The Death of the Mind

Eighty years ago today, Richard Winger was born. He is the foremost expert on ballot access in the United States today–and probably ever. He is a national treasure. A person who is irreplaceable by any measure. Please join me in … Continue reading →

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2023/08/27/happy-birthday-richard-winger/

On August 14th, DNA biometrics testing identified a body that was found on pilings in a Washington river a year ago, according to a release from the Cowlitz County Sheriff’s Office. It was too decomposed to conduct facial recognition or take fingerprints, the Tri-City Herald reports. Investigators partnered with Othram, a forensic genetic genealogy lab in Texas, which was able to identify the brother of the unidentified body. The brother confirmed the deceased man was 55-year old Bryan M. Heinrich Sr. based on a tattoo. While there was no foul play in this instance, the case raises questions about privacy concerns with the use of DNA databases in criminal investigations. By using a privacy loophole…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202308/gedmatch-loophole-allows-the-police-to-access-user-dna-without-their-consent

Readers have been pointing us to HashiCorp’s announcement
that it is moving to its own “Business Source License” for some of its
(formerly) open-source products. Like other companies (example) that have taken this path, HashiCorp
is removing the freedom to use its products commercially in ways that it
sees as competitive. This is, in a real sense, an old and tiresome story.

The lessons to be drawn from this change are old as well. One is to beware
of depending on any platform, free or proprietary, that is controlled by a
single company. It is a rare company that will not try to take advantage
of that control at some point.

The other is to beware of contributor license agreements. HashiCorp’s
agreement used
to read that it…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/941799/

Enlarge (credit: NicoElNino)
On Friday, the US Department of Energy announced that it chose the first two sites to host facilities that will pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and permanently store it underground. The sites in Louisiana and Texas will be funded by money set aside in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that was passed early in President Biden’s term in office. They represent a major step for the US, as they’re not linked to a specific source of carbon emissions, and the CO2 they capture won’t be used for extracting fossil fuels.
They also represent a major step globally, as each facility is expected to have 250 times the capacity of the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1960812

Legal strategies are being formed to prevent U.S. states from imposing new restrictions, including age-verification policies, on online publishers of adult content. Publishers don’t want more restrictions on their product, of course, but others say blocking content violates the nation’s constitutional right to create and consume information without undue government intervention. Others feel governments and other organizations will collect, keep and use identification data without consent or adequate security. Utah’s new law requiring adult sites to prove their visitors are not minors easily withstood its first court challenge this month when a lawsuit opposing the regulation was dismissed. The U.S. District Court judge ruled narrowly against advocates like Free Speech Coalition, an association promoting the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202308/mixed-start-for-privacy-advocates-fighting-us-age-verification-rules-for-adult-content

In 2020, publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley and Penguin Random House sued the Internet Archive (IA) for copyright infringement, equating its ‘Open Library’ to a pirate site.
IA’s library is a non-profit organization that scans physical books, which can then be lent out to patrons in an ebook format. Patrons can also borrow books that are scanned and digitized in-house, with technical restrictions that prevent copying.
Staying true to the centuries-old library concept, only one patron at a time can rent a digital copy of a physical book. These restrictions were temporarily loosened at the height of the Covid epidemic when IA launched the National Emergency Library.
Mass Copyright Infringement or Fair Use?
Patrons happily use the library but not…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/internet-archives-copyright-battle-with-publishers-leads-to-lending-restrictions-230813/

$ grep kermit /etc/services
kermit 1649/tcp

What is this mysterious protocol? Who uses it and what is its story?
This story is a winding one, beginning in 1981. Kermit is, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest actively-maintained software package with an original developer still participating. It is also a scripting language, an Internet server, a (scriptable!) SSH client, and a file transfer protocol.
And my first use of it was talking to my HP-48GX calculator over a 9600bps serial link. Yes, that calculator had a Kermit server built in.
But let’s back up and talk about serial ports and Modems.
Serial Ports and Modems
In my piece The PC & Internet Revolution in Rural America, I recently talked about getting a…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10555-try-the-last-internet-kermit-server

So, you’re doing some sync stuff.
But you also need to do some async stuff,
without making everything async.
Maybe the sync stuff is an existing application.
Maybe you still want to use your favorite sync library.
Or maybe you need just a little async,
without having to pay the full price.
Of course,
you can run a coroutine with asyncio.run(),
and blocking sync code from a coroutine with asyncio.to_thread(),
but the former isn’t granular enough,
and the latter doesn’t solve async code being at the top.
As always, there must be a better way.

Maybe something like this?
async def do_stuff(i): return i * 2 async def generate_stuff(i): for n in range(i): yield n runner = ThreadRunner()
print(runner.run(do_stuff(2))) # 8
print(*runner.wrap_iter(generate_stuff(4))) # 0 1 2 3

Now, it would take a long…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://death.andgravity.com/asyncio-bridge