![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradeptLet us begin with the driver in a viral video who was joining a court hearing while driving his car, supposedly on a suspended license, had a good reason to believe the license had been reinstated nearly two years ago, but the actual order hadn't been processed. Except that wasn't it, either, apparently. Apparently, he never had a valid driver license, and the order lifting the suspension was for the privileges of driving, not for a suspended license. So it's even weirder than the video and the initial reaction. (killing_rose brought the newest information.)
The Vajenda offers an index post on supplements and the supplements industry, so that you might come to the discussion with information, rather than with what the claims of the industry are about supplements.
Computer chip design pioneer Lynn Conway has died at 86 years of age. Much of modern computing has her to thank, as does much of the world that is or wants to be the person they are, regardless of what they may have been assigned at birth. And like many of us, she had a homepage that covered so many of the things that were important to her life.
We are in an era where it is possible to have queer elders, and the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project wants to collect those stories before the elders go away.
The 988 mental health crisis line is supposed to be an alternative to more dramatic interventions like 911, but more and more, 988 callers find themselves being subjected to unwanted intervention from police or medics based on what they call about, and for at least some of the accounts mentioned, the 988 call center handlers seem to be aggressively pushing the idea of having police or medical interventions, up to and including commitment to psychiatric hospitals. Something that was supposed to help keep people out of those systems seems to be getting more and more intertwined with them. And worse, those calls, their transcripts, and other data about them are being shared with private corporations for potential robot training and possibly for research purposes, without the consent of the caller to have their data used in that manner. It is certainly ghoulish to take people pouring out their crises or their mental health concerns and think about how you can make money off of them. Then again, private equity and consolidation of medical care systems often means there are people thinking about profit before care in the United States, and they often have the leverage to charge arbitrary prices to consumers and insurers. And the insurers themselves can then also turn around and charge arbitrary prices to the consumers and businesses that have to have that insurance. It's such a system of perversity that nationalization of health care looks like the only way to save the system of health care in the country.
Right before the government that made her a minister dissolved, the Conservative Health minister banned access to puberty blockers for new under-18 patients in the United Kingdom and made it a criminal offense to possess them, if they came from sources other than the National Health Service. Given that the NHS is remarkably backlogged and is currently under fire to try and stop providing such things at all, many patients were getting prescriptions issued by doctors in the Eurozone and filling them at UK pharmacies. That practice is now banned, apparently, as a final fuck you from the outgoing government. Who gets caught in the ban, and the question of whether they will be prosecuted for it, is going to be up to interpretation, which allows for maximum possible latitude for intimidation and people deciding it's not worth the hassle to start. This is certainly not a decision that is made with the best interests of the health of the patients in mind, but it is entirely in line with a government that is working very hard to try and exclude trans women from any protections that are in the law for women and otherwise attempting to make life as difficult as possible for trans people to live their lives without interference and with the things they need to do so.
North Carolina's House of Representatives advanced a bill intended to curtail the ability of the public to wear masks to protect their health, through the narrowing of exceptions that allow for mask-wearing for health matters. In addition to the making it more difficult to wear a mask without being accused of malfeasance, there was an unrelated campaign finance provisions stuffed into the bill, which only increases the sus rating of the bill. The narrowed exceptions only allow mask-wearing when one is sick with a contagious disease (neglecting asymptomatic transmission) and seem to also prevent the wearing of the most effective masks against airborne viruses, and also provides that cops and any member of the public can demand that you remove your mask, under the fig leaf that they will need to identify you. All of this also is intended to prevent protests from happening, as well, because mask-wearing adds a class of misdemeanor or felony on the assumption that wearing a mask while being accused of a crime means you intended to conceal your identity.
Local residents of Jacksonville took their flashlights and lit up the Skyway Bridge in Jacksonville, Florida, in the rainbow of Pride, after the Florida Department of Transportation and Governor Ron Desantis declared that all bridges in Florida could only be lit up in red, white, and blue, to practice "Freedom Summer" right during Pride month. Florida has repeatedly attempted to assert that there are no queers in the state, and they cannot be talked about of acknowledged, and no books on their existence can be permitted to exist, but the residents of the state know better.
Elsewhere, a graduation video of a student refusing to shake the hand of the book-banning superintendent, and then attempting to hand him a copy of the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as a protest against his book-banning ways. The students have been waging a campaign against their censorious superintendent for a significant portion of the school year, after said superintendent refused to meet with them or hear their compromise proposals to keep materials on the shelves. As the details of the story point out, removals happened outside the normal process, without input from those most qualified to give it, the West Ada School District as been on this bullshit for a while, and they let the Moms for Liberty hack job BookLooks inform the decision. So as literally the only way to get the last word in after being shut out completely, the student tried to hand the superintendent a copy of one of the books that was banned in this out-of-band decision. The superintendent, unwilling to accept that a student might have had a point, even at a graduation, let the book fall to the floor. One can only hope that some other institution with compatible views lures the super away with a better job offer and West Ada gets someone who actually believes in education and in dialogue with students.
Colorado signs into law a requirement that public libraries develop collection development processes and standards and request for reconsideration processes before they are allowed to make any decisions to remove materials outside of the regular weeding process. Which is much closer to the right line to take when it comes to making book banning difficult in a state. In the actual thing itself, there's also the language about not removing things for partisan or doctrinal disapproval and other such provisions that are the "time, place, manner" and other standard language of library resources, so it's at least as effective and on line with the other states' laws. There's also a provision that prohibits retaliation against a library worker for refusing to remove material from the collection until the proper, formal, documented process for reconsideration has been completed and the decision published. Given how much of book bans happening in the country are either someone acting out-of-band and not following processes or someone not actually respecting the process, the Colorado bill that requires processes and standards to be created, promulgated, and followed should cut down significantly on public library attempts. Hopefully, they'll get a similar piece of legislation over the line for schools, since that's where a lot of the current focus is.
The convicted felon running for the Republican nomination has, as a consequence of the conviction, lost his ability to carry or own a firearm, serve on a jury, be employed in certain industries (not ones that he would be in normally), and may be automatically barred from entry into certain countries. Unless he is in a jail cell at the point in time when the election happens, he will still be able to vote for himself and the people he wants in office. If he wins re-election, there will probably be some diplomatic looking-the-other-way about those convictions if he wants to travel for head of state functions. Elsewhere, because he is a convicted felon, his sole proprietorship businesses like golf courses may be in danger of losing their liquor licenses in states that prohibit convicted felons from having them.
The convicted felon was likely boosted into prominence thanks to the confidence game that the producers of his reality television show assisted in the creation of. It's a good profile of how making The Apprentice made its star look better than he was, and that many of the things that he did or said that were not star-quality were ignored or otherwise buried, because it would mean having to find a new star. The person described off the camera is the man that was in the White House, and will be him even more venially and revengefully if he gets in again.
The conservative movement and their headliners are always in favor of using the law against other people, the ones they believe should be crushed, and always against using the law when it would hurt them or the ones they wish to court favor with. To call it hypocrisy would imply that the position on the rule of law was inconsistent or sufficiently held that these departures would be out of character. These characters are not hypocrites, they are consistent. They believe they should be the group that the law protects but does not bind and that everyone else is the group that the law should bind, but not protect.
Clarence Thomas, who was already known to be a wholly-owned Supreme Court Justice of Harlan Crow, turns out to not have disclosed everything in a previous disclosure where we learned of his corruption, so now we know more about private trips using the billionaire's money and possessions. This information was only provided to the Senate committee investigating after they agreed not to investigate Mr. Crow further. (At a certain point, this is only the question of what the price was, not whether or not the justice has been properly bought, so.)
Having found they cannot achieve much at the legislative pursuit, the Republican congresscritters are pouring their desire for victory into the congressional baseball game. Of course, what might have been a somewhat genial, if contentious game has been marred significantly by both the presence of political partisanship (like the MAGA hat) but also attempted shootings and other consequences of the increasingly sharp divides and incompatibility between the parties on issues of importance and the lives of those who are affected by those divides.
The Senate is investigating the investment of several billion dollars from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia to Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, with an eye to seeing as to whether the investment (made against the advice of the fund's managers) was a reward for allowing the Saudi government to influence the previous administrator's policy and (in)actions, since Jared Kushner is still the son-in-law to the convicted felon running for the Republican nomination.
Russian state media and state-controlled religious outlets are trying to convince men to sign up to fight Ukraine, with at least some promises of battlefield resurrection to the faithful who join the fight. Unsurprisingly, despite the miraculous claims, there doesn't appear to be enough volunteers to meet targets.
A YouTube stunt filmed in a California dry lake involved fireworks being fired from a helicopter at a Lamborghini and the Lamborghini firing them back. Thankfully, nobody was injured, although the driver of the car was arrested, the pilot of the helicopter had their piloting license revoked, and there will likely be a large amount of consequences having done the thing without the proper permissions, for turning off the helicopter transponder during the stunt, for bringing explosives on board an aircraft, for not having the correct safety personnel on site, for basically having done something for the clicks without thinking through what it might entail to do such a thing safely.
An exhibition of photographs and objects from a 1920s couple includes what was initially thought to be erotic postcards, but is apparently the couple themselves engaged in what we would likely now call gender play. Happy Pride, everybody.
When was the last time you saw a novel (or other entertainment item) where there was a fat character and their fatness was not a source of derision or negativity, from themselves or from other characters? It has probably been a while, because the culture of thin and the idea of Hollywood bodies being available to everyone still pervades.
In technology, Tesla shareholders sued Elon Musk for diverting resources intended for the other independent companies that he owns to his xAI startup, pointing out that because they're not departments of one company, the boards of those companies should have stopped the diversion of their resources by said CEO.
your reminder that new versions of Google Chrome will start disabling extensions that don't update themselves to the new version of the extension framework that severely restricts the ability of ad-blockers to do their job. Because, of course, we know that Google wouldn't have any ulterior motives in making it harder for extensions to block their ads, even if doing so might also open up the possibility that malicious ads will no longer be blockable as well.
Google continues to wish that all of you would stop using Fitbit products, soon getting rid of the web dashboard that was part of having a Fitbit device and account and forcing everyone into the app. An app which does not have feature parity, which does not work on large screens, and which presumably makes it easier for Google to extract data, should they desire to do so.
Unsurprisingly, when you collect as much data as Google does, you engage in an awful lot of potential privacy violations. Even if all of them might not be widespread, it says a lot about the amount of things collected and how much there might be leaking. And, obviously, it does affect the people who have private information disclosed in such a way.
Microsoft is doing their best to take the lead in privacy disasters, with Recall, the program that will take screenshots of your desktop at intervals, store them in an easily-exfiltrated database and folder, and will not redact anything captured in those screenshots, continues to raise concerns about just how invasive and privacy-violating it will be when deployed, and how much of a danger to others Recall will be, since it will affect everyone who interacts with a system that has Recall on it. Because it is turning out to be extremely easy to access the database and defeat security measures that supposedly protects the database. At the very end of the WIRED article, it says that Microsoft will be turning Recall off by default and implementing additional security measures, which is good, but not as good as, say, scrapping the whole thing entirely as a very bad idea and discontinuing development on it. Because if it's still there, then someone can turn it on, and then go to work on exfiltrating the data. Even if it's harder to do than at the current moment. Recall has at least been pulled from the launch of the Copilot+ PCs and will not be available for general consumption for a bit, but it's likely they'll come back with it later on or push it in an update that everyone has to take. Because Microsoft is unlikely to give up on such a tool for themselves or others.
Adobe did not do themselves any favors when they pushed an updated Terms and Conditions to Creative Cloud users that had to be accepted before anything else could happen, and that included provisions that suggested Adobe might be trying to claim the copyright or other such ownership of any works created with their products, or claim the right to train an LLM using work created with their products. The user base raised strong objections to such an apparent power grab, and Adobe quickly clarified that the new Terms were solely for scanning created work for possible child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or usage that violates their Terms of Service, and for generating thumbnails of works, rather than attempts to claim ownership of work or the ability to train an LLM. The rollout of such could certainly have been better, and more clear language was definitely needed. All the same, one wonders just how many rights could be exercised based on contract language that aren't at the moment. Especially with the moves toward making everything cloud-based and requiring an always-on Internet connection, rather than discrete, locally-available applications.
Apple Computer company is alleged to have been intentionally paying women significantly less than men for doing the same kind of work, according to a lawsuit brought by employees who discovered the pay disparity. If the action succeeds, there is a lot of back pay and pay increases that will be due.
Boeing and Airbus have disclosed to the FAA that a supplier of airline parts to them claimed their titanium was to specification, but their documents do not back this claim, and so there may have been "counterfeit" parts introduced. This appeared after Federal Aviation Administration officials are investigating what caused a power control unit on a Boeing 737 MAX plane to fail and put a plane into a dangerous condition called a Dutch Roll.
Jessamyn West describes the librarian experience very well when it comes to working with technology, which is much more about helping people untangle interconnected systems and spot when there's malice, profit, phishing, or LLMs manipulating things to try and get their preferred result rather than what the user actually wants.
Last for tonight, noodling on the understanding that Dungeons and Dragons is mechanically a tabletop wargame with roleplaying elements on top of it, but also that when someone asks how to extend those elements into new places, telling them to find a different system is the same response as telling someone who wants to make Windows do something to install Linux.
And, of course, completely unsurprisingly, when a child with a brain that works differently has it explained to them how their brain works, they do a lot better in school. Amazing what happens when someone learns they're not broken or stupid, and early on, before they end up with a bucket load of trauma that could have been completely avoided if only they had known how their brain worked and developed and practiced useful systems and found good ways and known to ask for ways of making their workflow work for them. (Not that I know anything about what it's like to have to unlearn negative self-opinions and to determine what works for me.)
(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.)
killing_rose brought the newest information.)The Vajenda offers an index post on supplements and the supplements industry, so that you might come to the discussion with information, rather than with what the claims of the industry are about supplements.
Computer chip design pioneer Lynn Conway has died at 86 years of age. Much of modern computing has her to thank, as does much of the world that is or wants to be the person they are, regardless of what they may have been assigned at birth. And like many of us, she had a homepage that covered so many of the things that were important to her life.
We are in an era where it is possible to have queer elders, and the Old Lesbian Oral Herstory Project wants to collect those stories before the elders go away.
The 988 mental health crisis line is supposed to be an alternative to more dramatic interventions like 911, but more and more, 988 callers find themselves being subjected to unwanted intervention from police or medics based on what they call about, and for at least some of the accounts mentioned, the 988 call center handlers seem to be aggressively pushing the idea of having police or medical interventions, up to and including commitment to psychiatric hospitals. Something that was supposed to help keep people out of those systems seems to be getting more and more intertwined with them. And worse, those calls, their transcripts, and other data about them are being shared with private corporations for potential robot training and possibly for research purposes, without the consent of the caller to have their data used in that manner. It is certainly ghoulish to take people pouring out their crises or their mental health concerns and think about how you can make money off of them. Then again, private equity and consolidation of medical care systems often means there are people thinking about profit before care in the United States, and they often have the leverage to charge arbitrary prices to consumers and insurers. And the insurers themselves can then also turn around and charge arbitrary prices to the consumers and businesses that have to have that insurance. It's such a system of perversity that nationalization of health care looks like the only way to save the system of health care in the country.
Right before the government that made her a minister dissolved, the Conservative Health minister banned access to puberty blockers for new under-18 patients in the United Kingdom and made it a criminal offense to possess them, if they came from sources other than the National Health Service. Given that the NHS is remarkably backlogged and is currently under fire to try and stop providing such things at all, many patients were getting prescriptions issued by doctors in the Eurozone and filling them at UK pharmacies. That practice is now banned, apparently, as a final fuck you from the outgoing government. Who gets caught in the ban, and the question of whether they will be prosecuted for it, is going to be up to interpretation, which allows for maximum possible latitude for intimidation and people deciding it's not worth the hassle to start. This is certainly not a decision that is made with the best interests of the health of the patients in mind, but it is entirely in line with a government that is working very hard to try and exclude trans women from any protections that are in the law for women and otherwise attempting to make life as difficult as possible for trans people to live their lives without interference and with the things they need to do so.
North Carolina's House of Representatives advanced a bill intended to curtail the ability of the public to wear masks to protect their health, through the narrowing of exceptions that allow for mask-wearing for health matters. In addition to the making it more difficult to wear a mask without being accused of malfeasance, there was an unrelated campaign finance provisions stuffed into the bill, which only increases the sus rating of the bill. The narrowed exceptions only allow mask-wearing when one is sick with a contagious disease (neglecting asymptomatic transmission) and seem to also prevent the wearing of the most effective masks against airborne viruses, and also provides that cops and any member of the public can demand that you remove your mask, under the fig leaf that they will need to identify you. All of this also is intended to prevent protests from happening, as well, because mask-wearing adds a class of misdemeanor or felony on the assumption that wearing a mask while being accused of a crime means you intended to conceal your identity.
Local residents of Jacksonville took their flashlights and lit up the Skyway Bridge in Jacksonville, Florida, in the rainbow of Pride, after the Florida Department of Transportation and Governor Ron Desantis declared that all bridges in Florida could only be lit up in red, white, and blue, to practice "Freedom Summer" right during Pride month. Florida has repeatedly attempted to assert that there are no queers in the state, and they cannot be talked about of acknowledged, and no books on their existence can be permitted to exist, but the residents of the state know better.
Elsewhere, a graduation video of a student refusing to shake the hand of the book-banning superintendent, and then attempting to hand him a copy of the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale as a protest against his book-banning ways. The students have been waging a campaign against their censorious superintendent for a significant portion of the school year, after said superintendent refused to meet with them or hear their compromise proposals to keep materials on the shelves. As the details of the story point out, removals happened outside the normal process, without input from those most qualified to give it, the West Ada School District as been on this bullshit for a while, and they let the Moms for Liberty hack job BookLooks inform the decision. So as literally the only way to get the last word in after being shut out completely, the student tried to hand the superintendent a copy of one of the books that was banned in this out-of-band decision. The superintendent, unwilling to accept that a student might have had a point, even at a graduation, let the book fall to the floor. One can only hope that some other institution with compatible views lures the super away with a better job offer and West Ada gets someone who actually believes in education and in dialogue with students.
Colorado signs into law a requirement that public libraries develop collection development processes and standards and request for reconsideration processes before they are allowed to make any decisions to remove materials outside of the regular weeding process. Which is much closer to the right line to take when it comes to making book banning difficult in a state. In the actual thing itself, there's also the language about not removing things for partisan or doctrinal disapproval and other such provisions that are the "time, place, manner" and other standard language of library resources, so it's at least as effective and on line with the other states' laws. There's also a provision that prohibits retaliation against a library worker for refusing to remove material from the collection until the proper, formal, documented process for reconsideration has been completed and the decision published. Given how much of book bans happening in the country are either someone acting out-of-band and not following processes or someone not actually respecting the process, the Colorado bill that requires processes and standards to be created, promulgated, and followed should cut down significantly on public library attempts. Hopefully, they'll get a similar piece of legislation over the line for schools, since that's where a lot of the current focus is.
The convicted felon running for the Republican nomination has, as a consequence of the conviction, lost his ability to carry or own a firearm, serve on a jury, be employed in certain industries (not ones that he would be in normally), and may be automatically barred from entry into certain countries. Unless he is in a jail cell at the point in time when the election happens, he will still be able to vote for himself and the people he wants in office. If he wins re-election, there will probably be some diplomatic looking-the-other-way about those convictions if he wants to travel for head of state functions. Elsewhere, because he is a convicted felon, his sole proprietorship businesses like golf courses may be in danger of losing their liquor licenses in states that prohibit convicted felons from having them.
The convicted felon was likely boosted into prominence thanks to the confidence game that the producers of his reality television show assisted in the creation of. It's a good profile of how making The Apprentice made its star look better than he was, and that many of the things that he did or said that were not star-quality were ignored or otherwise buried, because it would mean having to find a new star. The person described off the camera is the man that was in the White House, and will be him even more venially and revengefully if he gets in again.
The conservative movement and their headliners are always in favor of using the law against other people, the ones they believe should be crushed, and always against using the law when it would hurt them or the ones they wish to court favor with. To call it hypocrisy would imply that the position on the rule of law was inconsistent or sufficiently held that these departures would be out of character. These characters are not hypocrites, they are consistent. They believe they should be the group that the law protects but does not bind and that everyone else is the group that the law should bind, but not protect.
Clarence Thomas, who was already known to be a wholly-owned Supreme Court Justice of Harlan Crow, turns out to not have disclosed everything in a previous disclosure where we learned of his corruption, so now we know more about private trips using the billionaire's money and possessions. This information was only provided to the Senate committee investigating after they agreed not to investigate Mr. Crow further. (At a certain point, this is only the question of what the price was, not whether or not the justice has been properly bought, so.)
Having found they cannot achieve much at the legislative pursuit, the Republican congresscritters are pouring their desire for victory into the congressional baseball game. Of course, what might have been a somewhat genial, if contentious game has been marred significantly by both the presence of political partisanship (like the MAGA hat) but also attempted shootings and other consequences of the increasingly sharp divides and incompatibility between the parties on issues of importance and the lives of those who are affected by those divides.
The Senate is investigating the investment of several billion dollars from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia to Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners, with an eye to seeing as to whether the investment (made against the advice of the fund's managers) was a reward for allowing the Saudi government to influence the previous administrator's policy and (in)actions, since Jared Kushner is still the son-in-law to the convicted felon running for the Republican nomination.
Russian state media and state-controlled religious outlets are trying to convince men to sign up to fight Ukraine, with at least some promises of battlefield resurrection to the faithful who join the fight. Unsurprisingly, despite the miraculous claims, there doesn't appear to be enough volunteers to meet targets.
A YouTube stunt filmed in a California dry lake involved fireworks being fired from a helicopter at a Lamborghini and the Lamborghini firing them back. Thankfully, nobody was injured, although the driver of the car was arrested, the pilot of the helicopter had their piloting license revoked, and there will likely be a large amount of consequences having done the thing without the proper permissions, for turning off the helicopter transponder during the stunt, for bringing explosives on board an aircraft, for not having the correct safety personnel on site, for basically having done something for the clicks without thinking through what it might entail to do such a thing safely.
An exhibition of photographs and objects from a 1920s couple includes what was initially thought to be erotic postcards, but is apparently the couple themselves engaged in what we would likely now call gender play. Happy Pride, everybody.
When was the last time you saw a novel (or other entertainment item) where there was a fat character and their fatness was not a source of derision or negativity, from themselves or from other characters? It has probably been a while, because the culture of thin and the idea of Hollywood bodies being available to everyone still pervades.
In technology, Tesla shareholders sued Elon Musk for diverting resources intended for the other independent companies that he owns to his xAI startup, pointing out that because they're not departments of one company, the boards of those companies should have stopped the diversion of their resources by said CEO.
your reminder that new versions of Google Chrome will start disabling extensions that don't update themselves to the new version of the extension framework that severely restricts the ability of ad-blockers to do their job. Because, of course, we know that Google wouldn't have any ulterior motives in making it harder for extensions to block their ads, even if doing so might also open up the possibility that malicious ads will no longer be blockable as well.
Google continues to wish that all of you would stop using Fitbit products, soon getting rid of the web dashboard that was part of having a Fitbit device and account and forcing everyone into the app. An app which does not have feature parity, which does not work on large screens, and which presumably makes it easier for Google to extract data, should they desire to do so.
Unsurprisingly, when you collect as much data as Google does, you engage in an awful lot of potential privacy violations. Even if all of them might not be widespread, it says a lot about the amount of things collected and how much there might be leaking. And, obviously, it does affect the people who have private information disclosed in such a way.
Microsoft is doing their best to take the lead in privacy disasters, with Recall, the program that will take screenshots of your desktop at intervals, store them in an easily-exfiltrated database and folder, and will not redact anything captured in those screenshots, continues to raise concerns about just how invasive and privacy-violating it will be when deployed, and how much of a danger to others Recall will be, since it will affect everyone who interacts with a system that has Recall on it. Because it is turning out to be extremely easy to access the database and defeat security measures that supposedly protects the database. At the very end of the WIRED article, it says that Microsoft will be turning Recall off by default and implementing additional security measures, which is good, but not as good as, say, scrapping the whole thing entirely as a very bad idea and discontinuing development on it. Because if it's still there, then someone can turn it on, and then go to work on exfiltrating the data. Even if it's harder to do than at the current moment. Recall has at least been pulled from the launch of the Copilot+ PCs and will not be available for general consumption for a bit, but it's likely they'll come back with it later on or push it in an update that everyone has to take. Because Microsoft is unlikely to give up on such a tool for themselves or others.
Adobe did not do themselves any favors when they pushed an updated Terms and Conditions to Creative Cloud users that had to be accepted before anything else could happen, and that included provisions that suggested Adobe might be trying to claim the copyright or other such ownership of any works created with their products, or claim the right to train an LLM using work created with their products. The user base raised strong objections to such an apparent power grab, and Adobe quickly clarified that the new Terms were solely for scanning created work for possible child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or usage that violates their Terms of Service, and for generating thumbnails of works, rather than attempts to claim ownership of work or the ability to train an LLM. The rollout of such could certainly have been better, and more clear language was definitely needed. All the same, one wonders just how many rights could be exercised based on contract language that aren't at the moment. Especially with the moves toward making everything cloud-based and requiring an always-on Internet connection, rather than discrete, locally-available applications.
Apple Computer company is alleged to have been intentionally paying women significantly less than men for doing the same kind of work, according to a lawsuit brought by employees who discovered the pay disparity. If the action succeeds, there is a lot of back pay and pay increases that will be due.
Boeing and Airbus have disclosed to the FAA that a supplier of airline parts to them claimed their titanium was to specification, but their documents do not back this claim, and so there may have been "counterfeit" parts introduced. This appeared after Federal Aviation Administration officials are investigating what caused a power control unit on a Boeing 737 MAX plane to fail and put a plane into a dangerous condition called a Dutch Roll.
Jessamyn West describes the librarian experience very well when it comes to working with technology, which is much more about helping people untangle interconnected systems and spot when there's malice, profit, phishing, or LLMs manipulating things to try and get their preferred result rather than what the user actually wants.
Last for tonight, noodling on the understanding that Dungeons and Dragons is mechanically a tabletop wargame with roleplaying elements on top of it, but also that when someone asks how to extend those elements into new places, telling them to find a different system is the same response as telling someone who wants to make Windows do something to install Linux.
And, of course, completely unsurprisingly, when a child with a brain that works differently has it explained to them how their brain works, they do a lot better in school. Amazing what happens when someone learns they're not broken or stupid, and early on, before they end up with a bucket load of trauma that could have been completely avoided if only they had known how their brain worked and developed and practiced useful systems and found good ways and known to ask for ways of making their workflow work for them. (Not that I know anything about what it's like to have to unlearn negative self-opinions and to determine what works for me.)
(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.)
no subject
Date: 2024-06-20 05:12 am (UTC)