Comment Re:"If plaintiff didn't read her contract ..." (Score 1) 77
Comment Congratulations (Score 1) 6
I'm glad you got to have kids and watch them grow from birth. I never got to do that; I married a gal and the boys were already ten and eleven years old when I entered their life.
Comment Re:Not a bad thing, necessarily (Score 1) 91
I agree. I think a second benefit could be that interested high school (or college) students now get a data source that doesn't change locations from administration to administration. It is mildly frustrating to me that many government websites simply change where things are each year. Worse is when a department goes through the amazingly beneficial operation of name change.
Comment Re:Server Configuration (Score 1) 116
Apparently this was a new test, essentially A B testing. The only difference in the two sets of email were that one set had links to ActBlue and the other set had links to WinRed. The complaint is that the WinRed linking emails were marked as spam but the ActBlue linking emails were not.
Submission + - SPAM: Proof Trump Rigged 2024 Election 3
Submission + - Fifteen Years Later, Citizens United Defined the 2024 Election (brennancenter.org)
Comment Re:Could he be retried for one of the hit attempts (Score 1) 339
Submission + - Anti-Trump Searches Appear Hidden on TikTok (ibtimes.com)
Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Pardoned (bbc.com) 339
"The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me," Trump said in his post online on Tuesday evening. "He was given two life sentences, plus 40 years. Ridiculous!" Ulbricht was found guilty of charges including conspiracy to commit drug trafficking, money laundering and computer hacking. During his trial, prosecutors said Ulbricht's website, hosted on the hidden "dark web", sold more than $200 million worth of drugs anonymously.
Submission + - Trump Pardons Silk Road Founder (nypost.com)
Submission + - Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy (404media.co)
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)
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?"
Great Barrier Reef Hit By Its Most Widespread Coral Bleaching, Study Finds (theguardian.com) 15
Only 92 coral colonies escaped bleaching entirely and by July, when the analysis for the study ended, 193 were dead and a further 113 were still showing signs of bleaching. Prof Maria Byrne, a marine biologist at the University of Sydney and lead author of the study, has been researching and visiting the island for 35 years.
Brendan Carr is Officially in Charge of the FCC (theverge.com) 71
Carr's priorities might also be gleaned from a document you might have already heard about: Project 2025. That's because he authored the FCC chapter of the Heritage Foundation's wishlist for a Donald Trump presidency. In that chapter, Carr proposes actions including: limiting immunity for tech companies under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, requiring disclosures about how platforms prioritize content, requiring tech companies to pay into a program that funds broadband access in rural areas, and more, quickly approving applications to launch satellites from companies like Elon Musk's Starlink.