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Submission + - Amazon to close newly unionized facility (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: After opening it's first Quebec facility in 2020, Amazon will be closing all seven locations located within the province — just after it's Lachine location unionized. Amazon stated that it was done as a cost cutting measure and was going back to using local small businesses.

Submission + - Amazon Exits Quebec Operations, To Cut About 1,700 Jobs (msn.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: E-commerce giant Amazon.com is exiting its operations in the Canadian province of Quebec, leading to the loss of about 1,700 full-time jobs, the company said on Wednesday, prompting Ottawa to express its unhappiness. The online retailer will phase out operations across seven sites in the province — the only location in Canada with unionized Amazon employees — over the next two months. It will return to a third-party delivery model, relying on local small businesses, similar to its approach before 2020.

Submission + - Federal Court (Finally) Rules Backdoor Searches of 702 Data Unconstitutional (eff.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The district court found that regardless of whether the government can lawfully warrantlessly collect communications between foreigners and Americans using Section 702, it cannot ordinarily rely on a “foreign intelligence exception” to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant clause when searching these communications, as is the FBI’s routine practice. And, even if such an exception did apply, the court found that the intrusion on privacy caused by reading our most sensitive communications rendered these searches “unreasonable” under the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted 3.4 million warrantless searches of US person’s 702 data.

Submission + - Fifteen Years Later, Citizens United Defined the 2024 Election (brennancenter.org)

Submitted by NewYorkCountryLawyer
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: The influence of wealthy donors and dark money was unprecedented. Much of it would have been illegal before the Supreme Court swept away long-established campaign finance rules. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court’s controversial 2010 decision that swept away more than a century’s worth of campaign finance safeguards, turns 15 this month. The late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called it the worst ruling of her time on the Court. Overwhelming majorities of Americans have consistently expressed disapproval of the ruling, with at least 22 states and hundreds of cities voting to support a constitutional amendment to overturn it. Citizens United reshaped political campaigns in profound ways, giving corporations and billionaire-funded super PACs a central role in U.S. elections and making untraceable dark money a major force in politics. And yet it may only be now, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, that we can begin to understand the full impact of the decision.

Submission + - Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy (404media.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction. [...] Mastodon’s ActivityPub and Bluesky’s AT.Protocol have provided the base technology layer to make this possible, and have laid important groundwork over the last few years to decorporatize and decentralize the social internet.

The problem with decentralized social media platforms thus far is that their user base is minuscule compared to platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, meaning the cultural and political influence has lagged behind them. You also cannot directly monetize an audience on Bluesky or Mastodon—which, to be clear, is a feature, not a bug—but also means that the value proposition for an influencer who makes money through the TikTok creator program or a small business that makes money selling chewing gum on TikTok shop or a clothes brand that has figured out how to arbitrage Instagram ads to sell flannel shirts is not exactly clear. I am not advocating for decentralized social media to implement ads and creator payment programs. I’m just saying that many TikTok influencers were directing their collective hundreds of millions of fans to follow them to Instagram or YouTube, not a decentralized alternative.

This doesn’t mean that the fediverse or that a decentralized Instagram or TikTok competitor that runs on the AT.Protocol is doomed. But there is a lot of work to do. There is development work that needs to be done (and is being done) to make decentralized protocols easier to join and use and more interoperable with each other. And there is a massive education and recruitment challenge required to get the masses to not just try out decentralized platforms but to earnestly use them. Bluesky’s growing user base and rise as a legitimately impressive platform that one can post to without feeling like it’s going into the void is a massive step forward, and proof that it is possible to build thriving alternative platforms. The fact that Meta recently blocked links to a decentralized Instagram alternative shows that big tech sees these platforms, potentially, as a real threat.

Submission + - TikTok is censoring anti-Trump content (newsweek.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: After going dark for 12 hours in response to a U.S. law saying it must divest from Chinese ownership, TikTok came back on line when the new administration took office. However, once up and running, users found one unexpected change. Anti-Trump content is now being censored. Words, phrases, and videos which were readily accessible pre-blackout were now unavailable or being removed entirely.

A post on X, formerly Twitter, which has received 4.5 million views at the time of reporting, claims that "TikTok is now region locking Americans from looking up things like "fascism" and "Donald Trump rigged election"."

The post includes two screenshots of the TikTok app. The screenshot is of the search page, and in both the search term is "Donald Trump rigged election." The post states that: "On the left are results from a device in America, and on the right are results from one in the UK."

The post on the left shows a results page stating "No results found," while on the left it shows two videos of the President.

Another post from the account Dustin Genereux said that, "Censorship on TikTok is at an all time high with accounts being deleted, posts going back years being flagged, people losing access to the creator fund for saying anything Anti-Trump, MAGA, Elon, etc. But free speech and all that right?"

Comment Thank you, Bram (Score 1) 62

by faragon (#63743100) Attached to: Vim's Creator Bram Moolenaar Dies at Age 62
'vim' is a marvel, and Bram Moolenaar did a lot of good for the world, and I am grateful for that. TL;DR: I started using Borland IDEs on MS-DOS (Turbo Pascal and Turbo C, around 1987/1988), which were based on the WordStar editor commands. I first tried 'vim' around 1994, on my first PC, using Linux on a Slackware distribution (486 DX2 66MHz with 8MB of RAM, and a 500MB hard disk), because for university homework we were told to learn the 'vi' editor, as in the lab we were using Sun workstations. I continued using a Borland-compatible editor for Linux named 'Joe', as I felt more productive. It took me some time, but I ended up switching to 'vim', once I felt I could do it better than with previous editors. Despite using other editors, e.g. Notepad++ and Visual Studio in Windows, in Linux and Mac I still use mostly 'vim', even though it's considered outdated because more modern/popular editors are taking its place, e.g. VS Code, Kate, etc.

Comment Re:Most of the classics will be inducted eventuall (Score 1) 44

by CronoCloud (#63499716) Attached to: The 2023 Video Game Hall of Fame Inductees

Barbie Fashion Designer sold more copies than Quake did, seriously. Part of the reason for that was that it was about designing outfits for Barbie that one could print out and make for the actual dolls.

Civilization is already IN the hall of fame, I checked. As are games like Starcraft, Halo, DOOM, Colossal Cave Adventure, World of Warcraft, Kings Quest.

And may I gently suggest that a Video Game Hall of Fame shouldn't just be "brown shooters for 90's edgelords"

Comment Re:How many are in scalper's basements? (Score 1) 25

by CronoCloud (#63485496) Attached to: Sony Closes In On 40 Million PS5s Sold

it is a much better PS4 than the original and its fragile, noisy optical disk system

The BD drive on a PS4 is only used for games when they are installed, and a quick check when you start a disc based game after you install it Otherwise it doesn't read games from the BD drive only the hard drive.

Also the noisiest thing about a PS4 is the fan! PS4's are built like tanks like the 50001 series PS2's, not trouble prone like some other PS1, PS2 or PS3 models. And you could replace the hard disk drive in it with a SATA SSD.

That said, the PS5 IS a better way of playing PS4 games, since you can just copy your PS4 games on your PS4 to an external drive, then just plug it in to the PS5. No need for PS4 games to use valuable SSD space. It also applies PS4 Pro boosts to PS4 games.

Comment Re:Who are they selling them to? (Score 1) 25

by CronoCloud (#63485468) Attached to: Sony Closes In On 40 Million PS5s Sold

I keep on hearing about how the PlayStation 5 is now easily available, but I've still yet to see one in stores.

I found mine at the local wal-mart a couple of weeks after launch.

I do know Sony won't sell you a PS5 through their own online store, which is amusing.

They do!
https://direct.playstation.com...

the link the timeOday posted doesn't have "hardware" in it and is incomplete somehow.

Comment Re: Given opportunity, people will. (Score 1) 99

by CronoCloud (#63365759) Attached to: Teens Are Stealing More Cars. They Learn How on Social Media.

Violent crime is dropping...again, though crimes of property..like grand theft auto is up. Things like that happen. In fact, violent crime today is STILL lower than it was in the 70's, even in what you call "urban cesspools"
Though if you look at the statistics, medium sized and small cities have worse crime than the large cities.

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