The Death of the Mind

Last week, confusion erupted in response to the INDY’s publication of an April 3 letter, sent from Habitat for Humanity of Durham to members of Durham’s city council and board of county commissioners, in which a spokesperson for Durham Habitat stated that the organization did not authorize its co-sponsorship of the proposed “SCAD” text amendment to Durham’s zoning ordinance. The letter—which also stated that Durham Habitat’s involvement in the proposal “was enacted through an unauthorized third party” and noted that “the same third party has been speaking and negotiating on the behalf of Habitat for Humanity of Durham with members of City Council and others”—seemed, to many observers, inaccurate and easily refutable. While Durham Habitat had…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://indyweek.com/news/durham/durham-builder-scad-habitat-humanity/

The Pirate Bay has been around for nearly two decades, which is quite an achievement considering the immense legal pressure it has faced over the years.
Swedish police tried to shut the site down, twice, raiding dozens of servers. This ultimate goal failed but local authorities did prosecute the site’s three co-founders, who all served time in prison for their involvement.
The notorious torrent site stood tall in the midst of this turmoil and continues to operate from thepiratebay.org until this day. While it is no longer the largest piracy site online, anti-piracy forces haven’t forgotten about it.
Pirate Bay Targeted in New Subpoena Wave
This week, we spotted yet another attempt to uncover the current operators. Through the Motion…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/ace-wants-cloudflare-to-expose-the-pirate-bays-operators-230412/

 
Thanks in large part to pandemic social spending, employment recovered from the 2020 recession in record time (Chart: Apricitas Economics, 4/8/23).
A ban on evictions. Required paid leave. Continuous Medicaid coverage. Free school meals. Emergency SNAP allotments. An extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits. Child tax credit expansion. Thousands in stimulus checks.
These measures were part of a suite of policies the US government passed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic fallout it precipitated. They were meant to blunt the damage, to protect the population from a much darker alternative.
And they were remarkably successful. The government boosted incomes of the worst-off in a way that would have appeared totally alien in 2001 or 2008….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://fair.org/home/nyt-blames-american-public-for-collapse-of-pandemic-safety-net/

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…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/12/congress-urges-doj-to-review-the-time-warner-discovery-merger-mess-amidst-chaos-and-ongoing-layoffs/

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…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/12/recent-case-highlights-how-age-verification-laws-may-directly-conflict-with-biometric-privacy-laws/

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/

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…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2023/04/05/link-to-federal-court-order-from-2014-that-says-states-cant-kick-parties-off-the-ballot-immediately/