As the year draws to a close, so has EFF’s long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Drug Enforcement Agency about the mass phone surveillance program infamously known as “Hemisphere.” We won our case and freed up tons of records. (So did the Electronic Privacy Information Center.) The government, on the other hand, only succeeded in dragging out the fake secrecy. In late 2013, right as the world was already reeling from the Snowden…
While it’s not getting making big headlines in the mainstream media, US courts are still loaded with BitTorrent related lawsuits. The cases are filed by a small group of copyright holders. To state their claim, these companies generally rely on IP-addresses as evidence. These IP-address details are collected from BitTorrent swarms and linked to a geographical location using geolocation tools. With this information in hand, rightsholders ask the courts to grant a subpoena, forcing Internet…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/courts-want-something-more-than-an-ip-address-to-catch-pirates-181217/
The Librem 5 dev kit’s hardware is done and shipping! We are beyond excited for our backers to receive their dev kits before year-end. Our entire PureOS Librem 5 development team will getting the same dev kits, upgrading the generic i.MX 6 boards (which most of the demos you have seen have been based on) to the Purism i.MX 8M based dev kit. We aim from this point forward to have a community assisted development…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://puri.sm/posts/2018-devkits-are-shipping/
Sen. James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican recently elevated to chair the Senate Armed Services Committee after the death of John McCain, was implicated recently in what looked to be an insider trading scandal. A few days after meeting with President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to successfully advocate for a military budget increase, Inhofe purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 of stock in defense contractor Raytheon, which stands to profit from additional defense spending. Inhofe…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2018/12/17/jeff-merkley-james-inhofe-ban-stock-trading/
Animated tear-jerker awaits man who illegally shot bucks An outlaw hunter will spend not only the next year or so behind bars, but also must face regular screenings of the Disney film Bambi.…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/18/poacher_bambi/
A new introductory book about dependent types, involving some familiar names: The Little Typer by Daniel P. Friedman and David Thrane Christiansen. Foreword by Robert Harper. Afterword by Conor McBride. An introduction to dependent types, demonstrating the most beautiful aspects, one step at a time. A program’s type describes its behavior. Dependent types are a first-class part of a language, and are much more powerful than other kinds of types; using just one language for…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://test.lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5552
Here’s a puzzler for you: If you’re phreaking something that’s not exactly a phone, are you still a phreak? That question probably never crossed the minds of New Yorkers who were acoustically assaulted on the normally peaceful sidewalks of Manhattan over the summer by creepy sounds emanating from streetside WiFi kiosks. The auditory attacks caused quite a stir locally, leading to wild theories that Russian hackers were behind it all. Luckily, the mystery has been…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/12/15/manhattan-mystery-of-creepy-jingles-and-random-noises-solved/
Once nuclear’s strongest booster, China is growing wary about its cost and safety.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612564/chinas-losing-its-taste-for-nuclear-power-thats-bad-news/
The Hackaday Superconference is over, which is a shame, but one of the great things about our conference is the people who manage to trek out to Pasadena every year to show us all the cool stuff they’re working on. One of those people was [Piotr Esden-Tempski], founder of 1 Bit Squared, and he brought some goodies that would soon be launched on a few crowdfunding platforms. The coolest of these was the iCEBreaker, an…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2018/12/13/icebreaker-the-open-source-development-board-for-fpgas/
Click here to go see the bonus panel!Hovertext:My new website, skimmedit ™ is just reddit but you can only read headlines and comment on what you think the article is about.Today’s News:
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/skimmed
But y’know, maybe we will terminate positions post-merger if there’s a business case Cloudera founder Mike Olson has asked staffers to turn down recruiters’ advances ahead of the firm’s merger with Hortonworks – despite acknowledging there could be layoffs.…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/14/cloudera_merger_staff/
The use of face recognition by companies raises a host of concerns about privacy and unfair watchlisting. Rolling Stone reported this week that face recognition was used on attendees at a Taylor Swift concert in Los Angeles to look for stalkers. Stalkers are a real problem, and we sympathize with how scary it must be for a celebrity to know that they are out there. Nonetheless, we have a number of concerns about where this…
In Massachusetts, a federal court affirmed that the First Amendment protects secret recording of police performing their duties in public. The First Amendment right to record the police is a critical check and balance for people living in a free, open, and democratic society. It promotes the free discussion of governmental affairs as well as protects the democratic process. And for some communities, it’s a vital tool for uncovering, if not deterring, police misconduct. But…
The gentrification of cities like New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. has soared in recent years, as the affluent and educated have poured back into them. These superstar cities and tech hubs are epicenters of the “new urban crisis” with high and worsening levels of income inequality, economic segregation, and increasingly unaffordable housing, all of which have disproportionate negative effects on the less advantaged.But what is actually behind these shifts? One popular…
Today, EU negotiators in Strasbourg struggled to craft the final language of the Copyright in the Single Digital Market Directive, in their last possible meeting for 2019. They failed, thanks in large part to the Directive’s two most controversial clauses: Article 11, which requires paid licenses for linking to news stories while including more than a word or two; and Article 13, which will lead to the creation of error-prone copyright censorship algorithms that will…
Internet Archive is well-known for our interactive user services. These include the Wayback Machine, the archive.org website, and OpenLibrary. Less well known are the programmatic, or API (Application Program Interface) tools that can allow users and computer programs to access archived information “at scale.” Our APIs evolved over time, adapting to address specific projects and expanding as we introduced new services and capabilities into our operations. Although not entirely uniform, these APIS were created to…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2018/12/13/documentation-for-public-apis-at-the-internet-archive/
US citizens: protect US ocelots — oppose the border wall. If you send a message, please spread the word!
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2018-sep-dec.html#12_December_2018_%28Urgent%3A_Ocelots%29
Intel’s Architecture Day on Tuesday was delightfully filled with an overwhelming amount of valuable hardware information, but Intel’s software efforts were also briefly touched on too. In fact, Raja Koduri reinforced how software is a big part of Intel technology and goes in-hand with their security, interconnect, memory, architecture, and process pillars and that’s where their new oneAPI initiative will fit in. But what learning afterwards was most exciting on the software front…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Open-Source-FSP-Likely
Enlarge / After arriving from China, Wenhong Chen and Funina Wu, from Frederick, Maryland, are photographed at Dulles as part of the US Customs and Border Protection’s newly implemented biometrics system. (credit: Katherine Frey/The Washington Post via Getty Images) A new report by the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog has concluded that the agency does not always adequately delete data seized as part of a border search of electronic devices, among other concerns. According…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1427505
