The Death of the Mind

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/

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…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theconversation.com/researchers-turned-superglue-into-an-recyclable-cheap-oil-free-plastic-alternative-202315

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

On February 7, the Washington State Senate Committee on State Government and Elections passed SB 5209 by 4-3. It makes voting mandatory. Here is the text. It is sponsored by 14 Democratic State Senators: Sam Hunt, Andy Bilig, Lisa Wellman, Bob Hasegawa, Lisa Lovelett, Rebecca Saldana, Mark Liias, Steve Conway, Manka Dhingra, Karen Keiser, Patty Kuderer, Joe Nguyen, Javiere Valdez, and Claire Wilson.
It is ironic that a bill for mandatory voting is making headway in the state with one of the least choices on general election ballots. Washington uses a top-two system, so that there are never more than two candidate on the general election ballot for congress or any partisan state office. No minor party…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2023/02/09/bill-for-mandatory-voting-advances-in-washington-legislature/

Handy thing, that First Amendment. Now, about the Second …

The US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that a North Carolina police department policy prohibiting the livestreaming of traffic stops is unconstitutional unless the department can support its claim that broadcasting endangers officers.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/02/09/us_livestream_police/

Australian pubs are starting to use facial recognition in areas with
gambling machines, to keep people out who have requested not to be
allowed to gamble.

The basic idea sounds harmless in principle. It would seem that if
you have not added yourself to the list of people to exclude, this
system won’t affect you. But is that really true?

I wonder who else will have access to the face scans of people who
visit the club? Will those scans go into a system connected to the
internet?

Will state agencies be able to add faces to the list of people to
exclude? Will state agencies be able to collect the face scans of
everyone that enters?

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-nov-feb.html#3_February_2023_(aus_pubs_facial_recognition_gambling)

Self-driving cars are causing mayhem on SF streets In letters to the California Public Utilities Commission seeking to curtail their expansion, the city’s Municipal Transportation Agency and County Transportation Authority documented at least 92 incidents between late May and December where self-driving taxis created mayhem on city streets — disrupting traffic, Muni transit and emergency responders. Jan 22: Firefighters were battling a two-alarm apartment blaze on the corner of Hayes and Divisadero streets when a driverless Cruise car entered the active firefighting scene and nearly ran over fire hoses on the street. Firefighters at the scene stood in front of the car to try to get it to stop, but the autonomous vehicle came to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/02/autonomous-murderbots-still-going-great/