On July 22, 2020, Pamela Samuelson, Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley, spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit against the Internet Archive brought by the publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House. These are her remarks: Good afternoon. Very happy to be here with you today. The Authors Alliance has several thousand members around the world and we have endorsed the controlled…
You see, there is a COVID-19 silver lining. For employers. For the rest of us, welcome to the machine Google has gone all-in on its work-from-home policy, telling techies they don’t need to return to the office until July 2021 at the earliest.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/07/28/google_homeworking_study/
When Mexico’s Congress rushed through a new copyright law as part of its adoption of Donald Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), it largely copy-pasted the US copyright statute, with some modifications that made the law even worse for human rights. The result is a legal regime that has all the deficits of the US system, and some new defects that are strictly hecho en Mexico, to the great detriment of the free expression rights of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/how-mexicos-new-copyright-law-crushes-free-expression
The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) conducted mass surveillance of protesters at the end of May and in early June using a downtown business district’s camera network, according to new records obtained by EFF. The records show that SFPD received real-time live access to hundreds of cameras as well as a “data dump” of camera footage amid the ongoing demonstrations against police violence. The camera network is operated by the Union Square Business Improvement District…
Article note: it writes itself.The rogue deployment of secret federal police forces in Portland, Oregon, has added a new complication to negotiations over reauthorizing the Trump administration’s vast surveillance powers and appropriating new money for the Department of Homeland Security. In March, a sweeping set of government authorities to monitor people in the United States expired, and Congress continues to debate what limits should be put on such powers before reauthorizing them. And the House…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2020/07/21/fisa-surveillance-dragnet-warrants-dhs/
The National Audubon Society has released all of John James Audubon’s magnificent watercolors from his classic work Birds of America (1827-1838) as free, high-resolution downloads for printing. The 435 life-size watercolors in the collection were “all reproduced from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration.” Each image’s web page is accompanied by Audubon’s wonderful first-person descriptions of the animal. John J. Audubon’s “Birds of America” image downloads (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/22/audobons-birds-of-america-ar.html
On July 6, North Dakota Voters First submitted more than 36,000 signatures to state officials as part of their statewide ballot measure campaign that would, among other reforms, implement ‘Top-4’ open primaries with ranked choice voting (RCV) general elections. BREAKING: Our campaign just submitted over 36,000 signatures to the North Dakota Secretary of State to ensure our measure to put North Dakota voters first makes the ballot! #ndpol pic.twitter.com/kB8AYBNJwO— North Dakota Voters First (@NDVotersFirst) July…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/ballot_measure_featuring_rcv_submitted_in_north_dakota
They’re more than happy to take Uncle Sam’s coin no matter the protests from some corners of Silicon Valley Despite all those protests, internal and external, by tech workers against their employers’ selling AI to the US military, the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JIAC) this week said the biggest names in IT are lining up to supply Uncle Sam.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/07/09/pentagon_ai_report/
The Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture magazine that lasted from 1968 to 1998, tried many experiments in bringing the goals and nature of their publication to other media. Published regularly from 1968 to 1972 with additional editions throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Stewart Brand’s magazine covered all sorts of subjects, from nature and politics through to technology and human potential. Issues can still be found online and bought used, and are beloved by many,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2020/07/08/the-whole-earth-on-cd-rom-in-hypercard-in-your-browser/
GRAND RAPIDS, MI—Desperately attempting to free himself from a lingering sense of paranoia, local man Adreese Fowler admitted Wednesday that he just couldn’t seem to shake the creeping sensation that someone other than the government, his employer, and advertisers was watching him. “I keep getting this eerie feeling…Read more…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/man-can-t-shake-feeling-that-someone-other-than-governm-1844311785
Back in May we reported on work being done for a readfile() system call to read small files more efficiently. Greg Kroah-Hartman has now volleyed those patches for review on the kernel mailing list for this improvement for reading small to medium file sizes on Linux systems…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Readfile-Sys-Call-Review
Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, is trying to prolong her father’s endless war in Afghanistan. You would think that every Democrat would be united in opposing such a policy, right? Well, you would be wrong. A paratrooper watches as an aircraft flies overhead while dropping supplies in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, on November 9, 2007. US Army / Spc. Micah E. Clare It’s not every day that you wake up in your blue state and…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/afghanistan-war-liz-cheney-jason-crow/
If you spent your youth watching James Bond or similar movies on rainy Saturday afternoons, then you may be familiar with a microdot as a top-secret piece of spy equipment, usually revealed as having been found attached to a seemingly innocuous possession of one of the bad guy’s henchmen, which when blown up on the screen delivers the cryptic yet vital clue to the location of the Evil Lair. Not something you give much thought…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/07/03/make-your-own-microdot/
Like many of us, [John Whittington] was saddened with the news that John Horton Conway passed away a little earlier this year, and in honor of his work, he added the Game of Life to a flip-dot display that he has been working on. The physicality of an electromechanical display seems particularly fitting for cellular automata. Like what you see? If you’re curious about what makes it all tick, the display shown is an Alfa-Zeta…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/07/02/watch-conways-game-of-life-flutter-across-a-flip-dot-display/
I’ve seen a lot of people — including those who are supporting the publishers’ legal attack on the Internet Archive — insist that they “support libraries,” but that the Internet Archive’s Open Library and National Emergency Library are “not libraries.” First off, they’re wrong. But, more importantly, it’s good to see actual librarians now coming out in support of the Internet Archive as well. The Association of Research Libraries has put out a statement asking…
The day before a committee debate and vote on the EARN IT Act, the bill’s sponsors replaced their bill with an amended version. Here’s their new idea: instead of giving a 19-person federal commission, dominated by law enforcement, the power to regulate the Internet, the bill now effectively gives that power to state legislatures. And instead of requiring that Internet websites and platforms comply with the commission’s “best practices” in order to keep their vital…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/new-earn-it-bill-still-threatens-encryption-and-free-speech
This week, two major library organizations affirmed their commitment to the longstanding and widespread library practice of digitizing physical books they own and lending out secured digital versions. The practice, controlled digital lending (CDL), is the digital equivalent of traditional library lending. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) joined hundreds of individual libraries and supporters in signing a public position statement in support of controlled digital…
Matt Saincome knows that compared to many of the startup acquisitions that we write about on TechCrunch, selling a website for a little over $1 million (mostly cash, with a little stock) isn’t a huge deal. “But in the world of punk comedy media? Whoo boy!” he said. Saincome is happy to poke fun at himself — he is the co-founder and CEO of a satirical punk news website, after all — but he also…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/02/project-m-acquires-the-hard-times/
These days, reading the monthly jobs report can feel like opening a time capsule. According to the data for June, which was released today, the recovery from the COVID-19 recession was still chugging along as of the middle of last month, when the two surveys that form the backbone of the report were conducted. The unemployment rate fell from 13.3 percent in May to 11.1 percent in June, and 4.8 million more people were employed…
In the House of Representatives, militarist Democrats and militarist Republicans are working together to keep the war in Afghanistan going. 16 Democrats in the senate helped defeat an amendment to repeal the authorization for use of military force. The amendment would also have withdrawn US troops from Afghanistan, but I think repealing the authorization is even bigger. Compared with past attempts, having 40 senators vote for this is a lot of progress. In a few…