Two years ago Internet provider Cox Communications lost its legal battle against a group of major record labels.
Following a two-week trial, a Virginia jury held Cox liable for pirating subscribers which it failed to disconnect, ordering the company to pay $1 billion in damages.
Heavily disappointed by the decision, Cox asked the court to set the jury verdict aside and decide the issue directly. In addition, the ISP asked to lower the “shockingly excessive” damages or allow a new trial. All these efforts failed.
The court was initially open to lowering the amount because there were several overlapping copyrights at play. However, it later backtracked and confirmed the jury’s $1 billion judgment.
Cox Appeals
That was another setback for…
On Friday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released unscientific, politically motivated guidelines intended to justify school reopenings everywhere.
A very weak consumer data privacy bill is sailing through the Virginia legislature with backing from Microsoft and Amazon, which have both testified in support of the bill. The bill, SB 1392 and its companion HB 2307, are based on a Washington privacy law backed by tech giants that has threatened for two years to lower the bar for state privacy bills. If you’re a Virginia resident who cares about privacy, please submit a comment to the House Committee on Technology, Communications, and Innovation before it meets on Monday, Feb. 15.
EFF has long advocated for strong privacy legislation. Consumer privacy has been a growing priority for legislatures across the country since California in 2018 passed the…
Martin Gugino spent nearly a month in hospital after a Buffalo cop pushed him over, cracked his head on the pavement and left him to bleed there with a fractured skull. Though charged after the incident, officers Robert McCabe and Aaron Torgalski are off the hook: the charges have now been dropped. — Read the rest
A US appeals court has ruled that Customs and Border Protection agents can conduct in-depth searches of phones and laptops, overturning an earlier legal victory for civil liberties groups. First Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch declared that both basic and “advanced” searches, which include reviewing and copying data without a warrant, fall within “permissible constitutional grounds” at the American border.
Lynch ruled against a group of US citizens and residents objecting to invasive searches of their electronic devices. The group includes Sidd Bikkannavar, a NASA scientist who was detained and pressured to unlock a secure government-issued phone.
Enlarge / NASA originally studied nuclear thermal propulsion in the 1960s. Here is concept art for the Nuclear Energy for Rocket Vehicle Applications (NERVA) program. (credit: NASA)
Getting humans to Mars and back is rather hard. Insanely difficult, in fact. Many challenges confront NASA and other would-be Mars pioneers when planning missions to the red planet, but chief among them is the amount of propellant needed.
During the Apollo program 50 years ago, humans went to the Moon using chemical propulsion, which is to say rocket engines that burned liquid oxygen and hydrogen in a combustion chamber. This has its advantages, such as giving NASA the ability to start and stop an engine quickly, and the technology…
On February 12, the Federal Election Commission filed this brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Level the Playing Field v FEC, 20-649. This is the lawsuit over who can be included in general election presidential debates. … Continue reading →
I used to be a tea drinker, from age nineteen until sometime in my mids 20s, when I was seduced by the ease of just tossing some grounds and water into a machine and clicking brew to make some coffee, and just stopped drinking tea entirely for far too many years. I made the occasional attempt to grab a couple of tins and get back into it, but just always fell back to the ease of the coffee machine.
Eventually I got one of those fancy normal person 45-hour-a-week desk jobs, and had to wake up at normal person hours… and the extra ten minutes needed to steep tea instead of making enough coffee to give myself caffeine poisoning on a daily basis was just too much. So I just gave up entirely on trying to get back into tea for far too long. The thought of having to spend ten entire minutes heating up some water and steeping a pot of tea was just too much because mornings were absolute misery.
During the summer of 2018, I finally realized what I was doing to myself, and how many of my problems with irritability in the morning, constant exhaustion, being unable to get moving before the entire day was gone on the weekends, and taking hours to get ready when on the road and needing to go places to actually enjoy my brief mini-vacations had a common cause: drinking too much damn caffeine! I ordered a few packets of loose leaf tea, put the evil machine away, and forced myself to start drinking tea again.
The first months were rough: the amount of caffeine I had been consuming was pretty obscene, so I was even more exhausted and found focusing difficult. But eventually I made it through, and it’s been incredible. My resting heart rate is lower, I went from needing three or four 6oz cups of coffee just to not hate existence and be minimally awake to being able to grab a couple cups of tea and get moving (and nowadays, don’t even need caffeine in the morning at all, for the first time in over a decade), and when I’m on the road I can grab a half cup of coffee and be ready to go go go and enjoy life.
I do not have a problem.
And less than three years later, here I am with fourteen tins of tea again, just like in 2004/2005, and I finally feel like me again. I won’t claim to be a connoisseur now though, I just drink boring black teas (nothing like a hearty cup of Assam) because I still don’t have the patience to properly make green tea aside from the occasional cup of gunpowder green tea (very forgiving), and Oolongs are generally too expensive for me now (I know you can steep them over and over, but I’m still a bit lazy and I don’t find them so much better than it justifies the prices nowadays). But it’s something.
As President Biden gears up to give electric car buyers a federally subsidized discount, advocates are urging Congress not to forget the other electric vehicle that can do far more to save the planet: the humble electric bicycle. Congressional Bike Caucus Chairman Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jimmy Panetta (D-Calif.) are pushing the Electric Bicycle Incentive Kickstart for the Environment (E-BIKE) Act, which would offer Americans of all income levels a refundable 30-percent tax credit for purchasing a pedal-assist bicycle. Notably, the credit would be renewable every three years, and married people who wanted to each buy their own e-bike would both be able to take advantage of the program. The bill was applauded by advocates who think…
Academics, legal experts, and authors explained the thoughtful reasoning and compelling need for libraries to engage in Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) at a webinar hosted by the Internet Archive and Library Futures on February 11. A recording of the session is now available. The panel dispelled myths about CDL, the digital lending model in which a library lends a digital version of a print book it owns. Emphasizing the limited and controlled aspect of the practice, the speakers said CDL allows libraries to fulfill their mission of serving the public in the digital age. The global pandemic only underscores the importance of providing flexibility in how people can access information. Isn’t CDL digital piracy?…
2021-02-12Comments Off on Internet Archive Blogs – Mythbusting Controlled Digital Lending: Community Rallies to Fight Misinformation About the Library Practice
Greetings Programs,Some extensive XScreenSaver changes are coming, and I could use some volunteers willing to compile and test it on X11 systems. If you can help out, please email me.Beyond the usual, some things that are of particular interest, for test coverage: Unixen that are not Linux. Linuxen that are not Debian or Fedora. Multi-monitor setups, with vigorous hot-swapping. HiDPI monitors. PBP monitors (“two HDMI one cup”). Exotic PAM authentication methods, such as USB or Bluetooth fobs or fingerprint readers. Any PAM setup that prompts for more than one input. Exotic input devices: do you have a controller that does not present as key-press or mouse-motion? Interactions…
Just when we thought we’d seen it all in the infinity mirror department, [FieldCrafting] blazed a tiny, shiny new trail with their electroplated infinity mirror hair pin. We’d sure like to stick this in our French twist. Fortunately, [FieldCrafting] provided step-by-step instructions for everything from the 3D printing to the copper electroplating to the mirror film and circuitry application.
And what tiny circuitry it is! This pin is powered by a coin cell and even has a micro slider switch to conserve it. The stick parts are a pair of knitting needles, which is a great idea — they’re pointy enough to get through hair, but not so pointy that they hurt.
[FieldCrafting] was planning to solder 1206…
Larry Flynt, the pornographer who launched Hustler magazine in 1974 and became a fierce First Amendment activist, has died of heart failure. He was 78. Hustler was far more explicit than the likes of Playboy and one infamous issue featured an illustration of a woman going through a meat grinder. — Read the rest
On February 10, the Second Circuit refused to enjoin the new New York definition of a qualified political party. SAM Party of New York v Kosinski, 20-3047. Here is the twenty-page opinion, which was written by Judge Michael H. Park, a Trump appointee. It is also signed by Judge Robert D. Sack, a Clinton appointee, and Steven J. Menashi, a Trump appointee.
The new definition requires a party to poll 2% of the presidential vote to retain its qualified status. The decision says there are two state interests in the new, more difficult requirement: (1) to improve the chances that the winner will get a majority of the popular vote; (2) to save money, because the state…
Security researcher finds it’s easy to confuse build systems with malicious versions of private software libraries
Bug hunter Alex Birsan last year managed to compromise the software supply chain of 35 companies by exploiting packaging mechanisms used by JavaScript, Python, and Ruby developers.…
How do you rapidly record the output from your three million dollar analog computer in the 1940s when the results are only available on analog meters? The team responsible for the Westinghouse 1947 AC Network Calculator at Georgia Tech was faced with just this problem and came up with a nifty solution — hack the control panel and wire in a special-purpose drafting table.
What Is It?
What is this beast of a computer? Machines of this type were developed during and after World War 2, and strictly speaking, belong in the category of scale models rather than true computers. Although these machines were very flexible, they were primarily designed to simulate power distribution grids. There is a…
The recent announcement by Facebook that it would “reduce the amount of political content” on its platform is part of the drive by the US ruling establishment to block the spread of progressive, left-wing and socialist ideas on social media.
People should vote on paper, marking ballots with a pen. Then a
computerized machine can be used to count them. That machine should
not be able to alter them.
