The Justice Department released recommendations on Wednesday to pare back the legal shield for online platforms that has been crucial to their growth since the earliest days of the internet, taking a direct shot at companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that have come into the cross hairs of the Trump administration. From a report: In a 25-page recommendation, the agency…
Tag: Conservative
Scientists Say Most Likely Number of Contactable Alien Civilizations Is 36
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: They may not be little green men. They may not arrive in a vast spaceship. But according to new calculations there could be more than 30 intelligent civilizations in our galaxy today capable of communicating with others. In 1961 the astronomer Frank Drake proposed what became known as the Drake equation, setting…
Plastic Rain In Protected Areas of the United States
Writing today in the journal Science, researchers report a startling discovery: After collecting rainwater and air samples for 14 months, they calculated that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic particles fall into 11 protected areas in the western U.S. each year. That’s the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. Wired: To quantify just how bad the problem has become…
Lawsuit Says Trump’s Social Media Crackdown Violates Free Speech
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: President Trump’s crackdown on social media companies faced a new legal challenge on Tuesday, as a technology policy organization claimed in a lawsuit that he violated the companies’ right to free speech with his executive order aimed at curtailing their legal protections. The nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology says…
Joe Biden Doesn’t Like Trump’s Twitter Order, But Still Wants To Revoke Section 230
Former Vice President Joe Biden still wants to repeal the pivotal internet law that provides social media companies like Facebook and Twitter with broad legal immunity over content posted by their users, a campaign spokesperson told The Verge. Still, the campaign emphasized key disagreements with the executive order signed by the president earlier this week. From a report: Earlier this year,…
Ask Slashdot: Did Fear and Groupthink Drive Unnecessary Global Lockdowns?
An anonymous reader writes: There’s an interesting analysis, which looks at several data points, to conclude that media may have flamed fears that drove the world to enforce lockdowns. From the story: “To put things in perspective, the virus is now known to have an infection fatality rate for most people under 65 that is no more dangerous than driving 13…
UK May Drop Huawei From Planned 5G Networks
An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian:
The National Cyber Security Agency in the UK is expected to conclude that U.S. sanctions against Huawei will make it impossible to use the Chinese company’s technology as planned for 5G networks. The emergency review, announced on Sunday, is designed to pave the way for Downing Street to push for the total elimination of Huawei equipment…
Is Support Now Growing for a Universal Basic Income?
Economist Tyler Cowen and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov (now the chairman of the nonprofit Renew Democracy Initiative) co-authored an opinion piece this week in Bloomberg arguing that “a pandemic is providing a tragic preview of some of the conditions UBI was conceived to address.” Though they worry about the cost of such a program, “And, though there are some…
James Damore Silently Ends Lawsuit Against Google
“The high-profile discrimination dispute between Google and one of its former software engineers has quietly come to an end,” reports USA Today. “Ex-Google employee James Damore has moved to dismiss his lawsuit against the internet giant two years after alleging discrimination against conservative white men.” Damore worked as an engineer at Google before being fired in 2017 after criticizing the company’s…
Should Colleges Preserve the Idea of Meritocracy?
“Is Meritocracy an Idea Worth Saving?” asks The Chronicle of Higher Education, reporting on a special forum held recently at the University of North Carolina’s Program for Public Discourse. “This discussion took place before Covid-19 changed everything. But the topics — the definition of meritocracy, the role of universities in a just society, the composition of socioeconomic class, and the real…