Joshua McLemore, a man suffering from severe mental illness, was left for 20 days in the Indiana jail cell where he died of malnutrition. When they took him in, during a psychotic episode, they skipped the booking process and conducted no medical evaluation. — Read the rest
The Pirate Bay has been around for nearly two decades, which is quite an achievement considering the immense legal pressure it has faced over the years.
Swedish police tried to shut the site down, twice, raiding dozens of servers. This ultimate goal failed but local authorities did prosecute the site’s three co-founders, who all served time in prison for their involvement.
The notorious torrent site stood tall in the midst of this turmoil and continues to operate from thepiratebay.org until this day. While it is no longer the largest piracy site online, anti-piracy forces haven’t forgotten about it.
Pirate Bay Targeted in New Subpoena Wave
This week, we spotted yet another attempt to uncover the current operators. Through the Motion…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/ace-wants-cloudflare-to-expose-the-pirate-bays-operators-230412/
IBM’s Selectric line of typewriters were quite popular in the 1960s, thanks in part to an innovation called the typeball which allowed for easy font changes on a single machine. Unfortunately, as if often the case when specialized components are involved, it’s an idea that hasn’t aged particularly well. The Selectric typewriters are now around 60 years old and since IBM isn’t making replacement parts, those restoring these machines have had to get somewhat creative like using a 3D printer to build new typeballs.
It sounds like it would be a simple, but much like the frustration caused with modern printers, interfacing automated computer systems with real-world objects like paper and ink is not often as straightforward…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/11/ibm-selectric-typewriters-finally-get-diy-typeballs/
It is now illegal for anyone in Arkansas under 18 to be on social media without asking their parents, according to a new bill signed by the state’s governor on Wednesday. Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders enacted the Social Media Safety Act, also known as SB396, in the latest legislative push to restrict children and teens from using social media. “A social media company shall not permit an Arkansas user who is a minor to be an account holder on the social media company’s social media platform unless the minor has the express consent of a parent or legal guardian,” the bill states. “A social media company shall verify the age of an account holder. If an…
SAN FRANCISCO—With the powerful Democrat making frequent appearances before her and urging her to resign her seat, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) reportedly faced increased pressure Friday from a hallucination of the late former President John F. Kennedy yelling at her to step down. “The party, Dianne! Think of the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/sen-feinstein-faces-increased-pressure-from-hallucinat-1850337992
Thanks in large part to pandemic social spending, employment recovered from the 2020 recession in record time (Chart: Apricitas Economics, 4/8/23).
A ban on evictions. Required paid leave. Continuous Medicaid coverage. Free school meals. Emergency SNAP allotments. An extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits. Child tax credit expansion. Thousands in stimulus checks.
These measures were part of a suite of policies the US government passed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic fallout it precipitated. They were meant to blunt the damage, to protect the population from a much darker alternative.
And they were remarkably successful. The government boosted incomes of the worst-off in a way that would have appeared totally alien in 2001 or 2008….
External feed Read More at the Source: https://fair.org/home/nyt-blames-american-public-for-collapse-of-pandemic-safety-net/
*Markey, Merkley, Jayapal Lead Colleagues on Legislation to Ban Government Use of Facial Recognition and Other Biometric Technology.*
I support passing this law, but it does not go far enough. Nongovernmental
operation of systems for facial recognition (and other 1984 surveillance
systems) is equally dangerous and we need to put an end to that too.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2023-jan-apr.html#12_April_2023_(Legislation_to_ban_facial_recognition)
The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years before giving up.
But that was just the start.
After its tactical retreat, AT&T spun off Time Warner into an entirely new company, Warner Media. Warner Media then immediately turned around and announced a blockbuster merger with Discovery, creating the creatively named Warner Brothers Discovery.
This new company has been a blistering mess as well. Executives there have been so cheap they’ve refused to pay residuals to…
KDE Connect is the great software that allows for interfacing between the KDE desktop and your various mobile devices running Android, Plasma Mobile, Apple iOS, or even Sailfish OS. KDE Connect allows easily sharing files and data with your mobile device(s), receiving phone notifications on your desktop, and a lot of other remote/cross-device functionality. The KDE Connect 2.0 initiative that is taking shape this year thanks to full-time development work is going to modernize this open-source solution…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Connect-2.0-Plans
California passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) nominally to protect children’s privacy, but at the same time, the AADC requires businesses to do an age “assurance” of all their users, children and adults alike. (Age “assurance” requires the business to distinguish children from adults, but the methodology to implement has many of the same characteristics as age verification–it just needs to be less precise for anyone who isn’t around the age of majority. I’ll treat the two as equivalent).
Doing age assurance/age verification raises substantial privacy risks. There are several ways of doing it, but the two primary options for quick results are (1) requiring consumers to submit government-issued documents, or (2) requiring consumers to submit…
Looking back on what programming used to be like can be a fascinatingly entertaining thing, which is why [Tough Developer] decided to download and try using Turbo C and C++, from version 1.0 to the more recent releases. Borland Turbo C 1.0 is a doozy as it was released in 1987 — two years before the C89 standardization that brought us the much beloved ANSI C that so many of us spent the 90s with. Turbo C++ 1.0 is from 1991, which precedes the standardization of C++ in 1998. This means that both integrated development environments (IDEs) provide a fascinating look at what was on the cutting edge in the late 80s and early 90s.
Online help…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/08/revisiting-borland-turbo-c-and-c/
Mobian is a project that aims to bring the Debian distribution to mobile devices such
as smartphones and tablets. By building on the flexibility, stability, and community-driven
development of Debian, Mobian aspires to create a powerful and
user-friendly alternative to existing mobile operating systems. The project
is actively working on reducing the delta between Mobian and Debian, and its
ultimate goal is to be absorbed back into its parent distribution and to
make it easy to run Debian on mobile devices.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/928211/
US police have used the database nearly a million times: Clearview took photos without users’ knowledge, its CEO Hoan Ton-That acknowledged in an interview last month. Doing so allowed for the rapid expansion of the company’s massive database, which is marketed on its website to law enforcement. […] Ton-That said “Clearview AI’s database of publicly available images is lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google.” Notable privacy advocate Facebook begs to differ: “Clearview AI’s actions invade people’s privacy which is why we banned their founder from our services and sent them a legal demand to stop accessing any data, photos, or videos from our services,” a Meta spokesperson said….
Cities and counties across the country have banned government use of face surveillance technology, and many more are weighing proposals to do so. From Boston to San Francisco, Jackson, Mississippi to Minneapolis, elected officials and activists know that face surveillance gives police the power to track us wherever we go. It also disproportionately impacts people of color, turns us all into perpetual suspects, increases the likelihood of being falsely arrested, and chills people’s willingness to participate in first amendment protected activities. Even Amazon, known for operating one of the largest video surveillance networks in the history of the world, extended its moratorium on selling face recognition to police.
Now, Congress must do its part. We’ve created a…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/enough-enough-tell-congress-ban-federal-use-face-recognition
SAN FRANCISCO—Conducting his monthly sweep for new content, Tubi CEO Farhad Massoudi was reportedly combing through a shelf of used DVDs at Goodwill Thursday looking for movies to upload to the streaming service. “American Hustle, fine, Secondhand Lions, fine, The Passion Of The Christ, fine,” said Massoudi, who…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/tubi-ceo-combs-through-goodwill-used-dvds-looking-for-m-1850262553
This year, legislatures in Montana, Minnesota and Texas are threatening to pass bills making it far more difficult for a ballot-qualified party to remain on the ballot, and making the new requirement go into effect before the 2024 election. This is shocking behavior. It has long been the custom that when a state makes it more difficult for a ballot-qualified party to remain on the ballot, the change does not take effect until after the next election, to give any affected party a chance to try to meet the new requirement.
The Minnesota and Texas bills raise the vote test to 10%, and the Montana bill raises it to 5% of the number of registered voters. The…
Concrete is an incredibly useful and versatile building material on which not only today’s societies, but also the ancient Roman Empire was built. To this day Roman concrete structures can be found in mundane locations such as harbors, but also the Pantheon in Rome, which to this day forms the largest unreinforced concrete dome in existence at 43.3 meters diameter, and is in excellent condition despite being being nearly 1,900 years old.
Even as the Roman Empire fell and receded into what became the Byzantine – also known as the Eastern Roman – Empire and the world around these last remnants of Roman architecture changed and changed again, all of these concrete structures remained despite knowledge of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/04/03/self-healing-concrete-what-ancient-roman-concrete-can-teach-us/
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/
Look, we all knew that there was going to be a lot of fuss about the upcoming public domaining (finally!) of Mickey Mouse nine months from now on January 1, 2024. I mean, we’ve already been talking about what next year’s public domain game jam is going to look like with Mickey as one of the options.
If you somehow have been living under a rock and never read anything on Techdirt before, let’s get you up to speed. Mickey Mouse debuted as Steamboat Willie in 1928. The character was a blatant animated copy of Steamboat Bill, a Buster Keaton silent film that came out… the same year. Disney, of course, also built up much of its…
