Uber and Lyft have tracked their passengers’ movements for many years. Now New York City tracks those passengers’ movements too. Please do not call what these companies do “sharing”. That is an absurd misnomer.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jan-apr.html#7_April_2019_%28Tracking_passengers%27_movements%29
Chelsea Manning has been released from solitary imprisonment.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jan-apr.html#7_April_2019_%28Chelsea_Manning%29
For as long as climate change has been a part of America’s national consciousness, it’s been talked about in dire terms, evoking images of some hellish, Mad Max-style dystopia. The title and much of the content of David Wallace-Wells’s recent book is a variation on the same theme, stirring up hundreds of pages of images worth of an “Uninhabitable Earth” to make the case that the conversation has not been dire enough. In describing the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/04/07/green-new-deal-happiness/
With around a quarter of a billion monthly users, Reddit is one of the most important sites on the Internet. The site plays host to millions of live discussions on countless topics ranging from the mundane to obviously controversial. Recently we’ve reported on the troubles being faced by /r/piracy, Reddit’s most popular sub-Reddit focused on piracy discussion. In an article published mid-March 2019, we reported how the moderators of the forum were making best efforts…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/reddits-r-piracy-deleting-almost-10-years-of-history-to-avoid-ban-190407/
Depending on who you talk to, everything is either fine, or we’re living in an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia in which we forgot to drench everything in colored neon lighting. There’s little to be done about the digital surveillance panopticon that stalks our every move, but as far as the aesthetic goes, [abetusk] is bringing the goods. The latest is a laser jacket, to give you that 2087 look in 2019. The build starts with a…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2019/04/05/we-were-really-overdue-for-laser-jackets/
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…
A few summers ago, I was lucky enough to exist in the right time and place to be able to regularly play TEMPEST. The summer wasn’t meant to last — the realities of aging vector hardware in a busy bar led to TEMPEST disappearing a few shorts months later.
Attempting to simulate a spinner with a keyboard or gamepad with MAME is an exercise in futile suffering, so what’s a TEMPEST addict that can use a drill and knows how to plug wires into things and measure to do?
Why, build a very weird mouse in essence, which I did last September. This was a pretty easy project: I just grabbed a TurboTwist 2 spinner (an ultimarc spintrak would probably work equivalently), the mouse encoder board for it, a few buttons, and stuffed it all in a reasonably sized project box from the craft store.
I used a bit of openscad to make a template and ended up giving the box a light sanding and a few coats of spray paint that I had lying around.
I set MAME to interpret the third mouse button as both coin and start, so it’s all self contained for TEMPEST. It plays great after calibrating the turn count and making sure to totally disable mouse acceleration for the spinner.
Techie says he was grilled for three hours after refusing to let agents search his devices Former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal says he was interrogated for three hours by America’s border cops after arriving at San Francisco airport – because he refused to unlock his work laptop and phone.…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/02/us_customs_mozilla_cto/
While we talk about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, we almost never talk about any other section of the law. And there’s a good reason for that, a few years after it was put into law, every other part of the CDA was ruled unconstitutional. The original part of the CDA that is no longer law included criminalizing the knowing transmission of “obscene or indecent” messages to anyone under 18 or anything “that,…
Enlarge / A pile of fish trapped in the flood deposits. (credit: UC Berkeley) The Chicxulub impact is famed for having killed the dinosaurs and most other species alive on Earth at the time, and it left behind a thin layer of dust rich in rare elements. Modeling of the impact has suggested almost too many ways it could have killed: massive tsunamis, a magnitude 11 earthquake, global wildfires and searing heat, months of frigid…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1485061
In New York City, public parks, or, as the New York City Zoning Resolution of 1961 reads, “any publicly owned park, playground, beach, parkway or roadway within the jurisdiction and control of the Commissioner of Parks” are special.They’re exempt from zoning laws and don’t generate usable floor area. In other words, developers can’t build on them. As the City Charter reads, “The rights of the city in and to its … public parks … are…
Techie raises alarm over ‘detention’ after he refused to unlock work laptop, phone Former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal says he was interrogated for three hours by America’s border cops after arriving at San Francisco airport – because he refused to unlock his work laptop and phone.…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/02/us_customs_mozilla_cto/
One DNA-matching company has decided it’s going to corner an under-served market: US law enforcement. FamilyTreeDNA — last seen here opening up its database to the FBI without informing its users first — is actively pitching its services to law enforcement. The television spot, to air in San Diego first, asks anyone who has had a direct-to-consumer DNA test from another company, like 23andMe or Ancestry.com, to upload a copy so that law enforcement can…
Back to the PG I’m very excited to become a 2ndQuadrant member. I was involved in PostgreSQL activities in NTT group (Japanese leading ICT company, see here and here), including log shipping replication and PostgreSQL scale out solution as PostgresXC and PostgresXL. At NTT I had several chances to work very closely with 2ndQuadrant. After three years involvement in deep learning and accelerator usage in various applications I’m now back to PostgreSQL world. And I’m still very interested…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4o5
