May 302021
 

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themselves been archived up for posterity at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/

 2021-05-30  Comments Off on see shy jo – the end of the olduse.net exhibit
May 302021
 

It may seem overwrought, but The Drama of Metal Forming actually is pretty dramatic.
This film is another classic of mid-century corporate communications that was typically shown in schools, which the sponsor — in this case Shell Oil — seeks to make a point about the inevitable march of progress, and succeeds mainly in showing children and young adults what lay in store for them as they entered a working world that needed strong backs more than anything.
Despite the narrator’s accent, the factories shown appear to be in England, and the work performed therein is a brutal yet beautiful ballet of carefully coordinated moves. The sheer power of the slabbing mills at the start of the film…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/29/retrotechtacular-the-drama-of-metal-forming/

 2021-05-30  Comments Off on Hackaday – Retrotechtacular: The Drama of Metal Forming
May 302021
 

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

 2021-05-30  Comments Off on Boing Boing – Multiplayer deathmatch Joust
May 292021
 

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…

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

 2021-05-29  Comments Off on see shy jo – Joey Hess: the end of the olduse.net exhibit
May 282021
 

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

 2021-05-28  Comments Off on Techdirt. – US Postal Service’s Social Media Surveillance Program Uses Clearview’s Facial Recognition Tech
May 282021
 

Inkscape is an amazing piece of open source software, a vector graphics application that’s a million times more lightweight than comparable commercial offerings while coming in at the low, low price of free. The software also has plenty of extensions floating around on the Internet, though until now, they haven’t been organised particularly well. The MightyScape project aims to solve that, putting a bunch of Inkscape plugins into one useful release.
The current MightyScape release has a whole bunch of useful stuff inside, for tasks as varied as laser cutting, 3D printing, vinyl cutting, as well as improvements on areas where Inkscape is a bit weak out of the box – like CAD, geometry and patterning. The…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/27/one-inkscape-plugin-collection-to-rule-them-all/

 2021-05-28  Comments Off on Hackaday – One Inkscape Plugin Collection To Rule Them All
May 282021
 

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/

 2021-05-28  Comments Off on Jacobin – Jeff Bezos Weaponizes the Washington Post Homepage
May 282021
 

Two years ago, Google proposed Manifest v3, a number of foundational changes to the Chrome extension framework. Many of these changes introduce new incompatibilities between Firefox and Chrome. As we previously wrote, we want to maintain a high degree of compatibility to support cross-browser development.  We will introduce Manifest v3 support for Firefox extensions. However, we will diverge from Chrome’s implementation where we think it matters and our values point to a different solution.
For the last few months, we have consulted with extension developers and Firefox’s engineering leadership about our approach to Manifest v3. The following is an overview of our plan to move forward, which is based on those conversations.
High level changes

In our initial response…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2021/05/27/manifest-v3-update/

 2021-05-28  Comments Off on Planet Mozilla – Manifest v3 update
May 282021
 

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/

 2021-05-28  Comments Off on The Register – The Audacity: Audio tool finds new and exciting ways to annoy contributors with a Contributor License Agreement
May 222021
 

How many instructions do you need to successfully compile C code? Let’s see, you’d need some jump instructions, some arithmetic functions, and — of course — move instructions, right? Turns out you only need the move instruction, which — on x86, at least — is Turing complete.
While the effort is a bit tongue-in-cheek, we have to admit that if you were trying to create your own CPU, this would make for a simple architecture and might have power or complexity advantages, so maybe someone will find a practical use for it after all. If you wanted a C compiler for a simple CPU, this wouldn’t require much to emulate at a byte-code level, either.

How does it…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2021/05/21/one-instruction-to-rule-them-all-c-compiler-emits-only-mov/

 2021-05-22  Comments Off on Hackaday – One Instruction to Rule Them All: C Compiler Emits only MOV
May 222021
 

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

 2021-05-22  Comments Off on Planet KDE – This week in KDE: KCommandBar delivers ludicrous-mode productivity
May 222021
 

 
Emily Wilder, fired by AP after 16 days on the job. (photo: Angel Mendoza)
Emily Wilder had thought she’d hit it big. After interning at the Arizona Republic, she earned a newsroom assistant job at the Phoenix bureau of the Associated Press, starting May 3. It wouldn’t last long. 
Several right-wing organizations, including the Federalist (5/19/21) and Washington Free Beacon (5/18/21) outlets, attacked the news service over Wilder’s previous affiliation with Students for Justice in Palestine, when she was an undergraduate at Stanford University. AP, which recently had its office in Gaza destroyed by Israeli missile fire, bowed to the pressure (Washington Post, 5/20/21).
The News Media Guild, the union representing AP staff, said it was investigating Wilder’s firing…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://fair.org/home/ap-firing-shows-right-wing-hypocrisy-illusion-of-objectivity/

 2021-05-22  Comments Off on CounterSpin – AP Firing Shows Right-Wing Hypocrisy, Illusion of ‘Objectivity’
May 222021
 

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

 2021-05-22  Comments Off on The Onion – Adult Kickball League Great Way To Meet Other People Who Are Entirely Out Of Options
May 212021
 

As always, takedowns happen in seconds, and the appeals are processed in just as timely a fashion — only 1,602 days this time. Fifty-three months!

From: Instagram <no-reply@mail.instagram.com>
Subject: Your video has been re-posted
Date: Fri, 21 May 2021 11:43:29 -0700

We received your appeal and re-posted the video you originally shared at 1:25 PM on December 31, 2016.

View Video

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/05/fucking-facebook-4/

 2021-05-21  Comments Off on jwz – Fucking Facebook
May 212021
 

 
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/

 2021-05-21  Comments Off on CounterSpin – The New Podcast Oligopoly
May 212021
 

In 2018, LWN covered a talk by Gernot
Heiser
about the seL4 project, which has developed an open-source
operating system for safety-critical applications and gone to the trouble
of proving its correctness. Much of that work has been done at CSIRO in
Australia. Heiser has announced
via Twitter that CSIRO’s support for this project is being shut down, with
the staff being redirected to artificial-intelligence projects. Hopefully the seL4 Foundation, established in
2020, will be able to carry on this interesting work.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/856934/rss

 2021-05-21  Comments Off on LWN.net – CSIRO’s seL4 project shut down
May 212021
 

GAZA CITY — Dr. Khaled Harazeen described the scene at al-Shifa Hospital in the occupied Gaza Strip as “catastrophic.”
“We are already working within extreme limitations and now we face dozens of victims at a time,” he told The Intercept. “We try our best to triage the cases, but there are so many wounded. The end result is a lot of deaths and an unbearable load on the medical staff.” Harazeen added, “We are shattered.”
Leading up to the ceasefire announced on Thursday evening, the medical professionals of Gaza’s main hospital had worked around the clock for more than a week to treat the soaring number of war injuries inflicted by Israeli airstrikes — nearly 2,000 in only 10…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2021/05/21/gaza-bombing-hospital-israel/

 2021-05-21  Comments Off on The Intercept – Israel Attacks on Gaza Left Strained Health Care System in Tatters
May 192021
 

Several readers have alerted us to some serious problems at freenode, which runs an IRC network that
is popular in the free-software world. Evidently there has been a change
of control within the volunteer-run organization that has led to the
resignations of multiple different volunteers, at least in part due
to a concern about the personal information of freenode users under the new
management. “The
freenode resignation FAQ” has collected a bunch of information (and
links to even more resignation letters) that may help shed some light on this mess.
From the FAQ: “Freenode staff have stepped down. The network that
runs at freenode.org/net/com should now be assumed to be under control of a
malicious party.”
In the meantime, many of the volunteers who resigned have formed…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/856543/rss

 2021-05-19  Comments Off on LWN.net – Upheaval at freenode
May 112021
 

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

 2021-05-11  Comments Off on World Socialist Web Site (en) – Israel kills 24 in Gaza as Netanyahu steps up provocations on Jerusalem Day
May 112021
 

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

 2021-05-11  Comments Off on World Socialist Web Site (en) – Israel kills 20 in Gaza as Netanyahu steps up provocations on Jerusalem Day