Feb 082019
 

“MY PACKAGE THIEF HAS BEEN ARRESTED!!!,” reads a post on Neighbors, a “neighborhood watch” social network run by Ring, which is a home security systems company owned by Amazon. The post shows two side-by-side images: one is of a man as captured on a home security camera, and the other is of someone who appears to be the same man, as photographed in a mugshot. “This man stolen my packages along with my neighbors packages…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qvyvzd/amazons-home-security-company-is-turning-everyone-into-cops

 2019-02-08  Comments Off on Amazon’s Home Security Company Is Turning Everyone Into Cops Motherboard
Feb 072019
 

A few weeks ago I was chatting with someone who works security at Slim’s. He said something to the effect of, “Goldenvoice is terrible, but our contract with them is only for another year or two, so maybe after that things will go back to normal.” I didn’t have the heart to say to him, “How’s that going to happen when you no longer have a booking or promotions department? They fired everybody!” Slim’s, Great…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2019/02/06.html

 2019-02-07  Comments Off on DNA Lounge: Wherein Goldenvoice’s dismantling of San Francisco’s local music industry continues apace. jwz
Feb 062019
 

At the start of his linux.conf.au 2019 talk, Kristoffer Grönlund said that he would be taking attendees back 60 years or more. That is not quite to the dawn of computing history, but it is close—farther back than most of us were alive to remember. He encountered John McCarthy’s famous Lisp paper [PDF] via Papers We Love and it led him to dig deeply into the Lisp world; he brought back a report for the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/778550/rss

 2019-02-06  Comments Off on [$] Lisp and the foundations of computing LWN.net
Feb 062019
 

The EU’s on-again/off-again Copyright Directive keeps sinking under its own weight: on the one side, you have German politicians who felt that it was politically impossible to force every online platform to spend hundreds of millions of euros to buy copyright filters to prevent a user from infringing copyright, even for an instant, and so proposed tiny, largely cosmetic changes to keep German small businesses happy; on the other side, you have French politicians who…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/05/death-sentence-for-the-web.html

 2019-02-06  Comments Off on France and Germany just cut a deal to save the EU’s #CopyrightDirective — and made it much, much worse (PLEASE SHARE THIS POST!) Boing Boing
Feb 062019
 

Early adopters of LED lighting will remember 50,000 hour or even 100,000 hour lifetime ratings printed on the box. But during a recent trip to the hardware store the longest advertised lifetime I found was 25,000 hours. Others claimed only 7,500 or 15,000 hours. And yes, these are brand-name bulbs from Cree and GE. So, what happened to those 100,000 hour residential LED bulbs? Were the initial estimates just over-optimistic? Was it all marketing hype? Or,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2019/02/05/what-happened-to-the-100000-hour-led-bulbs/

 2019-02-06  Comments Off on What Happened to the 100,000-Hour LED Bulbs? Hackaday
Feb 062019
 

The 3D printers we’re most familiar with use the fused deposition process, in which hot plastic is squirted out of a nozzle, to build up parts on a layer by layer basis. We’ve also seen stereolithography printers, such as the Form 2, which use a projector and a special resin to produce parts, again in a layer-by-layer method. However, a team from the University of North Carolina were inspired by CT scanners, and came up…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2019/02/05/3d-printing-with-tomography-in-reverse/

 2019-02-06  Comments Off on 3D Printing With Tomography in Reverse Hackaday
Feb 062019
 

Back in 1947, decades before cat memes became a way of life, experimental documentary filmmakers Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid gave us a lovely glimpse of the “Private Life of a Cat.” From Archive.org: RECORDS FEMALE CAT & HER 5 KITTENS AS MOTHER CAT APPROACHES LABOR, KITTENS ARE BORN & OBTAIN MILK & MOTHER CAT THEN CARES FOR THEM IN LEARNING & GROWING PROCESS, IN WHICH TOM CAT OCCASIONALLY PARTICIPATES. (via r/ObscureMedia) Previously: Maya Deren’s…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/05/watch-the-private-life-of-a-ca.html

 2019-02-06  Comments Off on Watch the Private Life of a Cat Boing Boing
Feb 042019
 

As previously noted, on January 11, a Wisconsin state trial court ruled in favor of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and Jill Stein in Elections Systems and Software v Election Commission. The issue was whether Stein’s experts, who are permitted to look at the voting software in connection with Stein’s recount of the 2016 presidential vote, are free to comment on that software afterwards. The trial court had ruled that they may comment, as long as…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2019/02/01/vote-counting-machine-manufacturers-appeal-wisconsin-case-concerning-jill-steins-computer-experts/

 2019-02-04  Comments Off on Vote-Counting Machine Manufacturers Appeal Wisconsin Case Concerning Jill Stein’s Computer Experts Ballot Access News
Feb 042019
 

Braintree Payments uses PostgreSQL as its primary datastore. We rely heavily on the data safety and consistency guarantees a traditional relational database offers us, but these guarantees come with certain operational difficulties. To make things even more interesting, we allow zero scheduled functional downtime for our main payments processing services.Several years ago we published a blog post detailing some of the things we had learned about how to safely run DDL (data definition language) operations…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4kZ

 2019-02-04  Comments Off on James Coleman: PostgreSQL at Scale: Database Schema Changes Without Downtime Planet PostgreSQL
Feb 042019
 

I would never betray the trust of customers, says man perhaps doing exactly that Comment  Some would argue he has broken every ethical and moral rule of his in his profession, but genealogist Bennett Greenspan prefers to see himself as a crime-fighter.…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/01/familytreedna_fbi_link/

 2019-02-04  Comments Off on I’m a crime-fighter, says FamilyTreeDNA boss after being caught giving folks’ DNA data to FBI The Register
Feb 032019
 

The Living Computers museum in Seattle has a Xerox Alto, the machine famous for being the first to sport a mouse-based windowing graphical user interface. They received it in working condition and put it in their exhibit, but were dismayed when a year later it ceased to operate. Some detective work revealed that the power supply was failing to reach parts of the machine, and further investigation revealed an unlikely culprit. Electromigration had degraded the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2019/02/03/fail-of-the-week-electromigration-nearly-killed-this-xerox-alto/

 2019-02-03  Comments Off on Fail of the Week: Electromigration Nearly Killed This Xerox Alto Hackaday
Feb 032019
 

NBC News published a predictably viral story Friday, claiming that “experts who track websites and social media linked to Russia have seen stirrings of a possible campaign of support for Hawaii Democrat Tulsi Gabbard.” But the whole story was a sham: the only “experts” cited by NBC in support of its key claim was the firm, New Knowledge, that just got caught by the New York Times fabricating Russian troll accounts on behalf of the Democratic…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/02/03/nbc-news-to-claim-russia-supports-tulsi-gabbard-relies-on-firm-just-caught-fabricating-russia-data-for-the-democratic-party/

 2019-02-03  Comments Off on NBC News, to Claim Russia Supports Tulsi Gabbard, Relies on Firm Just Caught Fabricating Russia Data for the Democratic Party The Intercept
Feb 012019
 

Release YouTube, you beast! (credit: 123pendejos) The latest beleaguered Google product to get a death date is Google+. Google’s controversial Facebook clone is shutting down on April 2. Google has been backing away from the service for years, but it gave the site a death sentence in October, after revelations of a data leak were made public. Now we have a concrete shutdown date for the service. Google’s support page details exactly how the G+…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1449009

 2019-02-01  Comments Off on Google+ shuts down April 2, all consumer data will be deleted Ars Technica
Feb 012019
 

One of the most influential ideas in urbanism today is that the key to addressing the housing crisis is reforming zoning and building codes to allow for taller buildings and higher population densities.A growing chorus of market urbanists and YIMBYs make the case: Restrict supply, and demand and therefore prices go up. So, it follows, liberalizing codes to make it easier to build—and to permit taller, denser structures—will increase supply and cause prices to fall,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/01/zoning-reform-house-costs-urban-development-gentrification/581677/?utm_source=feed

 2019-02-01  Comments Off on Does Upzoning Boost the Housing Supply and Lower Prices? Maybe Not. CityLab | All Articles
Feb 012019
 

One of the most common questions we get asked is why I started Purism. And given the growing importance of Purism’s mission amid the barrage of news about how large tech companies are surveilling and exposing their users, it seemed like an opportune time to share our origin story, and why I felt it was important to create this alternative to the status quo. When my first daughter was born, in 2007, her birth had…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://puri.sm/posts/purism-origin-story/

 2019-02-01  Comments Off on Purism Origin Story Purism
Feb 012019
 

When Trump FCC Chairman (and former telcoms executive) Ajit Pai murdered Net Neutrality, he told us the slaughter was necessary, otherwise the ISPs wouldn’t invest in their networks. A year later, Charter has joined Comcast in announcing major cuts to its capital expenditures budget, slashing spending from $8.9 billion under Net Neutrality to $7 billion under Net Discrimination, which allows the company to extort funds from online services on pain of having their data slowed…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/31/insult-to-injury-2.html

 2019-02-01  Comments Off on Charter slashes network spending by $2B, but makes up for it by charging its customers more Boing Boing
Feb 012019
 

The E3D #ToolChangerHello everyone, and welcome to a new year and an exciting step forward in the world of 3D Printing and in this case  > ‘desktop manufacturing’ <I’m delighted to be diving in to building and using (hopefully not ‘destruction-testing’) the E3D ToolChanger.Quick Jump Index I’ll update this list as I post more blogs and video’s about the ToolChanger adventures.Part 1 – First ToolChanger Post – Introduction and un-boxing.Next post – Motion System Assembly -…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://richrap.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-toolchanger-part-1-e3d-reference.html

 2019-02-01  Comments Off on The ToolChanger – Part 1 – E3D Reference design of a multi-tool 3D Printer Reprap development and further adventures in DIY 3D printing