The Free Software Foundation has elected a new president following Richard Stallman’s resignation last September from the FSF…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FSF-President-2020
BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — Wednesday, August 5th, 2020 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced the addition of a new director to its board, and the election of a new president. Long-time free software activist and developer Odile Bénassy, known especially for her work promoting free software in France, was elected to the FSF’s board of directors. Geoffrey Knauth, who has served on the FSF’s board for over thirty years, was elected president. On…
Behold: The mesmerizing glow of the brightest fluorescent material ever made. These colorful bundles of light may look like visions from a dream of the 1980s, but they are real 3D-printed objects illuminated by a new class of materials called SMILES, according to a study published on Thursday in the journal Chem. SMILES, which stands for small-molecule ionic isolation lattices, are crystals scaffolded by star-shaped structures that can brighten the light of fluorescent dyes to…
Medieval ‘wine windows’ reopen, reviving Italian plague traditionThus, the “wine windows,” or buchette del vino, of Tuscany. They are just as they sound: pint-size hatches, carved into the concrete walls of urban wineries and shops, where beverage merchants would serve sips at a safe social distance.First introduced in the 1600s, their true purpose went untapped for centuries after the plague — that is, until a new one came along this year.Previously, previously, previously, previously.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/08/wine-windows/
Spreadsheet woes spanning 16+ years force official update Geneticists have issued new guidelines in naming human genes – after spending years wrestling with Microsoft Excel and similar software that automatically converts the names of genes to dates.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/08/06/excel_gene_names/
On July 22, 2020, Pamela Samuelson, Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley, spoke at a press conference about the copyright lawsuit against the Internet Archive brought by the publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House. These are her remarks: Good afternoon. Very happy to be here with you today. The Authors Alliance has several thousand members around the world and we have endorsed the controlled…
You see, there is a COVID-19 silver lining. For employers. For the rest of us, welcome to the machine Google has gone all-in on its work-from-home policy, telling techies they don’t need to return to the office until July 2021 at the earliest.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/07/28/google_homeworking_study/
When Mexico’s Congress rushed through a new copyright law as part of its adoption of Donald Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), it largely copy-pasted the US copyright statute, with some modifications that made the law even worse for human rights. The result is a legal regime that has all the deficits of the US system, and some new defects that are strictly hecho en Mexico, to the great detriment of the free expression rights of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/07/how-mexicos-new-copyright-law-crushes-free-expression
The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) conducted mass surveillance of protesters at the end of May and in early June using a downtown business district’s camera network, according to new records obtained by EFF. The records show that SFPD received real-time live access to hundreds of cameras as well as a “data dump” of camera footage amid the ongoing demonstrations against police violence. The camera network is operated by the Union Square Business Improvement District…
Article note: it writes itself.The rogue deployment of secret federal police forces in Portland, Oregon, has added a new complication to negotiations over reauthorizing the Trump administration’s vast surveillance powers and appropriating new money for the Department of Homeland Security. In March, a sweeping set of government authorities to monitor people in the United States expired, and Congress continues to debate what limits should be put on such powers before reauthorizing them. And the House…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2020/07/21/fisa-surveillance-dragnet-warrants-dhs/
The National Audubon Society has released all of John James Audubon’s magnificent watercolors from his classic work Birds of America (1827-1838) as free, high-resolution downloads for printing. The 435 life-size watercolors in the collection were “all reproduced from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration.” Each image’s web page is accompanied by Audubon’s wonderful first-person descriptions of the animal. John J. Audubon’s “Birds of America” image downloads (Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/22/audobons-birds-of-america-ar.html
On July 6, North Dakota Voters First submitted more than 36,000 signatures to state officials as part of their statewide ballot measure campaign that would, among other reforms, implement ‘Top-4’ open primaries with ranked choice voting (RCV) general elections. BREAKING: Our campaign just submitted over 36,000 signatures to the North Dakota Secretary of State to ensure our measure to put North Dakota voters first makes the ballot! #ndpol pic.twitter.com/kB8AYBNJwO— North Dakota Voters First (@NDVotersFirst) July…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/ballot_measure_featuring_rcv_submitted_in_north_dakota
They’re more than happy to take Uncle Sam’s coin no matter the protests from some corners of Silicon Valley Despite all those protests, internal and external, by tech workers against their employers’ selling AI to the US military, the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JIAC) this week said the biggest names in IT are lining up to supply Uncle Sam.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/07/09/pentagon_ai_report/
The Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture magazine that lasted from 1968 to 1998, tried many experiments in bringing the goals and nature of their publication to other media. Published regularly from 1968 to 1972 with additional editions throughout the 70s, 80s, and 90s, Stewart Brand’s magazine covered all sorts of subjects, from nature and politics through to technology and human potential. Issues can still be found online and bought used, and are beloved by many,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2020/07/08/the-whole-earth-on-cd-rom-in-hypercard-in-your-browser/
GRAND RAPIDS, MI—Desperately attempting to free himself from a lingering sense of paranoia, local man Adreese Fowler admitted Wednesday that he just couldn’t seem to shake the creeping sensation that someone other than the government, his employer, and advertisers was watching him. “I keep getting this eerie feeling…Read more…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/man-can-t-shake-feeling-that-someone-other-than-governm-1844311785
Back in May we reported on work being done for a readfile() system call to read small files more efficiently. Greg Kroah-Hartman has now volleyed those patches for review on the kernel mailing list for this improvement for reading small to medium file sizes on Linux systems…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-Readfile-Sys-Call-Review
Rep. Liz Cheney, daughter of Dick, is trying to prolong her father’s endless war in Afghanistan. You would think that every Democrat would be united in opposing such a policy, right? Well, you would be wrong. A paratrooper watches as an aircraft flies overhead while dropping supplies in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, on November 9, 2007. US Army / Spc. Micah E. Clare It’s not every day that you wake up in your blue state and…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/afghanistan-war-liz-cheney-jason-crow/
If you spent your youth watching James Bond or similar movies on rainy Saturday afternoons, then you may be familiar with a microdot as a top-secret piece of spy equipment, usually revealed as having been found attached to a seemingly innocuous possession of one of the bad guy’s henchmen, which when blown up on the screen delivers the cryptic yet vital clue to the location of the Evil Lair. Not something you give much thought…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/07/03/make-your-own-microdot/
Like many of us, [John Whittington] was saddened with the news that John Horton Conway passed away a little earlier this year, and in honor of his work, he added the Game of Life to a flip-dot display that he has been working on. The physicality of an electromechanical display seems particularly fitting for cellular automata. Like what you see? If you’re curious about what makes it all tick, the display shown is an Alfa-Zeta…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/07/02/watch-conways-game-of-life-flutter-across-a-flip-dot-display/
I’ve seen a lot of people — including those who are supporting the publishers’ legal attack on the Internet Archive — insist that they “support libraries,” but that the Internet Archive’s Open Library and National Emergency Library are “not libraries.” First off, they’re wrong. But, more importantly, it’s good to see actual librarians now coming out in support of the Internet Archive as well. The Association of Research Libraries has put out a statement asking…