A dangerous heat wave is sweeping across two-thirds of the U.S. this weekend, bringing some kind of heat watch or excessive heat warning to nearly 200 million people. Temperatures on Friday pushed into the 90s in several cities, from St. Louis and Chicago in the Midwest to Washington, D.C. and New York City along the East Coast.With stifling humidity, heat index values in many areas soared past 100 degrees Fahrenheit as of 1 p.m. Friday,…
For years, the abandoned tower in Pasadena, Texas, has beckoned adventurers. Drone pilots and urban explorers have surveyed the derelict building inside and out. What was once a pledge to the future of this industrial Houston suburb is now a relic from the past.No more. Early on Sunday morning, the city of Pasadena will demolish the First Pasadena State Bank building, its one and only skyscraper. The 12-story tower is one of only a few…
Why do we care about encryption? Why was it a big deal, at least in theory, when Mark Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that Facebook would move to end-to-end encryption on all three of its messaging platforms? We don’t just support encryption for its own sake. We fight for it because encryption is one of the most powerful tools individuals have for maintaining their digital privacy and security in an increasingly insecure world. And although…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/dont-let-encrypted-messaging-become-hollow-promise
The Socialist Party will hold its national convention in Newark, New Jersey, on October 18-19, 2019. The party will decide whether or not to run a presidential candidate. The last time it didn’t run anyone for president was 1984. There is some sentiment that the party should not run its own nominee, and instead try to assist Howie Hawkins, who is seeking the Green Party presidential nomination. Hawkins is also a member of the Socialist…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://ballot-access.org/2019/07/19/socialist-party-sets-national-convention-3/
The most egregious aspects of Palantir’s privatized state surveillance of just about everyone.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-may-aug.html#20_July_2019_%28Privatized_state_surveillance%29
A dangerous heat wave is sweeping across two-thirds of the U.S. this weekend, bringing some kind of heat watch or excessive heat warning to nearly 200 million people. Temperatures on Friday pushed into the 90s in several cities, from St. Louis and Chicago in the Midwest to Washington, D.C. and New York City along the East Coast.With stifling humidity, heat index values in many areas soared past 100 degrees Fahrenheit as of 1 p.m. Friday,…
Just months before millions of its internal documents were stolen and dumped on the internet, the Tennessee-based surveillance company Perceptics was preparing to pitch New York’s transit authority on how it could help enforce impending “congestion pricing” rules, according to leaked documents reviewed by The Intercept. The pitch, as outlined in the files, went well beyond mere toll enforcement and into profiling New Yorkers’ travel patterns and companions, creating what experts describe as major privacy…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/07/09/surveillance-perceptics-new-york-city-drivers/
After decades of nurturing a culture of violent, racist abuse, Customs and Border Protection cannot be seen as just another working-class job. Like Hitler’s SS, we must see CBP not as a place where good people do bad things, but where bad people do bad things. Protesters demonstrate for the migrants who perished at the US-Mexico border or while in custody of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) on July 1, 2019 in Los Angeles,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/07/border-patrol-is-the-american-ss/
In April, hundreds of people packed into the Old South Church in Boston to hear the world-renowned dissident and linguist Noam Chomsky speak. In this hour-long special, we air an excerpt of Chomsky’s speech and his on-stage interview with Amy Goodman.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.democracynow.org/2019/7/5/an_hour_with_noam_chomsky_on
The United States is in the middle of a massive housing crisis. Community land trusts can help address it. Tenants march in a protest in the Lower East Side in New York. (Marlis Momber) Over the past fifty years, cycles of disinvestment and aggressive reinvestment in urban real estate markets, stagnating wages, and neoliberal shifts in federal housing policy have created a complex housing system that is fueled by debt and fails to serve a…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/07/community-land-trusts-affordable-housing/
Noah Scalin (previously) writes, “I’m so devastated to learn about Mad magazine’s imminent demise. I just recently finished my own portrait of Alfred E. Neuman, made from stickers, inspired by the reboot of the magazine (which features new works by artists inspired by growing up reading Mad). Mad was such a seminal part of my childhood. As a budding activist I loved seeing popular culture, politics and advertising skewered in such a clever & subversive…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/05/att-vs-bill-gaines.html
The Working Families will endorse one Democrat for president later this year, but in the meantime it has announced that the endorsement will go to one of these six candidates: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Bill de Blasio, or Kamala Harris. See this press release, which only relates to West Virginia. See this story, which says that the story is true for the entire Working Families Party, not just the West Virginia…
Way back in February, Mozilla announced an upcoming collaboration with Scroll aimed at finding a way to help fund news outlets. The organization appears ready to finally launch to the service, sending users a survey, along with invites to an upcoming beta launch of what it calls “Firefox Ad-free Internet.” The service is one of countless third-party platforms aimed at helping ailing publications find a way to better monetize in an an era of defunding,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/05/mozilla-readies-launch-of-news-subscription-service/
The scrubbing began quickly. At 10:55 a.m., ProPublica published a story reporting the existence of a secret, invitation-only Facebook group for current and former Border Patrol agents that featured vulgar, violent, and misogynistic content directed at migrants and lawmakers. A little over two hours later, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, called for active-duty agents responsible for the posts to lose their jobs. Minutes after that, U.S. Customs and Border…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/07/05/border-patrol-facebook-group/
Enlarge (credit: Andrew Cowie/AFP/GettyImages) Earlier this year, ICANN sought public comment on a new contract for the Public Interest Registry, the non-profit organization that administers the .org top-level domain. The results were stark. More than 3,200 individuals and organizations submitted comments to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and most of them focused on a proposal to remove a cap on the price customers could be charged for .org domains. The existing contract, signed…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1530117
GnuPG contributors Robert J. Hansen (rjh) and Daniel Kahn Gillmor (dkg) were victims of a certificate spamming attack over the past week. This attack exploited a defect in the OpenPGP protocol itself in order to “poison” rjh and dkg’s OpenPGP certificates. Anyone who attempts to import a poisoned certificate into a vulnerable OpenPGP installation will very likely break their installation in hard-to-debug ways. Poisoned certificates are already on the SKS keyserver network. There is no…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/792494/rss
The books of the 20th century are largely not online. They are mostly not available from even the biggest booksellers. And, libraries who have collected hard copies of these books have not been able to deliver them in a cost-efficient, simple, digital form to their patrons. The way libraries could fill that gap is to adopt and deliver a controlled digital lending service. The Internet Archive is trying to do its part but needs others…
Unless we begin shutting down coal and natural-gas facilities, and stop building new ones, we’re doomed to miss the targets of the Paris treaty.
The Democratic Party should be hosting thematic debates with viable presidential candidates on poverty, housing, foreign policy, immigrant rights, the climate crisis, and more. Instead, they are collaborating with the mainstream media to host empty entertainment spectacles. Democratic presidential candidates (L-R) Marianne Williamson, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, former tech executive Andrew Yang, South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg, former vice president Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/07/democratic-presidential-debate-winner/
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez resisted the efforts of Customs and Border Protection officials to prevent her from speaking directly to migrants detained in El Paso, Texas on Monday, forcing her way into a cell filled with women during a visit by a Congressional delegation. Emerging from the facility, Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter that one of the detained women “described their treatment at the hands of officers as ‘psychological warfare’ — waking them at odd hours for…