SUVs and pick-up truck drivers are three to four times more likely to hit a pedestrian when they make a turn than the drivers of smaller cars, a new study finds — and researchers think it’s because federal regulators aren’t scrutinizing the common design features that make it impossible for megacar drivers to see walkers passing right in front of them.
In a new study of federal crash data by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety, researchers found that crashes in which a driver kills a walker are three times more likely to involve a left turn if that motorist was piloting an SUV at the time of impact, compared to fatal walking crashes involving the drivers…
Back when Netflix was a pesky upstart trying to claw subscribers away from entrenched cable providers, the company had a pretty lax approach to users who shared streaming passwords. At one point CEO Reed Hastings went so far as to say he “loved” password sharing, seeing it as akin to free advertising. The idea was that as kids or friends got on more stable footing (left home to job hunt, whatever), they’d inevitably get hooked on the service and purchase their own subscription.
But as Netflix subscription numbers have begun to go south and competitors are challenging Netflix’s market share and revenue, the company is predictably taking a harder stance on the practice.
In a blog post, Netflix…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/03/17/netflix-starts-cracking-down-harder-on-password-sharing/
Enlarge / With better alignment, the test star has been joined by a whole host of background stars and galaxies. (credit: NASA/STScI)
Today, NASA announced that it has successfully completed two further steps to align the mirrors of the Webb telescope. The resulting performance indicates that Webb will meet or exceed its design goals. “So far, we’re finding that the performance is as good [as] or better than our most optimistic projections,” said Lee Feinberg, the Webb optical telescope element manager.
The announcement was accompanied by a spectacular image that showed a sharp focus on the target star and included many in-focus galaxies in the backdrop.
Get in line
The Webb telescope’s primary mirror is made…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1841522
Democrats dropped Covid response from a bill to keep the government
operating. This includes testing, vaccination, treatment, and more.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2022-jan-apr.html#14_March_2022_(Covid_response_dropped_from_a_bill)
Keep Russia’s citizens online but block its military networks, say
The former head of ICANN, two EU parliamentarians, and a handful of technical, security, and legal experts on Thursday plan to publish an open letter to the internet governance community arguing that the time has come to develop a targeted internet sanctions system.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/03/10/internet_russia_sanctions/

The Eno River State Park near downtown Hillsborough could soon add more than 200 acres following a historic land transaction.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://indyweek.com/news/orange/eno-river-state-park-expansion/
The Pentagon will receive nearly $800 billion, with the prospect of even greater increases as the US and NATO step up their intervention in the Russia-Ukraine war.
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/03/10/budg-m10.html

When a pet guinea pig or snake or hamster dies in the hands of America’s largest pet store, PetSmart, the retailer has strict protocols for disposing of its remains, at least on paper. Wrap the deceased pet in a paper towel, place it in a plastic fish bag, seal the bag with rubber bands, and store it in a refrigerator or a freezer, according to the company’s “deceased store-owned pet policy,” which was obtained by Motherboard. (PetSmart enacted this policy in July 2020 and it was active as of January 2022, but the company did not respond to a question about whether the policy remains active.) “A minimum of once per week”, deceased animals must be…
Enlarge / This is the stern of the good ship Endurance, which sank off the coast of Antarctica in 1915 after being crushed by pack ice. The Endurance22 expedition has located the shipwreck in pristine condition after nearly 107 years. (credit: Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust/NatGeo)
In 1915, intrepid British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew were stranded for months on the Antarctic ice after their ship, Endurance, was crushed by pack ice and sank into the freezing depths of the Weddell Sea. Today, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust and National Geographic announced the discovery of this famous shipwreck, nearly 107 years later, 3,008 meters down, roughly four miles (6.4 km) south of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1839766
There are multiple places government agencies can go to acquire location data. The Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision put a damper on warrantless demands, but the private sector has rushed to fill this hole in the law enforcement market by selling access to data pulled from apps that don’t (currently) require a warrant to access. But this data tends to be vague and/or incomplete. There’s one company that collects location data with a frequency that rivals that of cell phone providers: Google. And while warrants may be technically in use, these warrants reverse the expectations of probable cause by turning everyone in a geofenced area into a suspect before investigators work backwards from the location data to…

Ryan Grim, left, and Robby Soave, right, host The Hill’s morning politics show “Rising,” in a screenshot from a YouTube broadcast in March 2022.
Photo: The Hill
The politics morning show “Rising,” produced by The Hill and which I currently co-host, was suspended by YouTube on Thursday for allegedly violating the platform’s rules around election misinformation. Two infractions were cited: First, the outlet posted the full video of former President Donald Trump’s recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on its page. The speech, of course, was chock full of craziness. Second, “Rising” played a minutelong clip of Trump’s commentary on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which included the claim that none of it would have happened if…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2022/03/04/youtube-censorship-big-tech-rising-the-hill/
A growing chorus of voices is calling for Joe Biden to establish a no-fly zone — an action that would risk the future of human civilization.
US servicemen stand in front of F-15 fighters during NATO military exercises in Ukraine in 2018. (GENYA SAVILOV/AFP via Getty Images) I’m not much of an R.E.M. fan, but I’ve had “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” stuck in my head for days. A disturbing number of high-profile voices have been calling for President Joe Biden to establish a no-fly zone in Ukraine. To his credit, he’s steadfastly refused to do so. But these forces are only…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2022/03/no-fly-zone-ukraine-russia-us-war/
Kris Holt Contributor Kris Holt is a contributing writer at Engadget. More posts by this contributor Twitch will ban streamers who frequently share misinformation Panasonic will start making Tesla’s higher-capacity EV batteries by March 2024
Twitch has updated its misinformation policies and says it will ban those who frequently share falsehoods. Under the new rules, the platform will block “harmful misinformation superspreaders who persistently share misinformation on or off of Twitch,” as The New York Times first reported.
“Every day, people come together on Twitch to build communities that celebrate a variety of interests, passions, and talents,” Twitch wrote in a blog…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/03/twitch-will-ban-streamers-who-frequently-share-misinformation/
Even if we wanted to, which we don’t, we can’t, so we won’t, says boss
ICANN on Wednesday rebuffed a request from Mykhailo Fedorov, First Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, to revoke all Russian web domains, shut down Russian DNS root servers, and invalidate associated TLS/SSL certificates in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/03/03/icann_russian_domains/
Copyright maximalists just don’t know when to stop. Having failed in their 2020 attempt to use U.S. law to force GitHub to permanently cut off access to youtube-dl, an open source tool that allows users to download and preserve videos, on the theory that the tool can also be used for infringing purposes, the music publishers have turned to the German courts instead. But one small German hosting provider, represented by the German Society for Civil Rights (GFF), is fighting back.
The saga started two years ago, when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to demand that GitHub take down the repository for youtube-dl, claiming that the software breaks…
NEW YORK—Saying the billionaire had used the asset as his own private pleasure island for decades, the U.S. Justice Department announced Thursday that it had seized a New York City borough belonging to Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov. “When Usmanov bought this borough in the late ’90s, it was a flagrant display of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/u-s-seizes-new-york-city-borough-belonging-to-russian-1848611882
As the world’s leading free distributor of millions of oftentimes ‘paywalled’ research papers, Sci-Hub is often described as “The Pirate Bay of Science”.
While this status warms the hearts of many researchers, academics and students around the world, especially those with limited resources available to access education, Sci-Hub has also accrued many high-powered enemies.
These are not limited to major publishing houses angry at their content being distributed for free. Founder Alexandra Elbakyan is also a person of interest to elements of the US government’s intelligence and security services, which appear to be conducting an investigation into the computer security expert.
Elbakyan’s Apple Account Compromised
In May 2021, Elbakyan received an email from Apple (via her Gmail account) advising…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/fbi-gains-access-to-sci-hub-founders-google-account-data-220303/
Enlarge / The US Air Force Research Laboratory seeks to develop a satellite to patrol cislunar space. (credit: US Air Force Research Laboratory)
This week, the US Air Force Research Laboratory released a video on YouTube that didn’t get much attention. But it made an announcement that is fairly significant—the US military plans to extend its space awareness capabilities beyond geostationary orbit, all the way to the Moon.
“Until now, the United States space mission extended 22,000 miles above Earth,” a narrator says in the video. “That was then, this is now. The Air Force Research Laboratory is extending that range by 10 times and the operations area of the United States by 1,000…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1837881