I always appreciate the payphone’s community-contributed stickers.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/04/hard/
Apr 292023
2023-04-29
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Apr 292023
After his death earlier this week, the whole world is remembering Jerry Springer’s trashy talk show. But nobody is talking about Springer’s 2004 role as an antiwar US president who took on the military-industrial complex and won.
Jerry Springer attends the Galaxy British Book Awards at Grosvenor House Hotel on April 3, 2009 in London, United Kingdom. (Danny Martindale / Getty Images) Jerry Springer, who died this past week at the age of seventy-nine, might end up being remembered for being a lot of things: the disgraced city councilman who paid for sex with a check; the Cincinnati mayor with a social conscience who once said, “if a man has five…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/jerry-springer-the-defender-movie-war-on-terror-us-foreign-policy/
2023-04-29
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Apr 292023
To call what’s happening in the oceans right now an anomaly is a bit of an understatement. Since March, average sea surface temperatures have been climbing to record highs, as shown in the dark line in the graph below.
(credit: Sean Birkel/University of Maine)
Since this record-keeping began in the early 1980s—the other squiggly lines are previous years—the global average for the world’s ocean surfaces has oscillated seasonally between 19.7° and 21° Celsius (67.5° and 69.8° Fahrenheit). Toward the end of March, the average shot above the 21° mark and stayed there for a month. (The most recent reading, for April 26, was just a hair under 21°.) This temperature spike is not just unprecedented, but…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1935397
2023-04-29
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Apr 282023
‘Reject this capitalist logic’ urges French legion within Linux slinger
Exclusive Red Hat’s decision to lay off around 800 people, or four percent of the company, has not only upset employees, it’s fueled calls to unionize.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/red_hat_layoffs_union/
2023-04-28
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Apr 282023
Sometimes, finding new ways to use old hardware requires awesome feats of reverse engineering, software sleight of hand, and a healthy dose of good fortune. Other times, though, it’s just as simple as reading the data sheet and paying attention to details.
Not that we’re knocking [upir]’s accomplishment with these tricked-out 16×2 OLED displays. Far from it, in fact — the smoothly animated bar graph displays alphanumerics look fantastic. What’s cool about this is that he accomplished all this without resorting to custom characters. We’ve seen him use this approach before; this time around, the hack involves carefully shopping for a 16×2 OLED display with the right driver chip — a US2066 chip. You’ll still need a…
2023-04-28
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Apr 282023
From the early days of ARPANET until the dawn of the World Wide Web (WWW), the internet was primarily the domain of researchers, teachers and students, with hobbyists running their own BBS servers you could dial into, yet not connected to the internet. Pitched in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN, the WWW was intended as an information management system that’d provide standardized access to information using HTTP as the transfer protocol and HTML and later CSS to create formatted documents inspired by the SGML standard. Even better, it allowed for WWW forums and personal websites to begin to pop up, enabling the eternal joy of web rings, animated GIFs and forums on any…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/27/the-modern-www-or-where-do-we-want-to-go-from-here/
2023-04-28
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Apr 272023
Enlarge / Chesapeake Bay is subsiding up to 5 millimeters a year, greatly exacerbating sea-level rise. It’s a growing problem up and down the Atlantic coast. (credit: Marli Miller/Getty Images)
Climate scientists already know that the East Coast of the United States could see around a foot of sea-level rise by 2050, which will be catastrophic on its own. But they are just beginning to thoroughly measure a “hidden vulnerability” that will make matters far worse: The coastline is also sinking. It’s a phenomenon known as subsidence, and it’s poised to make the rising ocean all the more dangerous, both for people and coastal ecosystems.
New research published in the journal Nature Communications finds…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1934883
2023-04-27
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Apr 272023
If you want to test a free platform’s ability to protect content over the long haul, here’s a fun test: Upload an image, post it somewhere, then wait a decade to see if it sticks around. Odds are, it won’t. Which is why, perhaps, it’s not totally surprising to learn that Imgur, a popular photo-uploading service that has been informally tied to Reddit since its 2009 founding, will remove two types of content from its platform starting next month: explicit or pornographic imagery, and images uploaded anonymously—the latter with a lean on unused images, according to the company. While technically banned from Imgur for years through its community rules, adult content hasn’t been actively removed (and…
2023-04-27
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Apr 272023
Senator Brian Schatz is one of the more thoughtful Senators we have, and he and his staff have actually spent time talking to lots of experts in trying to craft bills regarding the internet. Unfortunately, it still seems like he still falls under the seductive sway of this or that moral panic, so when the bills actually come out, they’re perhaps more thoughtfully done than the moral panic bills of his colleagues, but they’re still destructive.
His latest is… just bad. It appears to be modeled on a bunch of these age verification moral panic bills that we’ve seen in both red states and blue states, though Schatz’s bill is much closer to the red state version…
2023-04-27
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Apr 272023
Clear has already seen success in the travel sector with its biometric authentication being used to streamline check-ins and security screening. Now, the company wants to expand into other industries, such as health and social media. It is still growing in travel, however. Pittsburgh International Airport is deploying Clear infrastructure. The airport is getting a $600,000 upfront payment from and a 10 percent revenue share from Alclear, maker of Clear, over a five-year contract. Clear is designed to enable enrolled travelers to bypass manual identification checks and instead walk directly to the front of the Transportation Security Administration screening line, the airport says. Membership in Clear costs about $16 per month, and confers priority screening….
2023-04-27
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Apr 272023
Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the company behind both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic The Gathering has been on our pages recently and not for good reasons. Most recently, the company kicked up a completely unnecessary shitstorm for itself by changing the OGL license under which it released D&D Fifth Edition in such a way that it essentially kneecapped the wider community’s ability to create off of the base content, as the community had for years and years. The public response to that change was almost universally negative.
But if that was bad, imagine what the response will be to WotC sending the literal Pinkerton Agency after a YouTuber who revealed a bunch of Magic The Gathering…
2023-04-27
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Apr 262023
“A Critical Division of Starfleet Intelligence” There’s no precedent for it in the franchise; nothing that its backstory is needed to unpack or explain. Indeed, it makes the whole thing more inexplicable: societies with unchecked, unaccountable black ops and secret police forces do not, typically, resemble paradises even on a surface level — something that DS9 itself readily understood when it came to worldbuilding for the Cardassians. […] But one can, perhaps, forgive DS9 this particular indulgence; it came in the midst of a larger arc about what happens when you throw Gene Roddenberry’s humanist utopia into a major war, and it can be read in the context of that story: To what extent is…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/04/section-31-and-the-normalization-of-the-security-state/
2023-04-26
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Apr 262023
I just attended my fifth in-person conference of 2023, four of them PostgreSQL focused. I look forward to attending more in the coming months to share and learn about the platform, meet more community members, and continue to invest however I can. Unfortunately, between these conferences, several recent blogs, and the general attitude towards PostgreSQL … Continue reading “In defense of PostgreSQL MVCC and Vacuuming”
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5JJ
2023-04-26
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Apr 262023
There’s a bit of Linux kernel code for AMD Zen 2 processors called the “spectral chicken” and a call for cleaning up that code, which was originally written by an Intel Linux engineer, has been rejected…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-AMD-Spectral-Chicken
2023-04-26
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Apr 242023
The California Court of Appeal has held that a geofence warrant seeking information on all devices located within several densely-populated areas in Los Angeles violated the Fourth Amendment. This is the first time an appellate court in the United States has reviewed a geofence warrant. The case is People v. Meza, and EFF filed an amicus brief and jointly argued the case before the court.
Geofence warrants, which we have written about extensively before, are unlike typical warrants for electronic information because they don’t name a suspect and are not even targeted to specific individuals or accounts. Instead, they require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or…
2023-04-24
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Apr 242023
The California Court of Appeal has held that a geofence warrant seeking information on all devices located within several densely-populated areas in Los Angeles violated the Fourth Amendment. This is the first time an appellate court in the United States has reviewed a geofence warrant. The case is People v. Meza, and EFF filed an amicus brief and jointly argued the case before the court.
Geofence warrants, which we have written about extensively before, are unlike typical warrants for electronic information because they don’t name a suspect and are not even targeted to specific individuals or accounts. Instead, they require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or…
2023-04-24
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Apr 212023
A new U.S. Senate bill introduced this week threatens security and free speech on the internet. EFF urges Congress to reject the STOP CSAM Act of 2023, which would undermine the viability of services offering end-to-end encryption, and force internet companies to take down lawful user content.
The bill is aimed at removing from the internet child sexual abuse material (CSAM), also known as child pornography. Existing law already requires online service providers who have actual knowledge of “apparent” CSAM on their platforms to report that content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which is essentially a government entity. NCMEC then forwards actionable reports to law enforcement agencies for investigation.
The STOP…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/stop-csam-act-would-put-security-and-free-speech-risk
2023-04-21
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Apr 202023
Video editor Ewzzy Rayburn discovered the concealed gag in the 1992 Simpsons episode “The Otto Show.” In this episode, Homer’s tinnitus drowns out Marge’s words, leaving viewers uncertain about her dialogue. Rayburn carefully examined the audio and managed to isolate Marge’s line. — Read the rest
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2023/04/19/lost-simpsons-joke-recovered-by-pro-editor.html
2023-04-20
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Apr 202023
tl;dr
The Rust Foundation’s proposed new trademark policy is far too restrictive, and will cause (more) drama unless it is substantially revised.Process
Substance
Values
Next steps
Echoes of a dispute from 2006Process
“Rust” is a trademark owned by the Foundation.
The Rust Foundation still seems to be finding its feet. Evidently, one of the items on its backlog was to update the trademark policy. Apparently they have been working on this for some time, in an informal working group.
In August, there was a survey. (I saw it in This Week In Rust, the community-curated newsletter where most important stuff appears, and responded.) I don’t think the results of this survey have been published anywhere.
Last week (12th April) the Foundation published an official Inside…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/14929.html
2023-04-20
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Apr 202023
You know you’re fucked when the only way out of your current SEO/PR nightmare is to distance yourself… well, from yourself. Some of this predates Google’s search engine stranglehold. But altering public perception sometimes means hoping someone will look at your shiny new logo, rather than your disturbing past.
After killing innocent people while providing security to government forces in Iraq in 2007, Blackwater rebranded several times, hoping to keep one step ahead of negative news cycles. It became Xe Services in 2009, Academi in 2011, and — after a merger with Triple Canopy (another private security firm) — Constellis.
The same thing happened with Taser. Taser — named after its foremost product (itself a loose acronym for…
2023-04-20
Comments Off on Techdirt. – ShotSpotter Attempts To Memory Hole Itself, Rebrands As ‘SoundThinking’