Internet Archive Blogs – The CDL Lawsuit and the Future of Libraries

Oct 172022
 

https://www.loc.gov/item/2019642586/ It’s been over two years since a group of large book publishers sued the Internet Archive over our lending programs. After an expensive and lengthy discovery phase, arguments have now been fully briefed in the district court. What might we learn from the proceedings so far about how publishers see the future of libraries? The first thing we might learn is that the publishers want controlled digital lending declared illegal. At the time the lawsuit against us was filed, much of the commentary and analysis suggested that the case was really about the National Emergency Library–our emergency pandemic lending program. But while the NEL is certainly a part of the lawsuit, it did not take…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2022/10/17/the-cdl-lawsuit-and-the-future-of-libraries/

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Richard Stallman’s Political Notes – Proposed rule to classify Uber and Lyft drivers as employees

Oct 172022
 

Biden’s Labor Department has proposed an employment rule that would
classify the drivers of Uber and Lyft as employees.

This would be a big step forward for employee’s rights, but it won’t
do anything about the injustice of Uber and Lyft to the passengers:
making them nonfree software (an app) and identify themselves
(enabling surveillance). This should be forbidden.

So I will continue to get into an Uber or Lyft car. I go out of my
way to get a real taxi that I can board anonymously and pay with cash.
Or I take a bus. Or I walk.

In some places, such as New York City, even taxis are part of a
surveillance machine. A cab driver there told me that all NYC taxis
are…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-jul-oct.html#16_October_2022_(Proposed_rule_to_classify_Uber_and_Lyft_drivers_as_employees)

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Hackaday – Poly Keyboard has Screens in Every Key

Oct 172022
 

Aspiring polyglots can be stymied by differing keyboard layouts and character sets when switching between languages. [Thomas Pollak]’s Poly Keyboard circumvents this problem by putting a screen in every key of the keyboard.
In his extensive build logs, [Pollak] details the different challenges he’s faced while bringing this amazing keyboard to life. For example, the OLED screens need glyph rendering to handle the legends on the keys. Since the goal is true universal language support, he used the Adafruit-GFX Library as a beginning and was able to extend support to Japanese, Korean, and Arabic so far in his custom fork of QMK.
The attention to detail on this build is really impressive. Beside the dedication to full glyph…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/10/17/poly-keyboard-has-screens-in-every-key/

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Motherboard – Housing Advocates Release Database of Serial Evictors for Tenants

Oct 172022
 

On Tuesday, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP)—a data visualization project focused on documenting urban displacement and resistance—unveiled a new tool: the Evictorbook, a database of corporate landlords in San Francisco and Oakland that identifies evictors, their shell companies, additional rental properties, and eviction patterns. “As they did after the 2008 housing crash, investors and corporate landlords have taken advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to buy up housing across the country,” the team behind Evictorbook writes on its website. “This disproportionately harms communities of color and limits opportunities for homeownership. Evictorbook is a tool communities can use to combat the systemic racial and economic inequities within our housing system and ensure that housing is for people, not…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7bp4a/housing-advocates-release-database-of-serial-evictors-for-tenants

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– The Conversation – Home – What is Fog Reveal? A legal scholar explains the app some police forces are using to track people without a warrant

Oct 172022
 

The Rockingham County Sheriff’s Department in Wentworth, N.C., is among the law enforcement agencies the AP found using the Fog Reveal location tracking tool. AP Photo/Allen G. BreedGovernment agencies and private security companies in the U.S. have found a cost-effective way to engage in warrantless surveillance of individuals, groups and places: a pay-for-access web tool called Fog Reveal. The tool enables law enforcement officers to see “patterns of life” – where and when people work and live, with whom they associate and what places they visit. The tool’s maker, Fog Data Science, claims to have billions of data points from over 250 million U.S. mobile devices. Fog Reveal came to light when the Electronic Frontier…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theconversation.com/what-is-fog-reveal-a-legal-scholar-explains-the-app-some-police-forces-are-using-to-track-people-without-a-warrant-189944

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