Legal strategies are being formed to prevent U.S. states from imposing new restrictions, including age-verification policies, on online publishers of adult content. Publishers don’t want more restrictions on their product, of course, but others say blocking content violates the nation’s constitutional right to create and consume information without undue government intervention. Others feel governments and other organizations will collect, keep and use identification data without consent or adequate security. Utah’s new law requiring adult sites to prove their visitors are not minors easily withstood its first court challenge this month when a lawsuit opposing the regulation was dismissed. The U.S. District Court judge ruled narrowly against advocates like Free Speech Coalition, an association promoting the…
The entire police department of a small town in Kansas raided the local newspaper and home of its owners, one of whom died the next day, apparently due to stress.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/08/15/kcpb-a15.html
In 2020, publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley and Penguin Random House sued the Internet Archive (IA) for copyright infringement, equating its ‘Open Library’ to a pirate site.
IA’s library is a non-profit organization that scans physical books, which can then be lent out to patrons in an ebook format. Patrons can also borrow books that are scanned and digitized in-house, with technical restrictions that prevent copying.
Staying true to the centuries-old library concept, only one patron at a time can rent a digital copy of a physical book. These restrictions were temporarily loosened at the height of the Covid epidemic when IA launched the National Emergency Library.
Mass Copyright Infringement or Fair Use?
Patrons happily use the library but not…

Hope to see someone rocking this ensemble at CYBERDELIA!DADE: Who’s that?
PHREAK: Curtis.
DADE: And what’s he do?
PHREAK: That’s it, you’re looking at it, he just looks slick all day.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/08/if-the-90s-were-a-person/
$ grep kermit /etc/services
kermit 1649/tcpWhat is this mysterious protocol? Who uses it and what is its story?
This story is a winding one, beginning in 1981. Kermit is, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest actively-maintained software package with an original developer still participating. It is also a scripting language, an Internet server, a (scriptable!) SSH client, and a file transfer protocol.
And my first use of it was talking to my HP-48GX calculator over a 9600bps serial link. Yes, that calculator had a Kermit server built in.
But let’s back up and talk about serial ports and Modems.
Serial Ports and Modems
In my piece The PC & Internet Revolution in Rural America, I recently talked about getting a…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10555-try-the-last-internet-kermit-server
This is just collection of alternatives to EPub for electronic
books and similar stuff.Why to have alternative to EPub: The publishing industry has
a problem, and EPUB is not the solution ? … the author (Jani
Patokallio) has a bit of problem confusing EPub with DRM, but
otherwise his point that ZIP archive of HTMLs would do at
least as well as EPub is a valid one. Except of course there is
absolutely no reader for such animal.
Portable Documents for the Open Web (Part 1) (part 2 and
part 3) how this is seen by the publishing industry (by the
chairman of IDPF).
Forest of evergreen notes … personal storage of knowledge,
quite related to the concept of public Zettelkasten by Andy
Matuschak. Right, Zettelkasten. There I…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://matej.ceplovi.cz/blog/ebook-formats.html
So, you’re doing some sync stuff.
But you also need to do some async stuff,
without making everything async.
Maybe the sync stuff is an existing application.
Maybe you still want to use your favorite sync library.
Or maybe you need just a little async,
without having to pay the full price.
Of course,
you can run a coroutine with asyncio.run(),
and blocking sync code from a coroutine with asyncio.to_thread(),
but the former isn’t granular enough,
and the latter doesn’t solve async code being at the top.
As always, there must be a better way.Maybe something like this?
async def do_stuff(i): return i * 2 async def generate_stuff(i): for n in range(i): yield n runner = ThreadRunner()
print(runner.run(do_stuff(2))) # 8
print(*runner.wrap_iter(generate_stuff(4))) # 0 1 2 3Now, it would take a long…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://death.andgravity.com/asyncio-bridge

WASHINGTON—Granting the cleaning implement full legal authority over her personal affairs, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) reportedly ceded her power of attorney on Friday to a broom resembling her daughter. “At my age, it’s important to have a dependable family member I can rely on, and there’s no one I trust more than…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/sen-feinstein-cedes-power-of-attorney-to-broom-resembl-1850708197

The quickest run from mouth to anus was just six minutes.
“Further experiments are needed to investigate how to stimulate the frogs to defecate,” says Sugiura. “However, I speculate that R. attenuata use legs and the body to stimulate the frog’s hind gut.”
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/08/frog-anus-speed-run/

I created my first “World Wide Web Home Page” in March 1993. The original URL was ftp://lucid.com/pub/jwz/index.html. In July 1994, that became http://home.mcom.com/people/jwz/, then http://people.netscape.com/jwz/ in 1995, and finally I registered jwz.org on Aug 2, 1998. It took me a little while to accept that having my email and web presence completely beholden to my employer was perhaps not the greatest plan. That is obvious to you now, but it was the 90s, we were like little children. Why that date, though? Oh, there was a stupid Netscape PR disaster that made the comms team pull the plug on all of the employee home pages. There were five days, Friday through Tuesday, when nobody could download…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/08/jwz-org-is-now-25/

Three people died in an Amtrak derailment in September 2021 because the freight rail company that owns the tracks did not properly maintain them, partly as a result of cost-cutting measures that slashed the track inspection workforce, according to a two-year government investigation. The crash occurred after a Motherboard investigation earlier in the year that warned the freight rail industry was courting catastrophe by slashing maintenance and inspection programs to save on labor costs. The report, which was published on Thursday by the National Transportation Safety Board, says the derailment of the Amtrak Empire Builder train in Joplin, Montana occurred because of “a combination of conditions that affected the BNSF Railway track” including worn rail and…

Anybody who has set up a satellite TV antenna will tell you that alignment is critical when picking up a signal from space. With a satellite dish it’s a straightforward task to tweak the position, but what happens if the dish in question is out beyond the edge of the Solar System?
We told you a few days ago about this exact issue currently facing Voyager 2, but we’re guessing Hackaday readers will want to know a little bit more about how a 50+ year old spacecraft so far from home can still sort out its antenna. The answer lies in NASA Technical Report 32-1559, Digital Canopus Tracker from 1972, which describes the instrument that notes the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/07/31/just-how-is-voyager-2-going-to-sort-out-its-dish-then/
Wonderful news! Emacs 29.1 is out now. If you’re wondering what’s new, and why it’s absolutely worth upgrading, keep reading. I’ve annotated the NEWS file – as I’ve been doing for the last thirteen years – with my own thoughts and comments on the deluge of new and interesting features.To celebrate, my book on Emacs is also on sale: 29% off.Before I go into the specifics of every minor item, a quick summary of what I think are the major highlights of Emacs 29.1:Official tree-sitter supportTree-sitter is a third-party library that parses your text (usually code, but also things like Markdown) into a concrete syntax tree. It’s one of the hallmark features in Emacs 29, though…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.masteringemacs.org/article/whats-new-in-emacs-29-1?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=rss
So, you’re doing some sync stuff.
But you also need to do some async stuff,
without making everything async.
Maybe the sync stuff is an existing application.
Maybe you still want to use your favorite sync library.
Or maybe you need just a little async,
without having to pay the full price.
Of course,
you can run a coroutine with asyncio.run(),
and blocking sync code from a coroutine with asyncio.to_thread(),
but the former isn’t granular enough,
and the latter doesn’t solve async code being at the top.
As always, there must be a better way.
Maybe something like this?async def do_stuff(i): return i * 2 async def generate_stuff(i): for n in range(i): yield n runner = ThreadRunner()
print(runner.run(do_stuff(2))) # 8
print(*runner.wrap_iter(generate_stuff(4))) # 0 1 2 3Now, it would take a long…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://death.andgravity.com/asyncio-bridge
Enlarge (credit: Getty)
Reddit is campaigning to replace numerous longstanding moderators who were removed from their positions after engaging in API protests. Over the past week, a Reddit employee has posted to subreddits with ousted mods, asking for new volunteers. But in its search, the company has failed to address the intricacies involved in moderating distinct and, in some cases, well-known subreddits. And it doesn’t look like the knowledge from the previous moderators is being passed down.
Redditors were enraged over suddenly high API access pricing, and the social media platform’s subsequent responses to protests and feedback have beleaguered Reddit for weeks. A two-day blackout of over 8,000 subreddits, for example, shut Reddit down…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1957407
And here we go again. We have been talking about both the concept of video game preservation being lost to the copyright gods, as well as how copyright often prevents fan-made creations and content around game franchises, for years and years now. Both topics are quite frustrating and both serve as examples of how copyright law and its modern application appear to be getting in the way of its stated purpose: the proliferation of content and culture.
But it’s when these two topics converge that it gets unbelievably frustrating. And that brings us to a fan-made remake and enhanced version of a beloved old game: The Simpsons: Hit & Run. The original game came out in…
Enlarge / A vector ecologist displays a vial of live lone star ticks. (credit: Getty | Ben McCanna)
A little over a decade ago, researchers discovered that bites from lone star ticks could cause some people to develop a food allergy to meat and meat products—an allergic condition called alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), which can vary from mild to life-threatening.
The condition is named after a carbohydrate called galactose-α-1,3-galactose (aka alpha-gal), which is commonly found on proteins in most mammals—with the important exception of primates, like humans. Alpha-gal shows up on all sorts of non-primate mammalian tissue, which means it’s also in meat—such as pork, beef, rabbit, and lamb—and animal products, like milk and gelatin….
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1957268

Soldering can get frustrating when you’re working fast. It often feels like you don’t have enough hands, particularly on jobs where you need to keep feeding solder in a hurry. To solve that issue, [mulcmu] developed a simple one-handed solder feeder.
The solder is fed out of the tip by simply dragging it with the thumb.
The intended use-case is for busy work like soldering long pin headers. The one-handed device allows solder to be continually fed while the other hand uses the soldering iron. It solves a long-running problem for [mulcmu], after their experiments with techniques inspired by TIG welding came to nought.
The design uses a pen-like form factor. A 3D-printed hollow tube has a wire ferrule…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/07/27/a-simple-one-handed-solder-feeder/

WASHINGTON—Discovering the phenomenon as they all received emergency medical attention at the same time, several elderly senators reportedly found it amusing Thursday that their strokes seemed to be syncing up. “I’ve heard of this happening, but I honestly thought it was a myth,” a distant, glassy-eyed Mitch McConnell…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/elderly-senators-amused-to-discover-their-strokes-synci-1850683176