The Death of the Mind

Enlarge (credit: D. Anschutz)
There is a reason countless songs about loneliness exist. Many are relatable, since feeling alone is often part of being human. But a particular song or experience that resonates with one lonely person may mean nothing to someone else who feels isolated and misunderstood.
Human beings are social creatures. Those who feel left out often experience loneliness. To investigate what goes on in the brains of lonely people, a team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, conducted noninvasive brain scans on subjects and found something surprising. The scans revealed that non-lonely individuals were all found to have a similar way of processing the world around them. Lonely…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1951521

The most dependable things in life tend to be the things most easily taken for granted. In the piracy ecosystem, that certainly applied to torrent site RARBG.
RARBG was never likely to win any prizes for being the best-looking site with bleeding-edge features. Nor would its operators hope to win any. What the site did was what any indexer of any content should strive for; plenty of well-organized and readily searchable content, all of it supported by ancillary sources of complementary data, with very little downtime and zero drama.
Until the site threw in the towel in May, RARBG met all of these requirements and made it look easy. The decision to shut down obviously came as a…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/over-900-rarbg-magnet-link-repos-anonymously-nuked-from-github-230701/

Over on the Software Freedom Conservancy blog, Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence Bradley M. Kuhn analyzes the recent changes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source availability in light of the GPL. It contains some interesting information about two alleged GPL violations that came about because the company’s business model is structured in a way that brings it too close to non-compliance with the license, he said:

Perhaps the biggest problem with a murky business model that skirts the line of GPL compliance is that violations can and do happen — since even a minor deviation from the business model clearly violates the GPL agreements. Pre-IBM Red Hat deserves a certain amount of credit, as SFC is aware…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/936127/

More than 300 subreddits, including popular ones like r/aww, r/music r/videos, and r/futurology, plan to go dark indefinitely after a large protest against Reddit’s API changes ends on June 14. This means users won’t be able to access these communities during this blackout.
This step was announced after The Verge reported that in an internal memo, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said “Like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well”. Huffman said in the memo that the blackout hasn’t caused any significant impact on the company’s revenue.
Over the last few days, (June 12-14) thousands of subreddits have gone dark to protest API changes by the platform that will potentially shut down many third-party apps. Because…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/14/hundreds-of-subreddits-plan-to-go-dark-indefinitely-after-reddit-ceos-internal-memo/

Enlarge (credit: Anjali Nair; Getty Images)
On a Wednesday morning in May, Hannah got a call from her lawyer—there was a warrant out for her husband’s arrest. Her thoughts went straight to her kids. They were going to come home from school and their father would be gone. “It burned me,” Hannah says, her voice breaking. “He hasn’t done anything to get his bond revoked, and they couldn’t prove he had.”
Hannah’s husband is now awaiting trial in jail, in part because of an anti-pornography app called Covenant Eyes. The company explicitly says the app is not meant for use in criminal proceedings, but the probation department in Indiana’s Monroe County has been using…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1947404

Strike 3 Holdings has been a familiar name in U.S. federal courts for a while now.
Last year, the adult entertainment company filed a record-breaking number of lawsuits against alleged BitTorrent pirates.
The company is keeping up this pace in 2023, averaging dozens of lawsuits per week. Most of these are never mentioned in the press and a large number are settled behind closed doors.
Every now and then, an accused Internet subscriber objects, but these cases rarely go to trial. According to some, the lawsuits’ main objective is to collect settlement payments and default judgments.
Motion to Quash
This line of reasoning was also brought up by a “John Doe” defendant whose IP address was targeted in…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/court-comcast-must-identify-accused-bittorrent-pirate-230613/

Debian v12 with codename bookworm was released as new stable release on 10th of June 2023. Similar to what we had with #newinbullseye and previous releases, now it’s time for #newinbookworm!
I was the driving force at several of my customers to be well prepared for bookworm. As usual with major upgrades, there are some things to be aware of, and hereby I’m starting my public notes on bookworm that might be worth also for other folks. My focus is primarily on server systems and looking at things from a sysadmin perspective.
Further readings
As usual start at the official Debian release notes, make sure to especially go through What’s new in Debian 12 + Issues to be…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://michael-prokop.at/blog/2023/06/11/what-to-expect-from-debian-bookworm-newinbookworm/

“After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development”, Debian 12, codenamed “bookworm”, has been released. The announcement has lots of details about package versions for desktop environments (6 are supported), kernel version (Linux 6.1 series), other package versions (compilers, graphics tools, office suites, languages, and more), architectures supported (8 for real hardware and 5 for cloud services), blends, and lots more.

This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as “obsolete”. 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for “bookworm” is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.
“bookworm” has more translated man pages than ever thanks…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/934361/

Two third-party Reddit apps have thrown in the towel over increased expenses

Social media community Reddit plans to lay off about 90 employees, amounting to about five percent of its 2,000-person staff.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/reddit_job_cuts_api_pricing_pushback/

The ruling elites through their corrupt media outlets are attempting to destroy Waters and intimidate other artists, performers and intellectuals from speaking out. This is a desperate and systematic attack on freedom of speech and artistic expression.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/08/fzcl-j08.html