Jacobin – Amazon Is Beefing Up Its Already Dystopian Worker Surveillance Machine

Aug 242021
 

Amazon is installing high-tech cameras inside supplier-owned delivery vehicles. Workers say the cameras are a shocking invasion of privacy as well as a safety hazard.
An Amazon Prime delivery van in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana. Tony Webster / Wikimedia Commons Earlier this year, Amazon revealed plans to install high-tech surveillance cameras in its fleet of delivery vans that are now ubiquitous in neighborhoods across the United States. The cameras watch drivers as well as the road and provide real-time audio feedback. While many of these drivers work in Amazon Prime–branded vehicles, they are not Amazon employees, but rather are employed by third-party contractors called delivery-service partners (DSPs) — an arrangement that,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/08/amazon-worker-surveillance/

 2021-08-24  Comments Off on Jacobin – Amazon Is Beefing Up Its Already Dystopian Worker Surveillance Machine

Motherboard – Prop 22 Was Declared Unconstitutional, and It’s Just the Beginning

Aug 242021
 

On Friday, California Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch ruled that Proposition 22—the ballot measure written by Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and Instacart to deny drivers and couriers the benefits and protections of employee classification—was unenforceable and unconstitutional despite the deep-pocketed campaign’s victory in November.  Writing in favor of the petitioners—the Service Employees International Union and three drivers—Roesch concluded that Prop 22 appears to only “protect the economic interests” of gig companies and undermined the constitutional authority of the state’s legislature to write and enforce labor laws. Specifically, Roesch pointed at a part of Proposition 22 that required a seven-eights legislative majority to alter Proposition 22, but even then only with the approval of the gig company drafters….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4av8jb/prop-22-was-declared-unconstitutional-and-its-just-the-beginning

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The Intercept – Banks Are Opting Out of the Government’s PPP Loan Forgiveness Process

Aug 232021
 

At least three major banks have decided to opt out of a new process for getting Paycheck Protection Program loans forgiven directly by the Small Business Administration, The Intercept has learned, leaving their small business customers with no other recourse if the banks refuse to forgive loans or drag out the process.
Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and PNC have all decided to opt out, according to emails shared with The Intercept.

They are major players in the program, which Congress created to offer businesses loans to spend on payroll and other qualified expenses to help weather the shutdowns. As of the end of May, JPMorgan Chase was the top PPP lender, followed by Bank of America in…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2021/08/22/covid-ppp-loan-forgiveness/

 2021-08-23  Comments Off on The Intercept – Banks Are Opting Out of the Government’s PPP Loan Forgiveness Process

Hackaday – 3D Printing Liquid Crystal

Aug 222021
 

If you think at all about liquid crystals, you probably think of display technology. However, researchers have worked out a way to use an ink-jet-like process to 3D print iridescent colors using a liquid crystal elastomer. The process can mimic iridescent coloring found in nature and may have applications in things as diverse as antitheft tags, art objects, or materials with very special optical properties.
For example, one item created by the team is an arrow that only appears totally green when viewed from a certain angle. The optical properties depend on the thickness of the material which, being crystalline, self-organizes. Controlling the speed of deposition changes the thickness of the material which allows the printer to…

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TorrentFreak – TorrentFreak News Article Targeted by Dubious ‘DRM Circumvention Complaint

Aug 222021
 

At TorrentFreak, we have written hundreds of articles about dubious takedown notices. Today, we find ourselves at the center of another one.
Earlier this week the ‘American Society of Composers’ sent a series of “DRM Circumvention” complaints to Google, acting on behalf of the Video Industry Association of America.
These notices are similar to standard DMCA takedown requests but focus on content that violates the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provision. And there’s another important distinction. Unlike normal takedown notices, there is no option to appeal a wrongful accusation.
Irreversable DRM Circumvention Takedowns
Whether the site operators agree with the takedowns or not, they are generally irreversible. The DMCA doesn’t prescribe a takedown and counter-notification scheme for these notices and Google previously confirmed…

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 2021-08-22  Comments Off on TorrentFreak – TorrentFreak News Article Targeted by Dubious ‘DRM Circumvention Complaint

The Intercept – Banks Are Opting Out of PPP Loan Forgiveness

Aug 222021
 

At least three major banks have decided to opt out of a new process for getting Paycheck Protection Program loans forgiven directly by the Small Business Administration, The Intercept has learned, leaving their small business customers with no other recourse if the banks refuse to forgive loans or drag out the process.
Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and PNC have all decided to opt out, according to emails shared with The Intercept.

They are major players in the program, which Congress created to offer businesses loans to spend on payroll and other qualified expenses to help weather the shutdowns. As of the end of May, JPMorgan Chase was the top PPP lender, followed by Bank of America in…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2021/08/22/covid-ppp-loan-forgiveness/

 2021-08-22  Comments Off on The Intercept – Banks Are Opting Out of PPP Loan Forgiveness

Ars Technica – Intrepid brewer risks scalding to recreate recipe for long-lost medieval mead

Aug 222021
 

Enlarge / A medieval form of mead called “bochet” calls for caramelizing raw honey in a cauldron over an open flame. (credit: Screenshot/Gemma Tarlach/Gastro Obscura)
Ah, mead, that sweet, honeyed alcoholic beverage that has been a staple at Renaissance Fairs for decades (along with giant turkey legs). It’s also increasingly popular among home craft brewers since it’s relatively easy to make. Those in search of a unique challenge, however, are turning to a special kind of medieval mead called bochet. The only known detailed recipe for bochet dates back to the late 14th century and was lost for centuries, until it was rediscovered around 2009.
Fermentation in general has been around for millennia, and mead (“fermented honey…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1788923

 2021-08-22  Comments Off on Ars Technica – Intrepid brewer risks scalding to recreate recipe for long-lost medieval mead

World Socialist Web Site (en) – New US coronavirus surge is growing faster than the spring and summer waves of 2020

Jul 302021
 

A devastating increase in COVID-19 cases is sweeping across the US, driven both by the Delta variant and the ongoing criminal response of the ruling elite to the pandemic.

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World Socialist Web Site (en) – Judge rules against Maryland’s threat to end extended pandemic benefits

Jul 212021
 

The court ruling was the result of over two weeks of court battles and appeals by Republican Governor Larry Hogan’s administration after two lawsuits filed June 30 opposed the order cutting off enhanced benefits.

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The Register – Open-source dev and critic of Beijing claims Audacity owner Muse threatened him with deportation to China in row over copyright

Jul 212021
 

‘Who knows how he may be received…’

Audacity’s new owner Muse Group has been accused of threatening to land a developer in legal hot water, a move that could result in the programmer being forced to return to China to face a government of which he has been a vocal critic.…

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 2021-07-21  Comments Off on The Register – Open-source dev and critic of Beijing claims Audacity owner Muse threatened him with deportation to China in row over copyright

Internet Archive Blogs – Reflections as the Internet Archive turns 25

Jul 212021
 

Photo by Rory Mitchell, The Mercantile, 2020 – CC by 4.0 (L-R) Brewster Kahle, Tamiko Thiel, Carl Feynman at Thinking Machines, May 1985. Photo courtesy of Tamiko Thiel. A Library of Everything As a young man, I wanted to help make a new medium that would be a step forward from Gutenberg’s invention hundreds of years before.  By building a Library of Everything in the digital age, I thought the opportunity was not just to make it available to everybody in the world, but to make it better–smarter than paper. By using computers, we could make the Library not just searchable, but organizable; make it so that you could navigate your way through millions, and maybe…

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CounterSpin – Shoplifting Is Big News; Stealing Millions From Workers Is Not

Jul 202021
 

 
Urban crime is the golden child of local media, as recent FAIR coverage (6/21/21) has shown. But as FAIR’s Julie Hollar recently noted, the amount of attention given to a topic does not always reflect the seriousness of the situation.
The original KGO report (6/15/21) that sparked hundreds of followup stories.
An alleged “crime surge” at Walgreens drugstores in San Francisco was a hot topic for Bay Area news outlets in the early months of 2021. When Lyanne Melendez, a reporter for the ABC-owned KGO-TV in San Francisco, tweeted out a cellphone video of a brazen shoplifter, it elevated this narrative into a nationwide story. The video purports to show a man apparently filling a garbage bag with…

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Techdirt. – Sixth Circuit Says School Board Can’t Boot People From Meetings Just Because It Doesn’t Like What They’re Saying

Jul 142021
 

Just because government officials may not like the tone of the criticism they’re receiving doesn’t mean they can use their government power to mandate civility. That’s the determination of the Sixth Circuit Appeals Court, which has struck down part of an Ohio school board’s rules of (public) engagement.

Following a school shooting in 2016, the Madison (OH) Local School District came up with a preventative plan — one that involved allowing school staff to carry concealed weapons. This didn’t play well with some parents. It also didn’t play well with some of the district’s students, who staged a walkout to protest gun violence. Following the discipline of those students, some residents decided to attend a school board…

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 2021-07-14  Comments Off on Techdirt. – Sixth Circuit Says School Board Can’t Boot People From Meetings Just Because It Doesn’t Like What They’re Saying

World Socialist Web Site (en) – Pentagon cancels JEDI contract and plans more advanced cloud-based warfare platform

Jul 092021
 

The US Defense Department has canceled the cloud computing solicitation known as JEDI and replaced it with a request for a more advanced IT platform that will enable imperialist warfare to be fought with artificial intelligence and unprecedented information gathering and processing power.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/09/jedi-j09.html

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Fedora People – Fedora Magazine: Use cpulimit to free up your CPU

Jun 142021
 

The recommended tool for managing system resources on Linux systems is cgroups. While very powerful in terms of what sorts of limits can be tuned (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, etc.), configuring cgroups is non-trivial. The nice command has been available since 1973. But it only adjusts the scheduling priority among processes that are competing for time on a processor. The nice command will not limit the percentage of CPU cycles that a process can consume per unit of time. The cpulimit command provides the best of both worlds. It limits the percentage of CPU cycles that a process can allocate per unit of time and it is relatively easy to invoke. The cpulimit command…

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 2021-06-14  Comments Off on Fedora People – Fedora Magazine: Use cpulimit to free up your CPU

Planet PostgreSQL – Hans-Juergen Schoenig: Data warehousing: Making use of synchronized seq scans

Jun 142021
 

PostgreSQL contains some hidden gems which have been around for many years and help to silently speed up your queries. They optimize your SQL statements in a clever and totally transparent way. One of those hidden gems is the ability to synchronize sequential scans. Actually, this feature has been around for 15+ years, but has gone mostly unnoticed by many end-users. However, if you are running data warehouses and analytical workloads, you might have already used synchronized seq scans without actually knowing it.
Reducing I/O for large SQL queries
Before we draw any conclusions, it is necessary to understand the problem we’re trying to solve in the first place. Consider the following scenario: 10 users are concurrently running…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/55L

 2021-06-14  Comments Off on Planet PostgreSQL – Hans-Juergen Schoenig: Data warehousing: Making use of synchronized seq scans

TechCrunch – Ring refuses to say how many users had video footage obtained by police

Jun 092021
 

Ring gets a lot of criticism, not just for its massive surveillance network of home video doorbells and its problematic privacy and security practices, but also for giving that doorbell footage to law enforcement. While Ring is making moves towards transparency, the company refuses to disclose how many users had their data given to police.
The video doorbell maker, acquired by Amazon in 2018, has partnerships with at least 1,800 U.S. police departments (and growing) that can request camera footage from Ring doorbells. Prior to a change this week, any police department that Ring partnered with could privately request doorbell camera footage from Ring customers for an active investigation. Ring will now let its police partners publicly request…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/08/ring-police-warrants-neighbors/

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