Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Leftovers

  • Jon Udell ☛ Seymour and Brownie

    My family, on my dad’s side, were Jews from Poland and Ukraine. His parents came to America before the shit hit the fan, but I grew up knowing two people who weren’t so lucky. Seymour Mayer lived across the street during my teens.

  • Hackaday ☛ Hacking A Brother Label Maker: Is Your CUPS Half Empty Or Half Full?

    On the one hand, we were impressed that a tiny Brother label maker actually uses CUPS to support printing. Like [Sdomi], we were less than impressed at how old a copy it was using – – 1.6.1. Of course, [Sdomi] managed to gain access to the OS and set things up the right way, and we get an over-the-shoulder view.

  • Off Guardian ☛ WATCH: Ancient Apocalypse & Graham Hancock’s “Dangerous Ideas”

    Today I explore Graham Hancock’s controversial DRM spreader Netflix series “Ancient Apocalypse.” Hancock argues that human civilization is older than mainstream archaeology suggests, erased by a disaster 12,000 years ago.

  • Wouter Groeneveld ☛ Good Blogging Habits Yield a Book Each Year

    Did you know that if you write a lengthy blog post of say a thousand words twice a week for fifty out of fifty-two weeks, you’ll end up with a hundred thousand words, which is longer than the average book? Even if you can’t muster the discipline, getting beyond 80k isn’t particularly difficult to pull off.

  • Robin Rendle ☛ Creativity is the byproduct of work

    With my design work I know this to be true: just keep iterating and eventually a novel approach will accidentally happen. My cursor will slip or I’ll click the wrong button and it will lead to a cascade of changes and improvements that eventually turn into something resembling good. With my career in design, I’ve got to the point that if you give me a project I’m confident I’ll figure out a solution, given enough time.

  • Lykolux ☛ Another post about writing

    Writing Zettelkasten notes are cumbersome to me at the moment: it takes also too much effort. Maybe this will change over time, but for now I like to keep things organized in notes.

  • The Guardian UK ☛ ‘This sucks. I want to go back to being famous’: Kevin Bacon’s experiment as a ‘regular person’

    Yet the newfound freedom soon palled as Bacon discovered the downsides of invisibility.

    “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice,” he said. “Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to buy a fucking coffee or whatever. I was like, This sucks. I want to go back to being famous.”

  • Vanity Fair ☛ Kevin Bacon Spent a Day as a Regular Person: “I Was Like, This Sucks”

    He was outfitted with fake teeth, a slightly different nose, and glasses—a getup that made Bacon look a lot like his character in the new Ti West horror film MaXXXine, a sleazy private detective hired to track down the title character (Mia Goth). Bacon put on his normal-person camouflage and tested it at one of the most densely populated locations in Los Angeles: an outdoor shopping mall called The Grove that is perpetually full of tourists.

    To his initial delight, the disguise really worked. “Nobody recognized me,” he says. But then an unfamiliar sensation washed over Bacon: the feeling of being invisible. (Given the actor’s prolific career, it is unsurprising that Bacon has played invisible—in 2000’s Hollow Man—but that was for an audience.)

  • Science

    • Science Alert ☛ We Finally Know What Turned on The Lights at The Dawn of Time

    • Science Alert ☛ Incredible New Tech Lets Scientists Watch Fetuses Develop in Real Time

      The start of life.

    • Science Alert ☛ Stunning Infographics Reveal All The Amazing Planets You've Never Heard Of

      It's a very big sky.

    • Science Alert ☛ Life Only Needed A Small Amount of Oxygen to Explode, Scientists Find

      Starts with a whimper, ends with a bang.

    • Science Alert ☛ This New Map Reveals The Predicted Future Climate Where You Live

      A crystal ball.

    • France24 ☛ NASA scientists reemerge after more than a year of isolation for Mars project

      "They have spent more than a year in this habitat conducting crucial science, most of it nutrition-based and how that impacts their performance ... as we prepare to send people on to the Red Planet," Steve Koerner, deputy director at NASA's Johnson Space Center, told the crowd.

    • Henrik Warne ☛ John von Neumann – The Man from the Future

      Before I read The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, I only knew about John von Neumann in two contexts: that computers use the von Neumann architecture, and that he appeared in a story about a mathematical problem I remember from many years ago. After reading it, I understand what a genius he was, and how much of science in the 20th century he influenced. He deserves to be better known than I think he is, and this is a great book to learn about him.

  • Education

    • TruthOut ☛ Public Libraries Are Essential Resources — and They’re More Threatened Than Ever

      But if you turned to your local New York Public Library this past Sunday, one of this summer’s hottest days yet, you were out of luck. Last year, the New York Public Library received a $23.6 million cut in funding, which resulted in its decision to close on Sundays. Recently, Mayor Adams proposed an even bigger cut of $58.3 million for the 2025 fiscal year, citing the “need” to move more funds toward the police, who received $5.8 billion in 2024. After months of protest, a compromise was found.

      Unfortunately, this attack on public libraries is not contained to New York. Thanks to the efforts of some lawmakers, libraries all over the U.S. are having an increasingly difficult time serving their communities.

    • Axios ☛ Schools ban phones, but do the policies work?

      Why it matters: School cellphones policies are a difficult flashpoint: On one hand, the phones can be a useful learning tool and essential parent lifeline; on the other — well, they're a pretty obvious distraction.

  • Hardware

    • Thomas Rigby ☛ Testing an old Zenit 11 Soviet-era SLR camera

      What is odd is that the manual claims, instead of ISO, the film speed is measured in ГОСТ (GOST). There's has a conversion chart and the values aren't wildly different. I would need to use 360ГОСТ for my ISO400 film. However, the unusual disk for setting film speed has units for ISO and DIN. Still, I learned a bit about different measurement scales.

    • Hackaday ☛ 2024 Business Card Challenge: Magnetic Fidget Card

      If you want someone to keep your business card around, you should probably make it really cool-looking, or have it do something useful. It’s kind of the whole point of the 2024 Business Card Challenge. And while we’d normally expect electronics of some persuasion to be involved, we must admit that this magnetic fidget card definitely does something, at least when manipulated. And even when it’s just sitting there, the card has a storage slot for IDs, or whatever you want.

    • Hackaday ☛ New Battery Has No Anode

      Conventional batteries have anodes and cathodes, but a new design from the University of Chicago and the University of California San Diego lacks an anode. While this has been done before, according to the University, this is the first time a solid-state sodium battery has successfully used this architecture.

    • Hackaday ☛ Korean Multifunction Counter Teardown

      [Thomas Scherrer] likes to tear down old test equipment, and often, we remember the devices he opens up or — at least — we’ve heard of them. However, this time, he’s got a Hung Chang HC-F100 multifunction counter, which is a vintage 1986 instrument that can reach 100 MHz.

  • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

    • JURIST ☛ Kansas Supreme Court reaffirms abortion rights and strikes down state restrictions

      The Kansas Supreme Court issued two decisions on Friday striking down a series of abortion rules and restrictions that reaffirmed its 2019 decision that the state constitution guarantees the right to terminate a pregnancy. In its first opinion, the Kansas Supreme Court upheld the district court’s decision.

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Borderline blues: Switch to Shenzhen by budget-conscious Hongkongers eats away at profits for local eateries

      Months of poor business forced Hongkonger Emma and her husband Wai to close one of their Japanese omakase restaurants in February, despite its prime location in Causeway Bay. With their lease not yet expired, the pair swiftly transitioned to fast-food-style chicken chops costing less than HK$100 per meal.

    • Off Guardian ☛ What, Me Worry?

      Is it over? Will people continue to die due to the Covid vaccines? Or have the excess deaths hit their peak? Or should I keep worrying about all of my friends and family who got jabbed?

    • Michigan News ☛ Dear Annie: How will I survive high school without Snapchat?

      Now, how should we communicate with others our age, and how should we be able to stay socially friendly with everyone even though no one communicates with us via text or phone calls? -- Stuck on Snapchat

  • Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    • Michael Tsai ☛ Bruce Bastian, RIP

      There was a period in the mid-90s when WordPerfect was my favorite Mac word processor. It was not particularly Mac-like; it just worked really well. At the time, one of my issues with Microsoft Word was that the formatting would get all screwed up, and it was really hard to debug it. You couldn’t see which styling and spacing commands were attached to which bits of text. Most of the time, the problem was within a run of whitespace, so everything was invisible and it wasn’t clear where to click. Sometimes you’d have to just delete the whole section and start over. WordPerfect had a mode where you could show all the formatting codes. You could see—and edit—them like pseudo–HTML tags mixed in with the text. This made it easy to see exactly where to put the insertion point. You could even put it between “tags” and start typing to separate two regions that would seem glued together when Reveal Codes was off.

    • Tom's Hardware ☛ China's Hey Hi (AI) model glut is a 'significant waste of resources' due to scarce real-world applications for 100+ LLMs says Baidu CEO

      Industry experts expect China's over 100 publicly-available LLMs to be pared down to just five in the next few years.

  • Security

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Tom's Hardware ☛ Your Wi-Fi can now double as a home security system — Gamgee uses home Wi-Fi networks for intruder detection

        A Dutch startup has launched a crowdfunding campaign for a home security system that piggybacks on your Wi-Fi to detect intruders. Using a home mapping app and artificial intelligence, Gamgee’s Wi-Fi Home Alarm is claimed to offer precision protection by ‘body printing’ your household’s trusted people and pets.

      • India Times ☛ India produces 20% of world's data: Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal

        "Only one-tenth of that is stored in India. 90% is exported into global data centres, largely owned by big techs. And they're not... It is processed into AI, brought back into India and sold to us in dollars," he said.

        He also said that 200 years ago, East India Company used to export cotton and now are exporting data and bringing intelligence from abroad.

      • Don Marti ☛ Big Tech platforms: mall, newspaper, or something else?

        A licensing bill covering cross-context tracking could bring together two constituencies: people who already believe in the harms of cross-context tracking and want fewer, better-run companies doing it, and people who are neutral or slightly positive about the tracking part but want to use future public meetings about tracking license renewals to get Big Tech to improve their behavior toward their state’s citizens and businesses. And maybe, when a social platform resembles the the arbitrary top-down decision-making of a credit report crossed with the psychological manipulation of a slot machine, the answer to the mall or newspaper question for Big Tech is neither.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • The Straits Times ☛ North Korea’s Kim Yo Jong calls South Korean drills a provocation: KCNA

      Seoul resumed live-fire artillery drills near the western maritime border in June.

    • The Straits Times ☛ Hezbollah launches drone attack on Mount Hermon in Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights

      The Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group said on Sunday it launched a drone attack on Mount Hermon in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights where Israel has a key surveillance centre.

    • Hindustan Times ☛ Elephant in room at NATO: would Trump blow it up?

      Western leaders are celebrating 75 years of NATO with an elephant in the room will Donald Trump, who could again be the US president within months, blow the alliance up?

      This week's summit in Washington will look, without saying so explicitly, to "Trump-proof" NATO by expanding the role of the alliance itself especially in supporting Ukraine, whose fight against Russia has drawn skepticism from the Republican candidate.

    • RTL ☛ Elephant in room at NATO: would Trump blow it up?

      Project 2025, an unofficial policy blueprint for a second Trump administration, led by the Washington-based Heritage Foundation, calls for transforming NATO so that US allies field "the great majority of conventional forces required to deter Russia," with the United States reducing forces in Europe and primarily offering its nuclear umbrella.

      The United States stations roughly 100,000 troops in Europe, a sharp increase since Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022.

    • Atlantic Council ☛ The US and Europe would be safer with Ukraine in NATO. Our war games showed why.

      To help answer these questions, the Atlantic Council, in partnership with the Estonian foreign ministry, conducted a series of major tabletop exercises this spring that brought together dozens of leading experts, including current US and allied government officials, to examine future Russia-Ukraine conflict scenarios and their implications for Western security. Some exercises were set in the near future, after Ukraine had already joined NATO, while others gamed out the process of Ukraine joining NATO. The scenarios included variants in which Ukraine had succeeded in taking back all of its territory, and others in which parts of the country remained occupied by Russia.

    • Michigan Advance ☛ With our democracy under siege, this Independence Day was a somber one

      July 4th hits different when you’re confronted by the unescapable reality that the American experiment is over in a fundamental way.

      And no, that isn’t hyperbole if you read the U.S. Supreme court opinion released last week in Trump v. the United States by six right-wing justices, who function more like insular high clerics than thoughtful jurists.

      The case was brought by Donald Trump, who has the distinction of being the only former president to be found guilty of 34 felonies in a hush money case tied to the 2016 election and faces dozens more in three other criminal cases.

      But the majority on the high court — half of whom were appointed by Trump — handed him an astounding victory, ruling that presidents have almost limitless immunity, so long as something can be called an “official act.”

    • The Hill ☛ Here's the hush money evidence at the center of Trump's immunity claims

      It bolstered prosecutors’ narrative that the hush money paid to Daniels at the center of the case was directly related to the campaign, rather than to prevent embarrassment to Trump’s family or other nonpolitical rationales. Hicks seemed to realize the damage, breaking down in tears moments later.

      Prosecutor Joshua Steinglass returned to the testimony in his marathon closing argument, telling jurors the testimony “puts the nail in Mr. Trump’s coffin.”

    • VOA News ☛ TikTok has launched tons of trends. Will its influence last?

      The popularity of TikTok — coupled with its roots in Beijing — led the U.S. Congress — citing national security concerns, to pass a law that would ban the video-sharing app unless its Chinese parent company sells its stake. Both the company, ByteDance, and TikTok have sued on First Amendment grounds.

      But while the platform faces uncertain times, its influence remains undisputed.

    • JURIST ☛ Taiwan prosecutor investigates former Democratic Progressive Party official for corruption

      The Taoyun District Prosecutor’s Office summoned the Chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and former Mayor of Taoyuan City, Taiwan, Cheng Wen-tsan, on Friday on suspicion of having violated the Corruption Prevention and Criminal Activity Ordinance and other laws, according to local media reports.

    • Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

      • RFERL ☛ Chinese Soldiers Arrive In Belarus For Anti-Terrorism Exercises

        Chinese soldiers arrived in Belarus on July 6 for joint a “anti-terrorism training exercise,” Belarus’s Defense Ministry said. In a Telegram posting, the ministry said the maneuvers be held from July 8-19.

      • France24 ☛ Politicians, world leaders react to French leftists' victory in blocking the far right

        French politicians and world leaders reacted to the results of parliamentary elections on Sunday after a coalition of the French left that quickly banded together to beat a surging far right won the most seats in parliament but not a majority. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he was "happy" and called the result a "disappointment" for Moscow.

      • RFERL ☛ Orban May Be On His Way To China After Trip To Moscow

        Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, fresh off a controversial trip to Moscow, may now be on his way to Beijing, a Hungarian media site reported on July 7, although the government in Budapest hasn't confirmed the journey.

      • New York Times ☛ New Plan to Target Russia’s Oil Revenue Brings Debate in White House

        Treasury officials want to impose penalties on tankers that help Russian oil evade sanctions. White House aides worry that risks making gasoline more expensive.

      • New York Times ☛ Ukraine Tries to Stay Neutral in Political Dogfight Between Trump and Biden

        With President Biden’s future unclear, Donald J. Trump’s support uncertain and a major NATO meeting looming, Ukrainian leaders are straining to keep their balance.

      • New York Times ☛ NATO Has to Change. Here’s How.

        It is increasingly clear that Europeans need to shoulder more responsibility for their own defense.

      • RFERL ☛ Parts Of Russia's Voronezh Under State Of Emergency After Suspected Drone Attack

        A state of emergency was declared on July 7 in parts of Russia's Voronezh region near the border with Ukraine following a suspected Ukrainian drone attack that set an ammunition depot on fire, regional authorities said.

      • RFERL ☛ New Dutch Leaders Pledge Weapons, 'Rock Solid' Support During Ukraine Visit

        Days after taking office, top leaders of the new far-right Dutch government sought to dispel concerns about a shift toward Russia, vowing during a visit to Kyiv that its support for Ukraine was “rock solid” and that sophisticated warplanes and an air-defense system were on the way.

      • RFERL ☛ New U.K. Defense Chief Visits Odesa, Vows To 'Fast-Track' Ukraine Aid

        Britain’s newly appointed Labour Party defense secretary traveled to the southern Ukrainian port city of Odesa on July 7 for his first official foreign journey, vowing his country’s continued support for Kyiv.

  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

    • India Times ☛ Big Tech: EU vs Big Tech: the cases keep mounting

      The European Commission (EC) on Friday asked Amazon to provide detailed information by July 26 on the measures the US ecommerce giant is taking to comply with the Digital Services Act (DSA) obligations, especially its compliance with provisions concerning transparency of the recommender systems.

      DSA requires Big Tech companies to do more to tackle illegal and harmful content on their platforms.

    • The Register UK ☛ 2023 data breach at OpenAI allegedly went unreported

      OpenAI apparently chose not to make the news public or tell anyone in law enforcement about the digital break in, because none of the Microsoft-backed firm's actual AI builds were compromised. Execs who disclosed the breach to employees didn't think it was much of a threat, because it was believed the miscreant behind the breach was a private individual unaffiliated with any foreign governments.

    • [Repeat] New York Times ☛ A [Cracker] Stole OpenAI Secrets, Raising Fears That China Could, Too

      OpenAI executives revealed the incident to employees during an all-hands meeting at the company’s San Francisco offices in April 2023 and informed its board of directors, according to the two people, who discussed sensitive information about the company on the condition of anonymity.

      But the executives decided not to share the news publicly because no information about customers or partners had been stolen, the two people said. The executives did not consider the incident a threat to national security because they believed the [attacker] was a private individual with no known ties to a foreign government. The company did not inform the F.B.I. or anyone else in law enforcement.

  • Environment

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Climate crisis: Dam breach triggers floods in Hunan, central China

      Chinese officials raced Saturday to stem floods caused by a dam breach in central China, state media reported, as the Asian nation grapples with a summer of extreme weather.

    • Los Angeles Times ☛ Death Valley motorcycle tour turns fatal as temperature hits 128

      The heat also hindered the rescue effort. When temperatures exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit, a medical helicopter cannot access the park. Air expands when it is heated, becoming thinner than cold air. So, helicopters can’t get the lift needed to fly.

    • Andreas ☛ When the world went quiet

      We stopped polluting the environment with noise and dirt and traffic and heavy machinery, and almost immediately nature started to recover. The effect that I noticed on a small scale in myself could also be seen on a much larger scale in the world.

      Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Once the lockdowns were over and the pandemic was under control, we went right back to our usual ways. Now a few years later car traffic and noise is as bad as it ever was, pollution has gone up again and we seem to have largely put the pandemic behind us and filed it away as some sort of nightmare that is best left forgotten. And don’t get me wrong, in many ways it was a nightmare and I wouldn’t for a second want the pandemic to flare up again.

      But we also caught a glimpse of how a world without constant traffic, noise, air pollution etc. could look like. And I wish we had learned something from it.

    • Energy/Transportation

      • The Straits Times ☛ China’s great green march: Meeting 2030 energy target over 5 years early boosts climate fight

        China has been on a tear, installing increasingly larger and record amounts of green energy in recent years.

      • The Register UK ☛ China plans to boost national compute capacity 30% by 2025

        Details of China's current capacity emerged in recent days at the Global Digital Economy Conference 2024, where Wang Xiaoli, a representative of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, revealed that China has over 8.1 million datacenter racks in operation and that they house kit with combined processing power of 230 exaFLOPS.

        State-owned media reports of Wang's remarks referred to a 2023 plan to reach 300 exaFLOPS "by 2025."

      • Luke Harris ☛ New job, and adventures on public transit

        The new job comes with an hour-long commute by train and bus. I could drive to work in half the time it takes to get there on public transit, but driving inevitably leads to parking, and parking on either end of my commute could take as long as it took to drive there. And it’s a lot harder to catch up on blog posts in my RSS reader while both eyes and hands are employed in disaster avoidance.

      • VOA News ☛ North Dakota tribe goes back to its roots with a massive greenhouse operation

        The natural gas released in North Dakota's Bakken oil field has long been seen by critics as a waste and environmental concern, but Fox said the tribal nation intends to capture and compress that gas to heat and power the greenhouse and process into fertilizer.

        Flaring, in which natural gas is burned off from pipes that emerge from the ground, has been a longtime issue in the No. 3 oil-producing state.

        North Dakota Pipeline Authority Director Justin Kringstad said that key to capturing the gas is building needed infrastructure, as the MHA Nation intends to do.

    • Wildlife/Nature

      • VOA News ☛ Oldest inhabited termite mounds have been active for 34,000 years

        Francis said the Namaqualand mounds are a termite version of an "apartment complex" and the evidence shows they have been consistently inhabited by termite colonies.

        Termite mounds are a famous feature of the Namaqualand landscape, but no one suspected their age until samples of them were taken to experts in Hungary for radiocarbon dating.

        "People don't know that these are special, ancient landscapes that are preserved there," Francis said.

    • Overpopulation

      • RFA ☛ Laos can feed itself, but its food security is complicated

        A farm sector incentivized to export will mean more cash crops, fewer staples, and rising fertilizer imports.

  • Finance

    • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ Real World Economics: Using fuzzy math to debate Social Security

      How do you know not to hire a particular financial planner? Well, if they write about Social Security that “when they started the program the average age of death was 65 — and the average person never collected Social Security,” you need to run. Fast!

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • University of Michigan ☛ The language of tribalism: How political shibboleths are destroying discourse

      We live in a world dominated by the sound bite, the clip and all things scrollable. To facilitate this shortened content, different groups have had to find creative ways to convey great meaning in small packages. Though this may sound ingenious, these words — known today as political buzzwords — have had a divisive effect. They have become tribal, drawing lines in the sand between ideologies. The shift in vernacular along party lines separates those who disagree from those with the same political vocabulary. Put another way: no buzz words, no entry.

    • [Repeat] Silicon Angle ☛ The AI money train keeps rolling, but the environmental toll keeps growing too

      But AI is the only real bright spot in a still-moribund venture capital picture. And even AI isn’t yet providing enough oomph to prevent continued cost-cutting, including layoffs at Microsoft and OpenText. AI is also supposed to provide a boost for robotics, but that didn’t prevent both Alphabet and Amazon from shutting down their business-oriented robotics units.

    • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

      • [Old] The Strategist ☛ Protecting Japan’s national security from information operations

        But in the wake of some high-profile Chinese disinformation and misinformation operations targeting Japan, the government in Tokyo has rightfully moved beyond these assumptions and is now increasingly aware of the power of information operations to undermine social cohesion and trust in political institutions.

      • RFERL ☛ Moldova, Romania, Ukraine Sign Agreement To Combat Russian Disinformation

        [...] The agreement was signed during a trilateral meeting of the three countries' foreign ministers in Moldova's capital, Chisinau, on July 5. [...]

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • JURIST ☛ Pakistan Punjab ministry recommends social control media ban, citing security concerns during religious processions

      Pakistan’s Punjab government proposed a ban on all social control media platforms for six days, citing security concerns during thousands of religious processions starting next week from July 13-18, according to a Thursday notice from the Ministry of Interior.

    • Bryan Lunduke ☛ Crazy Tech People Who Hate Lunduke - Part II

      Within minutes of making that test post, my Lunduke (err... I mean "violates forum rules") user account was banned completely.

    • Morning Star News ☛ Christian Sentenced to Death under Pakistan’s Blasphemy Law

      Masih’s lawyer, Khurram Shahzad Maan, said Masih testified that he had categorically denied creating or posting any blasphemous content on social media.

      “The police recovered Masih’s phone from his house and sent it to the Punjab Forensic Science Agency (PFSA) for examination,” Maan told Christian Daily International-Morning Star News. “The PFSA report concluded that no blasphemous material was found on the accused’s phone or TikTok account.”

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Hong Kong Free Press ☛ Why is students’ singing ability suddenly the speciality of Hong Kong school inspectors?

      School inspections are a funny business. They sit on an obstinate paradox which makes it difficult to have confidence in the results. An experienced observer can glean quite a lot about a school from walking the corridors: are the students cheerful and well-behaved; what is on the walls?

    • TwinCities Pioneer Press ☛ In lawsuit, Black pastors blame state, regional housing policies for increasing racial segregation

      A pastor's recent testimony before a state advisory committee on housing was largely thrown out.

    • JURIST ☛ New Brunswick judge rules school district lacks standing in gender identity policy lawsuit

      A New Brunswick judge ruled on Friday that the Anglophone East District Education Council does not have the legal standing to challenge changes to Policy 713, a gender identity policy made by the provincial government.

    • The Register UK ☛ Algorithmic wage discrimination: Not just for gig workers

      And when these algorithms are not disclosed, they're referred to as "black box" algorithms, as they can't be directly scrutinized.

      There are millions of workers who perform freelance work as independent contractors – 64 million in 2023, representing 38 percent of the US workforce, according to freelancing service Upwork. McKinsey in 2022 found that 36 percent of employed survey takers – which gets extrapolated to 58 million Americans – identify as independent workers.

    • Yossi Kreinin ☛ Managers have no human rights

      "Individual contributors" can be fairly non-competitive, certainly in an industry like computing where demand for workers outstrips supply, there's enough work for everyone, and where you know a ton of trivia about your area that anyone else would need lots of time to learn if they had to step into your shoes. It's not only desirable but very possible to find a place where no colleague is going to fight you in order to add your area of responsibility to theirs, and thus get promoted.

      Managers, on the other hand, are always basically low-grade1 fighting each other, in the same way as countries always have conflicting interests, even if they maintain what looks like cordial relationships. I mean it not as a statement about the character of managers, but as a description of their condition. This condition follows, not from their character, but from various unfortunate facts of life - for example, the fact that managers are assumed to be fungible and are hopelessly underinformed, and it gets worse with rank.

      The fungibility assumption means that a manager is always under a threat of losing "territory" to another manager, a reorg making him a report of someone undesirable, or a straightforward replacement, much more than an IC, which creates a very competitive environment. And the theoretical impossibility of managers being truly informed on the subjects falling under their responsibility guarantees that their never-ending competition involves a lot of so-called "misinformation, disinformation and malinformation." Of course, the manager's condition of eternal competition fought on such wonderful terms does filter for character - and not in a way making a manager's day spent with colleagues particularly pleasant.

    • RFA ☛ Dalai Lama marks 89th birthday, allays concerns about his health

      China – which annexed Tibet in 1951 and rules the western autonomous region with a heavy hand – says only Beijing can select the next spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists, as it seeks to control the centuries-old selection process for religious leaders, including the Dalai Lama.

      Tibetans, however, believe the Dalai Lama chooses the body into which he will be reincarnated, a process that has occurred 13 times since 1391, when the first Dalai Lama was born.

  Monopolies/Monopsonies

  • Don Marti ☛ Don Marti: Big Tech platforms: mall, newspaper, or something else?

    The Pruneyard is “an iconic destination and experience designed to make the everyday extraordinary.”

  • India Times ☛ EU regulator has a ‘warning’ for Nvidia

    European regulators are examining potential market risks related to Nvidia's AI chip supply constraints. Nvidia's GPUs are in high demand, leading to concerns about market dominance. The European Commissioner for Competition is monitoring the situation closely.

  • The Verge ☛ Epic says its EU iOS app store is approved but that Apple wants a change

    But the approval is just “temporary,” posted Epic CEO Tim Sweeney, who puts Apple’s request differently. He says the company is “demanding we change the buttons in the next version,” vowing that the company will “fight this.” The apparently conditional approval is just the latest part of the back-and-forth saga between Apple and Epic. Previously, Apple reinstated Epic Games Sweden’s European developer license after EU regulators started investigating its decision to pull it.

  • Greece ☛ European regulators crack down on Big Tech

    European regulators have launched a series of probes into Big Tech. In the latest move, the European Commission asked Amazon for more information on its compliance with the Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires Big Tech players to do more to tackle illegal and harmful content on their platforms.

    Here are some of the actions taken by European watchdogs against big technology companies: [...]

  • Patents

    • Software Patents

      • [Old] GNU ☛ (Formerly) Boycott Amazon!

        Amazon has obtained a US patent (5,960,411) on an important and obvious idea for E-commerce: an idea sometimes known as one-click purchasing. The idea is that your command in a web browser to buy a certain item can carry along information about your identity. (It works by sending the server a “cookie,” a kind of ID code that your browser received previously from the same server.)

        Amazon has sued to block the use of this simple idea, showing that they truly intend to monopolize it. This is an attack against the World Wide Web and against E-commerce in general.

  • Copyrights

    • Torrent Freak ☛ Cloudflare Blocks Pirate Sites After Web Sheriff Filed Laundry List of Violations

      Anti-piracy company Web Sheriff was once known for its off-the-wall approach to tackling infringement. Presumably part of its strategy to get noticed in the market, the company has since matured as an all-round brand protection service. Still, a pair of copyright claims sent to Cloudflare recently are so ridiculously over the top, it's hard to take them seriously. Unexpectedly, Cloudflare responded by blocking URLs on two pirate sites leading to the rarely-seen '451' error.

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal/Opinions

      • Sao

        The moon had been hollowed out for as long as anyone could remember by the time I'd arrived. What the mechanized diggers found during the process is still a mystery. We call it the *pulsing mind* of the moon. It throbs in regular time that has, as far as anyone knows, been consistent in interval to the microsecond. There are lengthy pauses, however, that spawn myriad conjectures. My theory is that the moon exists in a graduated, localized bubble perpendicular to the outside fourth dimension. The pauses are perceived proportionally to one's distance from the central *pulsing mind*. For if one is close enough, no cessation occurs at all.

      • Affairs in the Valid Universe

        A slightly modified version of Thalassa sings in my ears via my filthy Tuxedo speakers that are devoid of bass response. Or practically devoid of bass response. I'm following, perhaps, and perhaps not, Christian's need to "test" mixes on as many reproduction devices as "necessary". Of course, this is just his excuse to remain in a state of sloth. One's life of extreme *lujos* can't be bothered to move from the bed or sofa to engage in unity with high fidelity headphones when one can simply play music through the speakers of one's "device". I am **filled with rage** at these antics! His death will be prolonged during centuries of torturous neural procedures. He'll know the true Christian vision of the *lake of fire*. Fuck um.

      • 🔤SpellBinding — ABILTVY Wordo: SCENE