Ballot Access News – Qualified Parties in Maryland for 2026 are Democratic, Republican, Green, and No Labels

Nov 072024
 

Maryland now has four qualified parties, one fewer than before the election. The Green Party and the No Labels Party continue to be qualified, but the Libertarian Party went off the ballot for failing to poll 1% for President.
The Green Party and the No Labels Party each petitioned in 2024, and when a party petitions in Maryland, it gets the next two elections. The Green Party polled over 1% of the vote for president this year anyway, so it qualified two ways. But when a party polls 1% for President or Governor, it only gets one more election, so the Green Party’s accomplishment of getting over 1% for Jill Stein didn’t actually make a difference.
Under Maryland…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/11/06/qualified-parties-in-maryland-for-2026-are-democratic-republican-green-and-no-labels/

 2024-11-07  No Responses »

Techdirt. – Facial Recognition Firm Announces Way To Punish Retail Workers, Shoppers For Forming Relationships

Nov 062024
 

You stroll into your favorite food-jobber, looking to pick up a few things on your way home from work. Lots of people are on their way home from work. There are lines at every register and someone is in the self-checkout with $600-worth of groceries, beginning what will eventually become a 30-minute stop-start process that could have been handled in a five minutes by even the most incompetent cashier.
That’s when you start considering your options. Do you take the slightly shorter line manned by yet another interchangeable teen who is only working a register because the manager scrambled help to the front — one who would otherwise just be at the back of the store milking…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/06/facial-recognition-firm-announces-way-to-punish-retail-workers-shoppers-for-forming-relationships/

 2024-11-06  No Responses »

Hackaday – Zinc Creep and Electroplasticity: Why Arecibo Collapsed

Nov 062024
 

It’s been nearly four years since the Arecibo Telescope collapsed, an event the world got to witness in unprecedented detail thanks to strategically positioned drones. They captured breathtaking video of one of the support cables pulling from its socket as well as the spectacularly destructive results of 900 tons of scientific instruments crashing into the 300-meter primary reflector. But exactly why did those cable sockets fail?
A new report aims to answer that question, and in the process raises some interesting questions of its own. The proximate causes of the collapse have been known for a while, including the most obvious and visible one, the failure of the zinc “spelter sockets” that were cast around the splayed…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/11/05/zinc-creep-and-electroplasticity-why-arecibo-collapsed/

 2024-11-06  Comments Off on Hackaday – Zinc Creep and Electroplasticity: Why Arecibo Collapsed

Ballot Access News – 2024 is First Presidential Election in History in Which Ballot-Listed Candidates Can’t Have Votes Tallied

Nov 052024
 

This year, Georgia and Ohio ballots have presidential candidates on them, for whom votes will not be counted. This has never happened before in any state in the United States. In Georgia, after the ballots were printed, the State Supreme Court said the petitions for Claudia De la Cruz and Cornel West were invalid. In Ohio, after the ballots were printed, the Secretary of State said Jill Stein had accidentally withdrawn. So, in both states, voters will see names on the ballot but if they vote for those names, their vote won’t be counted.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/11/04/2024-is-first-presidential-election-in-history-in-which-ballot-listed-candidates-cant-have-votes-tallied/

 2024-11-05  Comments Off on Ballot Access News – 2024 is First Presidential Election in History in Which Ballot-Listed Candidates Can’t Have Votes Tallied

Deeplinks – EFF Lawsuit Discloses Documents Detailing Government’s Social Media Surveillance of Immigrants

Nov 052024
 

Despite rebranding a federal program that surveils the social media activities of immigrants and foreign visitors to a more benign name, the government agreed to spend more than $100 million to continue monitoring people’s online activities, records disclosed to EFF show.
Thousands of pages of government procurement records and related correspondence show that the Department of Homeland Security and its component Immigrations and Customs Enforcement largely continued an effort, originally called extreme vetting, to try to determine whether immigrants posed any threat by monitoring their social media and internet presence. The only real change appeared to be rebranding the program to be known as the Visa Lifecycle Vetting Initiative.
The government disclosed the records to EFF after we…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/11/eff-lawsuit-discloses-documents-detailing-governments-social-media-surveillance

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World Socialist Web Site (en) – DSA-backed “Uncommitted Movement” received nearly half a million dollars from pro-Democratic Party Super PAC

Nov 052024
 

Far from a “grassroots” operation, the “Uncommitted” trap was controlled and financed from the beginning by party operatives seeking to divert mass anger over the genocide in Gaza back into the Democratic Party.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/11/05/eyid-n05.html

 2024-11-05  Comments Off on World Socialist Web Site (en) – DSA-backed “Uncommitted Movement” received nearly half a million dollars from pro-Democratic Party Super PAC

The Onion – Neuralink Patient Unable To Stop Hand From Voting For Trump

Nov 052024
 

DOYLESTOWN, PA—Expressing concern about his inability to control his own body, local Neuralink brain-implant patient Emmett Shultz told reporters Tuesday that he was unable to stop his right hand from casting a vote for former President Donald Trump. “As soon as I entered the voting booth, my hand lurched forward and marked the box for Trump,” said Shultz, explaining that every time he attempted to select Vice President Kamala Harris instead, his hand went entirely limp and he was stricken with intense, overwhelming nausea. “Eventually I swatted at my right hand with the voter information packet, and I even tried stabbing it with a ballpoint pen. That seemed to subdue it for a while, but when…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theonion.com/neuralink-patient-unable-to-stop-hand-from-voting-for-trump/

 2024-11-05  Comments Off on The Onion – Neuralink Patient Unable To Stop Hand From Voting For Trump

Planet Debian – Steinar H. Gunderson: Ultimate rules as a service

Nov 032024
 

Since WFDF changed their ultimate rules web site
to be less-than-ideal (in the name of putting everything into WordPress…),
I made my own, at urules.org. It was a fun
journey; I’ve never fiddled with PWAs
before, and I was a bit surprised how low-level it all was. I assumed that
since my page is just a bunch of HTML files and ~100 lines of JS, I could
just bundle that up—but no, that is something they expect a framework to do
for you. The only primitive you get is seemingly that you can fire up your own
background service worker (JS running in its own, locked-down context)
and that gets to peek at every HTTP request done and possibly intercept it.
So you can use…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2024-11-03-11-48_ultimate_rules_as_a_service.html

 2024-11-03  Comments Off on Planet Debian – Steinar H. Gunderson: Ultimate rules as a service

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024)

Nov 022024
 

Today’s links

Bluesky and enshittification: No one is the enshittifier of their own story.

Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

Hoisted from the comments: Smart stuff from readers.

This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2014

Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.

Recent appearances: Where I’ve been.

Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.

Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em.

Colophon: All the rest.

Bluesky and enshittification (permalink)
I would like to use Bluesky. They’ve done a bunch of seriously interesting technical work on moderation and ranking that I truly admire, and I’ve got lots of friends there who really enjoy it.
But I’m not on Bluesky and I don’t have any plans to join it anytime soon. I wrote about this…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/

 2024-11-02  Comments Off on Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow – Pluralistic: Bluesky and enshittification (02 Nov 2024)

blarg? – Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag

Nov 022024
 

Back in the mists of prehistory, by which I mean 2014, I bought a Timbuk2 messenger bag and spent the next six or seven years loving it into the ground. When it finally fell part Timbuk2 had lost their way as a company, turning into a lifestyle brand at the expense of their product quality, and they didn’t have a meaningful replacement to offer me so it was time to look around.
To review, my requirements were, and are:

Waterproof for real.
Holds a large laptop plus the usual extra nerd shit and two days’ clothing.
Replaceable straps. The straps can’t be sewn in to the bag.
Quick-adjust straps, to cinch it down and step out of it easily.
Side pockets I…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/11/02/papas-got-a-brand-new-bag/

 2024-11-02  Comments Off on blarg? – Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag

Techdirt. – Norfolk, Virginia Residents Sue City Over Its Network Of 172 Flock Cameras

Nov 012024
 

This lawsuit could not be more impeccably timed. Whether or not this timing is more fortuitous than impeccable remains to be seen, but there’s no denying the bang-bang-bang effect on display here, even if it may just be coincidental.
Last week, a Virginia federal court ruled three hits from Flock ALPR cameras wasn’t enough to trigger a Fourth Amendment violation. It reasoned this was not the same sort of post facto long-term tracking addressed by the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision, which mainly dealt with law enforcement’s obtaining massive amounts of cell site location data from service providers without a warrant.
That decision erected a warrant requirement for obtaining this data from service providers. The limited holding said important…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/10/31/norfolk-virginia-residents-sue-city-over-its-network-of-172-flock-cameras/

 2024-11-01  Comments Off on Techdirt. – Norfolk, Virginia Residents Sue City Over Its Network Of 172 Flock Cameras
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