The Death of the Mind

Enlarge / The Recall feature provides a timeline of screenshots and a searchable database of text, thoroughly tracking everything about a person’s PC usage. (credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft will begin sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs beginning in October, according to an update published today to the company’s original blog post about the Recall controversy. The company didn’t elaborate further on specific changes it’s making to Recall beyond what it already announced in June. For those unfamiliar, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible PCs, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, scanning those screenshots with optical character recognition (OCR), and saving the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2044616

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There needs to be a meta-app that just takes all the apps and converts them back into Internet.

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On August 17, the Seventh Circuit upheld Indiana’s petition requirement for statewide independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties.  Indiana Green Party v Morales, 23-2756.  The state required 44,935 signatures when the lawsuit was filed in 2022, and at the time Indiana had the nation’s highest percentage for presidential candidates running outside the major parties.  No one had used the petition since 2000.
However, due to low voter turnout in November 2022, the requirement (2% of the vote for Secretary of State) dropped to 36,944 signatures for the 2024 election. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. successfully met the requirement.  The Seventh Circuit therefore seemed to feel the requirement is not severe enough to be unconstitutional
Here is the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/08/19/seventh-circuit-upholds-indiana-petition-requirement-for-statewide-independent-petitions/

One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe hooked up to the Internet, which meant you could literally connect into real, actual ancient hardware. I assure you that to a segment of the population, this is an irresistible proposition. It’s also, ultimately, one that even the most ardent fans of “how it was” will leaf away from, because mainframes are their own wacky old world, like using a taffy-pull…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5672

Over the past two years, AI developments have progressed at a rapid pace.
This includes large language models, which are typically trained on a broad datasets of texts; the more, the better.
When AI hit the mainstream, it became apparent that rightsholders are not always pleased that their works were used to train AI. This applies to photographers, artists, music companies, journalists, and authors, some of whom formed groups to file copyright infringement lawsuits to protect their rights.
Book authors, in particular, complained about the use of pirated books as training material. In various lawsuits, companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and NVIDIA are accused of using the ‘Books3’ dataset, which was scraped from the library of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-copyrighted-books-are-just-statistical-correlations-to-our-ai-models-240617/

Late 2019, Internet provider Cox Communications lost its legal battle against a group of major record labels, including Sony and Universal.
Following a two-week trial, a Virginia jury held Cox liable for its pirating subscribers. The ISP failed to disconnect repeat infringers and was ordered to pay $1 billion in damages.
Cox challenged the verdict through several routes and earlier this year booked a partial victory. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed that the ISP was contributorily liable for pirating subscribers, but reversed the vicarious copyright infringement finding. A new trial will determine the appropriate damages amount given these new conclusions.
Following this ruling, Cox asked for the damages question to be put on hold, as there were…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/cox-asks-supreme-court-to-protect-internet-subscribers-from-piracy-terminations-240815/

Library Genesis (LibGen) is one of the oldest shadow libraries on the Internet, offering free access to millions of books and academic papers people otherwise have to pay for.
The site’s origins reportedly trace back to the Soviet Union’s underground publishing culture ‘samizdat,’ which was used to bypass state censorship in the last century.
LibGen launched around 2008 as a digital version of the same concept. In addition to bypassing ‘local’ censorship, it’s widely used to circumvent the paywalls of major international publishing companies, serving as a popular ‘pirate’ site for (text)books and academic works.
Rightsholders have attempted to take the site offline several times over the years, but none led to concrete results. Today, Libgen.rs, Libgen.is…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/popular-shadow-library-libgen-breaks-down-amidst-legal-troubles-240814/

Prominent Wake Democrats and the Wake County chapter of the North Carolina Democratic Party’s Jewish caucus are urging the larger county party not to make endorsements in this year’s nonpartisan Raleigh City Council races. All city council seats and the mayor’s seat are up for election in November, and in several races, multiple Democrats are in the running. Since 2011, the party has endorsed one of those candidates. But this year, some are calling for the party not to weigh in, and candidates’ positions on the Israel-Hamas conflict appear to be the main reason. In a letter sent to Wake County Democratic Party Chair Kevyn Creech and executive director Wesley Knott on Friday, more than 20…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://indyweek.com/news/wake/endorsements-split-wake-county-dems/