Techdirt. – US Postal Service’s Social Media Surveillance Program Uses Clearview’s Facial Recognition Tech

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

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Hackaday – One Inkscape Plugin Collection To Rule Them All

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/

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Jacobin – Jeff Bezos Weaponizes the Washington Post Homepage

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/

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Planet Mozilla – Manifest v3 update

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/

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The Register – The Audacity: Audio tool finds new and exciting ways to annoy contributors with a Contributor License Agreement

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