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Assange Hearing Day 14
Monday was a frustrating day as the Assange Hearing drifted deep into a fantasy land where nobody knows or is allowed to say that people were tortured in Guantanamo Bay and under extraordinary rendition. The willingness of Judge Baraitser to accept American red lines on what witnesses can and cannot say has combined…
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An Archive of a Different Type
It was supposed to be magazines.Elaine Wooton contacted me as many people do - in the middle of a shutdown and discard project, asking if the Internet Archive might want some of what is destined for deep storage or the trash compactor. In this case, she said, there might be some old journals and magazines
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How does Brown University know where you are?
In September 2020, Brown University accused students of lying about their location; e.g.:
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72% of Americans say social media companies have too much political influence
Roughly half of Americans think social media companies should be regulated more than they are now, our survey found.
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Mailing lists are resistant to censorship
sourcehut is a network of useful open source tools for software project maintainers and collaborators, including git repos, bug tracking, continuous integration, and mailing lists.
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Victims of school bullying are at a higher risk of developing violent behavior
A University of Cordoba and University of Cambridge study analyzed what factors in childhood and adolescence increase the likelihood of having violent...
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The Slack Social Network
Slack lost to Microsoft head-to-head, but has smartly shifted to a horizontal strategy that the vertically-oriented Microsoft can’t match.
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Old bills in Yemen are worth 10% more than new ones
I often write about odd monetary phenomena on this blog. Here's a new contender, Yemen's dual banknote system. Yemen uses the Yemeni ri...
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Why Getting Paid for Your Data Is a Bad Deal
One bad privacy idea that won’t die is the so-called “data dividend,” which imagines a world where companies have to pay you in order to use your data.Sound too good to be true? It is. Let’s be clear: getting paid for your data—probably no more than a handful of dollars at most—isn’t going to fix...
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At least 11 cities use automated surveillance in the EU
At least 11 local police forces in Europe use computer vision to automatically analyze images from surveillance cameras. The risks of discrimination run high but authorities ignore them.
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On the Closing of Living Computers: Museum+Labs
As you might have heard, Living Computers: Museum+Labs has shut down; its doors will remain closed for at least the next twelve to eighteen ...
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Signaling as a Service
01 Intro One of the best books I have read in the last few years is The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler. The book makes two main arguments: a) Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signaling or status seeking b) Our brains deliberately hi
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Google: “Any harm Epic has suffered is not irreparable and is of its own making”
Domain registriert bei united-domains.de
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Mozilla Is Crowdsourcing Research into YouTube Recommendations
Mozilla has built a browser add-on that transforms YouTube users into YouTube watchdogs YouTube recommendations can be delightful, but they can also be…
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The value of Tor and anonymous contributions to Wikipedia
According to a recently published research paper co-authored by researchers from Drexel, NYU, and the University of Washington, Tor users make high-quality contributions to Wikipedia. And, when they are blocked, as doctoral candidate Chau Tran, the lead author describes, "the collateral damage in the form of…
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Nuclear power is the only green solution (2004)
We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources, writes James Lovelock – civilisation is in imminent danger. Published in The Independent , 24 May 2004.
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How I got my Japanese permanent residency
In 2018 I applied for and received Permanent Residency in Japan. The process I used is relatively new and unknown so I wanted to document it in case it might come in handy for someone else.
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How Bees Argue
The book Honeybee Democracy, published in 2010, has been sitting on my shelf for many years.
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Save the USPS
There are three types of infrastructure. One is visible: roads, dams and bridges. The second is invisible: broadband internet provisions and the entirety of our cellular infrastructure. Both are st…
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America's Growth Ponzi Scheme
The American pattern of development creates the illusion of wealth. Today we are in the process of seeing that illusion destroyed…and with it the prosperity we have come to take for granted.
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COBOL underpins the entire financial system
COBOL is a coding language older than Weird Al Yankovic. The people who know how to use it are often just as old. It underpins the entire financial system. And it can’t be removed. How a computer language controls the financial life of the world.
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