blarg? – About Printers

Mar 312025
 

As the joke goes:

Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
Programmers/Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
Security technicians: *takes a deep swig of whiskey* I wish I had been born in the neolithic.

The only lie in this is the date; colour printers (and scanners, try scanning a $20 bill sometime) haven’t worked only for their owners since the 80s. Thanks to corporate…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2025/03/31/about-printers/

 2025-03-31  No Responses »

Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – TCE Is Linked to Heart Defects in Babies, Cancer and Parkinson’s. Republicans in Congress Want to Reverse a Ban on It.

Mar 262025
 

by Sharon Lerner and Lisa Song ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Although it was too late for him to benefit, Daniel Kinel felt relieved in December when the Environmental Protection Agency finally banned TCE. The compound, which has been used for dry cleaning, manufacturing and degreasing machines, can cause cancer, organ damage and a potentially fatal heart defect in babies, according to independent studies and the EPA. It has also been shown to greatly increase people’s chances of developing Parkinson’s disease. Kinel and three of his colleagues were diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. They all worked in a…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/tce-ban-cancer-parkinsons-trump-republicans

 2025-03-26  No Responses »

The Onion – Israel Ranked 8th Happiest Country

Mar 212025
 

Israel remains in the top 10 list of happiest countries in the world, ranking eighth according to an annual global survey, despite the ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon. What do you think?

“And isn’t being happy the ultimate land annexation?”
Jessica Moschini, Garlic Mincer

“When you love what you do, joy follows.”
Bobby Glowe, Necklace Detangler

“I’d hate to know the atrocities the happier countries are committing.”
Neil Cornish, Pool Filler

The post Israel Ranked 8th Happiest Country appeared first on The Onion.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theonion.com/israel-ranked-8th-happiest-country/

 2025-03-21  No Responses »

Techdirt. – Democratic Senators Team Up With MAGA To Hand Trump A Censorship Machine

Mar 212025
 

At the exact moment when Donald Trump and his MAGA allies are actively dismantling democratic institutions and working to silence critics, a group of Democratic Senators have decided to collaborate with Trump’s supporters to make it easier to censor speech online.
As reported in The Information (paywalled), several Democratic Senators are teaming up with some of Trump’s strongest Senate allies to repeal Section 230 — the law that both enables content moderation and protects websites from being sued into oblivion for hosting user speech.
They appear to be doing this out of a deep misunderstanding of how the law works combined with an astounding naiveté about how this process will be used by the MAGA faithful.

As early as…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/21/democratic-senators-team-up-with-maga-to-hand-trump-a-censorship-machine/

 2025-03-21  No Responses »

Planet Emacsen – Ryan Rix: Blocking Aggressive Scrapers at the Edge

Mar 212025
 

Blocking Aggressive Scrapers at the EdgeIn Limiting expensive to render nginx endpoints , I describe how to use a few nginx limit_req module to substantially limit the amount of aggressive scraping traffic to my Gitea instance without impacting “normal” “human” behavior.
There’s three layered rate-limiters in here that are applied to only certain URIs:
One does a per-IP limit excluding my Tailscale network and some ASNs I connect from. Each IP can make one costly request per minute, otherwise receive a 503.
One tries to map certain cloud providers in to a single rate-limit key and gives each of these providers 1 RPM on these endpoints. Each group of cloud IPs can make one request per minute, otherwise receive…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://cce.whatthefuck.computer/updates#20250320T130459.421338

 2025-03-21  No Responses »

Biometric Update – Clearview seeks refund for failed bulk purchase of SSNs, facial photos

Mar 212025
 

Clearview AI is in the midst of a court battle to recover money it paid to a data broker for a collection of arrest records from all 50 U.S. states. Documents shared by 404 Media show that the company has filed a petition for a court order in a bit to recover the $918,000 it paid to Investigative Consultant, Inc. (ICI) President Donald Berlin in July, 2019. In return, Clearview was expecting 690 million arrest records. The records Clearview attempted to purchase included social security numbers, phone numbers, dates of birth, email addresses, home addresses and 390 million photos to add to its facial recognition database, documents filed in court state. Clearview’s database is now…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202503/clearview-seeks-refund-for-failed-bulk-purchase-of-ssns-facial-photos

 2025-03-21  No Responses »

Planet GNOME – I Signed an OSI Board Agreement in Anticipation of Election Results

Mar 202025
 

An Update Regarding the 2025 Open Source Initiative Elections I’ve explained in other posts that I ran for the 2025 Open Source Initative Board of Directors in the “Affiliate” district. Voting closed on MON 2025-03-17 at 10:00 US/Pacific. One hour later, candidates were surprised to receive an email from OSI demanding that all candidates sign a Board agreement before results were posted. This was surprising because during mandatory orientation, candidates were told the opposite: that a Board agreement need not be signed until the Board formally appointed you as a Director (as the elections are only advisory —: OSI’s Board need not follow election results in any event. It was also surprising because the deadline was…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2025/03/19/a-sign-board-agreement.html

 2025-03-20  No Responses »

Ars Technica – Brains of parrots, unlike songbirds, use human-like vocal control

Mar 192025
 

Human speech arises courtesy of some significant neural horsepower. Different areas of the brain are involved in determining the meaning that’s desired, finding the words to express it, and then converting those words to a specific series of sounds—and all that comes before the correct sequence of nerve impulses is sent to the muscles that produce the final output. Humans are far from alone in the animal kingdom with an impressive range of vocalizations, though. That raises the prospect that we can understand a bit more about our own speech by studying how vocalization is managed in different animals.
One group of species that’s especially interesting is birds. They’re distant relatives compared to other animals with interesting…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/brains-of-parrots-unlike-songbirds-use-human-like-vocal-control/

 2025-03-19  No Responses »

Ars Technica – Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28

Mar 142025
 

Since Amazon announced plans for a generative AI version of Alexa, we were concerned about user privacy. With Alexa+ rolling out to Amazon Echo devices in the coming weeks, we’re getting a clearer view at the privacy concessions people will have to make to maximize usage of the AI voice assistant and avoid bricking functionality of already-purchased devices.
In an email sent to customers today, Amazon said that Echo users will no longer be able to set their devices to process Alexa requests locally and, therefore, avoid sending voice recordings to Amazon’s cloud. Amazon apparently sent the email to users with “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” enabled on their Echo. Starting on March 28, recordings of everything…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/everything-you-say-to-your-echo-will-be-sent-to-amazon-starting-on-march-28/

 2025-03-14  No Responses »

Ballot Access News – Georgia Libertarian and Green Parties File New Lawsuit Against Discriminatory Campaign Finance Law

Mar 042025
 

On December 16, 2024, the Georgia Libertarian and Green Parties filed a new lawsuit against the Georgia campaign finance law that lets individuals give more contributions to Republican and Democratic candidates for Governor and Lieutenant Governor, than those individuals may give to other candidates for those two offices. Libertarian Party of Georgia v Carr, n.d., 1:24cv-05763. Here is the Complaint.

An earlier case filed by the Libertarian Party was dismissed on standing grounds. The new case shores up defenses against that happening again. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Mark H. Cohen, who also handled the last case.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/03/04/georgia-libertarian-and-green-parties-file-new-lawsuit-against-discriminatory-campaign-finance-law/

 2025-03-04  No Responses »

Planet GNU – FSF defends user freedom in amicus brief submitted in Neo4j v. Suhy

Mar 032025
 

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA (March 3, 2025) — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced today it has submitted an amicus brief in the case entitled Neo4j, Inc., et al. v. Suhy, et al., Case No. 24-5538 in the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The amicus brief addresses various misstatements and baseless assertions regarding the FSF and the GNU Affero General Public License Version 3 (AGPLv3) — the license at issue in the case — found in a pleading filed by Neo4j.

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-submits-amicus-brief-in-neo4j-v-suhy

 2025-03-03  No Responses »

Planet Python – Mirek Długosz: Customizing fonts’ look with OpenType features

Mar 022025
 

Many programming fonts allow customization through OpenType features. For people who are picky about certain properties, like easily distinguishable l and I (lowercase L and uppercase i), a single toggle can make a difference between rejecting a font and starting to use it. Unfortunately, choosing the perfect font with the perfect setup is way harder than it should be. This post describes the tools that may help, including the one that I wrote recently.
Whenever I stumble upon a new font, I want to know:

how does the font generally look?
does the font allow customization of specific glyphs that bother me?
when set up properly, how does the font fare against my current setup?

But first, how do you even learn about a new font?…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://mirekdlugosz.com/blog/2025/customizing-fonts-look-with-opentype-features/

 2025-03-02  No Responses »