“[Historical knowledge] gives understanding of how the present world came to be, and maybe more importantly, an appreciation that everything that is, never necessarily had to be” -from “History as Freedom” —Joe Costello, longtime political organizer, writer
On the 10th anniversary of the groundbreaking SOPA Blackout, a question seems to surface above all else: can any one of us really go on to change history? And how, exactly, does that happen?
For the 24 million people who participated in the largest online protest in history against the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the millions more who witnessed the protest in real time, the course of history was changed. Had it succeeded, SOPA would have given anyone the power…
On 17th of January 2022, Michael Paquier committed patch: Introduce log_destination=jsonlog “jsonlog” is a new value that can be added to log_destination to provide logs in the JSON format, with its output written to a file, making it the third type of destination of this kind, after “stderr” and “csvlog”. The format is convenient … Continue reading “Waiting for PostgreSQL 15 – Introduce log_destination=jsonlog”
Congressional Democrats are joining Republicans in a last-ditch effort to undermine the newly implemented No Surprises Act, which bans surprise medical bills. A key provision in the law could become a first step toward allowing the federal government to standardize rates for medical procedures covered under private insurance plans, an objective the private health care industry has fought for decades. Late last year, in the months leading up to the bill’s enactment, opponents filed a flurry of lawsuits claiming that by enforcing the rule in a manner widely viewed as consistent with the text of the legislation, the Biden administration had overstepped Congress’s intentions.
The leading opponents of the provision, which mandates that insurers and health care…
The pulse-dial telephone and its associated mechanical exchange represents the pinnacle of late-19th and early-20th century electromechanical technology, but its vestiges have disappeared from view with astonishing rapidity. [Matthew Harrold] is a telecoms enthusiast who’s been kind enough to share with us the teardown and refurbishment of that most signature of pulse-dial components, a telephone dial. In this case it’s on a rather unusual instrument, a British GPO outdoor phone that would have been seen in all kinds of industrial and safety installations back in the day and can probably still be found in the wild today if you know where to look.
The teardown soon identifies a dial that runs very slowly and is sorely in…
At Akademy in Milan – I’m pretty sure it was
then – I gave a talk about “Managing meeting in Matrix”. The Blue Systems crew
has a kind of weekly stand-up over text chat to coordinate things and to keep
everyone in the loop. That meeting is managed by a Bot, which I call QuatBot.
Only two years after my talk about it, I’ve gotten around to doing an
actual release.
No Screenshots
QuatBot is a Bot for use in text-chat. So there are no pretty screenshots
of it in action, or what the UI looks like: pick your favorite
Matrix client (I switch between nheko
and neochat depending on which
has a more recent release fixing bugs that annoy me).
Getting the Source
QuatBot isn’t a KDE project,…
We’re taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what’s at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
Ten years ago, a diverse coalition of internet users, non-profit groups, and internet companies defeated the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), bills that would have forced internet companies to blacklist and block websites accused of hosting copyright-infringing content. These were bills that would have made censorship very easy, all in the name of copyright enforcement. This…
Enlarge / A Starlink track running across the Andromeda galaxy. (credit: Caltech Optical Observatories/IPAC)
SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service will require a dense constellation of satellites to provide consistent, low-latency connectivity. The system already has over 1,500 satellites in orbit and has received approval to operate 12,000 of them. And that has astronomers worried. Although SpaceX has taken steps to reduce the impact of its hardware, there’s no way to completely eliminate the tracks the satellites leave across ground-based observations.
How bad is the problem? A team of astronomers has used archival images from a survey telescope to look for Starlink tracks over the past two years. Over that time, the number of images affected…
Moleskine, manufacturer of popular notebooks, calendars, and sketchbooks, seems to think Taiwain sank to the bottom of the ocean or something. In 2019 its notebooks indicated Taiwan’s public holidays along with those of 43 other countries. In 2020 it started referring to the country as “Taiwan (Prov. — Read the rest
In October 2020, the RIAA caused outrage by taking down YouTube-ripping tool youtube-dl from GitHub.
The RIAA cited the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, claiming that the tool could be used to download their artists’ musical works from YouTube, in breach of copyright.
With little supporting case law in the United States, the RIAA referenced a decision from the Hamburg Regional Court in a similar case, which found that YouTube’s “rolling cipher” should be considered an effective technological protection measure under EU law. Any attempt to circumvent it, therefore, would amount to infringement.
Nevertheless, GitHub later restored the software and placed $1m in a takedown defense fund.
Threats Were Also Sent to Others
While the RIAA’s effort to take down…
Worrying changes are afoot for e-comics vendor ComiXology as Amazon finally gets round to asserting copy control – meaning no more downloads of unprotected comics, even if you’ve paid for them.…
I previously wrote about the issue of swap potentially breaking SSD [1]. My conclusion was that swap wouldn’t be a problem as no normally operating systems that I run had swap using any significant fraction of total disk writes. In that post the most writes I could see was 128GB written per day on a 120G Intel SSD (writing the entire device once a day).
My post about swap and SSD was based on the assumption that you could get many thousands of writes to the entire device which was incorrect. Here’s a background on the terminology from WD [2]. So in the case of the 120G Intel SSD I was doing over 1 DWPD (Drive Writes…
Washington D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a federal appeals court to block enforcement of onerous copyright rules that violate the First Amendment and criminalize certain speech about technology, preventing researchers, tech innovators, filmmakers, educators, and others from creating and sharing their work.EFF, with co-counsel Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia yesterday to reverse a district court decision in Green v. DOJ, a lawsuit we filed in 2016 challenging the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on behalf of security researcher Matt Green and technologist Andrew “bunnie” Huang. Both are pursuing projects highly beneficial to the public and perfectly lawful except…
Did you all just hear that? That tiny, nearly silent series of screams you hear all around you? Well, that was the entire craft beer industry crying out in fear and pain. Why? Well, because Monster Beverage Corp announced that it is going to be a brewery.
Energy drinks maker Monster Beverage Corp (MNST.O) said on Thursday it had agreed to buy craft beer and hard seltzer maker CANarchy Craft Brewery Collective Llc for $330 million in cash, marking its entry into the alcoholic drinks market.
Monster said the deal would add alcoholic brands Cigar City, Oskar Blues, Deep Ellum, Perrin Brewing, Squatters and Wasatch brands to its beverage portfolio and not include CANarchy’s restaurants.
On January 11, the Maine Green Party asked U.S. District Court Judge Lance Walker for the same ballot access relief that he had granted to the Libertarian Party, relative to petitions for candidates to get on primary ballots. See this … Continue reading →
Inspired by a long tradition of impossible objects, this ‘impossible portal’ created by coded loop artist @jn3008 challanges your mind leaning toward you or away from you according to the point of the portal you focus on [site: https://t.co/plmRoKqIzF] pic.twitter.com/R1tBs64EMW
A survey of thousands of Kroger workers finds that while its executives rake in millions, homelessness and food insecurity are rampant among its workforce.
A grocery store worker rings up items at a Ralphs Supermarket in California. (Frederic J. BROWN / AFP via Getty Images) A survey of more than ten thousand workers at Kroger, the fourth-largest private employer in the United States, finds that homelessness and food insecurity are rampant among union grocery store employees lauded as essential throughout the pandemic. Among the respondents, who work at Kroger-owned stores in Southern California, Colorado, and Washington State, 14 percent have been homeless in the past year, 36 percent worry about eviction,…
Last year Google quietly pushed a new feature to its Android operating system allowing users to optionally disable 2G at the modem level in their phones. This is a fantastic feature that will provide some protection from cell site simulators, an invasive police surveillance technology employed throughout the country. We applaud Google for implementing this much needed feature. Now Apple needs to implement this feature as well, for the safety of their customers.
What is 2G and why is it vulnerable?2G is the second generation of mobile communications, created in 1991. It’s an old technology from a time when standards bodies did not account for certain risk scenarios such as rogue cell towers and the need for…
Web3 is being called the future of the internet. But what is Web3, exactly? The Onion explains.
