The Death of the Mind

Consumer groups have grown all-too-politely annoyed at the Biden administration’s failure to pick a third Democratic Commissioner and permanent FCC boss nearly eight months into his term. After the rushed Trump appointment of unqualified Trump ally Nathan Simington to the agency (as part of that dumb and now deceased plan to have the FCC regulate social media), the agency now sits gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners under interim FCC head Jessica Rosenworcel.

While the FCC can still putter along tackling its usual work on spectrum and device management, the gridlock means it can’t do much of anything controversial, like reversing Trump-era attacks on basic telecom consumer protections, media consolidation rules, or the FCC’s authority to hold telecom giants…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211014/08532047746/gop-very-excited-to-be-handed-fcc-voting-majority-joe-biden.shtml

Instead of simply stopping its human rights abuses, the Israeli government has built an extensive and sophisticated public relations network across the West in order to protect itself from criticism.
Today, Lowkey speaks to one of the latest victims of that smear campaign, Professor David Miller. A prominent critic of the state of Israel’s policies, Miller was recently sacked from his position as Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, after a pressure campaign involving Zionist student groups and even members of parliament, who accused him of “inciting hatred against Jewish students.”
Miller, a graduate of the University of Glasgow Media Group, was appointed to his position at Bristol University in 2018. He also held positions at the University of Strathclyde…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/academic-david-miller-speaks-out-following-firing-israel-lobby-smear-campaign/

Today, Lowkey speaks to one of the latest victims of that smear campaign, Professor David Miller. A prominent critic of the state of Israel’s policies, Miller was recently sacked from his position as Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol, after a pressure campaign involving Zionist student groups and even members of parliament, who accused him of “inciting hatred against Jewish students.”

The post Academic David Miller Speaks Out Following Firing & Israel Lobby Smear Campaign appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://popularresistance.org/academic-david-miller-speaks-out-following-firing-israel-lobby-smear-campaign/

Dead-End SF Street Plagued With Confused Waymo Cars Trying To Turn Around ‘Every 5 Minutes’The visitors don’t just come at night. They come all day, right to the end of 15th Avenue, where there’s nothing else to do but make some kind of multi-point turn and head out the way they came in. Not long after that car is gone, there will be another, which will make the same turn and leave, before another car shows up and does the exact same thing. And while there are some pauses, it never really stops.”There are some days where it can be up to 50,” King says of the Waymo count. “It’s literally every five minutes. And we’re…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/10/how-much-more-terrifying-could-the-murderbots-be-waymo/

The quickest way to a warrantless search is obtaining consent. But consent obtained by officers isn’t always consent, no matter how it’s portrayed in police reports and court testimony. Courts have sometimes pointed this out, stripping away ill-gotten search gains when consent turned out to be [extremely air quotation marks] “consent.”

Such is the case in this court decision, brought to our attention by FourthAmendment.com. Language barriers are a thing, and it falls on officers of the law to ensure that those they’re speaking with understand clearly what they’re saying, especially when it comes to actions directly involving their rights.

It all starts with a stop. A pretextual one at that, as you can see by the narrative…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20211009/18253847725/court-says-google-translate-isnt-reliable-enough-to-determine-consent-search.shtml

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | d3sign)
Syniverse, a company that routes hundreds of billions of text messages every year for hundreds of carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T, revealed to government regulators that a hacker gained unauthorized access to its databases for five years. Syniverse and carriers have not said whether the hacker had access to customers’ text messages.
A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission last week said that “in May 2021, Syniverse became aware of unauthorized access to its operational and information technology systems by an unknown individual or organization. Promptly upon Syniverse’s detection of the unauthorized access, Syniverse launched an internal investigation, notified law enforcement, commenced remedial actions and engaged…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1801405

It is an unfortunate truth that libraries have long been called upon to censor or destroy knowledge—a topic we recently explored with Richard Ovenden, author of Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge. Indeed, Richard Ovenden has argued that, by standing against such attempts, libraries perform an essential function in support of democracy, the rule of law, and an open society. In the circumstances, it should be no surprise that libraries and librarians tend to react with some alarm to legislative proposals to censor or destroy information—no matter how well intentioned they may be. So it was with some alarm that Internet Archive Canada reviewed the Government of Canada’s latest proposals…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2021/10/01/internet-archive-canada-responds-to-canadas-wide-ranging-online-harms-proposal/