An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from The New York Times, written by Neil Shister, author of “Radical Ritual: How Burning Man Changed the World.” Here’s an excerpt: In perhaps the ultimate test of whether the internet can satisfyingly replicate the real world, Burning Man has gone online this year. The notion isn’t as much of a mismatch as it…
Tag: Opinion
Court Rules NSA Phone Snooping Illegal — After Seven-Year Delay
The National Security Agency program that swept up details on billions of Americans’ phone calls was illegal and possibly unconstitutional, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. From a report: However, the unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the role the so-called telephone metadata program played in a criminal terror-fundraising case against four Somali immigrants was so…
‘The Future of American Industry Depends On Open Source Tech’
An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from Wired, written by Kevin Xu and Jordan Schneider. Xu is the author of Interconnected, investor and advisor of open source startups at OSS Capital, and served in the Obama White House. Schneider is the author of the ChinaTalk newsletter and host of the ChinaTalk podcast, posted on Lawfare. From the report: Open source…
Anti-Piracy Outfit Hires VPN Expert To Help Track Down The Pirate Bay
Movie companies and their anti-piracy partners are pressing ahead with their legal action to track down The Pirate Bay. The site reportedly used VPN provider OVPN, which carries no logs, but a security expert — one that regularly penetration tests several major VPN providers — believes that information about the notorious site could still be obtained. TorrentFreak reports: After a period…
Facebook’s ‘Independent’ Fact Checks Face Quiet Political, Financial Pressures
tedlistens writes: Facing questions about a mysterious series of changes to some fact-check labels, Facebook recently wrote to a group of senators with an assurance: its fact checkers can and do label “opinion” content if it crosses the line into falsehood. What Facebook didn’t tell the senators: the company draws that line, and can pressure changes to fact checks & misinformation…
Arm Co-Founder: Nvidia Sale Is Because Softbank Over-Invested In Firm
Co-founder and ex-president of Arm Holdings Tudor Brown says that SoftBank’s projected sale of the chip company to Nvidia is the result of a bungled business strategy that saw the fund throw too much money at Arm and prioritize the wrong business areas. NS Tech reports: “In my opinion, they put too much money into it, spent money on things that…
Google Beats Song Lyric Scraping Lawsuit
Genius Media Group was pretty clever when it used digital watermarks to show that Google had been copying its huge collection of song lyrics. One of those watermarks spelled “redhanded” in Morse code. That Google was caught lifting another site’s song lyrics made international news — and even merited a mention during Congress’ Big Tech hearing late last month. But was…
Is the US about to Split the Internet?
The BBC reports:
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he wants a “clean” internet. What he means by that is he wants to remove Chinese influence, and Chinese companies, from the internet in the U.S. But critics believe this will bolster a worrying movement towards the breaking up of the global internet. The so called “splinternet” is generally used when talking…
Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg Law: The U.S. government charges too much for access to an electronic database of federal court records, the Federal Circuit ruled in a decision curbing a revenue stream the court system uses to help fund other programs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a lower court’s decision that the…
AI-Generated Text Is the Scariest Deepfake of All
An anonymous reader shares a report: In the future, deepfake videos and audiofakes may well be used to create distinct, sensational moments that commandeer a press cycle, or to distract from some other, more organic scandal. But undetectable textfakes — masked as regular chatter on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and the like — have the potential to be far more subtle, far…