Friday, April 21st, 2023

Time	Event
11:03a	Apt. apps greatly abuse, AU People who want to rent an apartment, in Australia, are almost forced to use invasive data-collection sites. The users of the sites are unhappy with the data they collect, and some of them are manipulative too. I expect similar abusive practices exist in the US. They may have started in the US. So many other Internet abuses did. There is a danger concern that the site will implement housing bias. If their developers get the idea to use trained neural nets to evaluate would-be renters, they are likely to learn whatever sorts of biases landlords have. I confidently predict that the site insists on running nonfree software on the user's site. The users are not complaining about this, but they would if they were wise. (Comment on this)
11:03a	UK political, French, "terrorism" UK "anti-terrorist" thugs arrested a French publisher visiting the London Book Fair. They accused him of having some sort of involvement in the mass protests against President Macron. This inculpates both the UK government and the French government in repression against protesters. In addition, it demonstrates the UK's disrespect for the rights of the accused. It is not the first time that the UK has used this repressive law against journalism. In 2014, David Miranda. whose spouse is Glen Greenwald, flew through London with a disk containing copy of Greenwald's data from reporting, including on Snowden. UK thugs arrested Miranda and threatened to imprison him for years if he did not immediately hand over the keys to that data. Flying through the UK is comparable to flying over Belarus. The UK government should be ashamed of itself. (Comment on this)
11:03a	(Satire) Doorbell criticalities, MO (satire) *Missouri Now Requiring All Residents To Have License, Permit To Operate Doorbell.* (Comment on this)
11:03a	AI Copyright law, AU Big Tech ask Australia to change copyright law to permit machine learning systems to scan copyrighted web sites to construct language models. Copyright should allow people to study copyrighted works to learn from them, as a matter of basic principle. That includes adducing patterns in how language is used. If people want a law to prohibit studying works of text or art to make programs that generate text or art, this should be a separate law so that it doesn't mess up other uses of studying works, or other ways of reusing aspects of works. We must not let Big Tech add copyright restrictions, since they will design it to give them more power over us. (Comment on this)
11:03a	Stand-your-ground homicides "Stand your ground" laws bring with them a roughly 10% increase in homicides. They also enable racism. Any shooter can cite this law, but courts are more likely to approve it for white shooters, especially when they shoot blacks. (Comment on this)
11:03a	Faux News let off *Dominion Was Never Going to Save Our Democracy From [Faux] News.* Squeezing money out of it was all it wanted. (Comment on this)
11:03a	The cost of avoiding deforestation *"Don’t fool yourself": Billions more needed to protect tropical forests.* (Comment on this)
11:03a	US spying on UN, leak Some of the leaked Pentagon files seem to show the US was listening to UN secretary general Guterres's conversations. (Comment on this)
11:03a	Price of vegetables, UK Children in Britain are becoming obese because many parents can't afford vegetables. (Comment on this)
11:03a	Urgent: Save end-to-end encryption US citizens: phone your senators to oppose the "EARN-IT" bill that would prohibit end-to-end encryption and require most online services to scan, for the government, all material they get from users. That's what Congress is considering once again, after it was shelved for public opposition in 2020. Now they are trying to rush it. I think this would require services to require users to run nonfree software in order to use them. The bill is so extreme that if people communicate through an encrypted service, and then commit a crime, that would be grounds to prosecute the service. Why go off the deep end? I speculate that they figure to drop them (as a "compromise") while keeping the basic outrages. I found a campaign to contact senators to oppose this bill, but I can't use it or recommend it, because it requires running nonfree Javascript code. Web sites and services should be usable with Javascript disabled. Why not make an exception and run the nonfree software "for a good cause"? Because once you make that kind of exception, once you allow a pervasive injustice to become part of how you fight other injustices, you've effectively legitimized that one. Those web sites could have been designed to function even with Javascript disabled, and they should be. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588. If you phone, please spread the word! (Comment on this)
11:32a	AI copyright law, AU Big Tech asks Australia to change copyright law to permit machine learning systems to scan copyrighted web sites to construct language models. Copyright should allow people to study copyrighted works to learn from them, as a matter of basic principle. That includes adducing patterns in how language is used. If people want a law to prohibit studying works of text or art to make programs that generate text or art, this should be a separate law so that it doesn't mess up other uses of studying works, or other ways of reusing aspects of works. We must not let Big Tech add copyright restrictions, since they will design it to give them more power over us. (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2023/04/21 [Calendar]

Next Day >>