frankel at California Institute of Technology in 1954, the LGP-30 (short for “Librascope General Purpose 30”) originally retailed for $47,000 (about $512,866 today, adjusted for inflation) and weighed in at 800 pounds. Even…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1895927

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Planet PostgreSQL – Amit Kapila: Logical Replication Improvements in PostgreSQL-15

Nov 082022
 

There are various areas in PostgreSQL like Partitioning, Logical Replication, Parallel Query, Vacuum, etc. which improve with each new version. In this blog, I’ll summarize the various enhancements in Logical Replication that users could see in the recently released PostgreSQL 15. You can read the enhancements in this area in the previous release in one of my previous blogs.Allow replication of prepared transactions:In the last release, we allowed logical decoding of prepared transactions and with this release, we added the support to replicate prepared transactions to built-in logical replication. Previously, we send the changes of the prepared transaction only once the commit prepared had been done. Users can enable replication at PREPARE time with the following syntax:CREATE PUBLICATION  mypub…

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

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Motherboard – Airbnb to List Actual Prices, Stop Letting Hosts Make Guests Do Laundry

Nov 072022
 

In response to a growing chorus of complaints, Airbnb plans to start prioritizing the total price of stays rather than the nightly rate and clamp down on “unreasonable” checkout tasks like vacuuming or doing the laundry, the company announced Monday.  As part of the effort, the company will, starting in December, give customers the option to view the total price of a stay before taxes “up front” when they search for homes, rather than only the nightly rate, which had excluded fees for things like cleaning. The total price will also be prioritized in the company’s search algorithm moving forward.  Additionally, the company will make sure guests can review all proposed checkout tasks before they book…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvm3q8/airbnb-to-list-actual-prices-stop-making-guests-do-laundry

 2022-11-07  Comments Off on Motherboard – Airbnb to List Actual Prices, Stop Letting Hosts Make Guests Do Laundry

Ars Technica – Intel says that both Intel and AMD CPUs can update Arc GPU firmware [Updated]

Nov 042022
 

Enlarge / An Intel Arc GPU. (credit: Intel)
Update, 7:35 pm ET: Intel told Ars Technica that it is possible for both Intel and AMD-based platforms to update Arc GPU firmware, and that Intel’s Management Engine wasn’t actually required for firmware updates.
“Intel Arc products do not require the host CSME to update Arc firmware,” an Intel spokesperson told Ars. “Firmware updates will work on both AMD and Intel platforms. Arc products have their own Graphics Security Control for firmware updates and leverage existing Intel technology like the HECI interface protocol to implement the firmware update flow.”
A follow-up from Richard Hughes, the developer who originally discovered the limitation, said that another user had told…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1895391

 2022-11-04  Comments Off on Ars Technica – Intel says that both Intel and AMD CPUs can update Arc GPU firmware [Updated]

Ars Technica – Cherry’s new mechanical switch hails from ’80s terminal keyboards

Nov 042022
 

Enlarge (credit: Cherry)
Cherry, the original mechanical switch maker, is continuing to tap the mechanical keyboard community for new product ideas. Its new mechanical switch, the Cherry MX Black Clear-Top, is a nod to enthusiasts who would love to turn in their modern-day clacker for an old-school terminal keyboard with extra-smooth typing.
’80s roots
Before Cherry’s Thursday announcement of plans to release the MX Black Clear-Top, the switch was known to hobbyists as the Nixie switch. Cherry made the switch in the 1980s for German office machine-maker Nixdorf Computer AG. The German switch maker was tasked with creating a version of its linear MX Black switch with “milky” upper housing, a 63.5 g actuation force…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1895257

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CounterPunch.org – Amtraks Across America: the New Penn Station

Nov 042022
 

This is the first part in a series about Amtrak travels during summer 2022. The new Moynihan Train Hall, a waiting room built at a cost of $1.6 billion, at New York’s Pennsylvania Station, across Eighth Avenue from the existing Amtrak station, which is between Seventh and Eighth avenues under Madison Square Garden. Photo: Matthew More

The post Amtraks Across America: the New Penn Station appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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The Onion – Biden Warns Americans That Ability To Even Pretend U.S. A Democracy At Stake

Nov 042022
 

WASHINGTON—Delivering a stark warning regarding the nation’s future, President Joe Biden gave a speech Wednesday night in which he cautioned Americans that the ability to even pretend the United States was a democracy was now at stake. “Today, our country teeters on a grim precipice, and if we aren’t careful, it will…

Read more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/biden-warns-americans-that-ability-to-even-pretend-u-s-1849738890

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The Register – Elon Musk reportedly outlines horrible Twitter layoff process

Nov 042022
 

Email to your personal account is bad news, email to your work account means you still work at Twitter

Twitter owner, sole director and – according to his Twitter profile, now also “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator” – has reportedly informed company staff that layoffs begin tomorrow.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/11/04/twitter_layoffs_email/

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Hackaday – Bye Bye Linux On The 486. Will We Miss You?

Nov 032022
 

A footnote in the week’s technology news came from Linus Torvalds, as he floated the idea of abandoning support for the Intel 80486 architecture in a Linux kernel mailing list post. That an old and little-used architecture might be abandoned should come as no surprise, it’s a decade since the same fate was meted out to Linux’s first platform, the 80386. The 486 line may be long-dead on the desktop, but since they are not entirely gone from the embedded space and remain a favourite among the retrocomputer crowd it’s worth taking a minute to examine what consequences if any there might be from this move.
Is A 486 Even Still A Thing?
An entire 486 PC in…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/11/02/bye-bye-linux-on-the-486-will-we-miss-you/

 2022-11-03  Comments Off on Hackaday – Bye Bye Linux On The 486. Will We Miss You?

Motherboard – A Wild Video Game Move in NASCAR Is Tearing the Sport Apart

Nov 022022
 

29-year-old NASCAR driver Ross Chastain did something that defies belief during Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series Playoff race in Martinsville, Virginia. The young driver kept the pedal pinned around the final corner of the last lap, geared up to rarely-used fifth, and drove directly into the racetrack barrier. As smoke flew up from the contact, the car rode the wall, picking up even more speed and slingshotting Chastain ahead of his competitors.  “I’ve never seen anything like that before in my life,” one announcer said. It was the fastest time that anyone had posted at the Martinsville track in 75 years. Chastain won a spot in the upcoming NASCAR Championship 4 with that daredevil move. Even more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/epzkba/a-wild-video-game-move-in-nascar-is-tearing-the-sport-apart

 2022-11-02  Comments Off on Motherboard – A Wild Video Game Move in NASCAR Is Tearing the Sport Apart

Planet Emacsen – Andrey Listopadov: Emacs Lisp shorthands as namespacing system

Nov 012022
 

In Emacs version 28 Emacs developers introduced so-called read symbol shorthands.
If you’re interested in the rationale, feel free to search the Emacs developer mailing list for the discussion.
However, it does seem that not everyone likes the idea of shorthands as a substitution for namespaces (or packages, if you’re coming from Common Lisp).
Neither did I.
And recently, a branch was set up that implements Common Lisp-style packages for Emacs.
In the discussion Richard Stallman, however, notes:

CL packages are the wrong way to implement packages in Lisp.
As I explained in a discussion two years ago, packages implemented using obarrays (or equivalent) don’t work reliably.
We have a much better basis for Lisp packages in the shorthands mechanism.
It only needs to be…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://andreyorst.gitlab.io/posts/2022-11-01-emacs-lisp-shorthands-as-namespacing-system/

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Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – Senator Seeks Antitrust Review of Apartment Price-Setting Software

Nov 012022
 

by Heather Vogell ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The chair of a U.S. Senate committee asked the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday to review whether a Texas-based property tech company’s rent-setting software violates antitrust laws. The move comes after ProPublica published an investigation Oct. 15 into RealPage’s pricing software, which suggests new rents daily to landlords for all available units in a building. Critics say the software may be helping big landlords operate as a cartel to push rents above competitive levels in some markets. “Alarmingly, recent reporting by ProPublica highlighted that RealPage’s algorithm-based price optimization software,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-senate-antitrust-apartment

 2022-11-01  Comments Off on Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – Senator Seeks Antitrust Review of Apartment Price-Setting Software

Deeplinks – Stop the Copyright Creep

Nov 012022
 

In 2020, two copyright-related proposals became law despite the uproar against them. The first was the unconstitutional CASE Act. The second was a felony streaming proposal that had never been seen or debated in public. In fact, its inclusion was in the news before its text was ever made public. The only way to find it was when the 6,000-page year-end omnibus was published. We want to make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Take Action
Tell Congress to Stop the Copyright Creep
No copyright proposal—or copyright-adjacent one—has a place in “must-pass” legislation. Must-pass legislation is a bill that is vital to the running of the country and therefore must be passed and signed into law. They are usually the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/10/stop-copyright-creep

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The Onion – It’s Ageist To Suggest A Corpse Can’t Be A Great Leader

Nov 012022
 

As the discussion rages over whether or not Joe Biden—our oldest president to date at age 79—should run for a second term in 2024, there is one glaring and pernicious aspect of the debate I demand we put a stop to at once. That is the suggestion that a corpse is not capable of being a great leader.

Read more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/it-s-ageist-to-suggest-a-corpse-can-t-be-a-great-leader-1849701047

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The Intercept – Leaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation

Nov 012022
 

The Department of Homeland Security is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/

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Hackaday – Infinitely Scrolling E-Ink Landscape Never Repeats

Nov 012022
 

Traditional Chinese landscape scrolls can be a few dozen feet long and require the viewer to move along its length to view all the intricate detail in each section. [Dheera Venkatraman] replicated this effect with an E-Ink picture frame that displays an infinitely scrolling, Shan Shui-style landscape that never repeats.
A new landscape every time you look
The landscape never repeats and is procedurally generated using a script created by [Lingdong Huang]. It consists of a single HTML file with embedded JavaScript, so you can run it locally with minimal resources, or view the online demo. It is inspired by historical artworks such as A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains and Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains.
[Dheera]’s implementation…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/10/31/infinitely-scrolling-e-ink-landscape-never-repeats/

 2022-11-01  Comments Off on Hackaday – Infinitely Scrolling E-Ink Landscape Never Repeats
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