French cities are collaborating with companies to combine data about people from every possible source. If the GDPR do not prohibit this, they are a joke. They aim to detect and use “weak signals”, which means collecting lots of personal data, looking for barely detectable patterns, and acting on unreliable conclusions.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2018-nov-feb.html#23_January_2019_%28Cities_collecting_data%29
In Bringing people back to the open web Chris states: But most users don’t care about the principles or implementation of an open web, at least not in those terms. Most people don’t see themselves as ever having left the open web behind, and if you told them to try to get back to it, they wouldn’t know what to do or why it was worthwhile. No matter how much it might be in their long-term self…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2019/01/we-need-open-hosting-platforms.html
The Open Web Platform is a careful and fragile construction billions of people, including millions of implementors rely on. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, the Document Object Model, the Web API and more are all standardized one way or another; that means vendors and stakeholders gather around a table to discuss all changes and that these changes must pass quality and/or availability criteria to be considered “shippable”. One notable absent from the list of Web Standards is…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2019/01/23/WebExtensions-v3-considered-harmful
Use this link to listen to the oral argument in Baca v Williams in the Tenth Circuit, held Thursday, January 24. This is the case over whether the Colorado Secretary of State had the authority to “fire” a presidential elector who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton, and to replace him with someone else. The argument is 33 minutes long and is fascinating for anyone who is interested in the electoral college. The attorney for…
My homebrewing frequency has taken a nosedive recently (surprise), but I still try to find time to brew a weird batch when I can. In August, when Scott and I drove to pick-up our first hop order in western Maryland, I noticed that Staghorn Sumac was in full bloom along I-270 . I’d read about flavoring beer with it in The Homebrewer’s Almanac, but never actually tasted a beer brewed with it. Sumac is tart…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.themadfermentationist.com/2019/01/foraged-staghorn-sumac-beer.html
Regular Internet providers are being put under increasing pressure for not doing enough to curb copyright infringement. Music rights company BMG got the ball rolling a few years ago when it won its piracy liability lawsuit against Cox. Following this defeat, several major record labels including Capitol Records, Warner Bros, and Sony Music filed a lawsuit in a Texas District Court. With help from the RIAA, they sued ISP Grande Communications for allegedly turning a blind…
In 1954, Eduardo Catalano designed perhaps the most stunning example of Modernist architecture in the state of North Carolina, the hyperbolic paraboloid wonder known as the Catalano House. It was a work that appeared more like origami than architecture.More than 50 years later, in 2007, semiretired executive trainer George Smart had been online one night researching design ideas for a new home he wanted to have built for his family in Raleigh, where he was…
Today the Illinois Supreme Court ruled unanimously that when companies collect biometric data like fingerprints or face prints without informed opt-in consent, they can be sued. Users don’t need to prove an injury like identity fraud or physical harm—just losing control of one’s biometric privacy is injury enough. In Rosenbach v. Six Flags, a 14 year old brought a challenge against an amusement park for collecting his thumbprint without his informed consent, in violation of…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/victory-illinois-supreme-court-protects-biometric-privacy
A dramatic, multi-level, and increasingly dark scandal has been engulfing the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro for the last month. It began just weeks after his stunning November victory but before he was inaugurated on January 1, and has completely paralyzed his presidency ever since. Just this week in Davos, which Brazil planned to unveil its new face to foreign capital, Bolsonaro and his top ministers left a long-scheduled press conference empty to avoid answering questions…
While I generally like PostgreSQL’s documentation quite a bit, there are some areas where it is not nearly specific enough for users to understand what they need to do. The documentation for maintenance_work_mem is one of those places. It says, and I quote, “Larger settings might improve performance for vacuuming and for restoring database dumps,” but that isn’t really very much help, because if it might improve performance, it also might not improve performance, and…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/4kx
Peak indifference is the moment at which a far-off problem becomes so obvious that the number of people alarmed about it begins to grow of its own accord; a new Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication survey finds that 46% of Americans believe that they are living through adverse effects from climate change right now (up 9% in a year) and 72% of Americans say…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/24/self-radicalizing.html
A New Abnormal To: Leaders and citizens of the world Re: A new abnormal: It is still two minutes to midnight Date: January 24, 2019 Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention. These major threats—nuclear weapons and climate change—were exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://thebulletin.org/2019/01/it-is-still-2-minutes-to-midnight/
A dramatic, multi-level and increasingly dark scandal has been engulfing the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro for the last month. It began just weeks after his stunning November victory but before he was inaugurated on January 1, and has completely paralyzed his presidency ever since. Just this week in Davos, which Brazil planned to unveil its new face to foreign capital, Bolsonaro and his top ministers left a long-scheduled press conference empty to avoid answering questions…
Here is an extensive look at handling software dependencies from Russ Cox. “Dependency managers have scaled this open-source code reuse model down: now, developers can share code at the granularity of individual functions of tens of lines. This is a major technical accomplishment. There are myriad available packages, and writing code can involve such a large number of them, but the commercial, legal, and reputational support mechanisms for trusting the code have not carried over.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/777407/rss
I trust you’ve heard by now that HTTP/3 is coming. It is the next destined HTTP version, targeted to get published as an RFC in July 2019. Not very far off. HTTP/3 will not be done over TCP. It will only be performed over QUIC, which is a transport protocol replacement for TCP that always is done encrypted. There’s no clear-text version of QUIC. TLS 1.3 The encryption in QUIC is based on TLS 1.3…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2019/01/21/quic-and-missing-apis/
Much of the U.S. political system was flummoxed two weeks ago when a brand new 29-year-old congressperson made a seemingly radical proposal on “60 Minutes.” Here’s what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said that wound everyone up: The U.S. should tax income over $10 million per year at a top rate of 60 or 70 percent. Republicans responded by shamelessly lying about what this meant, pretending that Ocasio-Cortez was advocating a tax rate of 70 percent on all income. Some older Democrats, such as…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2019/01/21/ocasio-cortez-marginal-tax-rate/
This Monday, the final “trilogue” (a meeting between the European Parliament, the European Presidency, and the EU member-states) was supposed to convene to wrap up the negotiations on the first update to the Copyright Directive since 2001, including the controversial Article 13 (mandatory copyright filters for online services) and Article 11 (letting news sites decide who can link to them and charging for the privilege). But that meeting has been cancelled and now the whole…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/19/axel-voss-hostage-freed.html
Over 20% of writers surveyed by PEN reported that they avoided writing about certain topics because they knew about surveillance. That survey was in Scotland. Here are some reports: One participant who had covered the conflict in Northern Ireland in 70s and 80s stated that they would not cover the conflict in the same manner if it took place now; another stopped writing about child abuse when they thought about what their search history may…
Both the Right and the center have every reason to fear the Women’s March — it’s advancing a radical vision of feminism for the 99 percent. Thousands hold signs and rally while attending the Women’s March on January 20, 2018 in New York. Spencer Platt / Getty It’s the kind of necessary conversation that takes place all the time within activist groups: someone calls out a bigoted statement or points to a pattern of bias…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://jacobinmag.com/2019/01/womens-march-agenda-2019-feminism/
