The Fourth Circuit wants oral argument in Kopitke v Bell, 19-2355. This is the lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s March petition deadline for independent candidates, and the requirement that they collect approximately 70,000 valid signatures if they are running for statewide … Continue reading →
[René Ceballos] contacted us about the new XFM2 FM synthesizer board, successor to the XFM that we covered on Hackaday last year. In addition to changing FPGAs from a Spartan 6 to an Artix-7 35, the DAC was also upgraded from 16 to 24 bits. Since the project is based around two easily available boards for the FPGA and DAC functionality, it is something that should be easy for anyone to recreate. The project consists…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2020/02/22/introducing-the-xfm2-a-new-fm-synthesizer-board/
FFII contends that the departure of Britain from the EU has invalidated the “unitary patent” agreement, and this offers a chance to kill it permanently. This is important because that deal would make the European Patent Office effectively autonomous regarding the question of which ideas are patentable — and it would certainly take advantage of that to rule that computational ideas are patentable. This offers one more chance to try to save software from patents…
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Americans for Financial Reform (AFR) Education Fund today called on ICANN and private equity firm Ethos Capital to make public secret details—hidden costs, loan servicing fees, and inducements to insiders—about financing the $1.1 billion sale of the .ORG domain registry.EFF and AFR today also urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to review the leveraged buyout, which will have profound effects on millions of charities, public interest organizations,…
This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.Airbnb is encouraging its hosts to purchase noise surveillance devices in an effort to crack down on parties. As part of its “party prevention” campaign, the home-sharing service is offering discounts on devices designed to alert hosts when there’s an irregular level of noise in their homes. An email I received on Thursday from Airbnb (I’ve occasionally rented out my apartment) told me to “plan ahead to protect your…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/akwnga/airbnb-is-pushing-surveillance-devices-as-party-prevention
When Apple’s App Store launched in 2008, it was widely hailed as a breakthrough in computing, a “curated experience” that would transform the chaos of locating and assessing software and replace it with a reliable one-stop-shop where every app would come pre-tested and with a trusted seal of approval. But app stores are as old as consumer computing. From the moment that timeshare computers started to appear in research institutions, college campuses, and large corporations,…
The number of law enforcement agencies Ring partners with continues to grow — up to nearly 900 by the latest count. Ring pitches its devices to homeowners as a better way to keep their homes secure. And maybe it is. But the pitches it makes to law enforcement agencies are something else. Ring drives this particularly questionable engagement by insinuating people who’ve received free or cheap cameras will become part of a surveillance network overseen…
A police investigator in Spain is trying to solve a crime, but she only has an image of a suspect’s face, caught by a nearby security camera. European police have long had access to fingerprint and DNA databases throughout the 27 countries of the European Union and, in certain cases, the United States. But soon, that investigator may be able to also search a network of police face databases spanning the whole of Europe and…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2020/02/21/eu-facial-recognition-database/
Amazon’s surveillance doorbell company Ring has announced extra layers of security and control for users after a wave of backlash from civil liberties and cyber security organizations like EFF and Mozilla. Organizations raised major concerns over Ring’s lack of effort in protecting the data and security of users, including permitting multiple log-in attempts that allowed bad actors to take control of people’s Ring cameras; not requiring two-factor authentication; and allowing a number of undisclosed third-party…
That’s right, we’re throwing another CYBERDELIA on Friday, February 28 — which is just four weeks from now! It’s a bit short notice, so please help us out by sharing this far and wide.The last time we threw this party was three years ago, but now it’s the 25th anniversary of the release of HACKERS, so we’re going all-out this time. A screening of Hackers at 7pm; Hackers costume contest at 10:45pm; Head-to-head Wipeout XL…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2020/02/05.html
On Tuesday, January 28, 2020, the Trump Administration revealed its vision for an Israel-Palestine peace plan. The proposed two-state solution would leave the state of Palestine completely surrounded by Israel, with tunnels connecting different sections. The “deal” was brokered in part by Jared Kushner. I put “deal” in quotes because no actual Palestinian humans were included in the conversations. This, to me, seems like a poor approach to solving such a famously contentious issue. Of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/29/jared-kushner-says-palestinian.html
Introduction I recently did some work with a customer who had some strange behavior happening in his database. When I asked for his logs, I found that each line had a message, and just one timestamp prefixed to it. In other words, he had log_line_prefix = ‘%t ‘. This made it hard for me to figure out who did what, especially as his database was serving many clients and applications. It got me thinking, and…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4Ea
Recently I was in a situation where autovacuum couldn’t keep up with changes. To solve the problem I finally decided to manually vacuum analyze all tables (manual vacuum/analyze is faster than one ran by autovacuum daemon). But it irritated me that I didn’t have ready way to check which tables are waiting for autovacuum to … Continue reading “Which tables should be auto vacuumed or auto analyzed?”
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4E2
Today Facebook announced the roll-out of its Off-Facebook Activity tool (initially introduced as “Clear History” nearly two years ago). The tools shows you a list of apps, websites, and businesses that Facebook knows you have visited through its business tools (including Facebook Login, Facebook’s tracking Pixel, social widgets such as Like and Share buttons, and other less visible features for developers). It also gives you options to “clear” or “disconnect” the identifiable information they have…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/facebook-history-welcome-incomplete-move
For my latest podcast, I read my Guardian Cities column, “The case for … cities that aren’t dystopian surveillance states,” which was the last piece ever commissioned for the section. The Guardian commissioned the piece after reading my Toronto Life blurb about how a “smart city” could be focused on enabling its residents, rather than tracking and manipulating them. In the article, I revisit my 2015 Locus column on the idea of an Internet of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/27/podcast-the-case-for-citi.html
Ring isn’t just a product that allows users to surveil their neighbors. The company also uses it to surveil its customers. An investigation by EFF of the Ring doorbell app for Android found it to be packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII). Four main analytics and marketing companies were discovered to be receiving information such as the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/01/ring-doorbell-app-packed-third-party-trackers
$300 smart hubs that are suddenly bricked when the manufacturer is sold. Video game consoles that mysteriously lose features after you bring them home. Books or films you purchase that you suddenly and inexplicably lose the ability to access. Printers that don’t print without an ink subscription. In the modern internet era, it’s increasingly clear that consumers no longer actually own the things we buy. Instead, we’re shelling out big bucks for products that can…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3a8dpn/sonos-makes-it-clear-you-no-longer-own-the-things-you-buy
Twenty years ago today, Boing Boing became a blog. Mark Frauenfelder’s first post linked to Street Tech, a now-dormant gadget blog. Now there are 160,000 more posts just like it and the impossible task of summarizing the best of them in yet another. Founded as a print zine in 1988 by Mark and Carla Sinclair, Mark’s personal retrospective posted earlier today is a must-read; following are a few of our greatest hits, proudest accomplishments, clickiest…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/01/21/20-years-of-blogging-at-boing.html
