Feb 032022
 

The House of Representatives has inserted SHOP SAFE—a piece of legislation that would make it extremely difficult for any individual to sell things online and equally difficult for any online platform to compete with Amazon—into a 3,000-page trade bill. It cannot remain there.
The “Stopping Harmful Offers on Platforms by Screening Against Fakes in E-Commerce” (SHOP SAFE) is a bill that claims to be about protecting consumers but is more likely to enrich big brands at consumers’ expense. SHOP SAFE would force pretty much any online service that allows people to buy and sell items to institute a draconian trademark protection system. If they don’t, they risk crushing liability for the actions of their users.
Take Action
Tell Your…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/shop-safe-will-stomp-out-online-sales-used-and-homemade-goods

 2022-02-03  Comments Off on Deeplinks – SHOP SAFE Will Stomp Out Online Sales of Used and Homemade Goods
Feb 022022
 

Eight Vermont State Senators have introduced SB 229, which would provide for ranked choice voting for primaries and general elections, for president and congress. The sponsors include six Democrats and two Progressives. The Vermont Senate has 30 members. … Continue reading

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/02/01/vermont-ranked-choice-voting-bill-has-8-sponsors/

 2022-02-02  Comments Off on Ballot Access News – Vermont Ranked Choice Voting Bill Has 8 Sponsors
Feb 022022
 

Legislation to punish online services for users’ illegal content would damage speech and encryption, it’s claimed

The EARN IT Act, a legislative bill intended “to encourage the tech industry to take online child sexual exploitation seriously” has been revived in the US Senate after it died in committee back in 2020.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2022/02/02/earnit_act_section230/

 2022-02-02  Comments Off on The Register – America’s EARN IT Act attacking Section 230 is back – and once again threatening the internet, critics say
Feb 012022
 

The first release candidate of Redis 7.0 was made available today. Getting us excited about this updated in-memory key-value database are “significant performance optimizations” among other improvements…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Redis-7.0-rc1

 2022-02-01  Comments Off on Phoronix – Redis 7.0 Is Near With “Significant Performance Optimizations”
Jan 222022
 

As already noted, last year the Ninth Circuit struck down the Montana distribution requirement for petitions to create a qualified party. The Montana legislature is not scheduled to meet during calendar year 2022, so there is no likelihood that the legislature can restore the distribution requirement until 2023 at the earliest. Presumably if the legislature restores it, it will require an equal number of signatures from legislative districts, avoiding the constitutional problem.
Therefore, for 2022, the petition to qualify a new party will be easier than it has been since 1969. The petition still needs 5,000 signatures, but signatures can be gathered anywhere in the state. However, the petition deadline is in late February.
Before 1969, Montana allowed…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/01/22/during-2022-montana-party-petition-will-not-require-any-distribution-requirement/

 2022-01-22  Comments Off on Ballot Access News – During 2022, Montana Party Petition Will Not Require Any Distribution Requirement
Jan 222022
 

Reviving and reworking the KRunner help
Currently KRunner does not provide any usage information itself, there
is only an bit of documentation on the user base wiki. Back in the KDE4 days KRunner had
help button, but fundamental changes in the architecture meant that the code could not simply be ported to the current version.

Since the help system required reimplementation, it was decided to implement it as a plugin for KRunner’s powerful plugin infrastructure.
This plugin produces results when one types ? or help. To make this more discoverable a button is added, which
puts the text ? in the search field.

By having it as a plugin it is reusable in every case KRunner is used,
for example the KWin overview effect,…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://write.as/alexander-lohnau/reviving-and-reworking-the-krunner-help

 2022-01-22  Comments Off on Planet KDE – Reviving and reworking the KRunner help
Jan 222022
 

Ranked choice voting (RCV) improves representation, increases participation, and improves our democracy. Some may have you believe that RCV is a tool for helping one party over another; however, recent legislation and elections prove that ranked choice voting is a cross-partisan reform with support on both sides of the aisle.
In 2019, New York City voted to amend their charter to implement RCV in primaries and special elections. FairVote Action Board Member Andrew Yang, a long-time supporter of RCV and founder of the Forward Party, tweeted, “Ranked choice voting would let us express our true preferences and make our politics more dynamic and responsive. We should make it the norm throughout the country.” Fast forward to 2021,…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/americans_of_all_parties_love_rcv

 2022-01-22  Comments Off on What’s New – Fairvote – Americans of All Parties Love RCV
Jan 222022
 

Joe Biden has completed the first year of his presidency, a tenure that has seen its share of controversy and political gridlock. The Onion looks at the highlights of President Biden’s first year in office.

Read more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/timeline-of-joe-biden-s-first-year-in-office-1848402189

 2022-01-22  Comments Off on The Onion – Timeline Of Joe Biden’s First Year In Office
Jan 222022
 

Vice News has some really great reporters on tech issues who work for its Motherboard publication. For reasons that don’t make sense, last week they had some other reporter write an absolutely ridiculously bad story trying to argue that the “stop the steal” idiots were helped along by the amazingly important work done by folks in the famed “Voting Village” at the DEFCON conference. The full article is long and bad and has the ridiculous and misleading title: How an “Ethical” Hacker Convention Is Fueling Trump’s Big Lie. But the very premise of this story is not just wrong, but dangerously stupid. It’s shameful that anyone at Vice thought this was an appropriate story to publish.

The…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20220115/01065948289/vice-publishes-bullshit-nonsense-article-blaming-defcon-voting-village-stop-steal-idiots.shtml

 2022-01-22  Comments Off on Techdirt. – Vice Publishes Bullshit Nonsense Article Blaming DEFCON Voting Village For ‘Stop The Steal’ Idiots
Jan 212022
 

When the pandemic hit, real estate firms gladly took government assistance to keep their businesses afloat as they faced financial hardships. Then they turned around and evicted scores of tenants enduring the same COVID-induced difficulties.

The post Real Estate Firms Take Federal Aid, Evict Tenants Anyway appeared first on Shelterforce.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://shelterforce.org/2022/01/20/real-estate-firms-take-federal-aid-evict-tenants-anyway/

 2022-01-21  Comments Off on Shelterforce – Real Estate Firms Take Federal Aid, Evict Tenants Anyway
Jan 212022
 

John D. Cook has a useful post on using “corner quotes” (⌜ ⌟) to delimit regular expressions in text. As Cook says, it makes a lot of sense especially when the regular expression begins or ends with a space. Cook’s port deals with using Unicode for the corner quotes but it’s also easy to do in Emacs.
In vanilla Emacs, the way to do it is to specify TOP LEFT CORNER and BOTTOM RIGHT CORNER with insert-char through the Ctrl+x 8 binding. If you have Ivy installed, you can also use the lceil and rfloor entities through ivy-insert-org-entity a handy function that I stole from John Kitchin’s Scimax.

(defun ivy-insert-org-entity () “Insert an org-entity using ivy.” (interactive) (ivy-read…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://irreal.org/blog/?p=10265

 2022-01-21  Comments Off on Planet Emacsen – Irreal: Corner Quotes
Jan 212022
 

On January 19, the North Carolina legislature passed HB 605, which moves the 2022 primary from May 17 to June 7. If the bill becomes law, that would also give independent candidates more time to petition. Independent candidate petitions in … Continue reading

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/01/20/north-carolina-legislature-passes-bill-moving-2022-primary-from-may-17-to-june-7/

 2022-01-21  Comments Off on Ballot Access News – North Carolina Legislature Passes Bill Moving 2022 Primary from May 17 to June 7
Jan 212022
 

This Sunday, January 23rd, is RCV Day (Get it? It’s 1/23)! In states all over the country, people will be mobilizing to spread the word about ranked choice voting. FairVote and Rank The Vote – a national grassroots organizing group – are collaborating to coordinate these efforts nationwide. Check out the events detailed below to learn more about some of the creative ways organizations are spreading the word about RCV and ways to get involved in your state!
“Beer Elections” are a fun way to introduce ranked choice voting to people who are unfamiliar, and allow them to experience RCV in action. Rank the Vote Delaware is hosting beer elections at local breweries where participants will be…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.fairvote.org/rcv_day_events_planned_across_america

 2022-01-21  Comments Off on What’s New – Fairvote – RCV Day Events Planned Across America
Jan 202022
 

I’ve been writing about Genode OS for over a decade as one of the interesting original, open-source operating system frameworks that has taken novel approaches to many design elements and continues persevering with their efforts. For 2022 the project has yet more ambitious goals ahead…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Genode-2022-Plans

 2022-01-20  Comments Off on Phoronix – Genode OS Planning For WireGuard, Mobile Usability With The PinePhone
Jan 192022
 

When you spend a lot of time on the computer doing certain more specialised tasks (no, we’re not talking about browsing cat memes on twitter) you start to think that your basic trackpad or mouse is, let’s say, lacking a certain something. We think that something may be called ‘usability’ or maybe ease-of-use? Any which way, lots of heavy CAD users gush over their favourite mouse stand-ins, and one particularly interesting class of input devices is the Space Mouse, which is essentially patented up-to-the-hilt and available only from 3DConnexion. But what about open source alternatives you can build yourselves? Enter stage left, the Orbion created by [FaqT0tum.] This simple little build combines an analog joystick with…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2022/01/18/a-diy-cad-mouse-you-can-actually-build/

 2022-01-19  Comments Off on Hackaday – A DIY CAD Mouse You Can Actually Build
Jan 192022
 

“[Historical knowledge] gives understanding of how the present world came to be, and maybe more importantly, an appreciation that everything that is, never necessarily had to be” -from “History as Freedom” —Joe Costello, longtime political organizer, writer

On the 10th anniversary of the groundbreaking SOPA Blackout, a question seems to surface above all else: can any one of us really go on to change history? And how, exactly, does that happen?

For the 24 million people who participated in the largest online protest in history against the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the millions more who witnessed the protest in real time, the course of history was changed. Had it succeeded, SOPA would have given anyone the power…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20220118/11134648307/how-sopa-blackout-happened.shtml

 2022-01-19  Comments Off on Techdirt. – How The SOPA Blackout Happened
Jan 182022
 

On 17th of January 2022, Michael Paquier committed patch: Introduce log_destination=jsonlog   “jsonlog” is a new value that can be added to log_destination to provide logs in the JSON format, with its output written to a file, making it the third type of destination of this kind, after “stderr” and “csvlog”. The format is convenient … Continue reading “Waiting for PostgreSQL 15 – Introduce log_destination=jsonlog”

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

 2022-01-18  Comments Off on Planet PostgreSQL – Hubert ‘depesz’ Lubaczewski: Waiting for PostgreSQL 15 – Introduce log_destination=jsonlog
Jan 182022
 

Congressional Democrats are joining Republicans in a last-ditch effort to undermine the newly implemented No Surprises Act, which bans surprise medical bills. A key provision in the law could become a first step toward allowing the federal government to standardize rates for medical procedures covered under private insurance plans, an objective the private health care industry has fought for decades. Late last year, in the months leading up to the bill’s enactment, opponents filed a flurry of lawsuits claiming that by enforcing the rule in a manner widely viewed as consistent with the text of the legislation, the Biden administration had overstepped Congress’s intentions.
The leading opponents of the provision, which mandates that insurers and health care…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2022/01/17/surprise-medical-billing-lawsuit/

 2022-01-18  Comments Off on The Intercept – Congressional Democrats Join Republicans to Undermine Biden Administration’s Surprise Medical Billing Rule