A complaint filed by the San Francisco office of the NLRB has charged Google with violating the National Labor Relations Act by interfering with, disciplining and firing employees who were engaged in legally protected organizing activities.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/12/14/goog-d14.html
San Francisco –YouTube is supposed to be a vibrant space for new creativity, but in practice creators are sharply hampered by the site’s “Content ID” system. A new whitepaper from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) takes a deep dive into the confusing process of getting a video past YouTube’s copyright filters, and what the system means for free speech and creativity on the Internet. “YouTube dominates the online video market, and Content ID dominates video…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/unfiltered-how-youtubes-content-id-helps-shape-what-we-see-online
Earlier today, we wrote about reports detailing the latest attempt to push through a bill to make streaming copyright-covered works online a possible felony, this time being pushed by Senator Thom Tillis, who wanted to attach it to the federal spending omnibus bill. As we noted, Tillis was pushing back on some of the criticism, saying that the bill is very narrowly tailored and wouldn’t be used to criminalize random people. Of course, the response…
Caption: Based on FairVote research, this is a state-by-state breakdown of all campaign events by the major-party presidential and vice presidential nominees from the end of both party conventions through Election Day. With a campaign season fought tooth and nail into the final day, Election Day has finally passed. More than 158 million Americans cast a ballot in the 2020 election, a record-breaking number that represents the highest turnout percentage of voting-age Americans in our…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/no_matter_the_candidate_who_wins_americans_lose_with_winner_take_all
https://thequietus.com/articles/24529-discogs-more-than-200-million-dollars Discogs has cracked the nut, struck the right balance, and is therefore an absolute Internet treasure– Thank you. If you don’t know them, Discogs is a central resource for the LP/78/CD music communities, and as Wikipedia said “As of 28 August 2019 Discogs contained over 11.6 million releases, by over 6 million artists, across over 1.3 million labels, contributed from over 456,000 contributor user accounts—with these figures constantly growing…” When I met the founder,…
Today’s links Ad-tech as a bubble overdue for a bursting: Upton Sinclair was an optimist. The largest strike in human history: The Shock Doctrine’s breaking-point. Soviet computing graveyard: Recovering a Saratov-2 from presumed extinction. This day in history: 2015, 2019 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming appearances, current writing projects, current reading Ad-tech as a bubble overdue for a bursting (permalink) In my book “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism” I point out that the claims for Big…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/
When I started writing music in in my teens, I didn’t even think about how to begin. I just did what every other starting writer does – I copied, emulated, plagiarized and otherwise ripped-off everything I’d enjoyed from the music I’d listened to thus far. Badly. Deprived of divine inspiration, it wouldn’t have been possible any other way. Show me a composer who hasn’t committed at least one of the above at some point and…
The coronavirus pandemic has thrown millions of Americans out of work — and over the past nine months, up to 20 million have filed for unemployment. Supplemental federal unemployment benefits of $600 per week — a lifeline for many — expired in July and more are set to go away at the end of the year if Congress doesn’t act. But beyond the economic consequences, not having that financial safety net can lead to serious health…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/losing-jobless-benefits-is-not-only-stressful/
The annual approval of the gargantuan U.S. military budget is one of the most reliable rituals in Congress. It is so ordinary and overwhelmingly bipartisan, it’s barely considered newsworthy, and few outlets follow the details of exactly how much the government is allocating to a nuclear weapons buildup, or deployments to the Asia Pacific, or the steady creep of U.S. military bases across the continent of Africa. Even under President Trump, when the Democratic leadership…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/congress-is-deadlocked-on-covid-19-relief/
Even though it’s only 26 words long, Section 230 doesn’t say what many think it does. So we’ve decided to take up a few kilobytes of the Internet to explain what, exactly, people are getting wrong about the primary law that defends the Internet. Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) is one of the most important laws protecting free speech online. While its wording is fairly clear—it states that “No provider or user of an…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/section-230-good-actually
Today the National Science Foundation released a pair of videos that document the collapse of the Arecibo Observatory with incredible detail. A wide shot, apparently taken from the Visitors Center, shows the 900 ton instrument platform breaking free and swinging on the remaining support cables until it smashes into the edge of the dish. The second clip, recorded by an airborne drone, is focused directly on the cables as they failed. Both can be seen…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/12/03/nsf-releases-video-of-arecibos-final-moments/
This week, the Internet Archive submitted a letter in response to a set of questions posed by Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) regarding potential reforms to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the law that provides a safe harbor against copyright liability for Internet services who abide by notice and takedown obligations. The Senator’s questions indicate that he is interested in potentially broad changes to not only the DMCA, but to copyright law more generally. His…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2020/12/03/internet-archive-responds-to-proposal-for-major-copyright-reform/
Enlarge / Sunset, by the Google empire. (credit: 400tmax | Getty Images) Google’s actions amid workplace organizing efforts, including the high-profile firings of several employees, were illegal violations of the National Labor Relations Act, federal regulators said this week. The National Labor Relations Board filed a formal complaint (PDF) against Google Wednesday, alleging that the company has been “interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees” to interfere with their protected concerted activity—workplace organization rights that are…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1727307
Even if the new bipartisan relief proposal does pass, it will be inadequate, forcing millions of Americans to rely on the generosity of family and strangers this winter. Millions of Americans are suffering, and our political leaders don’t care. Meals are prepared for people in need at the Thessalonica Christian Church in the Bronx, New York. (Photo by Spencer Platt / Getty Images) On Tuesday, after months of political paralysis, a bipartisan group of Senators…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/12/us-senate-coronavirus-relief-proposal-mutual-aid-winter/
Mesa 20.3 has been released as the Q4’2020 open-source graphics driver update, primarily around providing OpenGL and Vulkan support on the likes of Intel and AMD Radeon graphics along with the reverse-engineered Nouveau support, many smaller drivers especially in the embedded space, and the growing list of CPU-based implementations and other translation efforts…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-20.3-Released
Many of the smartphone apps people use every day are collecting data on their users and, in order to make money, many of these apps sell that information. One of the customers for this data is the U.S. government, which regularly purchases commercially available geolocation data. This includes the Department of Defense, CBP, ICE, the IRS, and the Secret Service. But it violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution for the government…
The first lab-grown, or cultured, meat product has been given the green light to be sold for human consumption. In the landmark approval, regulators in Singapore granted Just, a San Francisco–based startup, the right to sell cultured chicken—in the form of chicken nuggets—to the public. Just had been working with the regulators for the past two years and was formally granted approval on November 26. Singapore’s regulatory body assembled a panel of seven experts in…
Lab hopes improved tool will be used to craft new medicines faster DeepMind says its AlphaFold machine-learning software can now rapidly predict the structure of proteins with high accuracy, and could one day help us develop drugs faster.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/12/01/deepminds_protein_folding/