We’ve pointed out for years that there’s always been some level of confusion about the boundaries of the “non-commercial” tag on a Creative Commons license. There are lots of things that are kind of fuzzy about it. Does it mean you just can’t sell the work? Or does it mean you can’t even use it on a website if that website has ads on it? Indeed, we’ve worried that the non-commercial license created a bit…
SolidarityBy Linda Thompson and Steve BloomJanuary/February 2020 issue PROSPECTS FOR SOCIALISM are off in the future. The 2020 presidential election is here and now, and confronts us with a right-wing menace unlike any that has been faced before. When asked what our goals are in the 2020 elections the majority of left activists in the USA will say: “to defeat Donald Trump.” Many are even more specific: “We are Bernie or Bust.” If we are…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://greenpapers.net/socialists-and-the-2020-election/
The Communications Workers of America is seeking to unionize tech and video game workers Boing Boing
This week, the Communications Workers of America — one of the largest industrial unions in the country — launched the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE), which seeks to unionize people working for game and tech companies. The CWA forged an alliance with the grassroots labor group Game Workers Unite (a similar deal was struck in Toronto between the CWA and the local GWU chapter). Two fulltime CWA staffers are charged with assisting tech and…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/09/no-more-crunch.html
On December 31, U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Biggs, an Obama appointee, struck down North Carolina’s law requiring voters at the polls to show certain kinds of ID, or else to vote provisionally. North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP v Cooper, m.d., 1:18cv-1034. Here is the 60-page opinion. The case had been filed in 2018.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2020/01/01/u-s-district-court-strikes-down-north-carolina-voter-id-law/
(Someone stumbled upon my 2010 decade retrospective post and suggested I write a followup…) This has been a big decade for me. Ten years ago, I’d been in an increasingly stale job for several years too long. I was tired of living in the city, and had a yurt as a weekend relief valve. I had the feeling a big change was coming. Four months on and I quit my job, despite the ongoing financial…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/2020_hindsight/
[Prefatory Note: At this age, having exhausted prose options, I indulge myself during holidays, by sharing poems that seek also your indulgence. I searched 2019 forsome glimmers of good news, and felt stymied. Of course, here, there, everywhere there were glorious private exceptions, yet hovering over the public marketplaces ofthe world I cringe beneath menacing storm clouds and below chaos and misery, and catastrophes waiting to happen. It is this spirit that I looked back on 2019,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2019/12/31/forgetting-2019-a-poem/

Enlarge / A student in Berlin, Germany places his smartphone on a shelf on the classroom wall at the beginning of the lesson. (credit: Britta Pedersen/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB/Getty Images) In the early 2000s, when I taught freshman writing at the University of North Carolina, disengaged students couldn’t rely on the Internet to distract them—they had to make their own fun. One male student used a light “get to know each other” first-day exercise as a chance to…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1637139
Following Richard Stallman being ousted from the Free Software Foundation, the FSF was said to be re-evaluating its relationship with the GNU while R.M.S. said no radical changes are expected. Now a group of GNU maintainers have laid out some of their desires for improving the interactions between the GNU and FSF…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-FSF-Relationship-Ideas
As past identities become stickier for those entering adulthood, it’s not just individuals who will suffer. Society will too.

(Someone stumbled upon my 2010 decade retrospective post and suggested I write a followup…) This has been a big decade for me. Ten years ago, I’d been in an increasingly stale job for several years too long. I was tired of living in the city, and had a yurt as a weekend relief valve. I had the feeling a big change was coming. Four months on and I quit my job, despite the ongoing financial…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/2020_hindsight/
Comparing population growth to growth of traffic explains the fallacy in the “self-soothing” conceit that your children will make the world better (unlike most other people’s children). “‘Thinking your child will be part of the solution, not the problem, is hubris.’ We are the collapse. Our children are the collapse. That article is brilliant, but the author’s reasoning errs at the end when she asserts that her only choice, aside from reproducing and regretting the…
2019 has been an eye-opening, transformative year for free software and the Free Software Foundation (FSF), bringing some major changes both internally and in the world around us. As we navigate these changes, we are guided by the FSF’s founding vision — the four freedoms that define free software, and our mission to make all software be compatible with human freedom. It must be honest, transparent, and shareable, and it must truly work in service…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/bringing-the-free-software-vision-to-2020
2019 has been an eye-opening, transformative year for free software and the Free Software Foundation (FSF), bringing some major changes both internally and in the world around us. As we navigate these changes, we are guided by the FSF’s founding vision — the four freedoms that define free software, and our mission to make all software be compatible with human freedom. It must be honest, transparent, and shareable, and it must truly work in service…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/bringing-the-free-software-vision-to-2020
I live in a large apartment complex (it’s literally a city block big), so I spend a disproportionate amount of time walking down corridors. Recently one of my neighbours installed a Ring wireless doorbell. By default these are motion activated (and the process for disabling motion detection is far from obvious), and if the owner subscribes to an appropriate plan these recordings are stored in the cloud. I’m not super enthusiastic about the idea of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/53968.html

I live in a large apartment complex (it’s literally a city block big), so I spend a disproportionate amount of time walking down corridors. Recently one of my neighbours installed a Ring wireless doorbell. By default these are motion activated (and the process for disabling motion detection is far from obvious), and if the owner subscribes to an appropriate plan these recordings are stored in the cloud. I’m not super enthusiastic about the idea of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/53968.html
We recently posted a lengthy write-up of the licensing team’s activities in 2019. Although we have been really busy, we didn’t want to miss the chance to share some specifics about our activities in October. That month, members of our licensing and campaigns teams headed down to North Carolina to spread the message of software freedom. First, on the 14th & 15th, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) staffed a booth at the ATO conference where…
We recently posted a lengthy write-up of the licensing team’s activities in 2019. Although we have been really busy, we didn’t want to miss the chance to share some specifics about our activities in October. That month, members of our licensing and campaigns teams headed down to North Carolina to spread the message of software freedom. First, on the 14th & 15th, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) staffed a booth at the ATO conference where…
The passage — through MEPs erroneously pushing the wrong buttons! — of the new EU Copyright Directive last March means that online platforms operating in the EU will have to implement filters that allow anyone, anywhere, to claim anything as their copyright, whereupon the platforms will have to detect any attempt by anyone else to upload those claimed works and block them. Julia Reda (previously) was an MEP during the passage of the Copyright Directive…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/20/fat-fingered-disaster.html
Sycamore Brewing received a spanking from North Carolina’s Alcohol Law Enforcement (ALE), which will punish the brewery for making a beer can with cartoon reindeer having sex. From Vice: [T]he label likely violated the agency’s rules prohibiting obscene material, and the brewery didn’t submit it for approval before producing the cans either. As a result, Sycamore will most likely face a fine of between $500 and $1,000. “We’re in a moment in our country where…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/12/07/candian-beer-company-in-troubl.html
The .ORG top-level domain and all of the nonprofit organizations that depend on it are at risk if a private equity firm is allowed to buy control of it. EFF has joined with over 250 respected nonprofits to oppose the sale of Public Interest Registry, the (currently) nonprofit entity that operates the .ORG domain, to Ethos Capital. Internet pioneers including Esther Dyson and Tim Berners-Lee have spoken out against this secretive deal. And 12,000 Internet…