Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – They Followed North Carolina Election Rules When They Cast Their Ballots. Now Their Votes Could Be Tossed Anyway.

Jan 272025
 

by Doug Bock Clark ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. A Republican judge has spent more than two months trying to overturn his narrow defeat for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat by arguing that around 60,000 ballots should be tossed out. But many residents have only recently learned that their votes are in danger of not being counted and say they have done nothing wrong. ProPublica has heard from dozens of voters who expressed astonishment and anger at state appeals court Judge Jefferson Griffin’s ongoing attempts to cancel…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/north-carolina-voters-jefferson-griffin-supreme-court-challenge

 2025-01-27  No Responses »

Ballot Access News – New York State Senator James Skoufis Gives Up His Campaign to be Democratic National Committee Chair

Jan 212025
 

On January 16, New York State Senator James Skoufis gave up on trying to be elected Chair of the Democratic National Committee. See this story. He had said on December 27, 2024, that he wanted to dismantle the Green Party. … Continue reading →

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2025/01/21/new-york-state-senator-james-skoufis-gives-up-his-campaign-to-be-democratic-national-committee-chair/

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The Onion – Alarming Study Finds Only 1 In 4 Americans Can Get A Motherfuckin’ ‘Hell Yeah’

Jan 212025
 

CAMBRIDGE, MA—Revealing a precipitous decline in the nation’s access to a once-plentiful resource, an alarming study published Tuesday by Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that only one in four Americans can get a motherfuckin’ “hell yeah.” “It’s no secret that peer enthusiasm is harder to come by than it was in previous decades, but even then, we were shocked to find a full 75% of Americans could only get a half-hearted ‘nice’ for situations that would have had people raising the motherfuckin’ roof just a decade ago,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Jessica Landers, adding that weak-ass responses like “okay” and “whatever” had exploded in frequency while “hell yeah” equivalents such as…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theonion.com/alarming-study-finds-only-1-in-4-americans-can-get-a-motherfuckin-hell-yeah/

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Internet Archive Blogs – WEDNESDAY: Celebrate Public Domain Day 2025 at the Internet Archive

Jan 212025
 

Lights, camera, action! It’s time to roll out the red carpet and celebrate Public Domain Day, Oscar-style! On Wednesday, we’re honoring all the legendary works that have entered the public domain in 2025. And what better way to do it than with a glamorous, Hollywood-inspired twist? Public Domain Day Celebration at the Internet Archive 6pm – 10pm Internet Archive, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco $15 – REGISTER NOW. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. This year, we’re honoring 1929 — the year of the very first Academy Awards, held at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, CA. So put on your finest attire and get ready for an Oscar Award winning evening. Sip on a classic French 75 or an Old-Fashioned as we savor the final moments of the Roaring…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2025/01/21/wednesday-celebrate-public-domain-day-2025-at-the-internet-archive/

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Ars Technica – Sleeping pills stop the brain’s system for cleaning out waste

Jan 212025
 

Our bodies rely on their lymphatic system to drain excessive fluids and remove waste from tissues, feeding those back into the blood stream. It’s a complex yet efficient cleaning mechanism that works in every organ except the brain. “When cells are active, they produce waste metabolites, and this also happens in the brain. Since there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain, the question was what was it that cleaned the brain,” Natalie Hauglund, a neuroscientist at Oxford University who led a recent study on the brain-clearing mechanism, told Ars.
Earlier studies done mostly on mice discovered that the brain had a system that flushed its tissues with cerebrospinal fluid, which carried away waste products in a…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/01/how-sleeping-pills-interfere-with-the-brains-internal-cleaning-mechanism/

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World Socialist Web Site (en) – Biden issues last-minute pardons for family and January 6 Committee members, commutes sentence of Leonard Peltier

Jan 212025
 

That Biden felt it necessary to pre-emptively pardon his family members and political allies belies Democrat claims that “democracy” has been affirmed by the peaceful transfer of power to Trump.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2025/01/21/fite-j21.html

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Deeplinks – Police Use of Face Recognition Continues to Wrack Up Real-World Harms

Jan 162025
 

Police have shown, time and time again, that they cannot be trusted with face recognition technology (FRT). It is too dangerous, invasive, and in the hands of law enforcement, a perpetual liability. EFF has long argued that face recognition, whether it is fully accurate or not, is too dangerous for police use,  and such use ought to be banned.
Now, The Washington Post has proved one more reason for this ban: police claim to use FRT just as an investigatory lead, but in practice officers routinely ignore protocol and immediately arrest the most likely match spit out by the computer without first doing their own investigation.
Cities across the United States have decided to join the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/01/police-use-face-recognition-continues-wrack-real-world-harms

 2025-01-16  Comments Off on Deeplinks – Police Use of Face Recognition Continues to Wrack Up Real-World Harms

The Intercept – SCOTUS Won’t Hear the Real Reason Porn Age-Verification Laws Are Spreading

Jan 152025
 

When the U.S. Supreme Court considers the constitutionality of a Texas law requiring porn websites to verify visitors’ ages on Wednesday, the justices will likely ignore some crucial context about such laws, which have been passed by more than a dozen states since 2022: In the words of one of their chief proponents, these age-verification laws are a “back door” to a full ban on explicit material, “starting with the kids.” Even taking legislators’ stated aim of protecting minors from “harmful” material at face value, there is little dispute most of these laws are unconstitutional, as free speech advocates have argued successfully to lower courts around the country. “This case is not close,” wrote a federal…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2025/01/15/supreme-court-porn-age-verification/

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Techdirt. – 41 Percent of Americans Live Under Age Verification Laws Targeting Porn

Dec 302024
 

Age verification laws saw an unfathomable renaissance in 2024. It’s quite frightening to see a political class of predominately far-right Christian nationalists implement the anti-porn vision of Project 2025 without President-elect Donald Trump yet entering the White House.
These laws coming out of state legislatures are scripted like how Russell Vought, a controversial architect of Project 2025 and one of Trump’s closest Christian nationalist allies, described in a viral undercover video revealing how age verification laws serve as a “back door” ban on porn. 
As of this writing, nearly 139 million U.S. residents live in states with age verification laws on the books that specifically target adult entertainment platforms like Pornhub.com or xHamster.com.
That is slightly over 41 percent of the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/12/30/41-percent-of-americans-live-under-age-verification-laws-targeting-porn/

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Biometric Update – ROC deploys Vision AI tech for smart city initiative in West Virginia

Dec 302024
 

Colorado’s ROC has announced a new public security deployment in Marion County, West Virginia, marking the launch of its Smart Cities offering to support law enforcement and first responders. A release says the firm is leveraging its Vision AI product, smart sensors and other edge devices to enable real-time security monitoring that will “enhance public safety, provide critical situational awareness and actionable intelligence, and improve emergency response times” in Marion County. ROC’s multimodal vehicle recognition, facial recognition, gun detection and other real-time data analysis capabilities will be integrated into existing security infrastructure, including license plate readers and bodycams. Applications include road safety enforcement, accident detection, parking and toll road monitoring, as well as crime prevention…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202412/roc-deploys-vision-ai-tech-for-smart-city-initiative-in-west-virginia

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Techdirt. – Copyright Industry Wants To Apply Automated Blocking To The Internet’s Core Routers

Dec 282024
 

A central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) and this blog is that the copyright industry is never satisfied. Now matter how long the term of copyright, publishers and recording companies want more. No matter how harsh the punishments for infringement, the copyright intermediaries want them to be even more severe.
Another manifestation of this insatiability is seen in the ever-widening use of Internet site blocking. What began as a highly-targeted one-off in the UK, when a court ordered the Newzbin2 site to be blocked, has become a favored method of the copyright industry for cutting off access to thousands of sites around the world, including many blocked by mistake. Even more worryingly, the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/12/27/copyright-industry-wants-to-apply-automated-blocking-to-the-internets-core-routers/

 2024-12-28  Comments Off on Techdirt. – Copyright Industry Wants To Apply Automated Blocking To The Internet’s Core Routers

jwz – Exterminate All Rational Graphic Design

Dec 282024
 

I love that all of the billboards around town for “AI” companies have converged on an identical design aesthetic: sparse san-serif text on a solid-colored background, usually black, sometimes white, maybe a solid pastel if they’re feeling saucy.

It says, “We didn’t waste money by hiring a graphic designer, our CFO just knocked this out in Notepad! Good enough!”

This is morally consistent, as their business model is “Never pay an artist, or anyone else who does creative work.”

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/12/exterminate-all-rational-graphic-design/

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World Socialist Web Site (en) – New York Times reveals Israeli extermination order authorizing killing 20 civilians for each “combatant”

Dec 272024
 

On Thursday, the New York Times published a detailed account reporting the existence of official Israeli military documents authorizing the killing of 20 non-combatants for every “pre-emptive” attack on a single presumed Hamas supporter, with the ratio in some cases reaching 100 to one.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/27/gdhz-d27.html

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Hackaday – Stream Deck Plus Reverse Engineered

Dec 272024
 

[Den Delimarsky] had a Stream Deck and wanted to be free of the proprietary software, so he reverse-engineered it. Now, he has a Stream Deck Plus, and with the same desire, he reverse-engineered it as well.
The device has eight buttons, a narrow screen, and four encoder dials. The device looks like a generic HID device to the host machine, and once it has been configured, doesn’t need any special software to function. By configuring the device using the official software in a virtual machine under the watchful eye of Wireshark, it was possible to figure out how that initial setup worked and recreate it using a different software stack.
If you’ve never done this kind of thing…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/12/26/stream-deck-plus-reverse-engineered/

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Deeplinks – The Atlas of Surveillance Expands Its Data on Police Surveillance Technology: 2024 in Review

Dec 262024
 

EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance is one of the most useful resources for those who want to understand the use of police surveillance by local law enforcement agencies across the United States. This year, as the police surveillance industry has shifted, expanded, and doubled down on its efforts to win new cop customers, our team has been busily adding new spyware and equipment to this database. We also saw many great uses of the Atlas from journalists, students, and researchers, as well as a growing number of contributors. The Atlas of Surveillance currently captures more than 11,700 deployments of surveillance tech and remains the most comprehensive database of its kind. To learn more about each of the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/12/atlas-surveillance-expands-its-data-police-surveillance-technology-2024-year

 2024-12-26  Comments Off on Deeplinks – The Atlas of Surveillance Expands Its Data on Police Surveillance Technology: 2024 in Review

see shy jo – aiming at December

Dec 252024
 

I have been working all year on a solar upgrade aimed at December. Now here
it is, midwinter, and my electric car is charging on a cloudy day from my
offgrid solar fence. I lived happily enough with 1 kilowatt of solar that I
installed in 2017.
Meanwhile, solar panel prices came down massively, incentives increased
and everything came together: This was the year. In the spring I started clearing forest trees that were leaning over the house,
making both a firebreak and a solar field. In June I picked up a pallet of panels in a box truck. a porch with a a bunch of solar panels, stacked on edge leaning up against the wall. A black and white cat is…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://joeyh.name/blog/entry/aiming_at_December/

 2024-12-25  Comments Off on see shy jo – aiming at December

TorrentFreak – ‘Destroyed’ Usenet Provider Sues Anti-Piracy Group for Millions in Damages

Dec 242024
 

The legal saga of News-Service Europe (NSE) and anti-piracy group BREIN has taken another dramatic turn.
Once a titan in the Usenet world, NSE was forced to shut down in 2011 after BREIN took legal action on behalf of the movie and music industries.
In its initial verdict, the Court of Amsterdam concluded that NSE willingly facilitated online piracy through its services. As a result, the company was ordered to remove all copyrighted content and filter future posts for possible copyright infringements.
According to the Usenet provider, this filtering requirement would’ve been too costly to implement so it shut down its service but appealed the case.
NSE Wins Appeal
After several more years of litigation, the Amsterdam appeals court ruled…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/destroyed-usenet-provider-sues-anti-piracy-group-for-millions-in-damages-241223/

 2024-12-24  Comments Off on TorrentFreak – ‘Destroyed’ Usenet Provider Sues Anti-Piracy Group for Millions in Damages

Deeplinks – The Atlas of Surveillance Expands Its Data on Police Surveillance Technology: 2024 Year in Review

Dec 242024
 

EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance is one of the most useful resources for those who want to understand the use of police surveillance by local law enforcement agencies across the United States. This year, as the police surveillance industry has shifted, expanded, and doubled down on its efforts to win new cop customers, our team has been busily adding new spyware and equipment to this database. We also saw many great uses of the Atlas from journalists, students, and researchers, as well as a growing number of contributors. The Atlas of Surveillance currently captures more than 11,700 deployments of surveillance tech and remains the most comprehensive database of its kind. To learn more about each of the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/12/atlas-surveillance-expands-its-data-police-surveillance-technology-2024-year

 2024-12-24  Comments Off on Deeplinks – The Atlas of Surveillance Expands Its Data on Police Surveillance Technology: 2024 Year in Review
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