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silveradeptLet us begin with important business: the weighing of the manuscripts at the British Library.
Hopefully, there were no persons who suffered eye injury from looking at the solar eclipse, as there were worries about fake solar eclipse glasses filters being sold that would not actually protect the eyes during the viewing of the eclipse. Because there's always someone who wants to make a quick buck and who doesn't care about who gets hurt in the process.
The eclipse was fodder for all the conspiracy theorists and those that make their living from peddling to them, about who is supposedly going to perform occult rituals and show, if just for a moment, who the people that are really in charge of the world are. Or that the true reality of the world will be present during the eclipse, proving the world is flat, the universe is smaller than science says, or that staring at the sun at all times, eclipse or no, is perfectly fine and nobody ever gets hurt by looking directly at the sun.
Building on court cases that allow it under specific conditions, an Ohio organization is doing their best to get all the children in all Ohio public schools to elect religious education as part of their public school day. And they want everyone to see how many kids are electing this, by having them wear the same shirts, and by having parties, and by having the kids complete form letters that they can give to their friends telling them about it. And there are occasionally things that are probably not permissible, like promotions for the group going home in school backpacks, or staff handing out the information to students, especially non-Christian students. It is a fantastic example of how the law is a club, not a scalpel, and also that even if these options are supposedly open to others, it's rare they have the money to operate a bus full of children and have a church nearby for it to go to. (And also the issues where this instruction is happening during periods that aren't considered "essential," like recess or library periods, which deserves someone getting a smiting all by themselves for thinking of these as optional and not essential.)
West Virginia, on the other hand, seems to think they can just let religion into science classes by allowing "scientific theories" without defining whether those theories require actual, non-discredited science behind them, or whether they just have to sound sufficiently scientific.
Backlash against the general form of progress of the last several decades continues apace in those places that refuse to acknowledge the shared humanity of all their residents. Idaho has decided that trans people do not exist in their state and they will not permit them to do so, in addition to continuing the war against accurate information for children.
A regular reminder that prisoners are not only exempted from the prohibition on slavery, but are often subjected to the arbitrary and cruel whims of the people who have absolute power over their lives. In this article's case, it's that a person who is in solitary confinement can't get the books they want to read, because of arbitrary decisions about what counts as "sexual content" (an advertisement of someone in incontinence underwear, or material that is accurate sex education) or "promotes racial division" or because the librarian there thinks she needs to have her "heathen" soul saved, and therefore always sends a book with Christian themes, instead of what's been asked for. Along with the opportunities denied to those who are in long sentences, who do not get the opportunity to take courses or educate themselves or possibly even learn to read, because the carceral system believes prisoners do not deserve anything like humanity and allows people who agree with that to gain and hold positions of power. Fobazi Ettarh, coiner of "vocational awe" and someone who has been around the library block quite a bit, points out that the prison librarian believing she has to save the soul of the prisoner is exactly what white women in librarianship were put there for. She's absolutely correct, and many white women in libraries are still there because they believe their mission is to "civilize" the blacks, browns, and poors and make them act and have the interests of white people. And the ones that aren't are, as we are seeing, are having to fend off legislatures that are trying to force them into upholding white supremacy by making it illegal to do anything other than that.
Many of the anti-library bills are written in such a way that they presume someone making an objection is doing so for a valid reason and are correct about it, and then put the burden of proof on the library to prove that something is in the right place and in the right collection, upon the penalty of being sued or prosecuted if the library can't make their case, or the person who wants things gone is persistent enough. The Idaho bill apparently allows for someone to first demand things be moved, and then sue if their demands aren't met. So it's a new evolution of anti-library bills if there's no mechanism at all for the library to say "You're wrong, fuck off." and have it stick without having to do it in a lawsuit, or to have to do it in a criminal trial where someone can point at the standards established by Miller v. California and have that count for exactly nothing against these new laws that say there are no exemptions for teachers and librarians if someone wants to accuse them of peddling obscenity or pornography.
Legislation proposed in Louisiana would make it illegal for any public dollars to be spent on the American Library Association or any conference or continuing education where ALA is a sponsor or is putting on any part of that conference or continuing education. The penalty for spending, or even requesting reimbursement or advance funds for expenses on a forbidden conference or program is up to $1000 in fines, or up to two years in prison, with the possibility of hard labor with that. It stops just short of demanding that no individual librarian be allowed to be a member of the ALA in Louisiana (probably because there would be strong claims about abridgement of assembly if that were to happen), but a blanket ban on public dollars being used if there's any ALA presence is functionally the same thing, since nothing about ALA is cheap, nor is much about conferences and continuing education.
Elsewhere in the United States, given the choice between a recent law that would have been enjoined from enforcement in a pre-Dobbs era, and an 1864 territorial law that is a near-total ban on the practice of abortion, the Arizona Supreme Court decided they wanted to enforce the territorial law. The Governor has called for the repeal of the territorial law, and the Attorney General of the state has stated she will refuse to prosecute anyone under that statute. There is an petition for a state constitutional amendment gathering signatures for Arizona to enshrine proper protections for abortion care that will likely go before the voters in November, but until then, the women of Arizona find themselves under the rule of Civil War-era law.
The Colorado Republican Party had a reporter for the Colorado Sun removed from covering their state assembly, with the chairman for the party asserting the reporter's coverage was "unfair". In addition to spouting boilerplate fascism-friendly material when called on it. Many of the other responses garnered by the Sun in their article do at least point out that abridgement of the freedom of the press is not a good look, but they're also doing their best to say "well, no, the accusation of unfairness is wrong. She's pretty fair and tough." as if it were of equal or more importance than "our chairman just failed his First Amendment test." If they were focusing on the First Amendment part, they would be lining up to say "The chairman will now be removed for gross incompetence." after decrying such. But in one of the responses gathered by the Sun, someone talks about how "removing the Times Recorder that pretends to be real news is one thing," setting up the idea that there are some outlets that are more legitimate than others, and the definition of legitimate outlet is at least influenced by whether or not the people in government respect you or not. Even when they're trying to decry the removal of a reporter from something that should be observable by any member of the public that wants to be there, there's still this idea that the government gets to decide who is fake news and can be ejected and who is real news that gets to stay.
The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear a case where a lower court had found that a protest organizer could be held financially responsible for any illegal actions or damage that occurred from anyone who chose to show up to the protest. The decision currently in place removes the ability of people in Louisana, Texas, and Mississippi to petition the government for a redress of grievances, and also hands anti-protesters an easy way of making sure the protest organizers are financially ruined: show up, claim you're here for the protest to the police, then begin committing illegal acts and causing destruction. The Vox article heavily suggests the Fifth Circuit decided to torque the law, precedent, and the Constitution because they were interested in hurting the person who had been organizing protests and did not even want to acknowledge their own previous opinion that would have settled the matter well before this point.
A report headed by Dr. Cass in the United Kingdom offers some useful things, like not having a single clinic in the entire country handling gender care, but it also decries patient privacy as a bad thing when people writing reports want to gather information and twists that to make it sound like there was something to hide about gender care in the UK. (It kind of sounds like the n is sufficiently small in this case that any details released in a report would be identifying. Perhaps the political climate there has contributed to this?) It seems a reasonable conclusion to draw, then, that the Cass report appears to be something that has more political value than actual value. And, lo and behold, Amnesty International in the UK reports that plenty of people who "revel in spreading disinformation and myths about healthcare for trans young people" are "weaponising" the report and its conclusions.
The veracity of the report and its conclusions is not helped by the use of generative AI images in pictures accompanying the report, rather than the use of stock photos of actual children. (That Adobe is poisoning their own set of stock photos with generative images is a different condemnation.)
Attempts to preserve Romeyka, a dialect of Greek that may have more in common with Homeric Greek than current Greek, the presence of combs that indicate more of the Viking world and their presence in the land of the Angles, more treasures discovered (and attempted preservation thereof) in the Pompeii site, and a city with a good relationship with its hyenas, a rarity in Africa.
In technology, JAXA's SLIM moon lander says hello again, having awoken again after a second lunar night, which is two more nights than the engineers expected it to last, especially after the failure that had the craft land upside-down. Hopefully there's plenty of great data coming back that will help refine the designs for later spacecraft to make them hardier.
The ham-handed rebranding attempt of Twitter to X included some regex find and replace such that the displayed URL might be netflix.com, but the actual domain being sent to in the link was netflitwitter.com. As you might guess, that kind of obfuscation could be used for malicious purposes. Several potential domains in that matter were registered to prevent the malicious use, and someone apparently has realized that this is a bad idea, so the find and replace has stopped. As was mentioned by the person who posted it, "Clbuttic."
The creators of the excellent text editor software Notepad++ are asking for help in removing a site that calls itself an "unofficial fan website," but that is riddled with advertising and potential malware, and has a domain that would be easy for someone to confuse the unofficial site for the official one. (As of the writing, the noted domain appears to no longer serve a page when someone attempts to connect to it.)
Surprising very few people, even if you deny all the cookies you can, set your "Do Not Track" flags, and otherwise make it clear you do not want to be tracked or have advertising cookies set, plenty of websites do it anyway, either by not giving you the choice to reject their cookies, or by ignoring your preferences, or by setting the cookies before they give you the option to reject them. And this is studying things in the EU, where there are actual regulations and potential penalties to be had from not respecting those choices when they are made. I can only guess that in the US, the percentage of disrespect and not allowing choice is even higher.
Western Digital is announcing they will have 4 terabyte SD cards available for purchase shortly, which is an impressive amount of storage, although the bandwidth and card speed doesn't seem to quite be up to the demands of shooting 8K video or similar. It's a rather interesting thought that soon there might be small cards of sufficient size that they could contain full backups of the entire set of computers in the house, including the media vaults. That would make for a great way of holding off-site backups in small places. Assuming that the material will stay without bitrot for sufficient time.
The Archive of Our Own is scaled for massive things and lots of users and works, and in doing so, it makes certain decisions about code and the like. Now, they do open source their archive (it's a Rails application with a MySQL-compatible database in the background, along with several other packages), and in doing so, they offer a wiki of instructions on how to deploy their code to your own server or cluster. As it turns out, however, adapting AO3 code to your own situation is difficult, because the OTW does a lot of things in a hard-coded, non-modular, or other ways where you have to go into their code and change things for your own situation. That it is not a turnkey solution already is a barrier to deploying OTWArchive, but also, if you take a look at the Squidgeworld guide and notebook to deploying the OTWArchive code, you can see that there are several places where you have to make configuration changes or be reasonably familiar with the workings of databases and Rails applications to troubleshoot and make sure that you've caught all the hard-coded references and changed them appropriately. To that end, there's a Docker way of doing things, but Superlove tried to deploy OTWArchive using the Docker method and wrote up a guide for that as well that used help from the Squidgeworld guide. So, no, not yet a turnkey solution for deploying OTWArchive.
Truthfully, though, OTWArchive is overkill and then some for most people who want to have an archive for their works. It would do better to have simpler, less complex versions of itself where possible, but it's also true that the most common and simplest way of archiving your work online is learning the necessary HTML and CSS to create the page and then having a place to store it. Comments and kudos are a little harder to work out, but can probably be handled with learning how to use forms (which is not the best, but still possible), and tags can be wrangled and linked as needed. There will be a spot where it actually does become onerous to wrangle those things manually, at which point it might be worth looking into other methods and deployment of web apps. Even then, I think that OTWArchive might still be overkill for all but some very specific situations. (Squidge being one of them that probably does need a tool at that scale.)
Last for tonight, extensions on the idea of "two cakes!" that also remind us that sometimes people want cake without frosting, or that seeing someone else making cake means they have a community instead of being the only one. And that the idea continues on into comments, too, even if some of them seem better or more elaborate than others.
(Materials viaadrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
Hopefully, there were no persons who suffered eye injury from looking at the solar eclipse, as there were worries about fake solar eclipse glasses filters being sold that would not actually protect the eyes during the viewing of the eclipse. Because there's always someone who wants to make a quick buck and who doesn't care about who gets hurt in the process.
The eclipse was fodder for all the conspiracy theorists and those that make their living from peddling to them, about who is supposedly going to perform occult rituals and show, if just for a moment, who the people that are really in charge of the world are. Or that the true reality of the world will be present during the eclipse, proving the world is flat, the universe is smaller than science says, or that staring at the sun at all times, eclipse or no, is perfectly fine and nobody ever gets hurt by looking directly at the sun.
Building on court cases that allow it under specific conditions, an Ohio organization is doing their best to get all the children in all Ohio public schools to elect religious education as part of their public school day. And they want everyone to see how many kids are electing this, by having them wear the same shirts, and by having parties, and by having the kids complete form letters that they can give to their friends telling them about it. And there are occasionally things that are probably not permissible, like promotions for the group going home in school backpacks, or staff handing out the information to students, especially non-Christian students. It is a fantastic example of how the law is a club, not a scalpel, and also that even if these options are supposedly open to others, it's rare they have the money to operate a bus full of children and have a church nearby for it to go to. (And also the issues where this instruction is happening during periods that aren't considered "essential," like recess or library periods, which deserves someone getting a smiting all by themselves for thinking of these as optional and not essential.)
West Virginia, on the other hand, seems to think they can just let religion into science classes by allowing "scientific theories" without defining whether those theories require actual, non-discredited science behind them, or whether they just have to sound sufficiently scientific.
Backlash against the general form of progress of the last several decades continues apace in those places that refuse to acknowledge the shared humanity of all their residents. Idaho has decided that trans people do not exist in their state and they will not permit them to do so, in addition to continuing the war against accurate information for children.
A regular reminder that prisoners are not only exempted from the prohibition on slavery, but are often subjected to the arbitrary and cruel whims of the people who have absolute power over their lives. In this article's case, it's that a person who is in solitary confinement can't get the books they want to read, because of arbitrary decisions about what counts as "sexual content" (an advertisement of someone in incontinence underwear, or material that is accurate sex education) or "promotes racial division" or because the librarian there thinks she needs to have her "heathen" soul saved, and therefore always sends a book with Christian themes, instead of what's been asked for. Along with the opportunities denied to those who are in long sentences, who do not get the opportunity to take courses or educate themselves or possibly even learn to read, because the carceral system believes prisoners do not deserve anything like humanity and allows people who agree with that to gain and hold positions of power. Fobazi Ettarh, coiner of "vocational awe" and someone who has been around the library block quite a bit, points out that the prison librarian believing she has to save the soul of the prisoner is exactly what white women in librarianship were put there for. She's absolutely correct, and many white women in libraries are still there because they believe their mission is to "civilize" the blacks, browns, and poors and make them act and have the interests of white people. And the ones that aren't are, as we are seeing, are having to fend off legislatures that are trying to force them into upholding white supremacy by making it illegal to do anything other than that.
Many of the anti-library bills are written in such a way that they presume someone making an objection is doing so for a valid reason and are correct about it, and then put the burden of proof on the library to prove that something is in the right place and in the right collection, upon the penalty of being sued or prosecuted if the library can't make their case, or the person who wants things gone is persistent enough. The Idaho bill apparently allows for someone to first demand things be moved, and then sue if their demands aren't met. So it's a new evolution of anti-library bills if there's no mechanism at all for the library to say "You're wrong, fuck off." and have it stick without having to do it in a lawsuit, or to have to do it in a criminal trial where someone can point at the standards established by Miller v. California and have that count for exactly nothing against these new laws that say there are no exemptions for teachers and librarians if someone wants to accuse them of peddling obscenity or pornography.
Legislation proposed in Louisiana would make it illegal for any public dollars to be spent on the American Library Association or any conference or continuing education where ALA is a sponsor or is putting on any part of that conference or continuing education. The penalty for spending, or even requesting reimbursement or advance funds for expenses on a forbidden conference or program is up to $1000 in fines, or up to two years in prison, with the possibility of hard labor with that. It stops just short of demanding that no individual librarian be allowed to be a member of the ALA in Louisiana (probably because there would be strong claims about abridgement of assembly if that were to happen), but a blanket ban on public dollars being used if there's any ALA presence is functionally the same thing, since nothing about ALA is cheap, nor is much about conferences and continuing education.
Elsewhere in the United States, given the choice between a recent law that would have been enjoined from enforcement in a pre-Dobbs era, and an 1864 territorial law that is a near-total ban on the practice of abortion, the Arizona Supreme Court decided they wanted to enforce the territorial law. The Governor has called for the repeal of the territorial law, and the Attorney General of the state has stated she will refuse to prosecute anyone under that statute. There is an petition for a state constitutional amendment gathering signatures for Arizona to enshrine proper protections for abortion care that will likely go before the voters in November, but until then, the women of Arizona find themselves under the rule of Civil War-era law.
The Colorado Republican Party had a reporter for the Colorado Sun removed from covering their state assembly, with the chairman for the party asserting the reporter's coverage was "unfair". In addition to spouting boilerplate fascism-friendly material when called on it. Many of the other responses garnered by the Sun in their article do at least point out that abridgement of the freedom of the press is not a good look, but they're also doing their best to say "well, no, the accusation of unfairness is wrong. She's pretty fair and tough." as if it were of equal or more importance than "our chairman just failed his First Amendment test." If they were focusing on the First Amendment part, they would be lining up to say "The chairman will now be removed for gross incompetence." after decrying such. But in one of the responses gathered by the Sun, someone talks about how "removing the Times Recorder that pretends to be real news is one thing," setting up the idea that there are some outlets that are more legitimate than others, and the definition of legitimate outlet is at least influenced by whether or not the people in government respect you or not. Even when they're trying to decry the removal of a reporter from something that should be observable by any member of the public that wants to be there, there's still this idea that the government gets to decide who is fake news and can be ejected and who is real news that gets to stay.
The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear a case where a lower court had found that a protest organizer could be held financially responsible for any illegal actions or damage that occurred from anyone who chose to show up to the protest. The decision currently in place removes the ability of people in Louisana, Texas, and Mississippi to petition the government for a redress of grievances, and also hands anti-protesters an easy way of making sure the protest organizers are financially ruined: show up, claim you're here for the protest to the police, then begin committing illegal acts and causing destruction. The Vox article heavily suggests the Fifth Circuit decided to torque the law, precedent, and the Constitution because they were interested in hurting the person who had been organizing protests and did not even want to acknowledge their own previous opinion that would have settled the matter well before this point.
A report headed by Dr. Cass in the United Kingdom offers some useful things, like not having a single clinic in the entire country handling gender care, but it also decries patient privacy as a bad thing when people writing reports want to gather information and twists that to make it sound like there was something to hide about gender care in the UK. (It kind of sounds like the n is sufficiently small in this case that any details released in a report would be identifying. Perhaps the political climate there has contributed to this?) It seems a reasonable conclusion to draw, then, that the Cass report appears to be something that has more political value than actual value. And, lo and behold, Amnesty International in the UK reports that plenty of people who "revel in spreading disinformation and myths about healthcare for trans young people" are "weaponising" the report and its conclusions.
The veracity of the report and its conclusions is not helped by the use of generative AI images in pictures accompanying the report, rather than the use of stock photos of actual children. (That Adobe is poisoning their own set of stock photos with generative images is a different condemnation.)
Attempts to preserve Romeyka, a dialect of Greek that may have more in common with Homeric Greek than current Greek, the presence of combs that indicate more of the Viking world and their presence in the land of the Angles, more treasures discovered (and attempted preservation thereof) in the Pompeii site, and a city with a good relationship with its hyenas, a rarity in Africa.
In technology, JAXA's SLIM moon lander says hello again, having awoken again after a second lunar night, which is two more nights than the engineers expected it to last, especially after the failure that had the craft land upside-down. Hopefully there's plenty of great data coming back that will help refine the designs for later spacecraft to make them hardier.
The ham-handed rebranding attempt of Twitter to X included some regex find and replace such that the displayed URL might be netflix.com, but the actual domain being sent to in the link was netflitwitter.com. As you might guess, that kind of obfuscation could be used for malicious purposes. Several potential domains in that matter were registered to prevent the malicious use, and someone apparently has realized that this is a bad idea, so the find and replace has stopped. As was mentioned by the person who posted it, "Clbuttic."
The creators of the excellent text editor software Notepad++ are asking for help in removing a site that calls itself an "unofficial fan website," but that is riddled with advertising and potential malware, and has a domain that would be easy for someone to confuse the unofficial site for the official one. (As of the writing, the noted domain appears to no longer serve a page when someone attempts to connect to it.)
Surprising very few people, even if you deny all the cookies you can, set your "Do Not Track" flags, and otherwise make it clear you do not want to be tracked or have advertising cookies set, plenty of websites do it anyway, either by not giving you the choice to reject their cookies, or by ignoring your preferences, or by setting the cookies before they give you the option to reject them. And this is studying things in the EU, where there are actual regulations and potential penalties to be had from not respecting those choices when they are made. I can only guess that in the US, the percentage of disrespect and not allowing choice is even higher.
Western Digital is announcing they will have 4 terabyte SD cards available for purchase shortly, which is an impressive amount of storage, although the bandwidth and card speed doesn't seem to quite be up to the demands of shooting 8K video or similar. It's a rather interesting thought that soon there might be small cards of sufficient size that they could contain full backups of the entire set of computers in the house, including the media vaults. That would make for a great way of holding off-site backups in small places. Assuming that the material will stay without bitrot for sufficient time.
The Archive of Our Own is scaled for massive things and lots of users and works, and in doing so, it makes certain decisions about code and the like. Now, they do open source their archive (it's a Rails application with a MySQL-compatible database in the background, along with several other packages), and in doing so, they offer a wiki of instructions on how to deploy their code to your own server or cluster. As it turns out, however, adapting AO3 code to your own situation is difficult, because the OTW does a lot of things in a hard-coded, non-modular, or other ways where you have to go into their code and change things for your own situation. That it is not a turnkey solution already is a barrier to deploying OTWArchive, but also, if you take a look at the Squidgeworld guide and notebook to deploying the OTWArchive code, you can see that there are several places where you have to make configuration changes or be reasonably familiar with the workings of databases and Rails applications to troubleshoot and make sure that you've caught all the hard-coded references and changed them appropriately. To that end, there's a Docker way of doing things, but Superlove tried to deploy OTWArchive using the Docker method and wrote up a guide for that as well that used help from the Squidgeworld guide. So, no, not yet a turnkey solution for deploying OTWArchive.
Truthfully, though, OTWArchive is overkill and then some for most people who want to have an archive for their works. It would do better to have simpler, less complex versions of itself where possible, but it's also true that the most common and simplest way of archiving your work online is learning the necessary HTML and CSS to create the page and then having a place to store it. Comments and kudos are a little harder to work out, but can probably be handled with learning how to use forms (which is not the best, but still possible), and tags can be wrangled and linked as needed. There will be a spot where it actually does become onerous to wrangle those things manually, at which point it might be worth looking into other methods and deployment of web apps. Even then, I think that OTWArchive might still be overkill for all but some very specific situations. (Squidge being one of them that probably does need a tool at that scale.)
Last for tonight, extensions on the idea of "two cakes!" that also remind us that sometimes people want cake without frosting, or that seeing someone else making cake means they have a community instead of being the only one. And that the idea continues on into comments, too, even if some of them seem better or more elaborate than others.
(Materials via
adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)
