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silveradeptA quick update to start: One of the banks backing PayPal purchases in several currencies has decided to stop processing or accepting Steam transactions, making PayPal unavailable in regions that use those currencies. The slug says that PayPal doesn't support the transactions, but the article is quick to point out that it's actually one of the banks that has withdrawn their support for Steam transactions using PayPal. So we continue to get reminded that if the system of money decides that you're not allowed on their platform, it doesn't matter what the jurisdiction or the law says is allowed or not, you're banned from being able to do anything that involves the banking systems. People in places where cannabis is currently legal have already figured this out, because they continue to be denied access to financial transaction systems, and sex workers and their clients have figured this out, because they're regularly targeted for these kinds of purges and exclusions, but gamers are starting to understand how much their freedom to purchase and play works depends not on the laws or the interpretations of the laws, but on the control exerted by payment processors over the platforms they want to buy and play on.
Valve Corporation said that MasterCard was definitely pressuring them to delist and deplatform adult content, through the intermediaries of the banks and processors, after Mastercard claimed it made no such demands of the platforms. And I'm sure they also didn't say they'd been looking for the excuse once the group that was trying to get their attention did it.And they'd probably deny that they've been at this sex-negative prudery and denying access to their networks for legal, non-obscene content for at least two decades at this point.
A neat thing: a complete run of Computer Entertainer, one of the first video game magazines in the U.S., has been digitized and made available in Creative Commons, by the Video Game History Foundation. Hooray for accessible history!
Also because if you don't have history available to you, you start thinking that the methods of the past are superior to the methods of the present, when what you want is to draw forth the good things of the past into the present. The "90s parenting" being described here is entirely possible in the current decade, without any need for retro objects or such to bring back nostalgia along with what you want to actually do. Such nostalgia often makes people blame things improperly for creating the current world, or to start thinking that simply removing those objects will be enough to bring back the perfect world.
The only way not to build the Torment Nexus is not to build the Torment Nexus, and we have many reasons why we need to stay in the job that's going to build the Torment Nexus. Take care of your souls, and perhaps consider that if you're building the Torment Nexus, you don't have to do it at high speed or efficiency while you look for something that isn't on Team Torment Nexus. (What's also well-noted there is that there are a lot of people on Team Torment Nexus who have rationalized their participation, or who think this really is the way to go,.)
As we move into yet another year of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what's been learned and what best practices are good to continue. Including vaccination, even though, as we'll see in the later parts of the post, the anti-vaccination squad are currently running the health house.
A primer on the history of what the phrase "land grant university" means. More often than not, it's "land seized from Native nations, then sold, and the proceeds used to fund the construction and operation of the university" instead of something like "the state legislature granted land for the university from their own stores and funds."
The civility of the women's game (of football) has some fans of the men's game feeling like they're being fed their vegetables with no chance of dessert. We hear that kind of thing in the States as well, even with a top-ranked women's team. Am reminded of statistics I was quoted that suggest most men believe a crowd of about 17% women is 50% women, and a 33% woman crowd feels more like 90% to them. Because they're focused far too much on the thing they don't believe belongs there that they over-represent it in their heads.
From the archives: The current administrator, as he was then, is a man who feeds and is fed by the power granted him by those who see women as tokens at best, playing a game that only some ever "win," (and are permitted to win) but plenty more use as justification for the violence they enact. To say that he's encouraging the worst instincts in people makes the assumption that such base behavior is, in fact, the base of human nature, rather than a specific system that's been implemented over the decades to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few men, and then to immunize them from the consequences of the use and misuse of the power they have accreted to themselves.
Documents from the meeting between the U.S. administrator and the autocrat of the Russian Federation left in a hotel public printer provide new details about the meeting, as well as yet another indication that the people in charge of OPSEC in this administration are perhaps not from the top of the barrel.
Like the Star-Spangled Banner, "This Land Is Your Land" has four verses to it. Unlike the Star-Spangled Banner, the last verses are the important ones, and therefore the use of the song by this administration in any context would be a head-scratcher.
Then again, they're also currently well-versed in inserting things that have no relevance at all into discussions because that's what they've been told to do. For example, at the United Nations, the US delegates repeatedly raised the issue of the word 'gender' being present, even in documents and procedures that had nothing at all to do with gender, so that they could, like a toddler proudly proclaiming they've learned the skill of using the potty, talk about how their government no longer regards gender as a real word and only an 'ideology' and they are all about biological sex. Given that the United Nations has been telling them that actually following the science and providing gender-affirming care is the better idea, these kinds of statements can be both trying to weaken the consensus and thumb their noses at an organization they have long seen as a projection of U.S. power, instead of a true international organization that should be respected.
The kidnapping squads are buying themselves access to iris scanning technology and databases of iris scans that the manufacturer claims will identify a person consistently and swiftly.
Analyzing Wisconsin police reasons for using license plate reader data reveals that many of them are not providing specific justification for the use of the systems and that there's not sufficient oversight of the use of the system by civilians to ensure that the system is being used for intended purposes. Of course, the better option would be to dismantle surveillance systems and prevent the increasing capture of all of our lives on camera.
The current administrator intends to continue as he has started, deploying troops and attempting to federalize police forces, especially in places that didn't vote for him, so that he can attempt to intimidate and bully the residents and their elected leadership into being friendlier to him. And also to normalize the idea that you defeat your political opponents not at a ballot box in free and fair elections, but by using the force of the military, the police, and the secret police to ensure that your opposition is never allowed to voice a dissenting opinion allowed without being harassed or arrested for it. All of this increased militarization is because the administrator wants it, and he wants to force everyone else to see the world from his perspective, instead of staying grounded in facts and reality, so that when he commits abuses and atrocities on the people of the country, the people will nod and say that those people had it coming to them.
The states of West Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio gave their full-throated support to this view by sending National Guard members from their states to the District of Columbia to "help" with the nonexistent crisis the administrator has manufactured. Whether because they agree with it, or because they want to suck up to him, in either case, the governors of those states have decided they want to aid his delusions.
While still in the middle of a pandemic regarding a respiratory virus, one that kills and disables broad swaths of people on a daily basis, the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary pulled funding for further work on vaccinations designed to combat respiratory viruses. His reasoning for it is immaterial, and almost certainly is full of the conspiracy theory fodder anyway. A person charged with saving lives is deliberately consigning people to death and disability because of his fringe beliefs, and in any society but the one that has fully given into the delusions, as the Republican Party and their supporters have, this would be a heinous act requiring extensive justification and possibly a demand for the resignation of the Secretary. (Instead, it's business as usual.)
The current administrator has sent out an order insisting that homeless persons, the mentally ill, and those addicted to drugs be involuntarily committed to institutions and/or prisons, because he can't stand the possibility that those people might exist and be seen. Given that this administration also believes that any kind of gender variance, queerness, or transness is a sign of mental illness, in addition to the high rates of homelessness and mental illnesses among people who have been forcibly ejected from any support systems that they might otherwise have, in places that want to take this order as law instead of what it is, there's a good chance it could be used as a blanket arrest permission for people being too trans in public.
Rather than permit them to separate honorably from service and take the retirement benefits they have earned, the administration has decided that transgender members of the United States Air Force should instead be fired and denied the benefits of their work and service to the country.
The Republicans of the Supreme Court of the United States have decided that the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment is more powerful and more important than the Establishment Clause, deciding in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents have the right to opt a child out of any class where there's a queer person in classroom materials, because that queer person's existence might go against parents' wishes to teach that their religion doesn't believe in queer people. It's already well-established that such opt-outs create problems about trying to juggle which students are allowed and which are restricted from lessons, and encourages the development of a curriculum where there are no elements in it that would be offensive, or "offensive," to any person who can successfully prosecute a claim that their religious beliefs demand their child be removed from hearing about that aspect of reality. The ruling perpetuates the hostile and entirely incorrect stereotype that queer people are inherently NC-17, R18, or other restricted ratings, and there is no way that they can be mentioned, depicted, illustrated, or otherwise brought into the classroom environment without it being age-inappropriate. Regardless of how many children there are in that classroom that already know they are queer. In some other world, a ruling that is this obviously prejudicial would be immediately exploited to all kinds of malicious compliance ends, until everyone would understand that it's bad law and should be ignored. In this world, however, it seems pretty clear that this ruling is meant to be used only in specific ways, because only the ways that align with the Republican's prejudices will be allowed to go forward.
A federal judge has declared that the process the administration used to pressure schools into removing any and all of their diversity programs (upon threat of losing lots of federal funding) was not according to the laws set out. The court chose not to weigh in on the merits of the decisions, but instead focused solely on the procedures involved.
More substantively, and in a greater rebuke, A federal judge has dismissed Florida's book banning bill as unconstitutional, reminding the Florida legislature that there is a federal standard for obscenity that must be followed when making decisions about collections on those grounds, and that library collections are not government speech that would allow the legislature to dictate what's allowed as government speech.
The Superintendent of Schools in Oklahoma has mandated that teachers coming to Oklahoma for jobs from out of state pass an ideologically-based test developed with far-right nutjobs PragerU to obtain certification to teach in the state, insisting that whatever "woke agendas" or "leftist propaganda" learned outside of the state will not be tolerated or allowed in Oklahoma schools. (Nor will trans people, according to the test's supposed focus on "fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.") And, unsurprisingly, yes, Oklahoma has a teacher shortage. But, as is the case with Republicans all around the country, ideological purity is more important than fixing problems or even gesturing at fixing problems.
This is the same superintendent, by the way, who added curriculum that violates the Establishment Clause, tried to funnel money to a specific administrator-approved version of the Christian Foundational Writings, and also allegedly had hardcore pornography playing in his office when the state Board of Education was about to have a meeting with him, and then denied that he had any idea how those images got there or how to turn off the monitor they were playing on. [Memo From Your Future Self: It's possible that the Superintendent was not actually deliberately watching naked people, but that the default channel on the television was playing an old movie with gratuitous nudity in it, such that the board members did see what they saw, and the Superintendent did not know it was there, nor have an easy idea of how to get it to turn off or change the channel. That said, nobody is apologizing or backing down from their subsequent accusations in light of the possible new evidence or explanation.)]
The Republicans of the state of New Hampshire have deemed the death of trans children and teenagers acceptable to further their ideology, enacting a ban on any medical care being delivered to an under-18 if that care is primarily for the purposes of gender affirmation.
The Republicans of the state of Ohio have perverted public services sufficiently that public school buses are being used to transport private and charter school students instead of public school students, because the schools would be fined significantly if they didn't transport the private and charter schools, and there is no penalty for leaving the public school students to have to fend for themselves. Ohio has also basically decided that the public education purse should be given to private and charter school students, most of whom can already afford the tuition and more, and the public school system left to rot so that all the Poors and the non-white people can't get an education, as TurboJesus intended.
Wild pigs are consuming sufficient quantities of poisoned bait caches intended to kill squirrels that their insides have turned blue. (The caches of poison are often dyed to ensure that the humans know they're poisonous.)
One learns a lot when actually gardening. One of those things learned is that growing food is an arduous process and those who do so deserve both living wage and protection from racists looking to paint them as some kind of invader or gang member.
In technology, The electronic case-filing system used for federal court cases has been hacked, with the possibility of sensitive data, like informant identities, or the contents of cases or indictments being readied, exfiltrated from the system to the intruders. In addition to state actors who would be interested in such data for their own purposes, international drug cartels and other organized crime entities might be looking for information about informants, witnesses, cases, and other liabilities to their crime operations in the data.
Reworking old public pay telephones so that they can be used for free calling in areas where cell signal is spotty to nonexistent. And apparently, footing the costs himself, for the moment.
Because companies that refuse to respect anything short of a DDoS on their servers are scraping Reddit using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, Reddit has decided they'll block the Internet Archive from taking snapshots of their pages. As someone elsenet put it, there are trust issues that places like IA and other Open Culture places are having where they're not able to dissuade the scrapers or letting themselves be used as proxies in this way, but I think the problem is reasonably described in Our Economy, Explained In Cookies, where Reddit is the one with a cookie, the Internet Archive is the one with crumbs, and the techbros with the content scrapers are the bearded man in the bowtie. Also elsenet, the suggestion of how to defeat the crawlers was "Cloudflare," which everyone in the discussion acknowledged was a practical solution to the matter of detecting and deterring the scrapers, but which causes the ethical gears to grind horribly, based on who else Cloudflare is fine with protecting with their services, even after repeated demonstrations that those are not the kind of people who should have a presence on the Internet.
The newsletter platform Substack, for example, that has not only rolled out the "Nazis welcome" carpet, it's making sure we know that it wants to promote that it's a Nazi-friendly platform. The content is protected in the U.S. as free speech, but as a general rule, you want the people who are supposed to be on the fringe to have to build their own infrastructure and marketing, rather than having things that are on the mainstream providing that marketing and infrastructure for them.
Speaking of the Internet Archive and a different interaction between them and the AI techbros, it's not just Google that's been indexing those LLM chats that get a permanent resource address when they're shared with someone else - the Internet Archive has also been picking them up as well. The sharing settings, then, are not set properly or privately as defaults, or they are improperly set so that sharing to one shares to all.
The leaders of the NVIDIA and AMD corporations have apparently agreed to remit 15 percent of their revenues of a new chip's sales in China to the U.S. Government in exchange for receiving permission to export the technology outside the U.S. So we've learned what the current price is to bribe the administration so that you can sell abroad. We'll have to see if that price changes over time, or what other conditions become attached to export licenses. The party of supposedly free markets is entirely okay with this, of course, no matter how much it goes against their supposedly stated principles, because their real and only principle at this point is, "Whatever the administrator wants is good, legal, and beneficial, and everyone who is against it is a terrorist."
After 34 years in the business of dial-up Internet service, America On-Line will discontinue their dial-up offerings permanently in September. Which may very well leave rural areas without Internet service, based on a lack of cell towers, high-speed copper, and/or fiber. The Rural Internet-ification project would be a good one for a government that actually cares about infrastructure to undertake, so that there's good Internet access everywhere in the country.
A company rushing to put out the for dudes equivalent of Tea, an app that was supposed to be about women being able to make notes about the men they'd gone on dates with for other women to get information on, had even greater problems with user security and was leaking identification documents and more. APIs that happily disgorged sensitive information without requiring authentication, and an S3 bucket set up so that anyone with the link to a resource could view and download it, again, no authentication needed. But it was still the second most-popular app on the Apple App Store, which suggests there are a lot of people looking for a place to comment on the women they date where they won't have to deal with actual women, or anyone else telling them what jerks and creeps they were. (This entire thing is pinging hard on a short story I read somewhere about a service that allowed women to leave augmented-reality comments about men they had dated or tried to, and that during the course of the story, men successfully sue to be included in the service, and to do the same to women because otherwise it would be sex-discriminatory, and then the men basically proceed to do the equivalent of drawing dicks all over what was a place for people to leave comments about possible red flags. Can I find this story again? No. Did it exist? Absolutely.)
The High Court of the United Kingdom ruled against Wikipedia, saying that the online encyclopedia has to do age verification for its editors in accordance with the Online Safety Act. Wikipedia claimed undue burden from such a task, as well as that it would make the articles appear gibberish, because "non-verified" content would have to be hidden. I'm sure someone, though, thinks of Wikipedia as a porn site or other purveyor of adult content, simply because it is an encyclopedia that has articles of that nature present.
A seventeen year-old, Hannah Cairo, has disproven a mathematical conjecture in harmonic analysis, successfully constructing a function that, according to the conjecture, should not be able to exist. And in so doing, has shown how to construct functions that other conjectures can be tested against to see if they can account for Cairo-like structures in their mathematics. And thus, the sciences march on, in addition to opening up a significant amount of new space to do research and problem-solving in. There are some doctoral degrees that will be thankful to her (possibly including her own doctoral degree) for this paper.
Last out, something good in the technology: the engineers behind the Jupiter camera called Juno have been heating and then cooling the components to fix various radiation-related damage that has been seen on images, and the fixes bring the camera back to within specifications, albeit temporarily each time.
And the increasingly misnamed Sacramento Music Archive, and the progress being made on digitization, archiving, and sharing of concert recordings made by one person and/or the collections that have been given to them, many of which are for groups that never made it big, and some of which are previously-unknown performances, demos, or material for very big entities indeed.
A supposedly easy method for folding fitted sheets that they do fold appropriately and aesthetically pleasing-ly.
(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.)
Valve Corporation said that MasterCard was definitely pressuring them to delist and deplatform adult content, through the intermediaries of the banks and processors, after Mastercard claimed it made no such demands of the platforms. And I'm sure they also didn't say they'd been looking for the excuse once the group that was trying to get their attention did it.And they'd probably deny that they've been at this sex-negative prudery and denying access to their networks for legal, non-obscene content for at least two decades at this point.
A neat thing: a complete run of Computer Entertainer, one of the first video game magazines in the U.S., has been digitized and made available in Creative Commons, by the Video Game History Foundation. Hooray for accessible history!
Also because if you don't have history available to you, you start thinking that the methods of the past are superior to the methods of the present, when what you want is to draw forth the good things of the past into the present. The "90s parenting" being described here is entirely possible in the current decade, without any need for retro objects or such to bring back nostalgia along with what you want to actually do. Such nostalgia often makes people blame things improperly for creating the current world, or to start thinking that simply removing those objects will be enough to bring back the perfect world.
The only way not to build the Torment Nexus is not to build the Torment Nexus, and we have many reasons why we need to stay in the job that's going to build the Torment Nexus. Take care of your souls, and perhaps consider that if you're building the Torment Nexus, you don't have to do it at high speed or efficiency while you look for something that isn't on Team Torment Nexus. (What's also well-noted there is that there are a lot of people on Team Torment Nexus who have rationalized their participation, or who think this really is the way to go,.)
As we move into yet another year of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, what's been learned and what best practices are good to continue. Including vaccination, even though, as we'll see in the later parts of the post, the anti-vaccination squad are currently running the health house.
A primer on the history of what the phrase "land grant university" means. More often than not, it's "land seized from Native nations, then sold, and the proceeds used to fund the construction and operation of the university" instead of something like "the state legislature granted land for the university from their own stores and funds."
The civility of the women's game (of football) has some fans of the men's game feeling like they're being fed their vegetables with no chance of dessert. We hear that kind of thing in the States as well, even with a top-ranked women's team. Am reminded of statistics I was quoted that suggest most men believe a crowd of about 17% women is 50% women, and a 33% woman crowd feels more like 90% to them. Because they're focused far too much on the thing they don't believe belongs there that they over-represent it in their heads.
From the archives: The current administrator, as he was then, is a man who feeds and is fed by the power granted him by those who see women as tokens at best, playing a game that only some ever "win," (and are permitted to win) but plenty more use as justification for the violence they enact. To say that he's encouraging the worst instincts in people makes the assumption that such base behavior is, in fact, the base of human nature, rather than a specific system that's been implemented over the decades to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a few men, and then to immunize them from the consequences of the use and misuse of the power they have accreted to themselves.
Documents from the meeting between the U.S. administrator and the autocrat of the Russian Federation left in a hotel public printer provide new details about the meeting, as well as yet another indication that the people in charge of OPSEC in this administration are perhaps not from the top of the barrel.
Like the Star-Spangled Banner, "This Land Is Your Land" has four verses to it. Unlike the Star-Spangled Banner, the last verses are the important ones, and therefore the use of the song by this administration in any context would be a head-scratcher.
Then again, they're also currently well-versed in inserting things that have no relevance at all into discussions because that's what they've been told to do. For example, at the United Nations, the US delegates repeatedly raised the issue of the word 'gender' being present, even in documents and procedures that had nothing at all to do with gender, so that they could, like a toddler proudly proclaiming they've learned the skill of using the potty, talk about how their government no longer regards gender as a real word and only an 'ideology' and they are all about biological sex. Given that the United Nations has been telling them that actually following the science and providing gender-affirming care is the better idea, these kinds of statements can be both trying to weaken the consensus and thumb their noses at an organization they have long seen as a projection of U.S. power, instead of a true international organization that should be respected.
The kidnapping squads are buying themselves access to iris scanning technology and databases of iris scans that the manufacturer claims will identify a person consistently and swiftly.
Analyzing Wisconsin police reasons for using license plate reader data reveals that many of them are not providing specific justification for the use of the systems and that there's not sufficient oversight of the use of the system by civilians to ensure that the system is being used for intended purposes. Of course, the better option would be to dismantle surveillance systems and prevent the increasing capture of all of our lives on camera.
The current administrator intends to continue as he has started, deploying troops and attempting to federalize police forces, especially in places that didn't vote for him, so that he can attempt to intimidate and bully the residents and their elected leadership into being friendlier to him. And also to normalize the idea that you defeat your political opponents not at a ballot box in free and fair elections, but by using the force of the military, the police, and the secret police to ensure that your opposition is never allowed to voice a dissenting opinion allowed without being harassed or arrested for it. All of this increased militarization is because the administrator wants it, and he wants to force everyone else to see the world from his perspective, instead of staying grounded in facts and reality, so that when he commits abuses and atrocities on the people of the country, the people will nod and say that those people had it coming to them.
The states of West Virginia, South Carolina, and Ohio gave their full-throated support to this view by sending National Guard members from their states to the District of Columbia to "help" with the nonexistent crisis the administrator has manufactured. Whether because they agree with it, or because they want to suck up to him, in either case, the governors of those states have decided they want to aid his delusions.
While still in the middle of a pandemic regarding a respiratory virus, one that kills and disables broad swaths of people on a daily basis, the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary pulled funding for further work on vaccinations designed to combat respiratory viruses. His reasoning for it is immaterial, and almost certainly is full of the conspiracy theory fodder anyway. A person charged with saving lives is deliberately consigning people to death and disability because of his fringe beliefs, and in any society but the one that has fully given into the delusions, as the Republican Party and their supporters have, this would be a heinous act requiring extensive justification and possibly a demand for the resignation of the Secretary. (Instead, it's business as usual.)
The current administrator has sent out an order insisting that homeless persons, the mentally ill, and those addicted to drugs be involuntarily committed to institutions and/or prisons, because he can't stand the possibility that those people might exist and be seen. Given that this administration also believes that any kind of gender variance, queerness, or transness is a sign of mental illness, in addition to the high rates of homelessness and mental illnesses among people who have been forcibly ejected from any support systems that they might otherwise have, in places that want to take this order as law instead of what it is, there's a good chance it could be used as a blanket arrest permission for people being too trans in public.
Rather than permit them to separate honorably from service and take the retirement benefits they have earned, the administration has decided that transgender members of the United States Air Force should instead be fired and denied the benefits of their work and service to the country.
The Republicans of the Supreme Court of the United States have decided that the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment is more powerful and more important than the Establishment Clause, deciding in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents have the right to opt a child out of any class where there's a queer person in classroom materials, because that queer person's existence might go against parents' wishes to teach that their religion doesn't believe in queer people. It's already well-established that such opt-outs create problems about trying to juggle which students are allowed and which are restricted from lessons, and encourages the development of a curriculum where there are no elements in it that would be offensive, or "offensive," to any person who can successfully prosecute a claim that their religious beliefs demand their child be removed from hearing about that aspect of reality. The ruling perpetuates the hostile and entirely incorrect stereotype that queer people are inherently NC-17, R18, or other restricted ratings, and there is no way that they can be mentioned, depicted, illustrated, or otherwise brought into the classroom environment without it being age-inappropriate. Regardless of how many children there are in that classroom that already know they are queer. In some other world, a ruling that is this obviously prejudicial would be immediately exploited to all kinds of malicious compliance ends, until everyone would understand that it's bad law and should be ignored. In this world, however, it seems pretty clear that this ruling is meant to be used only in specific ways, because only the ways that align with the Republican's prejudices will be allowed to go forward.
A federal judge has declared that the process the administration used to pressure schools into removing any and all of their diversity programs (upon threat of losing lots of federal funding) was not according to the laws set out. The court chose not to weigh in on the merits of the decisions, but instead focused solely on the procedures involved.
More substantively, and in a greater rebuke, A federal judge has dismissed Florida's book banning bill as unconstitutional, reminding the Florida legislature that there is a federal standard for obscenity that must be followed when making decisions about collections on those grounds, and that library collections are not government speech that would allow the legislature to dictate what's allowed as government speech.
The Superintendent of Schools in Oklahoma has mandated that teachers coming to Oklahoma for jobs from out of state pass an ideologically-based test developed with far-right nutjobs PragerU to obtain certification to teach in the state, insisting that whatever "woke agendas" or "leftist propaganda" learned outside of the state will not be tolerated or allowed in Oklahoma schools. (Nor will trans people, according to the test's supposed focus on "fundamental biological differences between boys and girls.") And, unsurprisingly, yes, Oklahoma has a teacher shortage. But, as is the case with Republicans all around the country, ideological purity is more important than fixing problems or even gesturing at fixing problems.
This is the same superintendent, by the way, who added curriculum that violates the Establishment Clause, tried to funnel money to a specific administrator-approved version of the Christian Foundational Writings, and also allegedly had hardcore pornography playing in his office when the state Board of Education was about to have a meeting with him, and then denied that he had any idea how those images got there or how to turn off the monitor they were playing on. [Memo From Your Future Self: It's possible that the Superintendent was not actually deliberately watching naked people, but that the default channel on the television was playing an old movie with gratuitous nudity in it, such that the board members did see what they saw, and the Superintendent did not know it was there, nor have an easy idea of how to get it to turn off or change the channel. That said, nobody is apologizing or backing down from their subsequent accusations in light of the possible new evidence or explanation.)]
The Republicans of the state of New Hampshire have deemed the death of trans children and teenagers acceptable to further their ideology, enacting a ban on any medical care being delivered to an under-18 if that care is primarily for the purposes of gender affirmation.
The Republicans of the state of Ohio have perverted public services sufficiently that public school buses are being used to transport private and charter school students instead of public school students, because the schools would be fined significantly if they didn't transport the private and charter schools, and there is no penalty for leaving the public school students to have to fend for themselves. Ohio has also basically decided that the public education purse should be given to private and charter school students, most of whom can already afford the tuition and more, and the public school system left to rot so that all the Poors and the non-white people can't get an education, as TurboJesus intended.
Wild pigs are consuming sufficient quantities of poisoned bait caches intended to kill squirrels that their insides have turned blue. (The caches of poison are often dyed to ensure that the humans know they're poisonous.)
One learns a lot when actually gardening. One of those things learned is that growing food is an arduous process and those who do so deserve both living wage and protection from racists looking to paint them as some kind of invader or gang member.
In technology, The electronic case-filing system used for federal court cases has been hacked, with the possibility of sensitive data, like informant identities, or the contents of cases or indictments being readied, exfiltrated from the system to the intruders. In addition to state actors who would be interested in such data for their own purposes, international drug cartels and other organized crime entities might be looking for information about informants, witnesses, cases, and other liabilities to their crime operations in the data.
Reworking old public pay telephones so that they can be used for free calling in areas where cell signal is spotty to nonexistent. And apparently, footing the costs himself, for the moment.
Because companies that refuse to respect anything short of a DDoS on their servers are scraping Reddit using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, Reddit has decided they'll block the Internet Archive from taking snapshots of their pages. As someone elsenet put it, there are trust issues that places like IA and other Open Culture places are having where they're not able to dissuade the scrapers or letting themselves be used as proxies in this way, but I think the problem is reasonably described in Our Economy, Explained In Cookies, where Reddit is the one with a cookie, the Internet Archive is the one with crumbs, and the techbros with the content scrapers are the bearded man in the bowtie. Also elsenet, the suggestion of how to defeat the crawlers was "Cloudflare," which everyone in the discussion acknowledged was a practical solution to the matter of detecting and deterring the scrapers, but which causes the ethical gears to grind horribly, based on who else Cloudflare is fine with protecting with their services, even after repeated demonstrations that those are not the kind of people who should have a presence on the Internet.
The newsletter platform Substack, for example, that has not only rolled out the "Nazis welcome" carpet, it's making sure we know that it wants to promote that it's a Nazi-friendly platform. The content is protected in the U.S. as free speech, but as a general rule, you want the people who are supposed to be on the fringe to have to build their own infrastructure and marketing, rather than having things that are on the mainstream providing that marketing and infrastructure for them.
Speaking of the Internet Archive and a different interaction between them and the AI techbros, it's not just Google that's been indexing those LLM chats that get a permanent resource address when they're shared with someone else - the Internet Archive has also been picking them up as well. The sharing settings, then, are not set properly or privately as defaults, or they are improperly set so that sharing to one shares to all.
The leaders of the NVIDIA and AMD corporations have apparently agreed to remit 15 percent of their revenues of a new chip's sales in China to the U.S. Government in exchange for receiving permission to export the technology outside the U.S. So we've learned what the current price is to bribe the administration so that you can sell abroad. We'll have to see if that price changes over time, or what other conditions become attached to export licenses. The party of supposedly free markets is entirely okay with this, of course, no matter how much it goes against their supposedly stated principles, because their real and only principle at this point is, "Whatever the administrator wants is good, legal, and beneficial, and everyone who is against it is a terrorist."
After 34 years in the business of dial-up Internet service, America On-Line will discontinue their dial-up offerings permanently in September. Which may very well leave rural areas without Internet service, based on a lack of cell towers, high-speed copper, and/or fiber. The Rural Internet-ification project would be a good one for a government that actually cares about infrastructure to undertake, so that there's good Internet access everywhere in the country.
A company rushing to put out the for dudes equivalent of Tea, an app that was supposed to be about women being able to make notes about the men they'd gone on dates with for other women to get information on, had even greater problems with user security and was leaking identification documents and more. APIs that happily disgorged sensitive information without requiring authentication, and an S3 bucket set up so that anyone with the link to a resource could view and download it, again, no authentication needed. But it was still the second most-popular app on the Apple App Store, which suggests there are a lot of people looking for a place to comment on the women they date where they won't have to deal with actual women, or anyone else telling them what jerks and creeps they were. (This entire thing is pinging hard on a short story I read somewhere about a service that allowed women to leave augmented-reality comments about men they had dated or tried to, and that during the course of the story, men successfully sue to be included in the service, and to do the same to women because otherwise it would be sex-discriminatory, and then the men basically proceed to do the equivalent of drawing dicks all over what was a place for people to leave comments about possible red flags. Can I find this story again? No. Did it exist? Absolutely.)
The High Court of the United Kingdom ruled against Wikipedia, saying that the online encyclopedia has to do age verification for its editors in accordance with the Online Safety Act. Wikipedia claimed undue burden from such a task, as well as that it would make the articles appear gibberish, because "non-verified" content would have to be hidden. I'm sure someone, though, thinks of Wikipedia as a porn site or other purveyor of adult content, simply because it is an encyclopedia that has articles of that nature present.
A seventeen year-old, Hannah Cairo, has disproven a mathematical conjecture in harmonic analysis, successfully constructing a function that, according to the conjecture, should not be able to exist. And in so doing, has shown how to construct functions that other conjectures can be tested against to see if they can account for Cairo-like structures in their mathematics. And thus, the sciences march on, in addition to opening up a significant amount of new space to do research and problem-solving in. There are some doctoral degrees that will be thankful to her (possibly including her own doctoral degree) for this paper.
Last out, something good in the technology: the engineers behind the Jupiter camera called Juno have been heating and then cooling the components to fix various radiation-related damage that has been seen on images, and the fixes bring the camera back to within specifications, albeit temporarily each time.
And the increasingly misnamed Sacramento Music Archive, and the progress being made on digitization, archiving, and sharing of concert recordings made by one person and/or the collections that have been given to them, many of which are for groups that never made it big, and some of which are previously-unknown performances, demos, or material for very big entities indeed.
A supposedly easy method for folding fitted sheets that they do fold appropriately and aesthetically pleasing-ly.
(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: 2025-08-18 04:04 pm (UTC)Iris scanners are a joke. Your iris does change over time, and medical problems can change them.
The heating and cooling of a camera is something that astronomers do with their instruments to try to reduce or control contamination inside their vacuum-sealed chambers. Any time you crack open that vacuum chamber, you introduce contamination, it's impossible to eliminate. But by heating and cooling, you can sometimes get the contamination to creep towards the edge of the imaging chip and improve your science quality.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-19 03:35 am (UTC)Guess there really aren't all that many things that stay exactly the same over a lifetime for humans.
Annealing as a way of trying to get the bubbles and imprints to go to the edge. That's pretty cool that you can do that for big science instruments.