The Death of the Mind

Perception matters more than reality, especially when your budget is on the line.
Law enforcement agencies like to portray criminal activity as constantly rising, especially now that they’re facing additional scrutiny and the occasional so-called “defunding” effort. It’s a weird way to handle (government) business. On one hand, the cops claim rising crime necessitates more funding. On the other hand, an endlessly escalating crime rate tends to demonstrate cops aren’t an effective solution to the problem.
Portraying America as crime-ridden has worked out well for most law enforcement agencies. The tough questions are almost never asked by local legislators who tend to give cops whatever they want, rather than risk being perceived as “soft” on crime.
These efforts…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/24/just-because-certain-crimes-are-going-viral-doesnt-mean-crime-rates-are-increasing/

Intel, Siemens, Google, Meta, and Stripe among event walkouts

Meta and Stripe have joined Google, Intel, and Siemens in a growing boycott of next month’s Web Summit in Lisbon after the event’s chief executive compared Israel’s actions in response to attacks by Hamas as “war crimes.”…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/10/20/web_summit_cancelations_israel/

A digital rights organization says the popular view of biometric identification and surveillance is backward and the result is the commodification of people for government control and business profit. Access Now, which is particularly focused on the impact of AI on economically disadvantaged communities, has published a report with what it sees as unnecessary risks of biometrics-based tools. Instead of viewing the tools as mere collection systems, executives with Access Now see algorithms as programmed categorizers. They impose a desired order on what is by definition a spectrum of qualities, behaviors, reactions and identities. Biometric systems “are used to create baselines of what constitute ‘normal’ behaviors and bodies,’ ” according to the report. This “further…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202310/advocates-say-people-think-of-biometric-identification-all-wrong

Enlarge / Surveying the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system, such as those in the TRAPPIST-1 system (artist’s concept of four of the system’s seven planets shown), could turn up interesting molecules that might indicate life. But ruling out false positives will be a challenge. (credit: ADAPTED FROM NASA / JPL-CALTECH / R. HURT, T. PYLE (IPAC))
In June, astronomers reported a disappointing discovery: The James Webb Space Telescope failed to find a thick atmosphere around the rocky planet TRAPPIST-1 C, an exoplanet in one of the most tantalizing planetary systems in the search for alien life.
The finding follows similar news regarding neighboring planet TRAPPIST-1 B, another planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system….

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1975686

New York Attorney General Letitia James, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, State Senator Andrew Gounardes, and Assemblymember Nily Rozic announced two new bills aimed at protecting minors online. The New York Child Data Protection Act will prohibit all online sites from collecting, using, sharing, or selling personal data of anyone under the age of 18 for advertising unless they receive informed consent or unless doing so is strictly necessary for the website. For minors under 13, this informed consent must come from a parent. How to determine the age of the person interacting with the website or platform is not specified, however. Options include collecting personal information for age verification, or performing age estimation based…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202310/new-york-and-ohio-introduce-legislation-requiring-online-age-assurance

The InterPlanetary File System, more broadly known as IPFS, has been around for the past eight years.
While the name may sound otherworldly to the public at large, the peer-to-peer file storage network has a growing user base among the tech-savvy.
In short, IPFS is a decentralized network where users make files available to each other. The system makes websites censorship resistant and not vulnerable to regular hosting outages.
These advantages allow archivists, content creators, researchers, and many others to reliably distribute large volumes of data over the Internet. These same features also appeal to pirate sites, and several have actively started to embrace the technology to bypass censors.
Publishers Share IPFS Concerns
This week, IPFS was repeatedly mentioned by…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-sites-exploit-interplanetary-file-system-gateways-publishers-warn-231013/

Learn about pg_stat_io‘s debugging power: PostgreSQL 16 blesses users around the world with many features which ensure an even better user experience. One of those features is a system view called pg_stat_io. It offers deep insights into the I/O behavior of your PostgreSQL database server. From PostgreSQL 16 onward, it will make it far easier to debug and assess performance-related problems.
So, let us waste no time and dive into this wonderful feature.
pg_stat_io: Debugging I/O in PostgreSQL
The following listing shows us what the pg_stat_io view looks like:

blog=# \d pg_stat_io View “pg_catalog.pg_stat_io” Column | Type | Collation | Nullable | Default —————-+————————–+———–+———-+——— backend_type | text | | | object | text | | | context | text…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/6af

Project Nessie named in the antitrust suit, alleging Bezos’s bunch pulled in an extra billion-plus

A redacted portion of the US Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon last week has come to light, and with it more details of a secret pricing algorithm known as “Project Nessie” – which the FTC argued has “no valid and cognizable justification” other than an attempt to stifle competition. …

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/10/04/amazon_project_nessie_algorithm/

ShotSpotter has long presented itself as a reliable detector of gunshots. Mileage, however, has varied. Law enforcement customers that have gotten disgruntled with this limited service have pointed out — en route to terminated contracts — that (a) detected gunshots are not always gunshots, (b) detected gunshots are rarely useful intel, and (c) detecting gunshots rarely results in less gun-related crime.
The law enforcement agencies that still buy into ShotSpotter like it for other reasons. They like the fact that minimally-trained “analysts” will alter reports to provide cops with post facto justification for their actions. They like the “reasonable suspicion” ShotSpotter’s shot detection supposedly provides — justification for stopping and searching anyone in the area of a…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/02/shotspotter-looking-to-compound-bad-cop-tech-ideas-by-acquiring-predictive-policing-software-company/

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
A critical zero-day vulnerability Google reported on Wednesday in its Chrome browser is opening the Internet to a new chapter of Groundhog Day.
Like a critical zero-day Google disclosed on September 11, the new exploited vulnerability doesn’t affect just Chrome. Already, Mozilla has said that its Firefox browser is vulnerable to the same bug, which is tracked as CVE-2023-5217. And just like CVE-2023-4863 from 17 days ago, the new one resides in a widely used code library for processing media files, specifically those in the VP8 format.
Pages here and here list hundreds of packages for Ubuntu and Debian alone that rely on the library known as libvpx. Most browsers use…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1972043