Ars Technica – “Lab leak” marketing page replaces federal hub for COVID resources

Apr 192025
 

After obliterating the federal office on long COVID and clawing back billions in COVID funding from state health departments, the Trump administration has now entirely erased the online hub for federal COVID-19 resources. In its place now stands a site promoting the unproven idea that the pandemic virus SARS-CoV-2 was generated in and leaked from a lab in China, sparking the global health crisis.
Navigating to COVID.gov brings up a slick site with rich content that lays out arguments and allegations supporting a lab-based origin of the pandemic and subsequent cover-up by US health officials and Democrats.
Previously, the site provided unembellished quick references to COVID-19 resources, including links to information on vaccines, testing, treatments, and long COVID….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/covid-gov-now-redirects-to-site-promoting-unproven-lab-leak/

 2025-04-19  No Responses »

jwz – Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!

Apr 182025
 

Narc dot AI: American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on “college protesters,” “radicalized” political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers […] Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an “AI-powered force multiplier for public safety” that “deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels.” […] 404 Media obtained a presentation showing some of these AI characters. These include a “radicalized AI” “protest persona,” which poses as a 36-year-old…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/04/hello-fellow-kids-doing-crimes-is-tight/

 2025-04-18  No Responses »

Planet Python – Glyph Lefkowitz: Stop Writing `__init__` Methods

Apr 182025
 

The History
Before dataclasses were added to Python in version 3.7 — in June of 2018 — the
__init__ special method had an important use. If you had a class
representing a data structure — for example a 2DCoordinate, with x and y
attributes — you would want to be able to construct it as 2DCoordinate(x=1,
y=2), which would require you to add an __init__ method with x and y
parameters.
The other options available at the time all had pretty bad problems:

You could remove 2DCoordinate from your public API and instead expose a make_2d_coordinate function and make it non-importable, but then how would you document your return or parameter types?
You could document the x and y attributes and make the user assign…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.glyph.im/2025/04/stop-writing-init-methods.html

 2025-04-18  No Responses »

Internet Archive Blogs – Take Action: Defend the Internet Archive

Apr 182025
 

The Internet Archive needs your help. A coalition of major record labels has filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive—demanding $700 million for our work preserving and providing access to historical 78rpm records. These fragile, obsolete discs hold some of the earliest recordings of a vanishing American culture. But this lawsuit goes far beyond old records. It’s an attack on the Internet Archive itself. This lawsuit is an existential threat to the Internet Archive and everything we preserve—including the Wayback Machine, a cornerstone of memory and preservation on the internet. At a time when digital information is disappearing, being rewritten, or erased entirely, the tools to preserve history must be defended—not dismantled. This isn’t just…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2025/04/17/take-action-defend-the-internet-archive/

 2025-04-18  No Responses »

Ballot Access News – Disputed North Carolina Judicial Election Goes to Fourth Circuit

Apr 162025
 

On April 15, Allison Riggs, the winner of the North Carolina November 2024 State Supreme Court judicial race (according to official election returns), appealed to the Fourth Circuit for a stay of the U.S. District Court order that permits further judgment of thousands of the ballots. Griffin v Riggs and North Carolina State Board of Elections, 25-1397 and 25-1398.

The issue is whether the State Supreme Court violated the U.S. Constitution last week when it invalidated some overseas and miliatry absentee ballots and put others under a legal cloud.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/04/16/disputed-north-carolina-judicial-election-goes-to-fourth-circuit/

 2025-04-16  No Responses »

Ballot Access News – COFOE Is Now Forty Years Old

Apr 162025
 

COFOE, the Coalition for Free & Open Elections, is now 40 years old. COFOE is a loose coalition of some of the nation’s nationally-organized minor parties, plus other organizations that support tolerant ballot access. The founding meeting to bring such an organization into existence was held February 9, 1985, at 113 University Place, New York. Representatives of the Citizens, Communist, Humanist, Libertarian, New Alliance, Populist, and Socialist Party attended, along with Art Eisenberg of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
The March 16 meeting, also held in New York, created the Statement of Principles.
The May 11 meeting, also held in New York, chose the name “Coalition for Free & Open Elections.”
Back then, before the internet and e-mail,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/04/16/cofoe-is-now-forty-years-old/

 2025-04-16  No Responses »

Ballot Access News – North Carolina Overseas Military Voters File Their Own Lawsuit to Validate Their November 2024 Ballots

Apr 152025
 

On April 14, some overseas North Carolina voters filed their own lawsuit to save their November 2024 ballots from being invalidated. Cooley v Hirsch, e.d., 5:25cv-193. They put out that they followed all the rules when they voted last year. The rules said they didn’t need to enclose a copy of their photo ID. Yet now the State Supreme Court is ordering them all to send such copies in a short time period, or have their votes discarded.

The new case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Richard E. Myers, who already has the associated case filed by the State Board of Elections.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/04/14/north-carolina-overseas-military-voters-file-their-own-lawsuit-to-validate-their-november-2024-ballots/

 2025-04-15  No Responses »

Ballot Access News – North Carolina Supreme Court Invalidates Thousands of Votes in November 2024 Election for State Supreme Court Justice

Apr 122025
 

On April 11, the North Carolina Supreme Court issued an opinion in Griffin v North Carolina State Board of Elections, 25-181 P25-104. This is the lawsuit filed by the losing Republican nominee for State Supreme Court Justice in the November 2024 election. The State Supreme Court allowed thousands of challenged votes to be counted, but disallowed thousands of others that had been cast by overseas and military voters.
Some of the invalidated ballots were cast by overseas voters who had “inherited” their connection to North Carolina. They were born overseas, to U.S. citizen-parents who had been domiciled in North Carolina before they took up residence in other countries. Even though the law has long recognized their ability…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/04/11/north-carolina-supreme-court-invalidates-thousands-of-votes-in-november-2024-election-for-state-supreme-court-justice/

 2025-04-12  No Responses »

Ars Technica – That groan you hear is users’ reaction to Recall going back into Windows

Apr 122025
 

Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds.
When Recall was first introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they managed to gain even brief administrative access to a Windows device. Privacy advocates warned that Recall was ripe for abuse in intimate partner violence settings. They also noted that there was nothing stopping Recall from preserving sensitive disappearing content sent through privacy-protecting messengers such as Signal.
Enshittification at a new scale
Following months of backlash, Microsoft later suspended…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/04/microsoft-is-putting-privacy-endangering-recall-back-into-windows-11/

 2025-04-12  No Responses »

Techdirt. – AI Crawlers Are Harming Wikimedia, Bringing Open Source Sites To Their Knees, And Putting The Open Web At Risk

Apr 102025
 

The current rapid advances in generative AI are built on three things. Computing power, some clever coding, and vast amounts of training data. Lots of money can buy you more of the first two, but finding the necessary training material is increasingly hard. Anyone seeking to bolster their competitive advantage through training needs to find fresh sources. This has led to the widespread deployment of AI crawlers, which scour the Internet for more data that can be downloaded and used to train AI systems. Some of the prime targets for these AI scraping bots are Wikimedia projects, which claim to be “the largest collection of open knowledge in the world”. This has now become a serious…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/10/ai-crawlers-are-harming-wikimedia-bringing-open-source-sites-to-their-knees-and-putting-the-open-web-at-risk/

 2025-04-10  No Responses »

jwz – Signal

Apr 082025
 

Because of the ongoing fucktastrophe, the cries of “Use SIGNAL!” are constant and unavoidable. And I get it, it may be the least-bad option in a sea of terrible options. If, that is, you choose to ignore the advice of “don’t use your phone for that shit” (the Stringer Bell Rule). But out of curiosity, because I haven’t been keeping up, has the Signal Corporation addressed: The fact that they are shilling a climate-incinerating cryptocurrency ponzi scheme right inside the Signal app; The fact that there are no interoperable third-party implementations, or even third-party builds/distributions of the Signal app, because the Signal Corporation abuses Trademark law to legally prohibit anyone from doing…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2025/04/signal-3/

 2025-04-08  No Responses »

Ars Technica – Framework “temporarily pausing” some laptop sales because of new tariffs

Apr 072025
 

Framework, the designers and sellers of the modular and repairable Framework Laptop 13 and other products, announced today that it would be “temporarily pausing US sales” on some of its laptop configurations as a result of new tariffs put on Taiwanese imports by the Trump administration. The affected models will be removed from Framework’s online store for now, and there’s no word on when buyers can expect them to come back.
“We priced our laptops when tariffs on imports from Taiwan were 0 percent,” the company responded to a post asking why it was pausing sales. “At a 10 percent tariff, we would have to sell the lowest-end SKUs at a loss.”
“Other consumer goods makers have performed…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/04/framework-temporarily-pausing-some-laptop-sales-because-of-new-tariffs/

 2025-04-07  No Responses »
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