Michael Geist – This Must Stop: Government and Liberal Party Go All-In On Speech Regulation With Political Truth Oversight Bodies, Mandated Press Source Tracing, and Disclosure of Critics’ Communications

May 062023
 

Earlier today, the Liberal party convention approved (subject to a final vote) two stunning policy resolutions with enormous implications for freedom of expression. First, as discussed yesterday, it approved a resolution that seeks to “hold on-line information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms and to limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced.” If enacted, the policy would undermine freedom of the press and could even spark widespread censorship on Internet platforms. In addition, it passed a resolution to develop “truth in political advertising” legislation to be administered by an oversight body. There are legitimate concerns about the “truthiness” of all political parties communications, but political truth oversight bodies…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2023/05/this-must-stop-government-and-liberal-party-go-all-in-on-speech-regulation-with-political-truth-oversight-bodies-mandated-press-source-tracing-and-disclosure-of-critics-communications/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=this-must-stop-government-and-liberal-party-go-all-in-on-speech-regulation-with-political-truth-oversight-bodies-mandated-press-source-tracing-and-disclosure-of-critics-communications

 2023-05-06  Comments Off on Michael Geist – This Must Stop: Government and Liberal Party Go All-In On Speech Regulation With Political Truth Oversight Bodies, Mandated Press Source Tracing, and Disclosure of Critics’ Communications

Techdirt. – Germany Wants To Include Copyright Infringement Under Its Planned ‘Digital Violence’ Law

May 052023
 

The hyperbolic rhetoric that is a feature of the copyright industry, which tries absurdly to characterize making an additional digital copy as “theft”, can lead to some serious legislative harm. For example, Germany is currently aiming to bring in a new law against “digital violence” – things like bullying and stalking, but also identity abuse and theft. In the worst cases of digital violence, it may lead to real violence, with lives threatened. That makes legislation to curb it reasonable. But along the way, something unreasonable is happening, spotted here by Netzpolitik (translation by DeepL):

the planned law against digital violence is not only aimed at perpetrators of digital violence. It regulates “all cases of unlawful infringement of absolute rights”….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/05/germany-wants-to-include-copyright-infringement-under-its-planned-digital-violence-law/

 2023-05-05  Comments Off on Techdirt. – Germany Wants To Include Copyright Infringement Under Its Planned ‘Digital Violence’ Law

Planet PostgreSQL – Michael Christofides: Queries for pg_stat_statements

May 052023
 

As my entry for PGSQL Phriday #008, I want to give some example queries you can use with pg_stat_statements as a starting point for different challenges!Reduce your workloadIf you’re looking to reduce load on your system as a whole, a great starting point is looking at your statements by total time, for example: select (total_exec_time + total_plan_time)::int as total_time, total_exec_time::int, total_plan_time::int, mean_exec_time::int, calls, query
from pg_stat_statements
order by total_time desc
limit 50; This will return the 50 queries that take the most time across all calls, meaning that fast queries that are executed a lot can rank ahead of slow queries that are executed infrequently. This is likely to be a good proxy for which queries are responsible for…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5Kh

 2023-05-05  Comments Off on Planet PostgreSQL – Michael Christofides: Queries for pg_stat_statements

World Socialist Web Site (en) – North Carolina legislature poised to establish three-year high school option, vastly expand privatization of public education

May 052023
 

A North Carolina Senate committee recently approved a bill that will require districts to provide for a three-year option to graduate high school and funnels over a billion dollars into private schools.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/05/05/irib-m05.html

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Richard Stallman’s Political Notes – Airbnb destroying communities

May 052023
 

Airbnb is destroying communities which many people like to visit, as
many houses in them are now used as hotel rooms and there is not much in the way of housing to rent for all year.

I would never use airbnb anyway, since you are required to (1) run
nonfree software and (2) identify yourself to the company. I don’t mind
if the owner of the apartment or room knows who I am, but not a company!

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2023-mar-jun.html#4_May_2023_(Airbnb_destroying_communities)

 2023-05-05  Comments Off on Richard Stallman’s Political Notes – Airbnb destroying communities

Jacobin – When Jerry Springer Bucked the DC Foreign Policy Consensus in a Straight-to-DVD Movie

Apr 292023
 

After his death earlier this week, the whole world is remembering Jerry Springer’s trashy talk show. But nobody is talking about Springer’s 2004 role as an antiwar US president who took on the military-industrial complex and won.
Jerry Springer attends the Galaxy British Book Awards at Grosvenor House Hotel on April 3, 2009 in London, United Kingdom. (Danny Martindale / Getty Images) Jerry Springer, who died this past week at the age of seventy-nine, might end up being remembered for being a lot of things: the disgraced city councilman who paid for sex with a check; the Cincinnati mayor with a social conscience who once said, “if a man has five…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2023/04/jerry-springer-the-defender-movie-war-on-terror-us-foreign-policy/

 2023-04-29  Comments Off on Jacobin – When Jerry Springer Bucked the DC Foreign Policy Consensus in a Straight-to-DVD Movie

Ars Technica – An ominous heating event is unfolding in the oceans

Apr 292023
 

To call what’s happening in the oceans right now an anomaly is a bit of an understatement. Since March, average sea surface temperatures have been climbing to record highs, as shown in the dark line in the graph below.
(credit: Sean Birkel/University of Maine)
Since this record-keeping began in the early 1980s—the other squiggly lines are previous years—the global average for the world’s ocean surfaces has oscillated seasonally between 19.7° and 21° Celsius (67.5° and 69.8° Fahrenheit). Toward the end of March, the average shot above the 21° mark and stayed there for a month. (The most recent reading, for April 26, was just a hair under 21°.) This temperature spike is not just unprecedented, but…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1935397

 2023-04-29  Comments Off on Ars Technica – An ominous heating event is unfolding in the oceans

The Register – Red Hat layoffs spark calls to unionize, CEO wades in

Apr 282023
 

‘Reject this capitalist logic’ urges French legion within Linux slinger

Exclusive  Red Hat’s decision to lay off around 800 people, or four percent of the company, has not only upset employees, it’s fueled calls to unionize.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/04/28/red_hat_layoffs_union/

 2023-04-28  Comments Off on The Register – Red Hat layoffs spark calls to unionize, CEO wades in

Hackaday – Smooth Animations, Slick Bar Graphs, but No Custom Characters on This 16×2 OLED

Apr 282023
 

Sometimes, finding new ways to use old hardware requires awesome feats of reverse engineering, software sleight of hand, and a healthy dose of good fortune. Other times, though, it’s just as simple as reading the data sheet and paying attention to details.
Not that we’re knocking [upir]’s accomplishment with these tricked-out 16×2 OLED displays. Far from it, in fact — the smoothly animated bar graph displays alphanumerics look fantastic. What’s cool about this is that he accomplished all this without resorting to custom characters. We’ve seen him use this approach before; this time around, the hack involves carefully shopping for a 16×2 OLED display with the right driver chip — a US2066 chip. You’ll still need a…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/27/smooth-animations-slick-bar-graphs-but-no-custom-characters-on-this-16×2-oled/

 2023-04-28  Comments Off on Hackaday – Smooth Animations, Slick Bar Graphs, but No Custom Characters on This 16×2 OLED

Hackaday – The Modern WWW, Or: Where Do We Want To Go From Here?

Apr 282023
 

From the early days of ARPANET until the dawn of the World Wide Web (WWW), the internet was primarily the domain of researchers, teachers and students, with hobbyists running their own BBS servers you could dial into, yet not connected to the internet. Pitched in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee while working at CERN, the WWW was intended as an information management system that’d provide standardized access to information using HTTP as the transfer protocol and HTML and later CSS to create formatted documents inspired by the SGML standard. Even better, it allowed for WWW forums and personal websites to begin to pop up, enabling the eternal joy of web rings, animated GIFs and forums on any…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/27/the-modern-www-or-where-do-we-want-to-go-from-here/

 2023-04-28  Comments Off on Hackaday – The Modern WWW, Or: Where Do We Want To Go From Here?

Ars Technica – As sea levels rise, the East Coast is also sinking

Apr 272023
 

Enlarge / Chesapeake Bay is subsiding up to 5 millimeters a year, greatly exacerbating sea-level rise. It’s a growing problem up and down the Atlantic coast. (credit: Marli Miller/Getty Images)
Climate scientists already know that the East Coast of the United States could see around a foot of sea-level rise by 2050, which will be catastrophic on its own. But they are just beginning to thoroughly measure a “hidden vulnerability” that will make matters far worse: The coastline is also sinking. It’s a phenomenon known as subsidence, and it’s poised to make the rising ocean all the more dangerous, both for people and coastal ecosystems.
New research published in the journal Nature Communications finds…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1934883

 2023-04-27  Comments Off on Ars Technica – As sea levels rise, the East Coast is also sinking

Motherboard – The Imgur Apocalypse Is Going to Break Large Parts of the Internet

Apr 272023
 

If you want to test a free platform’s ability to protect content over the long haul, here’s a fun test: Upload an image, post it somewhere, then wait a decade to see if it sticks around. Odds are, it won’t. Which is why, perhaps, it’s not totally surprising to learn that Imgur, a popular photo-uploading service that has been informally tied to Reddit since its 2009 founding, will remove two types of content from its platform starting next month: explicit or pornographic imagery, and images uploaded anonymously—the latter with a lean on unused images, according to the company. While technically banned from Imgur for years through its community rules, adult content hasn’t been actively removed (and…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4a3vkq/the-imgur-apocalypse-is-going-to-break-large-parts-of-the-internet

 2023-04-27  Comments Off on Motherboard – The Imgur Apocalypse Is Going to Break Large Parts of the Internet

Techdirt. – Senator Brian Schatz Joins The Moral Panic With Unconstitutional Age Verification Bill

Apr 272023
 

Senator Brian Schatz is one of the more thoughtful Senators we have, and he and his staff have actually spent time talking to lots of experts in trying to craft bills regarding the internet. Unfortunately, it still seems like he still falls under the seductive sway of this or that moral panic, so when the bills actually come out, they’re perhaps more thoughtfully done than the moral panic bills of his colleagues, but they’re still destructive.
His latest is… just bad. It appears to be modeled on a bunch of these age verification moral panic bills that we’ve seen in both red states and blue states, though Schatz’s bill is much closer to the red state version…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/27/senator-brian-schatz-joins-the-moral-panic-with-unconstitutional-age-verification-bill/

 2023-04-27  Comments Off on Techdirt. – Senator Brian Schatz Joins The Moral Panic With Unconstitutional Age Verification Bill

Biometric Update – Clear accelerates growth in travel; expands into health, social media

Apr 272023
 

Clear has already seen success in the travel sector with its biometric authentication being used to streamline check-ins and security screening. Now, the company wants to expand into other industries, such as health and social media. It is still growing in travel, however. Pittsburgh International Airport is deploying Clear infrastructure. The airport is getting a $600,000 upfront payment from and a 10 percent revenue share from Alclear, maker of Clear, over a five-year contract. Clear is designed to enable enrolled travelers to bypass manual identification checks and instead walk directly to the front of the Transportation Security Administration screening line, the airport says. Membership in Clear costs about $16 per month, and confers priority screening….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202304/clear-accelerates-growth-in-travel-expands-into-health-social-media

 2023-04-27  Comments Off on Biometric Update – Clear accelerates growth in travel; expands into health, social media

Techdirt. – Wizards Of The Coast Sends Pinkerton Agency To Person That Bought Unreleased ‘Magic’ Cards In Error

Apr 272023
 

Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the company behind both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic The Gathering has been on our pages recently and not for good reasons. Most recently, the company kicked up a completely unnecessary shitstorm for itself by changing the OGL license under which it released D&D Fifth Edition in such a way that it essentially kneecapped the wider community’s ability to create off of the base content, as the community had for years and years. The public response to that change was almost universally negative.
But if that was bad, imagine what the response will be to WotC sending the literal Pinkerton Agency after a YouTuber who revealed a bunch of Magic The Gathering…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/26/wizards-of-the-coast-sends-pinkerton-agency-to-person-that-bought-unreleased-magic-cards-in-error/

 2023-04-27  Comments Off on Techdirt. – Wizards Of The Coast Sends Pinkerton Agency To Person That Bought Unreleased ‘Magic’ Cards In Error

jwz – Section 31 and the Normalization of the Security State

Apr 262023
 

“A Critical Division of Starfleet Intelligence” There’s no precedent for it in the franchise; nothing that its backstory is needed to unpack or explain. Indeed, it makes the whole thing more inexplicable: societies with unchecked, unaccountable black ops and secret police forces do not, typically, resemble paradises even on a surface level — something that DS9 itself readily understood when it came to worldbuilding for the Cardassians. […] But one can, perhaps, forgive DS9 this particular indulgence; it came in the midst of a larger arc about what happens when you throw Gene Roddenberry’s humanist utopia into a major war, and it can be read in the context of that story: To what extent is…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/04/section-31-and-the-normalization-of-the-security-state/

 2023-04-26  Comments Off on jwz – Section 31 and the Normalization of the Security State

Planet PostgreSQL – Ryan Booz: In defense of PostgreSQL MVCC and Vacuuming

Apr 262023
 

I just attended my fifth in-person conference of 2023, four of them PostgreSQL focused. I look forward to attending more in the coming months to share and learn about the platform, meet more community members, and continue to invest however I can. Unfortunately, between these conferences, several recent blogs, and the general attitude towards PostgreSQL … Continue reading “In defense of PostgreSQL MVCC and Vacuuming”

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5JJ

 2023-04-26  Comments Off on Planet PostgreSQL – Ryan Booz: In defense of PostgreSQL MVCC and Vacuuming

Deeplinks – First Appellate Court Finds Geofence Warrant Unconstitutional

Apr 242023
 

The California Court of Appeal has held that a geofence warrant seeking information on all devices located within several densely-populated areas in Los Angeles violated the Fourth Amendment. This is the first time an appellate court in the United States has reviewed a geofence warrant. The case is People v. Meza, and EFF filed an amicus brief and jointly argued the case before the court.
Geofence warrants, which we have written about extensively before, are unlike typical warrants for electronic information because they don’t name a suspect and are not even targeted to specific individuals or accounts. Instead, they require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/first-us-appellate-court-decide-finds-geofence-warrant-unconstitutional

 2023-04-24  Comments Off on Deeplinks – First Appellate Court Finds Geofence Warrant Unconstitutional
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