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/
DURHAM, N.C.—The Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit project, or DOLRT, is a planned 17.7-mile line linking Durham and Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The plan is two decades in the making—born of an ambitious 1990s scheme to stitch the state’s booming Research Triangle region together via rail.Since then, DOLRT has consumed more than $130 million in public money. In 2011 and 2012, voters in Durham and Orange counties approved half-cent sales taxes to fund transportation improvements, including…
Democrats and progressive groups across the state of New York are pushing back hard against an effort to ban fusion voting, a system that allows multiple parties to nominate the same candidate. The assault, according to those on the receiving end, is being driven by Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s ongoing hostility toward the Working Families Party, which has been a primary beneficiary of fusion voting in the state. A majority of Democrats in the state Senate,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/04/working-families-party-ny-cuomo/
Introduction When I first got involved in managing a Postgres database, I was quickly introduced to the need for replication. My first project was to get our databases up on Slony, which was the hot new replication technology, replacing our clunky DRBD setup and allowing near-realtime read-only copies of the database. Of course, with time and scale, Slony had a hard time keeping up with the write traffic, especially since it ultimately suffered from write…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4mZ
Following months of protests from its employees, Google announced last summer that it would not renew its contract with the military on Project Maven, an initiative to use artificial intelligence to improve the targeting and surveillance capabilities of drones on the battlefield. In an email sent this week by Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president for global affairs, the Silicon Valley giant appeared to hedge on its commitment to fully cut ties with the drone initiative. In an…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/03/01/google-project-maven-contract/
Earlier this month, security researcher Victor Gevers found and disclosed an exposed database live-tracking the locations of about 2.6 million residents of Xinjiang, China, offering a window into what a digital surveillance state looks like in the 21st century. Xinjiang is China’s largest province, and home to China’s Uighurs, a Turkic minority group. Here, the Chinese government has implemented a testbed police state where an estimated 1 million individuals from these minority groups have been…
For our latest “Voices & Choices” podcast, Lawrence Lessig and Adam Eichen of Equal Citizens sat down with Nancy Lavin, FairVote staff writer, to talk about their efforts to bring ranked choice voting to New Hampshire’s presidential primaries: how it works and why it matters. The pair also share the origins of their interest in electoral reform, and Lessig looks back on his own presidential run in 2016. The following is an excerpt from that…
When activists in New York get together to send letters to their elected officials, they pool together money to pay for postcards, stamps, and even pizza to chow on as they do their work. Printing out flyers to advertise their events can also cost a pretty penny. These efforts are almost always volunteer-funded, but if Gov. Andrew Cuomo gets his way, activist organizations will have to register as lobbyists if they spend $500 a year on…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/02/21/andrew-cuomo-budget-proposal-lobbying-reform/
After months of investigations and media reports into possible absentee-ballot fraud, we finally have a decision in the disputed election in the North Carolina 9th Congressional District: There will be a new election. This will be the first time that a congressional election has been redone since 1975. On Thursday, the North Carolina State Board of Elections voted 5-0 to hold a do-over election after hearing evidence that an illegal absentee-ballot scheme cast doubt on…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/north-carolina-is-getting-a-do-over-election/
Law enforcement agencies love their automatic license plate readers. ALPRs do what cops physically can’t: scan millions of plates a year and run them against a number of shared databases. The systems are black boxes. The public is often given little information about how many plate images databases store or for how long. Law enforcement agencies rarely audit the data, providing zero insight on the number of false positives ALPRs return. Non-hit photos are sometimes…
Beware of Using Young People’s Blood to Halt Aging:”There is no proven clinical benefit of infusion of plasma from young donors to cure, mitigate, treat or prevent these conditions, and there are risks associated with the use of any plasma product,” the FDA said in a statement from Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and Peter Marks, head of the agency’s biologics center.The idea of infusing young blood to fight aging has attracted technology entrepreneurs like billionaire Peter…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/02/fda-rebukes-noted-vampire-peter-thiel/