The Death of the Mind

Back when Netflix was a pesky upstart trying to claw subscribers away from entrenched cable providers, the company had a pretty lax approach to users that shared streaming passwords. At one point CEO Reed Hastings went so far as to say he “loved” password sharing, seeing it as akin to free advertising. The idea was that as kids or friends got on more stable footing (left home to job hunt, whatever), they’d inevitably get hooked on the service and purchase their own subscription. Execs at HBO (at least before the AT&T acquisition) have stated it doesn’t really hurt these companies’ bottom lines in part because, much like with traditional piracy, there’s no guarantee these users would…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210311/16575846407/netflix-starts-cracking-down-diabolical-menace-password-sharing.shtml

Photograph Source: AFGE – CC BY 2.0
Do you remember the promises made by the Democratic Party’s presidential and Congressional candidates on universal health insurance? You can forget their pledges and somber convictions now that your votes put the Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate. The Democrats’ leaders are abandoning their promises and retreating into a cowardly corporatist future.
Here is the present scene. Leading Democrats, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have decided to spend tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to subsidize the giant health insurance companies like Aetna and United Healthcare to “cover recently laid-off workers and those who purchase their own coverage,” as The New York Times reported. There are…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/16/perfidy-meets-putty-congressional-democrats-betray-voters/

I have been using Signal a lot and, besides the privacy features, I have come to really enjoy custom sticker packs. Naturally, this led me to upload and maintain a lot of them. To keep things under control I wrote packpath, a small command line utility to easily upload and update Signal sticker packs from a simple config file. Consider this mosaic a far more interesting screenshot than a terminal running packpath. Although the Signal stickers API is only kinda public, some developers have written libraries to interact with it. Concretely, signalstickers.com maintainer Romain Ricard, has written signalstickers-client, a Python library to interact with the sticker API. Thanks to signalstickers-client doing all of the heavy…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://diegoe.be/2021/03/15/packpath-upload-signal-stickers-from-config-file/

There is a new
mailing-list server running under the auspices of kernel.org that is
meant, over time, to address the problems that have been plaguing
vger.kernel.org in recent times.

The infrastructure behind
lists.linux.dev supports multiple domains, so all mailing lists hosted on
vger.kernel.org will be carefully migrated to the same platform while
preserving current addresses, subscribers, and list ids. The only thing
that will noticeably change is the procedure to subscribe and unsubscribe
from individual lists.

Among other things, the new server
prioritizes delivery to the lore.kernel.org archive, which should minimize
the problems seen recently with lost messages.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/849441/rss

Counterpunch has a new article about the harm done to minor parties by HR One, the bill in Congress to change many election laws. This one is also by Howie Hawkins, the Green Party presidential nominee in 2020. The article is balanced and acknowledges the helpful parts of the bill. The article also has a list of reforms that should have been included in the bill. The Green Party is doing a very good job of publicizing the harmful aspect of the bill. No daily newspaper has even mentioned that the bill makes it much harder for presidential candidates to qualify for primary season matching funds. Thanks to Fairvote for the link.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2021/03/12/counterpunch-carries-another-article-on-harm-done-by-hr-one-to-minor-parties/

Enlarge / Empty vials of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine are seen at a first-come, first-serve drive-thru vaccination site operated by the Lake County Health Department on January 28, 2021 in Groveland, Florida. Seniors 65 and older waited in line for hours to be vaccinated. (credit: Getty | NurPhoto)
Some experts speculate that the pandemic coronavirus will one day cause nothing more than a common cold, mostly in children, where it will be an indistinguishable drip in the steady stream of snotty kid germs. Such is the reality for four other coronaviruses that have long stalked school yards and commonly circulate among us every cold and flu season, to little noticeable effect.
But that sanguine—if not slightly slimier—future is…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1748537

Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema was once a Green Party member and a committed antiwar activist. Now she’s best known for a viral thumbs-down on a $15 minimum wage vote. It’s the timeless story of an earnest do-gooder turned Washington monster and what happens when we don’t hold politicians accountable.
Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) gives an enthusiastic thumbs down after voting with Republicans against a $15 minimum wage. One of the most enduring parables in American culture is about “going Washington” — it is a tale of the earnest do-gooder deciding to run for office on a pledge to be a voice for the voiceless, then getting to the Beltway and quickly becoming…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/03/kyrsten-sinema-thumbs-down-minimum-wage/

While the federal CDC has criticized Texas for ending all COVID-19 restrictions, the Biden administration policy of reopening all schools will have the same effect of spreading the pandemic.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/03/04/pers-m04.html

“Crypto art” is literally just “numbered prints, but each time I sign my name I also promise to burn down a local park.”In case you are fortunate enough to have not heard about this latest con:Someone has convinced a bunch of innumerate artists that Dunning-Krugerrands are not a planet-incinerating Ponzi scheme. I’ve had to start blocking them on the Twits to avoid hearing about it, even the artists whose work I used to enjoy. They think that making a buck trumps setting the world on fire. “Proof of useless work” is a global suicide pact.bombsfall:If anyone wants to pay me crypto art prices to make them a gif or a png we can skip the middle…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/03/crypto-fart/

Pretextual stops are legal. The courts have said repeatedly that it’s ok for cops to stop people for one thing to facilitate mini-investigations about other things. As long as the pretext holds up — and reasonable suspicion about other things develops quickly enough — cops can turn a failure to yield into a drug bust or a lucrative seizure.

This is only one form of lying blessed by the courts. Cops can also lie to people they’re questioning to drag confessions out of them. That some of these confessions are false or completely tainted by the cops’ lying doesn’t seem to matter much. Overturned convictions and wrongful arrest lawsuits haven’t changed the criminal “justice” matrix much over…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210213/12002346240/oregon-court-stop-so-pretexual-cops-forgot-about-pretext-is-rights-violation.shtml