Aug 312024
 

In the battle between Elon Musk and Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, the biggest losers are Brazilians. They are now at risk of being stripped of VPNs while facing massive fines if they somehow get around a countrywide ban on ExTwitter.
Yesterday, I wrote about the standoff between Elon Musk and Brazil, and how neither side comes out of it looking very good. Where it was left was that Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes was (1) freezing Starlink assets and (2) threatening to ban ExTwitter entirely from the country.
As we noted, there was nothing particularly new about the second point. Brazil has done this in the past with WhatsApp and Telegram. The freezing…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/30/brazil-bans-extwitter-in-battle-with-musk-takes-vpns-users-down-with-it/

 2024-08-31  No Responses »
Aug 312024
 

Georgia Democrats are about to sue the Secretary of State, to reverse the Secretary’s decision that puts Jill Stein, Cornel West, and Claudia De la Cruz on the ballot.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/08/30/georgia-democrats-in-process-of-suing-secretary-of-state-to-remove-minor-party-and-independent-presidential-candidates/

 2024-08-31  No Responses »
Aug 312024
 

Enlarge / A recall notice is posted next to Boar’s Head meats that are displayed at a Safeway store on July 31, 2024, in San Rafael, California. (credit: Getty | Justin Sullivan)
Federal inspections found 69 violations—many grisly—at the Boar’s Head meat facility at the center of a deadly, nationwide Listeria outbreak that has now killed nine people, sickened and hospitalized a total of 57 across 18 states, and spurred the nationwide recall of more than 7 million pounds of meat.
The Jarratt, Virginia-based facility had repeated problems with mold, water leaks, dirty equipment and rooms, meat debris stuck on walls and equipment, various bugs, and, at one point, puddles of blood on the floor,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2046499

 2024-08-31  No Responses »
Aug 312024
 

By Mike Feinstein. Advisor, Green Pages Editorial Board Phil Donahue – an American media personality, writer, film producer, and the creator and host of The Phil Donahue Show, passed away on August 18, 2024. During his storied career, Donahue had a special relationship with Ralph Nader and the Green Party. The first time the Green Party ever had an extended national TV presence in the United States was in February 1996, when 1996 Green presidential candidate Ralph Nader appeared on the Phil Donahue Show. The Green Party owes a great debt of gratitude to Phil Donahue for this unprecedented opportunity. This historic broadcast — and the legitimacy and momentum it gave to the Green…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://greenpagesnews.org/upon-the-passing-of-phil-donahue-phil-donahue-ralph-nader-and-the-green-party/

 2024-08-31  No Responses »
Aug 302024
 

It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication. For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry. A lot of things…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21542/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell

 2024-08-30  No Responses »
Aug 282024
 

On August 26, a Georgia Administrative Law Judge removed Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Jill Stein, Cornel West, and Claudia De la Cruz from the ballot.  See this story.
The administrative law judge said when presidential candidates seek to qualify by petition in Georgia, the true candidates are the candidates for presidential elector, and each elector needs his or her own petition.
He also said that Jill Stein can’t be on the ballot because it is impossible for her to prove that she is on the ballot in at least twenty other states or territories that have presidential electors.  This seems absurd, and would nullify the new law that allows presidential candidates to be on if their party is…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/08/26/georgia-administrative-law-judge-removes-jill-stein-robert-f-kennedy-jr-claudia-de-la-cruz-and-cornel-west-from-the-ballot/

 2024-08-28  No Responses »
Aug 272024
 

Hopper delivering the 1982 lectureU.S. Navy computer scientist and COBOL inventor Grace Hopper gave a famed lecture in 1982 that was recorded using an obsolete video medium for which no player now exists. Yesterday, the NSA posted it on its YouTube channel, reflecting years of demand for it to be made public and work by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to retrieve the footage: “NARA’s Special Media Department was able to retrieve the footage contained on two 1′ AMPEX tapes and transferred the footage to NSA to be reviewed for public release.” — Read the rest

The post NARA recovers famed 1982 Grace Hopper lecture recorded on obsolete media format appeared first on Boing Boing.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2024/08/27/nara-recovers-famed-1982-grace-hopper-lecture-recorded-on-obsolete-media-format.html

 2024-08-27  No Responses »
Aug 272024
 

Albuquerque’s Police Chief Says Cops Have a 5th Amendment Right To Leave Their Body Cameras Off Even more troubling, Medina said he “purposefully did not record because he was invoking his 5th Amendment right not to self-incriminate.” Since “he was involved in a traffic collision,” he reasoned, he was “subject to 5th Amendment protections.” Think about the implications of that argument. Body cameras are supposed to help document (and perhaps deter) police misconduct. But Medina is suggesting that cops have a constitutional right to refrain from recording their interactions with the public whenever that evidence could be used against them. By turning on their cameras in those situations, he argues, police could be incriminating themselves….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/08/today-in-acab-4/

 2024-08-27  No Responses »
Aug 272024
 

Crunchy Data is pleased to announce a new open source
pgMonitor Extension.
Crunchy Data has worked on a pgMonitor tool for several years as part of our
Kubernetes
and
self-managed Postgres
deployments and recently we’ve added an extension to the tool set.
Two primary scenarios motivated the creation of the pgMonitor extension :

Quicker Metrics: Monitoring metrics often need quick response times to
allow for frequent updates. We’ve noticed that certain metrics become slower
as the database grows. This impacts not only common metrics but also more
complex business metrics that could require several minutes to generate.
Version Compatibility: New PostgreSQL versions can break existing metrics
due to changes in the catalogs. Managing different metric sets for various
PostgreSQL versions is tedious and can be challenging.

Benefits of the pgMonitor extension
The…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/6Cc

 2024-08-27  No Responses »
Aug 272024
 

This article was originally published by The Legal Aid Society’s Decrypting a Defense Newsletter on August 5, 2024 and is reprinted here with permission.
Police departments and law enforcement agencies are increasingly collecting personal information using drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles. In addition to high-resolution photographic and video cameras, police drones may be equipped with myriad spying payloads, such as live-video transmitters, thermal imaging, heat sensors, mapping technology, automated license plate readers, cell site simulators, cell phone signal interceptors and other technologies. Captured data can later be scrutinized with backend software tools like license plate readers and face recognition technology. There have even been proposals for law enforcement to attach lethal and less-lethal weapons to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/backyard-privacy-age-drones

 2024-08-27  No Responses »
Aug 232024
 

When the Rev. Al Sharpton took the stage to introduce members of the Exonerated Five on the last night of the Democratic National Convention, it was, for the briefest moment, a nod toward a reality that the DNC had otherwise aggressively avoided: the myriad injustices of our criminal legal system. “Thirty-five years ago my friends and I were in prison for crimes we didn’t commit,” Korey Wise said. As teenagers, Wise, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Antron McCray were wrongly arrested, brutally interrogated, and imprisoned for the rape of a jogger in Central Park. Donald Trump notoriously spent tens of thousands of dollars on full-page ads in the New York Times calling to bring…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2024/08/23/dnc-democrats-death-penalty-executions/

 2024-08-23  No Responses »
Aug 222024
 

A few thousand protesters marched toward the site of the Democratic National Convention to voice their opposition to the war in Gaza, with activists hoping to amplify their progressive message before the nation’s top Democratic leaders. What do you think?

“If they really hated human rights abuses, they wouldn’t tempt the Chicago Police Department like this.”
Paul Bouis, Trombonist


“I prefer to have my convictions ignored from the comfort of home.”
Maggie Saam, Unemployed


“The DNC is hardly the place for political grandstanding.”
TJ Larios, Wax Molder

The post Thousands Of Pro-Palestinian Protesters Gather Outside DNC appeared first on The Onion.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theonion.com/thousands-of-pro-palestinian-protesters-gather-outside-dnc/

 2024-08-22  No Responses »
Aug 222024
 

Enlarge / The Recall feature provides a timeline of screenshots and a searchable database of text, thoroughly tracking everything about a person’s PC usage. (credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft will begin sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs beginning in October, according to an update published today to the company’s original blog post about the Recall controversy. The company didn’t elaborate further on specific changes it’s making to Recall beyond what it already announced in June. For those unfamiliar, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible PCs, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, scanning those screenshots with optical character recognition (OCR), and saving the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2044616

 2024-08-22  No Responses »
Aug 222024
 

Whack yakety-yak app chaps rapped for security crack

Updated  Slack AI, an add-on assistive service available to users of Salesforce’s team messaging service, is vulnerable to prompt injection, according to security firm PromptArmor.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/21/slack_ai_prompt_injection/

 2024-08-22  No Responses »
Aug 212024
 

Library Genesis (LibGen) is one of the oldest shadow libraries on the Internet, offering free access to millions of books and academic papers people otherwise have to pay for.
The site’s origins reportedly trace back to the Soviet Union’s underground publishing culture ‘samizdat,’ which was used to bypass state censorship in the last century.
LibGen launched around 2008 as a digital version of the same concept. In addition to bypassing ‘local’ censorship, it’s widely used to circumvent the paywalls of major international publishing companies, serving as a popular ‘pirate’ site for (text)books and academic works.
Rightsholders have attempted to take the site offline several times over the years, but none led to concrete results. Today, Libgen.rs, Libgen.is…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/popular-shadow-library-libgen-breaks-down-amidst-legal-troubles-240814/

 2024-08-21  No Responses »
Aug 202024
 

On August 17, the Seventh Circuit upheld Indiana’s petition requirement for statewide independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties.  Indiana Green Party v Morales, 23-2756.  The state required 44,935 signatures when the lawsuit was filed in 2022, and at the time Indiana had the nation’s highest percentage for presidential candidates running outside the major parties.  No one had used the petition since 2000.
However, due to low voter turnout in November 2022, the requirement (2% of the vote for Secretary of State) dropped to 36,944 signatures for the 2024 election. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. successfully met the requirement.  The Seventh Circuit therefore seemed to feel the requirement is not severe enough to be unconstitutional
Here is the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/08/19/seventh-circuit-upholds-indiana-petition-requirement-for-statewide-independent-petitions/

 2024-08-20  No Responses »
Aug 192024
 

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
The TV business isn’t just about selling TVs anymore. Companies are increasingly seeing viewers, not TV sets, as their most lucrative asset.
Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.
How did we get here? And what implications does an ad- and data-obsessed industry have for the future of TVs and the people watching them?Read 44 remaining paragraphs | Comments…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2027078

 2024-08-19  No Responses »
Aug 192024
 

One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe hooked up to the Internet, which meant you could literally connect into real, actual ancient hardware. I assure you that to a segment of the population, this is an irresistible proposition. It’s also, ultimately, one that even the most ardent fans of “how it was” will leaf away from, because mainframes are their own wacky old world, like using a taffy-pull…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5672

 2024-08-19  No Responses »
Aug 192024
 

On an x86 system the BIOS is the first part of the system to become active along with the basic CPU core(s) functionality, or so things used to be until Intel introduced its Management Engine (IME) and AMD its AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP). These are low-level, trusted execution environments, which in the case of AMD-SP involves a Cortex-A5 ARM processor that together with the Cryptographic Co-Processor (CCP) block in the CPU perform basic initialization functions that would previously have been associated with the (UEFI) BIOS like DRAM initialization, but also loading of encrypted (AGESA) firmware from external SPI Flash ROM. Only once the AMD-SP environment has run through all the initialization steps will the x86 cores…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/08/18/reverse-engineering-the-amd-secure-processor-inside-the-cpu/

 2024-08-19  No Responses »