The Death of the Mind

Today’s links

Freedom of reach IS freedom of speech: The end-to-end principle is good, actually.

Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

This day in history: 2002, 2007, 2012, 2017, 2021

Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

Freedom of reach IS freedom of speech (permalink)
The online debate over free speech suuuuucks, and, amazingly, it’s getting worse. This week, it’s the false dichotomy between “freedom of speech” and “freedom of reach,” that is, the debate over whether a platform should override your explicit choices about what you want to see:
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3849331-musk-meets-twitter-staff-freedom-of-reach-new-ideas-on-human-verification
It’s wild that we’re still having this fight. It is literally the first internet fight! The modern internet was born out of an epic struggled between “Bellheads” (who believed…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
The good news is by increasing productivity in the Bullshit Essay sector, students can focus on liquor, memes, and unfortunate casual encounters as God intended.

Today’s News:

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/themes

The US has delayed yet again the requirement for “REAL ID” drivers
licenses for purposes such as getting on an commercial flight.

There is too much identifying and tracking people in the US.
Let’s keep resisting, and see how many years we can block this.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-sep-dec.html#7_December_2022_(US_REAL_ID_requirement_delayed_again)

The U.S. Court of Appeals, D.C., will hear Stein v Federal Election Commission, 21-1213, on Wednesday, January 18. The issue is whether Jill Stein, the 2016 Green Party nominee, must repay $175,000 in primary season matching funds. The FEC shifted the rules in 2016. Previously, the primary period ended when the presidential candidate had finished campaigning for the last party nomination in the calendar, which for Stein was her campaign for the Peace & Freedom nomination, which nominated on August 13, 2016. But the FEC changed that rule, and said the primary season ended when she won the Green Party nomination on August 5. Therefore, the money Stein received between August 5 and August 13 could…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/12/01/d-c-circuit-sets-hearing-date-for-jill-steins-appeal-on-2016-primary-matching-funds-repayment/

I’ve been playing with an Orbic Speed, a relatively outdated device that only speaks LTE Cat 4, but the towers I can see from here are, uh, not well provisioned so throughput really isn’t a concern (and refurbs are $18, so). As usual I’m pretty terrible at just buying devices and using them for their intended purpose, and in this case it has the irritating behaviour that if there’s a power cut and the battery runs out it doesn’t boot again when power returns, so here’s what I’ve learned so far.First, it’s clearly running Linux (nmap indicates that, as do the headers from the built-in webserver). The login page for the web interface has some text…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/61725.html

It was just a little more than 24 hours ago that SDL 2.26 released for this widely-used library by cross-platform games and other software for abstracting software/hardware interfaces. With SDL 2.26 released, SDL 3.0 is now in development. One of the first stages of that big Simple DirectMedia Layer update is removing a lot of old platform code and other obsolete targets…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/SDL3-Dumping-Old-Code

New stuff in the GNU Press shop

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fsf.org/blogs/gnu-press/baby-gnus-hoodies-and-more-show-your-support-for-free-software-through-the-gnu-press-shop

Enlarge / No, those donut tracks aren’t mine, officer. (credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
The Perseverance rover landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater largely because of extensive evidence that the crater once hosted a lake, meaning the presence of liquid water that might once have hosted Martian life. And the landing was a success, placing the rover at the edge of a structure that appeared to be a river delta where the nearby highlands drained into the crater.
But a summary of the first year of data from the rover, published in three different papers being released today, suggests that Perseverance has yet to stumble across any evidence of a watery paradise. Instead, all indications are that water…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1899919

To save the children, we must destroy everything. That’s the reality of the EARN IT Act. I mean, you can get some sort of sense of what you’re in store for just by reading the actual words behind the extremely labored acronym: Eliminating Abuse and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act. Whew. It’s a mouthful. And, given the name, it seems like this would be Congress putting funding towards supporting moderation efforts that target abusive content.
But it’s nothing like that. It’s all about punishing tech companies for the acts of their users. Like FOSTA before it, the bill has zero interest in actually targeting the creators and distributors of illegal content, like child sexual abuse…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/23/earn-it-act-will-make-the-internet-worse-for-everyone-by-undermining-privacy-and-security/

At the November 8, 2022 election, Nevada voters passed Question Three, the top-five initiative, with 52.5% of the vote. It does not go into effect unless the voters pass it again in November 2024.

If it had been in effect in 2022, it is almost certain that no minor party candidates would have been on the November ballot for either Governor or U.S. Senator. At the 2022 primaries, there were ten major party candidates for Governor, and twelve for U.S. Senator. Based on what has happened in California 2012-2022, and Washington 2008-2022, the only choices for those two offices in November 2022 would have been five major party members for each office.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/11/19/if-nevada-had-top-five-in-place-in-2022-minor-parties-would-have-almost-surely-been-off-the-ballot-for-governor-and-u-s-senator/