Deeplinks – EFF Files Amicus Brief Challenging Orange County, CA’s Controversial DNA Collection Program

Nov 112022
 

Should the government be allowed to collect your DNA—and retain it indefinitely—if you’re arrested for a low-level offense like shoplifting a tube of lipstick, driving without a valid license, or walking your dog off leash? We don’t think so. As we argue in an amicus brief filed in support of a case called Thompson v. Spitzer at the California Court of Appeal, this practice not only impinges on misdemeanor arrestees’ privacy and liberty rights, but also violates the California Constitution. 
Since 2007, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office (OCDA) has been running an expansive program that coerces thousands of Orange County residents annually to provide a DNA sample in exchange for dropping charges for low-level misdemeanor offenses….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/eff-files-amicus-brief-challenging-orange-county-cas-controversial-dna-collection

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Planet Emacsen – Irreal: Almost Monospaced Fonts

Nov 112022
 

In almost every case, proportional fonts are superior. They look better and they’re easier to read. One obvious exception is when programming but, even there, not everyone agrees. Still, most programmers are pretty firm in their preference for monospaced fonts when programming.
Some writers also like monospaced fonts when preparing their manuscripts, probably for atavistic reasons involving typewriters. I thought that was silly when I read it but then I realized I do all my writing in a monospaced font even though Emacs would allow me to easily use a proportional font if I wished.
All of that notwithstanding, it remains true that monospaced fonts are a bit harder to read. Blake Watson has a very interesting post…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://irreal.org/blog/?p=10941

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Hackaday – $1 POV Display Goes Round and Round

Nov 112022
 

You don’t need much to do a persistence of vision display. A few LEDs and a processor is all it really takes. [B45i] made a simple PC board with five LEDs and an ATtiny CPU. There’s a battery and it connects to a fan to spin around.
While the project is pretty simple, we liked two aspects of it. First, he provides very detailed explanations about how to use an Arduino to program the Tiny using the Arduino IDE.

The other item of interest is the two web applications that can build arrays of data for the POV display easily. Examining the code is instructive, too, because of the use of bit coding and enumerations to save space.
The…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/11/09/1-pov-display-goes-round-and-round/

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Planet PostgreSQL – Thomas Munro: Reducing replication lag with IO concurrency in Postgres 15

Nov 102022
 

Reducing replication lag with IO concurrency in Postgres 15 PostgreSQL 15 improves crash recovery and physical replication performance of some large and very busy databases by trying to minimise I/O stalls. A standby server might now have an easier time keeping up with the primary. How? The change in PostgreSQL15 is that recovery now uses the maintenance_io_concurrency setting (default is 10, but you can increase it) to decide how many concurrent I/Os to try to initiate, rather than doing random read I/Os one at a time. With big and busy databases, when I/O concurrency increases, replication lag can be reduced. In this blog post, you’ll learn how recovery prefetching minimises I/O stalls and reduces replication…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5s1

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Ars Technica – Ancient wisdom: Oldest full sentence in first alphabet is about head lice

Nov 102022
 

Enlarge / Archaeologists excavated this engraved ivory comb at an ancient site in Israel. (credit: Dafna Gazit, Israel Antiquities Authority)
Several years ago, archaeologists unearthed a small ivory comb at Tel Lachsich in Israel, once a major Canaanite city-state in the second millennium BCE.  But it wasn’t until last December that someone realized the comb had an inscription using early pictograph symbols of the first alphabet. Once deciphered, the inscription turned out to be a spell for preventing an infestation of head lice, according to a new paper published in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology.
“This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel,” said co-author Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1895815

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Deeplinks – The Rise of the Police-Advertiser

Nov 092022
 

In August, the Tulsa police department held a press conference about how its new Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), a controversial piece of surveillance technology, was the policing equivalent of “turning the lights on” for the first time. In Ontario, California, the city put out a press release about how its ALPRs were a “vital resource.” In Madison, South Dakota, local news covered how the city’s expenditure of $30,000 for ALPRs “paid off” twice in two days.  
All these stories have two things in common: One, they are all about the same brand of ALPRs, Flock Safety. And two, they’re all reminders of how surveillance technology companies are coaching police behind the scenes on how best…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/11/rise-police-advertiser

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TorrentFreak – Court Upholds Piracy Blocking Order Against Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS Resolver

Nov 092022
 

Website blocking has become an increasingly common anti-piracy tool around the globe.
In dozens of countries, ISPs have been ordered by courts to block pirate sites, usually on copyright grounds. More recently, neutral DNS providers have been targeted as well.
Earlier this year, an Italian court ordered Cloudflare to block three torrent sites on its public 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. The order applies to kickasstorrents.to, limetorrents.pro, and ilcorsaronero.pro, three domains that are already blocked by ISPs in Italy following an order from local regulator AGCOM.
Cloudflare Appeals DNS Blocking Order
Disappointed by the ruling, Cloudflare filed an appeal at the Court of Milan. The internet infrastructure company doesn’t object to blocking requests that target its customers’ websites but believes…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/court-upholds-piracy-blocking-order-against-cloudflares-1-1-1-1-dns-resolver-221109/

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Techdirt. – Appeals Court Says St. Louis County’s Warrantless Arrests Are Likely Unconstitutional… But Somehow Still Pretty Much OK

Nov 092022
 

Law enforcement needs probable cause to effect arrests and engage in searches. In most cases, a warrant is also required. It’s a bit of paperwork that allows the government to bypass Fourth Amendment protections to serve the greater good, i.e., the invasion of privacy (a search) or the removal of personal freedom (an arrest).
For far too many cops, obtaining a warrant is a hassle they’d rather not deal with, even if it’s rarely an actual hassle. So, they find ways to route around this rights-related roadblock. Drug dogs are called to scenes so an animal can tell cops it’s ok to engage in a search. Pretextual stops use real or perceived traffic infractions as fishing licenses…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/08/appeals-court-says-st-louis-countys-warrantless-arrests-are-likely-unconstitutional-but-somehow-still-pretty-much-ok/

 2022-11-09  Comments Off on Techdirt. – Appeals Court Says St. Louis County’s Warrantless Arrests Are Likely Unconstitutional… But Somehow Still Pretty Much OK

Jacobin – The Quiet Merger Between Online Platforms and the National Security State Continues

Nov 092022
 

The Department of Homeland Security is helping to coordinate tech company censorship efforts according to recent reporting. The line between tech firms and the national security state is only getting blurrier.
President Joe Biden, appearing via teleconference, delivers remarks at a White House meeting. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas sits in the foreground. August 3, 2022. (Win McNamee / Getty Images) The steady march of the post-2016 tech censorship campaign has been picking up pace lately, and we’ve just learned of another leap forward. According to recent major reporting from the Intercept, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been involved in efforts aimed at corralling what it…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2022/11/dhs-big-tech-surveillance-censorship-mdm/

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Hackaday – Retrotechtacular: Programming by Card

Nov 092022
 

The recent Supercon 6 badge, if you haven’t seen it, was an old-fashioned type computer with a blinky light front panel. It was reminiscent of an Altair 8800, a PDP-11, or DG Nova. However, even back in the day, only a few people really programmed a computer with switches. Typically, you might use the switches to toggle in a first-level bootloader that would then load a better bootloader from some kind of storage like magnetic or paper tape. Most people didn’t really use the switches.
What most people did do, however, was punch cards.  Technically, Hollerith cards, although we mostly just called them cards, punched cards, or IBM cards. There were a lot of different machines you…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/11/09/retrotechtacular-programming-by-card/

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jwz – Coin mechs

Nov 092022
 

Dear Lazyweb, what coin mech should I buy for a 1982 Atari Millipede arcade cabinet? The original steel mechs, and some others I have tried of similar vintage, fill with jams that cannot be ejected. I tried these plastic Imonex 120 mechs which were recommended to me as “less validation but less headaches” but they suck. Every time you press coin return, they just disassemble themselves internally: the stretchy hinge thing pops off its axis. I am far less interested in “sometimes accepts a bad coin or rejects a good coin” than I am in “never get into a state where I have to open the thing up and fuck with it”. In case you are…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2022/11/coin-mechs/

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Ars Technica – Redditor discovers legendary 1956 computer in grandparents’ basement

Nov 092022
 

Enlarge / The LGP-30 computer, from 1956, that a Redditor found in a basement. (credit: c-wizz)
On Monday, a German Redditor named c-wizz announced that they had found a very rare 66-year-old Librascope LGP-30 computer (and several 1970 DEC PDP-8/e computers) in their grandparents’ basement. The LGP-30, first released in 1956, is one of only 45 manufactured in Europe and may be best known as the computer used by “Mel” in a famous piece of hacker lore. Developed by Stan Frankel at California Institute of Technology in 1954, the LGP-30 (short for “Librascope General Purpose 30”) originally retailed for $47,000 (about $512,866 today, adjusted for inflation) and weighed in at 800 pounds. Even…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1895927

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Planet PostgreSQL – Amit Kapila: Logical Replication Improvements in PostgreSQL-15

Nov 082022
 

There are various areas in PostgreSQL like Partitioning, Logical Replication, Parallel Query, Vacuum, etc. which improve with each new version. In this blog, I’ll summarize the various enhancements in Logical Replication that users could see in the recently released PostgreSQL 15. You can read the enhancements in this area in the previous release in one of my previous blogs.Allow replication of prepared transactions:In the last release, we allowed logical decoding of prepared transactions and with this release, we added the support to replicate prepared transactions to built-in logical replication. Previously, we send the changes of the prepared transaction only once the commit prepared had been done. Users can enable replication at PREPARE time with the following syntax:CREATE PUBLICATION  mypub…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5rN

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Motherboard – Airbnb to List Actual Prices, Stop Letting Hosts Make Guests Do Laundry

Nov 072022
 

In response to a growing chorus of complaints, Airbnb plans to start prioritizing the total price of stays rather than the nightly rate and clamp down on “unreasonable” checkout tasks like vacuuming or doing the laundry, the company announced Monday.  As part of the effort, the company will, starting in December, give customers the option to view the total price of a stay before taxes “up front” when they search for homes, rather than only the nightly rate, which had excluded fees for things like cleaning. The total price will also be prioritized in the company’s search algorithm moving forward.  Additionally, the company will make sure guests can review all proposed checkout tasks before they book…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvm3q8/airbnb-to-list-actual-prices-stop-making-guests-do-laundry

 2022-11-07  Comments Off on Motherboard – Airbnb to List Actual Prices, Stop Letting Hosts Make Guests Do Laundry

Ars Technica – Intel says that both Intel and AMD CPUs can update Arc GPU firmware [Updated]

Nov 042022
 

Enlarge / An Intel Arc GPU. (credit: Intel)
Update, 7:35 pm ET: Intel told Ars Technica that it is possible for both Intel and AMD-based platforms to update Arc GPU firmware, and that Intel’s Management Engine wasn’t actually required for firmware updates.
“Intel Arc products do not require the host CSME to update Arc firmware,” an Intel spokesperson told Ars. “Firmware updates will work on both AMD and Intel platforms. Arc products have their own Graphics Security Control for firmware updates and leverage existing Intel technology like the HECI interface protocol to implement the firmware update flow.”
A follow-up from Richard Hughes, the developer who originally discovered the limitation, said that another user had told…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1895391

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Ars Technica – Cherry’s new mechanical switch hails from ’80s terminal keyboards

Nov 042022
 

Enlarge (credit: Cherry)
Cherry, the original mechanical switch maker, is continuing to tap the mechanical keyboard community for new product ideas. Its new mechanical switch, the Cherry MX Black Clear-Top, is a nod to enthusiasts who would love to turn in their modern-day clacker for an old-school terminal keyboard with extra-smooth typing.
’80s roots
Before Cherry’s Thursday announcement of plans to release the MX Black Clear-Top, the switch was known to hobbyists as the Nixie switch. Cherry made the switch in the 1980s for German office machine-maker Nixdorf Computer AG. The German switch maker was tasked with creating a version of its linear MX Black switch with “milky” upper housing, a 63.5 g actuation force…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1895257

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CounterPunch.org – Amtraks Across America: the New Penn Station

Nov 042022
 

This is the first part in a series about Amtrak travels during summer 2022. The new Moynihan Train Hall, a waiting room built at a cost of $1.6 billion, at New York’s Pennsylvania Station, across Eighth Avenue from the existing Amtrak station, which is between Seventh and Eighth avenues under Madison Square Garden. Photo: Matthew More

The post Amtraks Across America: the New Penn Station appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/11/04/amtraks-across-america-the-new-penn-station/

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The Onion – Biden Warns Americans That Ability To Even Pretend U.S. A Democracy At Stake

Nov 042022
 

WASHINGTON—Delivering a stark warning regarding the nation’s future, President Joe Biden gave a speech Wednesday night in which he cautioned Americans that the ability to even pretend the United States was a democracy was now at stake. “Today, our country teeters on a grim precipice, and if we aren’t careful, it will…

Read more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/biden-warns-americans-that-ability-to-even-pretend-u-s-1849738890

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The Register – Elon Musk reportedly outlines horrible Twitter layoff process

Nov 042022
 

Email to your personal account is bad news, email to your work account means you still work at Twitter

Twitter owner, sole director and – according to his Twitter profile, now also “Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator” – has reportedly informed company staff that layoffs begin tomorrow.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/11/04/twitter_layoffs_email/

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