I’m convinced that my cats, Fade and Alucard, know their names. And, when I call them, they know I mean business. When I’m sleeping and Alucard wants me to top off his water dish, he bites my face. I scream his name and he gets more excited, because he knows it’s time for fresh water. When I’ve been on the computer too long, Fade strolls into the office and screeches at me until I log…
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images / Aurich Lawson) Referring to a drug as “mind altering” generally refers to its influence on immediate perceptions. But a lot of drugs that have been used for these effects have turned out to be mind altering in a more general sense: they can elicit longer-term changes in how the brain operates. Ketamine, for example, appears to provide rapid and sustained relief from depression. A study released this week suggests we…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1486473
Writing new software licenses is a seemingly irresistible vice in the free and open source world, and the decades since the first GPL have been filled with bitter disputes and splits over licensing, with new licenses proliferating for motives both noble and base. Benjamin “Mako” Hill’s seminal Libreplanet keynote described how “open source” had mutated to eliminate software freedom, allowing large companies (especially those with cloud-based products) to hoard all the benefits of openness without…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/04/open-ish.html
Sharon Ringel and Angela Woodall have published a comprehensive, in-depth look at the state of news archiving in the digital age, working under the auspices of the Tow Center at the Columbia Journalism Review; it’s an excellent, well-researched report and paints an alarming picture of the erosion of the institutional memories of news organizations. Ringel and Woodall find that news organizations are cavalier, even negligent, about archiving their news, and contrast this with the heyday…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/04/the-memory-hole-2.html
The Internet Archive has come to the rescue once again. The nonprofit digital library this week unveiled the MySpace Music Dragon Hoard, a collection of 490,000 MP3 files from 2008 to 2010 on the long-abandoned social media site. From a report: While the recovered tracks make up less than one percent of the music lost by some 14 million artists, it is still a sizable cache weighing in at 1.3TB. The lost songs were given…
EFF is proud to announce its newest investigative team: the Threat Lab. Using a combination of research skills, the Threat Lab will take a deep dive into how surveillance technologies are used to target communities, activists, or individuals. The Threat Lab is a multidisciplinary unit that’s part of our Technology Projects team. EFF’s Director of Cybersecurity, Eva Galperin heads up the group, which also includes Senior Staff Technologist Cooper Quintin and Senior Investigative Researcher Dave…