*Markey, Merkley, Jayapal Lead Colleagues on Legislation to Ban Government Use of Facial Recognition and Other Biometric Technology.*
I support passing this law, but it does not go far enough. Nongovernmental
operation of systems for facial recognition (and other 1984 surveillance
systems) is equally dangerous and we need to put an end to that too.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2023-jan-apr.html#12_April_2023_(Legislation_to_ban_facial_recognition)
The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years before giving up.
But that was just the start.
After its tactical retreat, AT&T spun off Time Warner into an entirely new company, Warner Media. Warner Media then immediately turned around and announced a blockbuster merger with Discovery, creating the creatively named Warner Brothers Discovery.
This new company has been a blistering mess as well. Executives there have been so cheap they’ve refused to pay residuals to…
KDE Connect is the great software that allows for interfacing between the KDE desktop and your various mobile devices running Android, Plasma Mobile, Apple iOS, or even Sailfish OS. KDE Connect allows easily sharing files and data with your mobile device(s), receiving phone notifications on your desktop, and a lot of other remote/cross-device functionality. The KDE Connect 2.0 initiative that is taking shape this year thanks to full-time development work is going to modernize this open-source solution…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Connect-2.0-Plans
California passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) nominally to protect children’s privacy, but at the same time, the AADC requires businesses to do an age “assurance” of all their users, children and adults alike. (Age “assurance” requires the business to distinguish children from adults, but the methodology to implement has many of the same characteristics as age verification–it just needs to be less precise for anyone who isn’t around the age of majority. I’ll treat the two as equivalent).
Doing age assurance/age verification raises substantial privacy risks. There are several ways of doing it, but the two primary options for quick results are (1) requiring consumers to submit government-issued documents, or (2) requiring consumers to submit…
Looking back on what programming used to be like can be a fascinatingly entertaining thing, which is why [Tough Developer] decided to download and try using Turbo C and C++, from version 1.0 to the more recent releases. Borland Turbo C 1.0 is a doozy as it was released in 1987 — two years before the C89 standardization that brought us the much beloved ANSI C that so many of us spent the 90s with. Turbo C++ 1.0 is from 1991, which precedes the standardization of C++ in 1998. This means that both integrated development environments (IDEs) provide a fascinating look at what was on the cutting edge in the late 80s and early 90s.
Online help…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/08/revisiting-borland-turbo-c-and-c/
Mobian is a project that aims to bring the Debian distribution to mobile devices such
as smartphones and tablets. By building on the flexibility, stability, and community-driven
development of Debian, Mobian aspires to create a powerful and
user-friendly alternative to existing mobile operating systems. The project
is actively working on reducing the delta between Mobian and Debian, and its
ultimate goal is to be absorbed back into its parent distribution and to
make it easy to run Debian on mobile devices.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/928211/
US police have used the database nearly a million times: Clearview took photos without users’ knowledge, its CEO Hoan Ton-That acknowledged in an interview last month. Doing so allowed for the rapid expansion of the company’s massive database, which is marketed on its website to law enforcement. […] Ton-That said “Clearview AI’s database of publicly available images is lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google.” Notable privacy advocate Facebook begs to differ: “Clearview AI’s actions invade people’s privacy which is why we banned their founder from our services and sent them a legal demand to stop accessing any data, photos, or videos from our services,” a Meta spokesperson said….
Cities and counties across the country have banned government use of face surveillance technology, and many more are weighing proposals to do so. From Boston to San Francisco, Jackson, Mississippi to Minneapolis, elected officials and activists know that face surveillance gives police the power to track us wherever we go. It also disproportionately impacts people of color, turns us all into perpetual suspects, increases the likelihood of being falsely arrested, and chills people’s willingness to participate in first amendment protected activities. Even Amazon, known for operating one of the largest video surveillance networks in the history of the world, extended its moratorium on selling face recognition to police.
Now, Congress must do its part. We’ve created a…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/enough-enough-tell-congress-ban-federal-use-face-recognition
SAN FRANCISCO—Conducting his monthly sweep for new content, Tubi CEO Farhad Massoudi was reportedly combing through a shelf of used DVDs at Goodwill Thursday looking for movies to upload to the streaming service. “American Hustle, fine, Secondhand Lions, fine, The Passion Of The Christ, fine,” said Massoudi, who…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/tubi-ceo-combs-through-goodwill-used-dvds-looking-for-m-1850262553
This year, legislatures in Montana, Minnesota and Texas are threatening to pass bills making it far more difficult for a ballot-qualified party to remain on the ballot, and making the new requirement go into effect before the 2024 election. This is shocking behavior. It has long been the custom that when a state makes it more difficult for a ballot-qualified party to remain on the ballot, the change does not take effect until after the next election, to give any affected party a chance to try to meet the new requirement.
The Minnesota and Texas bills raise the vote test to 10%, and the Montana bill raises it to 5% of the number of registered voters. The…
Concrete is an incredibly useful and versatile building material on which not only today’s societies, but also the ancient Roman Empire was built. To this day Roman concrete structures can be found in mundane locations such as harbors, but also the Pantheon in Rome, which to this day forms the largest unreinforced concrete dome in existence at 43.3 meters diameter, and is in excellent condition despite being being nearly 1,900 years old.
Even as the Roman Empire fell and receded into what became the Byzantine – also known as the Eastern Roman – Empire and the world around these last remnants of Roman architecture changed and changed again, all of these concrete structures remained despite knowledge of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/03/self-healing-concrete-what-ancient-roman-concrete-can-teach-us/
Apple tried to create something useful and ended up empowering awful people. Meant to help its users keep an eye on things that were important to them, the small tracking devices known as AirTags were soon exploited by stalkers to track and harass their targets, leading to a class action lawsuit against the company by victims of AirTag-enabled stalking.
To decrease the risk of manipulation by malicious people, Apple introduced a few safety features. If the target was an iPhone user, the phone would warn them if an unknown AirTag was active in their immediate vicinity. The AirTags also now emit beeps when separated from the deployer for an extended period of time.
Those features meant to prevent…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/03/the-dea-has-added-apples-airtags-to-its-surveillance-arsenal/
Look, we all knew that there was going to be a lot of fuss about the upcoming public domaining (finally!) of Mickey Mouse nine months from now on January 1, 2024. I mean, we’ve already been talking about what next year’s public domain game jam is going to look like with Mickey as one of the options.
If you somehow have been living under a rock and never read anything on Techdirt before, let’s get you up to speed. Mickey Mouse debuted as Steamboat Willie in 1928. The character was a blatant animated copy of Steamboat Bill, a Buster Keaton silent film that came out… the same year. Disney, of course, also built up much of its…
Researchers discovered a way to turn superglue into strong, clear plastic that can be made into many shapes. Allison Christy, CC BY-NDThe Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea Our team used superglue as a starting material to develop a low-cost, recyclable and easily produced transparent plastic called polyethyl cyanoacrylate that has properties similar to those of plastics used for single-use products like cutlery, cups and packaging. Unlike most traditional plastics, this new plastic can be easily converted back to its starting materials, even when combined with unwashed municipal plastic waste. To make a plastic from superglue, we first had to address the very issue that makes superglue so…
Another FOIA lawsuit has paid off for the ACLU. But there are no real winners here, since the documents pried from the government’s grasp detail a bunch of stuff we all wish the government wouldn’t be doing with its time and our money. Here’s Drew Harwell with the details for the Washington Post:
The FBI and the Defense Department were actively involved in research and development of facial recognition software that they hoped could be used to identify people from video footage captured by street cameras and flying drones, according to thousands of pages of internal documents that provide new details about the government’s ambitions to build out a powerful tool for advanced surveillance.
[…]
Program leaders worked with…
We’ve said many times that while woodworking is a bit outside our wheelhouse, we have immense respect for those with the skill and patience to turn dead trees into practical objects. Among such artisans, few are better known than the legendary Norm Abram — host of The New Yankee Workshop from 1989 to 2009 on PBS.
So we were pleased when the official YouTube channel for The New Yankee Workshop started uploading full episodes of the classic DIY show a few months back for a whole new generation to enjoy. The online availability of this valuable resource is noteworthy enough, but we were particularly impressed to see the channel start experimenting with AI enhanced versions of the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/03/02/norm-abram-is-back-and-thanks-to-ai-now-in-hd/
I was especially struck by some words following the habitual long litany of presidential achievements, which was for much different reasons also selected by Democratic Party fund raising machine that is never idle. Here is their version of the passage, conveyed the next morning as a private message from the President himself to me: “I’ve never been more optimistic about the future of America, Richard. I mean it. We’re a nation with a strong soul, a strong backbone, and a strong people. We just have to remember this and remember who we are. There is nothing beyond our capacity if we do it together.” I listened to these words, presumably inserted for their inspirational impact…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://richardfalk.org/2023/02/18/demonic-optimism-bidens-state-of-the-union-address/
The family of Anthony “Tony” Mitchell, a 33-year-old white man who was tortured for two weeks inside the Walker County jail before succumbing to his injuries, is suing over a dozen jail staff in connection with the death.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/02/18/ffka-f18.html
Under U.S. copyright law, Internet providers must terminate the accounts of repeat infringers “in appropriate circumstances.”
Many ISPs have been reluctant to take such drastic measures, which triggered a wave of copyright infringement lawsuits in recent years.
Internet provider RCN is among the targeted providers. In 2021, the company was sued by several film companies, including the makers of The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, London Has Fallen, and Hellboy.
The movie companies alleged that RCN wasn’t doing enough to stop subscribers from pirating on its network. Instead of terminating the accounts of persistent pirates, the Internet provider looked away, they argued.
The stakes in these liability lawsuits are high. Internet providers face damages claims reaching hundreds of millions of dollars, while…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/filmmakers-request-identities-of-reddit-users-to-aid-piracy-lawsuit-230218/
