The Internet Archive has come to the rescue once again. The nonprofit digital library this week unveiled the MySpace Music Dragon Hoard, a collection of 490,000 MP3 files from 2008 to 2010 on the long-abandoned social media site. From a report: While the recovered tracks make up less than one percent of the music lost by some 14 million artists, it is still a sizable cache weighing in at 1.3TB. The lost songs were given…
EFF is proud to announce its newest investigative team: the Threat Lab. Using a combination of research skills, the Threat Lab will take a deep dive into how surveillance technologies are used to target communities, activists, or individuals. The Threat Lab is a multidisciplinary unit that’s part of our Technology Projects team. EFF’s Director of Cybersecurity, Eva Galperin heads up the group, which also includes Senior Staff Technologist Cooper Quintin and Senior Investigative Researcher Dave…
Techie says he was grilled for three hours after refusing to let agents search his devices Former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal says he was interrogated for three hours by America’s border cops after arriving at San Francisco airport – because he refused to unlock his work laptop and phone.…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/02/us_customs_mozilla_cto/
While we talk about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, we almost never talk about any other section of the law. And there’s a good reason for that, a few years after it was put into law, every other part of the CDA was ruled unconstitutional. The original part of the CDA that is no longer law included criminalizing the knowing transmission of “obscene or indecent” messages to anyone under 18 or anything “that,…
Enlarge / A pile of fish trapped in the flood deposits. (credit: UC Berkeley) The Chicxulub impact is famed for having killed the dinosaurs and most other species alive on Earth at the time, and it left behind a thin layer of dust rich in rare elements. Modeling of the impact has suggested almost too many ways it could have killed: massive tsunamis, a magnitude 11 earthquake, global wildfires and searing heat, months of frigid…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1485061
In New York City, public parks, or, as the New York City Zoning Resolution of 1961 reads, “any publicly owned park, playground, beach, parkway or roadway within the jurisdiction and control of the Commissioner of Parks” are special.They’re exempt from zoning laws and don’t generate usable floor area. In other words, developers can’t build on them. As the City Charter reads, “The rights of the city in and to its … public parks … are…
Techie raises alarm over ‘detention’ after he refused to unlock work laptop, phone Former Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal says he was interrogated for three hours by America’s border cops after arriving at San Francisco airport – because he refused to unlock his work laptop and phone.…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/02/us_customs_mozilla_cto/
One DNA-matching company has decided it’s going to corner an under-served market: US law enforcement. FamilyTreeDNA — last seen here opening up its database to the FBI without informing its users first — is actively pitching its services to law enforcement. The television spot, to air in San Diego first, asks anyone who has had a direct-to-consumer DNA test from another company, like 23andMe or Ancestry.com, to upload a copy so that law enforcement can…
Back to the PG I’m very excited to become a 2ndQuadrant member. I was involved in PostgreSQL activities in NTT group (Japanese leading ICT company, see here and here), including log shipping replication and PostgreSQL scale out solution as PostgresXC and PostgresXL. At NTT I had several chances to work very closely with 2ndQuadrant. After three years involvement in deep learning and accelerator usage in various applications I’m now back to PostgreSQL world. And I’m still very interested…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4o5
Raster CRT Typography (According to DEC)The time it takes for the phosphor to become fully activated is actually longer than the pulse representing the timing to draw a single pixel (40 nanoseconds). Meaning, if we were to attempt to display just a single pixel, the phosphor on this particular spot will never reach its full activation level resulting in a fuzzy image of varying brightnesses between dimmer, thin strokes and heavier, thick strokes. So the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/03/font-archaeology/
A federal court’s ruling earlier this week has blunted a key provision of the surveillance reform law that required the government to be more transparent about legal decisions made by the United States secret surveillance court. After Edward Snowden revealed the government’s ongoing mass collection of Americans’ telephone phone records in 2013, Congress responded by passing the USA Freedom Act in 2015. In addition to limiting the NSA’s surveillance authority, Congress also clearly intended to…
“Surveillance capitalism, run as the code for everyday life, erases both free will and free markets.”
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jan-apr.html#21_March_2019_%28Surveillance_capitalism%29
Former Vice President Joe Biden waves after speaking at the International Association of Firefighters on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on March 12, 2019. Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP “The definition of insanity,” Einstein didn’t say, “is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” Have the Democrats gone mad? Are they really planning on putting up the same type of candidate against Donald Trump in 2020 that they put up against him…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/21/joe-biden-2020-hillary-clinton/
Enlarge / Moai statues in a row, Ahu Tongariki, Easter Island, Chile. (credit: De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images) Chile’s Easter Island (Rapa Nui) is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built by early inhabitants some 800 years ago. The islanders likely chose the statues’ locations based on the availability of fresh water sources, according to a recent paper in PLOS One. Scholars have puzzled over the moai on Easter Island for decades, pondering…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1438987
Anyone who’s used the US Court system’s PACER system has complained about it. Some of those complaints have formed the basis of lawsuits. The multitude of complaints has moved legislators to make periodic runs at eliminating PACER’s paywall. So far, PACER — which looks and feels like it’s still 2001 — has managed to outlast these efforts. The only change over the last nineteen years has been an increase in access fees. Many have complained,…
Star Trek’s original series and TNG were shot on film, allowing them to be rescanned for high-definition broadcast. Star Trek: Deep Space 9, however, was shot on video at standard definition: there’s no further detail to recover for HD broadcasts. Machine learning to the rescue! CaptRobau writes: I will go into greater detail about my process in a future blog post, but it took me about two days to get everything extracted, upscaled and put…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/03/21/deep-space-9-remastered-with-d.html
Last year, mathematician and professional optical illusionist [Kokichi Sugihara] came up with an arrow that only points one way. Technically, it’s ‘anomalous mirror symmetry’, but if you print this arrow and look at it juuuussst right, it appears this arrow only points one way. [Ali] had the idea to turn this arrow illusion into something motorized, and for that he turned to 3D printing. The models for the illusion arrows were already available, but there…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2019/03/20/dancing-arrows-to-break-your-brain/
Rich Whitehouse is a video game preservationist and a veteran programmer in the video game industry. This story was originally published on Whitehouse’s website. Yesterday, Google announced Stadia, a video game streaming and development platform that leverages the tech giant’s data centers around the world to let users play high-end video games on practically any screen, with no need for a console or PC. We still don’t know what Stadia will cost users, what games…
We’re into the final days before members of the European Parliament vote on the Copyright and the Digital Single Market Directive, home of the censoring Article 13, and the anti-news Article 11. Europeans are still urging their MEPs to vote down these articles (if you haven’t already, call now, and stepping up the visibility of their complaints in this final week. Take Action Stop Article 13 The first salvo drawing attention to the damage the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/best-europes-web-went-dark-today-we-cant-let-be-our-future
Six Vermont representatives have introduced HB 444. It provides for ranked choice voting for all non-presidential primaries, and also in general elections for Congress. Thanks to Mike Drucker for this news. … Continue reading →
External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2019/03/16/vermont-ranked-choice-voting-bill/