The Death of the Mind

Just when we didn’t think the state of Texas could get any more wacko on tech policy, this latest bill really suggests otherwise. House Bill 1181 is an age verification measure that is similar to what we’ve seen in the state legislatures across other red U.S. states.
You have an age verification proposal that is similar to Louisiana Act 440 and Utah’s Senate Bill 287 – all porn sites with users from these states must have a government ID or a credit card in order to verify age in order to watch age-restricted content. But, the bill itself takes an extreme turn in the guise of protecting the general public’s health.
House Bill 1181, introduced by a team of anti-porn legislators,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/01/texas-age-verification-bill-would-plaster-health-warnings-on-porn-sites/

The shock closure yesterday of one of the world’s oldest and most reliable torrent sites ranks as one of the biggest surprises in recent years.
Founded in 2008, RARBG had a reputation for taking the fundamentals seriously. The site offered the usual spread of movies and TV shows, available in various qualities and numerous file sizes. The site didn’t cover every single release but when trawling the archives, it certainly felt like it might.
Consistent, Organized, Predictable
RARBG also became known for consistently offering subtitles for most movie and TV show releases. Long before legal streaming services made any serious attempt, RARBG’s curation of subtitles helped the deaf enjoy films again, without any of the frustrations associated with mislabeled…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/rarbg-over-267000-movie-tv-show-magnet-links-appear-online-230601/

We’ve written a lot about AB 2273, California’s Age Appropriate Design Code (AADC) that requires websites with users in California to try to determine the ages of all their visitors, write up dozens of reports on potential harms, and then seek to mitigate those harms. I’ve written about why it’s literally impossible to comply with the law. We’ve had posts on how it conflicts with privacy laws and how it’s a radical experimentation on children (ironically, the drafters of the bill insist that they’re trying to stop experimentation on children).
We’ve also written about how NetChoice, an internet company trade group, has sued to block the law as unconstitutional, and how I filed a declaration explaining how…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/01/governor-newsom-desperately-begs-netchoice-to-drop-its-lawsuit-over-unconstitutional-aadc-bill/

Do you think Tcl/Tk GUIs are doomed to look outdated? Fear not! A treeview widget: The official example of Forest Light: The ttkthemes gallery Plus, Tk itself has a little choice of built-in themes: We can use these themes with nodgui, the Ltk fork. In June of 2020, @cage added a little function to load a .tcl file: (defun eval-tcl-file (file-path) “This function will feed the TCL interpreter with the contents of the file `path’. Please, as this function will load and execute a script, ensure to load files only from trusted sources otherwise severe security problem may arise.” (assert (stringp file-path))…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/pretty-gui-in-common-lisp-with-nodgui-tk-themes/

In his concurrence, Justice Gorsuch called the Supreme Court’s decision last week in the Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith case a narrow one of statutory interpretation, ostensibly doing nothing more than interpreting the breadth of the first fair use factor (“the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes”) the copyright statute lists for determining whether the use of an existing copyrighted work is fair.
But the majority’s decision, written by Justice Sotomayor, was hardly narrow; it was a decision that fundamentally rewrote the operational axis of our current copyright law. As a result, it does enormous damage to expressive freedom while also creating…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/25/the-warhol-decision-how-scotus-forgot-the-first-amendment-turned-copyright-into-a-liability-time-bomb/

The US hospice system is supposed to provide compassionate end-of-life care. But private equity firms have swallowed up the industry: 7 out of 10 hospice agencies are now for-profit, putting profit maximization over patient well-being.
In recent years, private equity has exploited both fragmentation in the hospice sector and gaping holes in oversight left by federal agencies. (Justin Paget / DigitalVision via Getty Images) Though the majority of Americans spend the final weeks of their lives in hospice care, the United States only got its first hospice, the Connecticut Hospice, in 1974. Today, just under a half century later, over 5,500 hospices provide services for the dying; in 2020, 1.72 million…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2023/05/private-equity-hospice-care-profit-regulation/

I’m about to write an essay that will lead to mass misinterpretation or out of context quoting, and before I get into that situation (intentionally), I have to create this entire sidebar to talk about a social construct I’ve observed over the years. I’ve spoken elsewhere about the Inside Out, but this is a different online (and offline) situation to that. Very quickly: The “Inside Out” is my belief that there are people who believe they are in private spaces online that are in fact not private at all but they’re absolutely convinced of it and the resulting friction is nearly blinding when it comes to a head. What I’m talking about is something else entirely….

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5528

A North Carolina State Court of Appeals will soon decide how many signatures an independent candidate needs to get on the ballot for Orange County Commissioner. The law says an independent needs 4% of the number of registered voters in the district. In Orange County, there are two rounds for County Commissioner elections. In the first round, the voters of district two are the only voters. But in the run-off, the entire county votes.

See this story. The independent candidate, Connor Fraley, argues that the 4% should be calculated on the number of registered voters in district two, not in the entire county. He lost in the lower court but is appealing.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2023/05/20/north-carolina-state-court-ponders-how-to-interpret-law-on-number-of-signatures-for-an-independent-candidate/