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Submission + - Study finds anti-piracy messages backfire, especially for men (phys.org) 1

Submitted by jbmartin6
jbmartin6 writes: Threatening messages aimed to prevent digital piracy have the opposite effect if you're a man, a new study from the University of Portsmouth has found. According to the research, women tend to respond positively to this kind of messaging, but men typically increase their piracy behaviors by 18% From the study's abstract: "One threatening message influences women to reduce their piracy intentions by over 50% and men to increase it by 18%. "

I'm not so sure about the author's attribution of this difference to evolutionary psychology, so looking forward to some educational comments on that.

Comment They're working with OSM! (Score 0) 59

From the FAQ @ https://overturemaps.org/resou... Overture is a data-centric map project, not a community of individual map editors. Therefore, Overture is intended to be complementary to OSM. We combine OSM with other sources to produce new open map data sets. Overture data will be available for use by the OpenStreetMap community under compatible open data licenses. Overture members are encouraged to contribute to OSM directly.

Comment Only adding so they can peek inside these too... (Score 4, Insightful) 110

by kbonin (#63546661) Attached to: 28 Years Later, Windows Finally Supports RAR Files
They've been scanning everything on windows boxes and anything else on the local network they can access for "your security!" for years (in perfect accordance with the EULA you read, right?), they've probably just figured out how to increase advertising or government surveillance revenue by increasing the accessible file packages.

Comment Re:No change there then (Score 4, Insightful) 47

by kbonin (#63425050) Attached to: AI is Entering an Era of Corporate Control
This is a fight RMS can't win, you can't buy enough GPUs on the salary of a waiter to compete with a Wall Street or Sand Hill Road funded data center. The best we can do is to continue to advance the tools and open training data sets so that academia and non-corporate models and training are usable. I look at Open Street Maps - Google and Garmin may have better maps due to their funding, but most of the interesting stuff is being built using OSM since its actually open.

Comment We need better nomenclature - released to public? (Score 1) 44

by kbonin (#63387999) Attached to: Google is Releasing Its Bard AI Chatbot To the Public
This is only an announcement that some people may begin using a new feature as part of a suite of proprietary products. The product technology with its model, weights, etc, are NOT being "released to the public" in any of the previous meanings of those terms. But hey, marketing... (sigh)

Comment Re:Figma is... (Score 1) 51

FWIW no connection to the company other than being a relatively happy customer after me and my team were unable to find anything remotely close in the foss world. Its UX is awkward, very steep learning curve, you pretty much have to already understand responsive web design to use it, but once there its a nice WYSIWYG editor & UX demo/refinement tool that emits usable code.

Comment Figma is... (Score 5, Informative) 51

... a great (paid) tool to build trivial and non-trivial web user interfaces, including prototyping interactions with static data. It can (sometimes with additional third party tools) auto generate much of the front end files, ready to wire up to your back end. Think of it as an IDE for modern web targeting HTML/CSS for Bootstrap, React, etc.

Submission + - U.S. Supreme Court EPA Ruling Cited in Challenge to DOJ's OPT Authority

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In a June 30th filing in a case challenging the U.S. Department of Justice's authority over Optional Practical Training (OPT) programs (e.g, see Bill Gates's Wish Is Homeland Security's Command), attorneys for the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers advised the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the EPA lacks authority to regulate carbon pollution from existing power plants.

It's the latest salvo fired in tiny WashTech's ongoing OPT legal battle that pits it against the U.S. DOJ, an alliance of 60 businesses, trade associations, and organizations (led by Mark Zuckerberg's billionaire-backed FWD.us PAC), and 150+ U.S. universities and colleges whose attorneys have filed Amicus Briefs with the Court in support of Optional Practical Training. Attorneys for some of the nation's largest tech, trade, and manufacturing lobbying groups have also been granted leave by the Court to intervene as defendants in the case to help the DOJ quash WashTech. "Members of ITI would incur significant direct and indirect costs if the OPT program were declared unlawful," argued lawyers in 2019 on behalf of the Information Technology Industry Council, whose members include Amazon, Apple, Facebook (Meta), Google, and Microsoft. "Member companies would lose thousands of employees who depend on OPT for employment authorization. Those businesses would face significant costs in hiring new workers to fill these critical jobs."

The July 15th DOJ response to the WashTech filing appeared to suggest (IANAL) to the Court that any comparisons to the EPA ruling should be ignored, since that was an "extraordinary case" involving a potentially huge economic impact. While the DOJ filing did not attempt to estimate the economic impact of filling the "773,844 active online job postings" for open computing jobs that was cited as important in the 2021 Amicus Brief in support of OPT signed by tech companies and others, the CEO of tech giant-bankrolled nonprofit Code.org estimated the value of filling just 500K tech jobs at $1.7 trillion in a 2017 pitch ("A trillion-dollar opportunity for America") for Federal support of K-12 computer science education to the incoming Trump administration (in 2012, Microsoft President and Code.org Board member Brad Smith unveiled the company's National Talent Strategy, "a two-pronged approach that will couple long-term improvements in STEM education in the United States with targeted, short-term, high-skilled immigration reforms" to address tech workforce needs). The importance of OPT to the economy was also underscored in the Amicus Brief signed by the universities and colleges, which advised the Court that "the labor market would lose 443,000 jobs" even if OPT was not eliminated but just reduced to 40% of its current size.

Comment Microsoft owns it, so your options are now theirs. (Score 1) 22

by kbonin (#62387573) Attached to: Complaints Mount After GitHub Launches New Algorithmic Feed
Like most of their products, everything is being re imagined as a marketing opportunity, you are the actual product, and like their OS they reserve the right to ignore and change any setting you have made at their whim. And there is nothing you can really do about it other than to install one of the knows fixes from the Linux world. Mint is an easy transition for Windows users... And GitLab is not only a nice alternative to GitHub, its CI/CD pipelines are far more advanced, and unlike GitHub you can self-host the Community Edition and all the runners you need without a license. I manage both for many users, and greatly prefer GitLab.

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