The Death of the Mind

Enlarge / A Starlink track running across the Andromeda galaxy. (credit: Caltech Optical Observatories/IPAC)
SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service will require a dense constellation of satellites to provide consistent, low-latency connectivity. The system already has over 1,500 satellites in orbit and has received approval to operate 12,000 of them. And that has astronomers worried. Although SpaceX has taken steps to reduce the impact of its hardware, there’s no way to completely eliminate the tracks the satellites leave across ground-based observations.
How bad is the problem? A team of astronomers has used archival images from a survey telescope to look for Starlink tracks over the past two years. Over that time, the number of images affected…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1826316

In October 2020, the RIAA caused outrage by taking down YouTube-ripping tool youtube-dl from GitHub.
The RIAA cited the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA, claiming that the tool could be used to download their artists’ musical works from YouTube, in breach of copyright.
With little supporting case law in the United States, the RIAA referenced a decision from the Hamburg Regional Court in a similar case, which found that YouTube’s “rolling cipher” should be considered an effective technological protection measure under EU law. Any attempt to circumvent it, therefore, would amount to infringement.
Nevertheless, GitHub later restored the software and placed $1m in a takedown defense fund.
Threats Were Also Sent to Others
While the RIAA’s effort to take down…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/major-record-labels-sue-youtube-dl-hosting-provider-220114/

I previously wrote about the issue of swap potentially breaking SSD [1]. My conclusion was that swap wouldn’t be a problem as no normally operating systems that I run had swap using any significant fraction of total disk writes. In that post the most writes I could see was 128GB written per day on a 120G Intel SSD (writing the entire device once a day).
My post about swap and SSD was based on the assumption that you could get many thousands of writes to the entire device which was incorrect. Here’s a background on the terminology from WD [2]. So in the case of the 120G Intel SSD I was doing over 1 DWPD (Drive Writes…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/01/16/ssd-endurance/

Washington D.C.—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked a federal appeals court to block enforcement of onerous copyright rules that violate the First Amendment and criminalize certain speech about technology, preventing researchers, tech innovators, filmmakers, educators, and others from creating and sharing their work.EFF, with co-counsel Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia yesterday to reverse a district court decision in Green v. DOJ, a lawsuit we filed in 2016 challenging the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) on behalf of security researcher Matt Green and technologist Andrew “bunnie” Huang. Both are pursuing projects highly beneficial to the public and perfectly lawful except…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-asks-appeals-court-rule-dmca-anti-circumvention-provisions-violate-first

On January 11, the Maine Green Party asked U.S. District Court Judge Lance Walker for the same ballot access relief that he had granted to the Libertarian Party, relative to petitions for candidates to get on primary ballots. See this … Continue reading →

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/01/12/maine-green-party-asks-u-s-district-court-for-same-ballot-access-relief-that-was-given-to-libertarians/

A survey of thousands of Kroger workers finds that while its executives rake in millions, homelessness and food insecurity are rampant among its workforce.
A grocery store worker rings up items at a Ralphs Supermarket in California. (Frederic J. BROWN / AFP via Getty Images) A survey of more than ten thousand workers at Kroger, the fourth-largest private employer in the United States, finds that homelessness and food insecurity are rampant among union grocery store employees lauded as essential throughout the pandemic. Among the respondents, who work at Kroger-owned stores in Southern California, Colorado, and Washington State, 14 percent have been homeless in the past year, 36 percent worry about eviction,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/report-survey-kroger-wages-grocery-store-workers-covid-working-conditions/

Back in October, I noted the huge amounts of money pouring into music copyrights, largely driven by the global rise of online streaming. Since then, that trend has continued, most notably with Bruce Springsteen’s sale of his recordings and songwriting catalogue to Sony, for a rumored $550 million. As I pointed out in the post, one of the problems with this “financialization” of the sector is that music copyrights become completely divorced from the original creativity that lies behind them. They become just another asset, like gold, petroleum or property. On the Open Future blog, Paul Keller has pointed out a plausible – and terrifying – consequence of this shift.

As Keller notes, the more the owners…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20220110/22495848263/how-financialization-music-could-lead-to-demands-perpetual-copyright.shtml

On January 10, New York Assemblymember John Salka introduced A8683. It reduces the number of signatures for statewide independent candidates, and the nominees of unqualified parties, from 45,000 to 15,000. It also cuts the number of votes for a party … Continue reading →

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/01/11/new-york-ballot-access-bill-introduced/

Read more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/pig-dies-waiting-for-transplant-heart-given-to-human-1848340574

Departure comes as app courts controversy by integrating private cryptocurrency scheme

Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of the Signal secure messaging app, on Monday announced his resignation as CEO of the company.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/01/11/signal_marlinspike_resigns/