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Cities Shut Down Flock Camera Networks Following Improper Access By Federal Agencies

4 days 17 hours ago
“Flock Safety” may be the brand name, but this company’s earliest sales successes had nothing to with safety. Its target audience was homeowners associations and people running gated communities in upscale neighborhoods. The purpose of the cameras (and, eventually, the attached license plate reader tech) was to make sure people who were plenty safe already […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: EDU Unlimited by StackSkills

4 days 17 hours ago
StackSkills is the premier online learning platform for mastering today’s most in-demand skills. Now, with this exclusive limited-time offer, you’ll gain access to 1000+ StackSkills courses for life. Whether you’re looking to earn a promotion, make a career change, or pick up a side hustle to make some extra cash, StackSkills delivers engaging online courses […]
Daily Deal

Brendan Carr Launches Baseless ‘Investigation’ Into PBS, NPR, And BBC To Try And Silence Criticism Of His Weird, Unpopular Boss

4 days 19 hours ago
Donald Trump’s FCC boss Brendan Carr is opening a fake new “investigation” into PBS, NPR, and BBC in the hopes of suppressing journalistic criticism of the country’s increasingly unmoored and unpopular President. Carr first leaked word of the fake investigation to right wing propaganda website Breitbart. In a letter to all three outlets (pages 1, […]
Karl Bode

How Trademark Ruined Colorado-Style Pizza

5 days 13 hours ago
You’ve heard of New York style, Chicago deep dish, Detroit square pans. But Colorado-style pizza? Probably not. And there’s a perfectly ridiculous reason why this regional style never spread beyond a handful of restaurants in the Rocky Mountains: one guy trademarked it and scared everyone else away from making it. This story comes via a […]
Mike Masnick

Fans Of Open Access, Unite: You Have Nothing To Lose But Your Chained Libraries

5 days 15 hours ago
When books were rare and extremely expensive, they were often chained to the bookcase to prevent people walking off with them, in what were known as “chained libraries”. Copyright serves a similar purpose today, even though, thanks to the miracle of perfect, zero-cost digital copies, it is possible simultaneously to take an ebook home and […]
Glyn Moody

The Misleading Story Fox News Told About Portland Before Trump Sent Troops

5 days 16 hours ago
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he’d started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television. He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. “What they’ve done to that […]
Rob Davis

Texas GOP Had A Legal Path To Gerrymander. Trump’s DOJ Ordered Them To Take The Blatantly Illegal Path Instead

5 days 17 hours ago
Let’s say, hypothetically, you want to gerrymander some congressional districts to help your party win more seats. Here are a couple of options: Which do you choose? If you said “obviously option 1,” congratulations, you understand the law better than the Trump administration’s Department of Justice. Because the Trump administration just got legally smacked down […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The Complete Superstar Photographer Bundle

5 days 17 hours ago
The Complete Superstar Photographer Bundle has 11 courses to help take your photography skills to the next level. Two course start you off with the basics of photography and how to take advantage of your DSLR camera. Other courses focus on lighting and posing techniques, how to photograph landscapes, food, portraits, and groups, night photography […]
Daily Deal

The Legal Case Against Ring’s Face Recognition Feature

6 days 13 hours ago
Amazon Ring’s upcoming face recognition tool has the potential to violate the privacy rights of millions of people and could result in Amazon breaking state biometric privacy laws. Ring plans to introduce a feature to its home surveillance cameras called “Familiar Faces,” to identify specific people who come into view of the camera. When turned […]
Mario Trujillo

Book Reports Potentially Copyright Infringing, Thanks To Court Attacks On LLMs

6 days 16 hours ago
A federal judge just ruled that computer-generated summaries of novels are “very likely infringing,” which would effectively outlaw many book reports. That seems like a problem. The Authors Guild has one of the many lawsuits against OpenAI, and law professor Matthew Sag has the details on a ruling in that case that, if left in […]
Mike Masnick

DOJ Memo Says It Won’t Prosecute US Troops No Matter How Illegal Trump’s Boat Strike Program Is

6 days 17 hours ago
Not content to simply deport as many South American migrants from this country as possible, the Trump administration leaned into its lies about the latent threat to national security the mere existence of foreign people poses to national security. This administration pretends everything is a “war,” even as it actively avoids seeking congressional approval to […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: The Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class

6 days 17 hours ago
MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if you don’t have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you’ll […]
Daily Deal

Bipartisan Senators Want To Honor Charlie Kirk By Making It Easier To Censor The Internet

6 days 19 hours ago
Democratic Senator Mark Kelly and Republican Senator John Curtis want to gut Section 230 to combat “political radicalization”—in honor of Charlie Kirk, whose entire career was built on political radicalization. Kirk styled himself as a “free speech warrior” because he would show up on college campuses to “debate” people, but as we’ve covered, the “debate […]
Mike Masnick