States are looking to jam T-Mobile and Sprint’s proposed $26.5 billion merger TechCrunch

Jun 122019
 

A number of  states have filed a lawsuit to block the proposed $26.5 billion merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. The lawsuitm, filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges that the merger of Sprint and T-Mobile would be anti-competitive and drive up costs for consumers. “When it comes to corporate power, bigger isn’t always better,” said James, in a statement. “The T-Mobile and Sprint merger would not only…

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 2019-06-12  Comments Off on States are looking to jam T-Mobile and Sprint’s proposed $26.5 billion merger TechCrunch

Branding the Decentralized Web Internet Archive Blogs

Jun 122019
 

The new DWeb logo draws inspiration from our colorful code base!The Decentralized Web is a concept. It’s a set of technologies. It’s a network of builders and designers and dreamers. What started with small gatherings in San Francisco, London, Los Angeles, Toronto and Berlin is growing into a global movement. So how do we visually convey the identity of this idea we call the “DWeb”? Designer, Iryna Nezhynska, has created a flexible, new brand identity…

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Ways and Means Committee Chair Doesn’t Want Medicare-for-All Hearing to Mention “Medicare for All” The Intercept

Jun 122019
 

In preparation for Wednesday’s hearing on Medicare for All before the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, the panel’s chair met privately with Democrats to lay out how he wants it to unfold. Rep. Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat who has been in office since 1989, told the Democrats on the panel that he didn’t want the phrase “Medicare for All” to be used. Instead, he said, the hearing should focus on all the different…

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The Day the Music Burned jwz

Jun 122019
 

The vault fire was not, as UMG suggested, a minor mishap, a matter of a few tapes stuck in a musty warehouse. It was the biggest disaster in the history of the music business.UMG’s internal assessment of the event stands in contrast to its public statements. In a document prepared for a March 2009 “Vault Loss Meeting,” The company described the damage in apocalyptic terms. “The West Coast Vault perished, in its entirety,” the document…

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This Free software ain’t free to make, pal, it’s expensive: Mozilla to bankroll Firefox with paid-for premium extras The Register

Jun 112019
 

Browser will remain gratis, optional $$-per-month services to be offered later this year Mozilla is planning to launch a suite of paid-for subscription services to complement its free and open-source Firefox browser in October.…

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 2019-06-11  Comments Off on This Free software ain’t free to make, pal, it’s expensive: Mozilla to bankroll Firefox with paid-for premium extras The Register

Federal Court: Eight Months Of Utility Pole Camera Surveillance Is A Fourth Amendment Violation Techdirt.

Jun 112019
 

The Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision continues to add warrant requirements to surveillance activities law enforcement routinely engages in with almost zero paperwork whatsoever. The Carpenter case dealt with the government’s collection of historical cell site location info from third party telcos, but its influence has spread much farther than that. The decision shook the foundation of the Third Party Doctrine, suggesting a new “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard that threatens warrantless access to a number…

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 2019-06-11  Comments Off on Federal Court: Eight Months Of Utility Pole Camera Surveillance Is A Fourth Amendment Violation Techdirt.

Exclusive: Leaked Chats Between Brazilian Judge and Prosecutor Who Imprisoned Lula Reveal Prohibited Collaboration and Doubts Over Evidence The Intercept

Jun 102019
 

A large trove of documents furnished exclusively to The Intercept Brasil reveals serious ethical violations and legally prohibited collaboration between the judge and prosecutors who last year convicted and imprisoned former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on corruption charges — a conviction that resulted in Lula being barred from the 2018 presidential election. These materials also contain evidence that the prosecution had serious doubts about whether there was sufficient evidence to establish Lula’s guilt. The archive, provided…

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 2019-06-10  Comments Off on Exclusive: Leaked Chats Between Brazilian Judge and Prosecutor Who Imprisoned Lula Reveal Prohibited Collaboration and Doubts Over Evidence The Intercept

The FBI Has Access to Over 640 Million Photos of Us Through Its Facial Recognition Database American Civil Liberties Union

Jun 092019
 

That’s about double the total U.S. population. We already know that the FBI has a massive facial recognition apparatus. We know the agency has slowly been working towards getting access to photos of almost every American to run through this system. We also know it is building this mass surveillance infrastructure without clear authorization from Congress, safeguards, or public input. The fact that face recognition technology, which can be readily abused, has been deployed by federal agencies…

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 2019-06-09  Comments Off on The FBI Has Access to Over 640 Million Photos of Us Through Its Facial Recognition Database American Civil Liberties Union

The ArduBoy Community Rolled Their Own Cartridge Hackaday

Jun 092019
 

The ArduBoy, as you might have guessed from the name, was designed as a love letter to the Nintendo Game Boy that many a hacker spent their formative years squinting at. While the open source handheld is far smaller than the classic DMG-01, it retains the same general form factor, monochromatic display, and even the iconic red LED to the left of the screen. But one thing it didn’t inherit from the original was the…

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I Lived in Chernobyl to See if Nuclear Fallout Makes Fungus Grow Better Motherboard

Jun 092019
 

Christopher Robinson is a microbiologist who spent three months in the Chernobyl exclusion zone as a Fulbright student in 2017. My favorite memory of Chernobyl is the puppies. I’d wake up at 6 a.m. every morning, walk a kilometer from my run-down hostel to the hotel, which sold cigarettes and vodka and serves such wonderful delicacies like cabbage, boiled eggs, and kielbasa with mayonnaise. I’d have breakfast with other scientists studying Chernobyl for various reasons.…

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 2019-06-09  Comments Off on I Lived in Chernobyl to See if Nuclear Fallout Makes Fungus Grow Better Motherboard

1980s Plotter Plays Flappy Bird Hackaday

Jun 092019
 

Should you happen to have an HP7440A or similar plotter hanging around, you could have a quick game of Flappy Bird — or Plotty Bird as [WesleyAC] calls it. Just be sure you have some blank paper. The whole thing fits in about 200 lines of Rust code and — according to the author — gets to about 20 frames per second. Watching the thing go, it appears that it draws a random set of…

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Thinking back on the special magic of Make: and Maker Faire Boing Boing

Jun 082019
 

As you may have heard by now, news began to break Friday night that Maker Media, home to Make: magazine, Maker Faire, and Maker Shed, was folding up their big top and calling it quits (though founder Dale Dougherty has vowed to attempt a resurrection in some form). As the sad news began to thread its way through social media, the sense of shock, grief, and confusion was palpable. As when a beloved artist, entertainer,…

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 2019-06-08  Comments Off on Thinking back on the special magic of Make: and Maker Faire Boing Boing

New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Starting in 2050 Motherboard

Jun 042019
 

A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization” and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30…

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 2019-06-04  Comments Off on New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Starting in 2050 Motherboard

New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ in 2050 Motherboard

Jun 042019
 

A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander. The analysis, published by the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration, a think-tank in Melbourne, Australia, describes climate change as “a near- to mid-term existential threat to human civilization” and sets out a plausible scenario of where business-as-usual could lead over the next 30…

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 2019-06-04  Comments Off on New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ in 2050 Motherboard

The army of contractor-linguists who power Google Assistant say they had their wages stolen Boing Boing

Jun 042019
 

The reason Google Assistant (that’s the product you invoke when you say “OK Google” to your device) works reasonably well is that the Pygmalion team — a small army of linguists — work long hours handcrafting variations on common phrases (“set a timer for five minutes,” “remind me in five minutes,” “in five minutes, remind me…”) and grammars that allow the system to correctly respond to your queries. These linguists (who have to have at…

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 2019-06-04  Comments Off on The army of contractor-linguists who power Google Assistant say they had their wages stolen Boing Boing

The Canadian government has released the surprisingly sensible results of its extensive, year-long review of copyright law Boing Boing

Jun 032019
 

[Editor’s note: Whenever governments review their copyright, one of two things happens: either they only listen to industry reps and then come to the “conclusion” that more copyright is always better; or they listen to stakeholders and experts and conclude that a little goes a long way. Normally, when the latter happens, the government that commissioned the report buries it out of terror of powerful Big Content lobbyists. This time, miraculously, an eminently sensible Canadian…

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 2019-06-03  Comments Off on The Canadian government has released the surprisingly sensible results of its extensive, year-long review of copyright law Boing Boing
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