The Death of the Mind

Ten years ago I began
the olduse.net exhibit,
spooling out Usenet history in real time with a 30 year delay.
My archive has reached its end, and ten years is
more than long enough to keep running something you cobbled together
overnight way back when. So, this is the end for olduse.net. The site will continue running for another week or so, to give you time to
read the last posts. Find the very last one, if you can! The source code used to run it, and the content of the website have
themselves been archived up for posterity at
The Internet Archive. Sometime in 2022, a spammer will purchase the domain, but not find it to be
of much value. The Utzoo archives that…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/the_end_of_the_olduse.net_exhibit/

joust.life is where you may engage in multiplayer deathmatch Joust. Just jump in and start bouncing and jousting around. It’s Joust, but feels weirdly like playing Defender after the planet explodes. Remember: higher wins. At Hacker News, creator Jason Kester writes:

Most of this code dates back to 1998, when I built a little 2 player Joust game to push the bounds of what you could do with Div (and at the time Layer) tags in the latest browsers such as IE4 and Netscape 3.

— Read the rest

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2021/05/29/multiplayer-deathmatch-joust.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=multiplayer-deathmatch-joust

Late last month, it was discovered the United States Postal Service was operating a social media surveillance program. The “why” of this was never explained. Apparently, the USPS has time and money to blow, so it has something called an “Internet Covert Operations Program” (iCOP) which it uses to investigate crimes that definitely are not of a postal nature.

According to the two-page bulletin first reported on by Yahoo News, iCOP was trawling social media looking for “threats.” And the “threats” observed in the report shared with the DHS and its many, many (mostly useless) “Fusion Centers” was that the threats weren’t credible.

Great, I guess, but why is the Postal Service surveilling communications that aren’t being sent…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210522/12130546847/us-postal-services-social-media-surveillance-program-uses-clearviews-facial-recognition-tech.shtml

The Washington Post’s website — owned, of course, by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — became a giant native ad Tuesday for Amazon. Bezos is using the paper as his personal megaphone to push back against criticism over wages and working conditions.
Jeff Bezos using native advertising on the homepage of the Amazon website to portray itself as a devoted supporter of a higher federal minimum wage. (Daniel Oberhaus, 2019 / Flickr) A few years after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, he said it was because it “is the newspaper in the capital city of the most important country in the world” and “has an incredibly important role to play in this…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/washington-post-jeff-bezos-amazon-minimum-wage-native-advertising/

Is that a tuning Fork we hear?

The saga of the Audacity takeover continued this week with the announcement of a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) by the project’s new owners.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/05/27/audacity_cla/

This week I have another exciting new UI element to present: KCommandBar! You might have gotten the impression by my fawning over KHamburgerMenu that we care more about casual or novice users today… not so! KCommandBar is an expert-focused UI element implementing a HUD-style popup that aggregates all of the actions in a KDE app’s full menu structure, so that you can quickly activate features at the speed of thought! It’s like a KRunner inside your apps. You can also use it as a search, if you think a feature may exist somewhere but you don’t know where.
Hmm, does kate have a Block Selection mode? How do I activate it?

Oh, like that!
Notice how it shows you…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://pointieststick.com/?p=8531

CHICAGO—Excited about his final opportunity to make friends as an adult before surrendering to a life of solitude, local man Josh Kelly reported Friday that the adult kickball he joined would be a great way to meet other people who are entirely out of options. “It feels good to do something different and meet some…

Read more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/adult-kickball-league-great-way-to-meet-other-people-wh-1846940382

 
iHeart Media‘s purchase of design podcast 99% Invisible means that the canary in the coalmine just died.
In the past couple of years, two high-profile acquisitions of podcast companies have produced a whirlwind of think pieces from the media press. Forbes (12/4/20) prophesied that Amazon’s 2020 purchase of podcast publisher Wondery put the industry “on a Path to a Crossroads.” And a Poynter headline (2/7/19) proclaimed Spotify’s 2019 purchase of celebrated commercial podcast network Gimlet Media “could change podcasting’s future.”
But that future has already arrived. In a largely ignored story last year, Liberty Media, a conglomerate that already owns SiriusXM radio and the audio streaming and podcast platform Pandora, secured the right to a 50% stake in…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://fair.org/home/the-new-podcast-oligopoly/

Around 1,000 security forces stormed the al-Aqsa Mosque compound in East Jerusalem and attacked worshippers with stun grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets, injuring more than 330 Palestinians.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/05/11/isra-m11.html