Ars Technica – Lost something? Search through 91.7 million files from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s

Oct 182022
 

Enlarge / Search through millions of vintage files with Discmaster. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more. Discmaster opens a window into digital media culture around the turn of the millennium, turning anyone into a would-be digital archeologist. It’s a rare look into a slice of cultural history that is often obscured by the challenges of obsolete media and file format incompatibilities.
The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1890903

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Ballot Access News – North Carolina Files Brief in Lawsuit Over Composition of State Board of Elections

Oct 182022
 

North Carolina law says the State Board of Elections is composed of five members, all of whom must be a registered member of one of the two largest parties. The major party that holds the governorship gets three members, and the other large party gets two members. UPDATE: see this story.
For some time, independent voters and their allies have been trying to win a lawsuit that says it violates the U.S. Constitution that an independent can never be on the board. The first such lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed, and a new lawsuit was filed by Common Cause earlier this year. The State officials who are being sued filed a brief on October 14, arguing that the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/10/18/north-carolina-files-brief-in-lawsuit-over-composition-of-state-board-of-elections/

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Hackaday – Kodak Film Factory Revealed

Oct 182022
 

Anybody born before the mid 1990s will likely remember film cameras being used to document their early years.  Although the convenience of digital cameras took over and were then themselves largely usurped by mobile phones, there is still a surprising variety of photographic film being produced.  Despite the long pedigree, how many of us really know what goes into making what is a surprisingly complex and exacting product? [Destin] from SmarterEveryDay has been to Rochester, NY to find out for himself and you can see the second in a series of three hour-long videos shedding light on what is normally the strictly lights-out operation of film-coating.
Kodak’s first attempt at a digital camera in 1975. The form-factor…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/10/18/kodak-film-factory-revealed/

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Jacobin – Democrats Went All In on the January 6 Hearings. Voters Don’t Seem to Care.

Oct 182022
 

Recent polls suggest that the Democrats’ sidelining of economic issues to go all in on the Capitol riot hasn’t borne fruit. While voters are most concerned about inflation, they think the party’s main priority is January 6, which barely registers.
The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol on June 16, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) When the Democrats embarked on their January 6 media extravaganza earlier this year, there were two schools of thought.
If you read more Democratic-friendly press outlets, the series of sometimes-prime-time hearings were all part of a canny electoral strategy to fire up the party’s base, while also…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2022/10/democrats-january-6-hearings-capitol-riot-polls-economy-inflation/

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jwz – Copilot lawsuit

Oct 182022
 

We’re investigating a potential lawsuit against GitHub Copilot for violating its legal duties to open-source authors and end users:Here again we find Microsoft getting handwavy. In 2021, Nat Friedman claimed that Copilot’s “output belongs to the operator, just like with a compiler.” But this is a mischievous analogy, because Copilot lays new traps for the unwary.Microsoft characterizes the output of Copilot as a series of code “suggestions”. Microsoft “does not claim any rights” in these suggestions. But neither does Microsoft make any guarantees about the correctness, security, or extenuating intellectual-property entanglements of the code so produced. Once you accept a Copilot suggestion, all that becomes your problem. […]What entanglements might arise? Copilot users — here’s one…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/10/copilot-lawsuit/

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Motherboard – FTC Wants to Add Right to Repair to Existing Energy Saving Rules

Oct 182022
 

On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced it’s thinking about updating its energy labeling rules to require manufacturers to provide people with repair instructions. According to the press release on the FTC website, the commission wants to revise its energy-saving Energy Guide Rules, and is looking for public comment. “We look forward to hearing from the public on our initiative to reduce energy costs, promote competition, and strengthen repairability,” Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in the press release. “As prices rise, the Commission will continue to take aggressive action to protect consumers’ pocketbooks and strengthen their right to repair their own products.” You’ve probably seen the yellow label on…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7bxaa/ftc-energy-rules-right-to-repair

 2022-10-18  Comments Off on Motherboard – FTC Wants to Add Right to Repair to Existing Energy Saving Rules