Boing Boing

LibreTaxi - free and open source Uber/Lyft alternative.
►https://libretaxi.org

https://libretaxi.org/img/2-en.jpg

Free and open source alternative to Uber/Lyft connecting passengers and drivers.
LibreTaxi makes ridesharing affordable by getting rid of the third party between passengers and drivers. Negotiate the price before the ride is confirmed, pay cash upon arrival. 1-minute hiring for all drivers.

https://libretaxi.org/img/1-en.jpg

GitHub - ro31337/libretaxi: LibreTaxi, free and open source Uber/Lyft alternative to connect passengers and drivers.
▻https://github.com/ro31337/libretaxi
▻https://avatars0.githubusercontent.com/u/1477672?s=400&v=4

LibreTaxi, free and open source Uber/Lyft alternative to connect passengers and drivers. ►http://libretaxi.org

LibreTaxi press coverage – Telegraph
▻https://telegra.ph/LibreTaxi-press-coverage-07-14

Roman PushkinJuly 14, 2017
CBC Radio One - The man who wants to out-Uber Uber

Text: ▻http://www.cbc.ca/radio/spark/346-biometrics-audio-intelligence-and-more-1.3987746/the-man-who-wants-to-out-uber-uber-1.3987987

Audio: ▻http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/879770691848
Bitcoinist - INTERVIEW WITH LIBRETAXI: THE ‘FREE ALTERNATIVE’ TO LYFT & UBER ▻http://bitcoinist.com/interview-libretaxi-free-uber-lyft
Hacker News (1200+ pts) - LibreTaxi – A free and open source alternative to Uber and Lyft ▻https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13529213
Shareable - Q&A: LibreTaxi’s Roman Pushkin on Why He Made a Free, Open-Source Alternative to Uber and Lyft ▻http://www.shareable.net/blog/qa-libretaxis-roman-pushkin-on-why-he-made-a-free-open-source-alternative
Seeker - A Free Uber-Like App Finds Rides for People in Rural Areas ▻https://www.seeker.com/a-free-uber-like-app-finds-rides-for-people-in-rural-areas-2242594637.html
Core Impulse (Columbia University’s entrepreneurship publication) - LibreTaxi: Uber for Rural, Disadvantaged Communities ▻https://impulse.coreatcu.com/libretaxi-an-uber-for-rural-disadvantaged-communities-657269849d31
El País (the most highly circulated daily newspaper in Spain) - /Spanish/ Libre Taxi, o cómo convertirse en chófer en dos minutos gracias a Telegram ▻https://elpais.com/tecnologia/2017/02/02/actualidad/1486029308_574979.html
hipertextual - /Spanish/ LibreTaxi, entre Telegram y la más absoluta locura ▻https://hipertextual.com/2017/02/libretaxi
Product Hunt - Open source alternative to Uber/Lyft for Telegram ▻https://www.producthunt.com/posts/libretaxi
Observer - Uber But for Places Where Uber Would Never Go ▻http://observer.com/2017/02/libretaxi-uber-ridesharing
TechCrunch - /mentioned along with few other projects/ ▻https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/30/google-org-blackrock-and-others-commit-2-2-million-to-fast-forwards-nonp
Boingboing - Libretaxi: a free, open, cash-only alternative to Uber, for the rest of the world ▻http://boingboing.net/2017/03/23/platform-cooperativism.html
Hightech.fm - /Russian/ LibreTaxi — революция в сфере пассажирских перевозок ▻https://hightech.fm/2017/02/08/libre-taxi
Hightech.fm - /Russian/ LibreTaxi — это коммуникационная услуга, а не сервис такси ▻https://hightech.fm/2017/06/21/libretaxi
Silver Rain Radio - /Russian/ - Заказать такси теперь можно через Telegram

Text: ▻http://www.silver.ru/programms/nanonovosti/editions-of-the-program/materials-ZakazattaksitepermozhnocherezTelegram

Audio: ▻http://www2.silver.ru/audio/FADWW
NTV - LibreTaxi /Russian/ Video: ▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY9_Rxck3YE

#Taxi #open_source #Uber #Vermittlung

Millennials have discovered antennas will give them free TV channels / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/08/03/millennials-have-discovered-an.html

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Rabbit-ears.jpg

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that millennials have learned how to get free TV with a simple antenna, for a one-time cost of about $20. Us old-schoolers have known of this ancient wisdom since, well, forever but have neglected to pass down to the young’uns.

But the crazy thing is that it’s not just young folks, the Journal consulted an industry group who estimate about a third of all Americans don’t realize that local channels are free

#wtf #télévision #disruption

$70 Hackintosh matches MacBook Pro / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/06/27/70-hackintosh-matches-macbook.html

Snazzy Labs built a startlingly powerful Mac with only $70—editing the video above on it to prove it!

A big part of it is being armed with knowledge and some technical chops: the donor PC (from institutional surplus) was a real beast in its day, they repaired a broken SSD (!), and found a miraculously appropriate bus-powered video card on Craiglist. All of which means you’re not likely to replicate the “Crapintosh” in a $100 visit to Goodwill.

Hackintosh Instructions, Hackintosh How To Guides: Hackintosh.com
▻http://www.hackintosh.com

Helpful individuals have provided step-by-step “how to” guides and tutorials as well as general advice on installing OS X on everything from self-built desktop systems and notebooks to netbooks, tablets, and more.

Installation guides for macOS Sierra (10.12), OS X El Capitan (10.11), OS X Yosemite (10.10), OS X Mavericks (10.9), OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), OS X Lion (10.7), Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) and Mac OS X Leopard (10.5) follow. See the Hackintosh video tutorials, too.

Truck-driving is a modern form of indentured slavery / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/06/21/pacific-9-transportation.html

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Reyes-Castellanos02.jpg

The current situation stems from a California rule that banned out-of-date, polluting diesel trucks from its ports. Trucking companies bought all-new trucks with better emissions profiles, then forced their workers to sign contracts through which they assumed all debt for this new fleet, with payments to be taken from their paychecks. The workers were made to sign on pain of immediate termination, without access to a lawyer or advisor, and many didn’t speak or read English well enough to understand the contracts.

Rigged. Forced into debt. Worked past exhaustion. Left with nothing. - USA TODAY
▻https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/news/rigged-forced-into-debt-worked-past-exhaustion-left-with-nothing

https://www.gannett-cdn.com/experiments/usatoday/responsive/2017/05-truckers/assets/images/share.jpg

A yearlong investigation by the USA TODAY Network found that port trucking companies in southern California have spent the past decade forcing drivers to finance their own trucks by taking on debt they could not afford. Companies then used that debt as leverage to extract forced labor and trap drivers in jobs that left them destitute.

If a driver quit, the company seized his truck and kept everything he had paid towards owning it.

If drivers missed payments, or if they got sick or became too exhausted to go on, their companies fired them and kept everything. Then they turned around and leased the trucks to someone else.

Drivers who manage to hang on to their jobs sometimes end up owing money to their employers – essentially working for free. Reporters identified seven different companies that have told their employees they owe money at week’s end.

#USA #Ausbeutung #LKW #Arbeit

2012: Tory Prime Minister David Cameron declares war on “Safety Culture” / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/06/17/tort-reform-astroturf.html

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/austerity2.jpg

The Conservative Party — and free market ideologues — have waged a long war on “safety culture,” insisting it was a nonsensical, incoherent regulation that acted as a drag on every business except no-win/no-fee lawyers, who exploited these rules to victimise poor corporations with punishing lawsuits.

The reality is that the alleged health-and-safety-gone-mad overreach was almost always an urban legend, a rule that didn’t exist and never existed (though it might be cited by a puny martinet of a middle-manager as a way to force their underlings to do their bidding). In their brilliant, beautifully written and beautifully researched 2014 book, In the Interests of Safety, Tracey Brown and Michael Hanlon from Sense about Science showed how tabloids, petty bosses and bureaucrats, and credulous members of the public invented the excesses of “Safety Culture” — while actual health and safety pros soberly and cautiously put forward the rules that stopped us all from dying of food poisoning, defective cars, or in terrible blazes in firetrap buildings.

London fire: just last year, Tory landlord-MPs rejected Labour’s tenant safety law / Boing Boing
▻https://boingboing.net/2017/06/14/voting-their-interests.html

https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/grenfell-1.jpg

The death-toll on London’s Grenfell Tower fire continues to mount, it’s worth remembering that there are no “natural disasters,” only human disasters, created by people who weigh different interests in the balance and create policies based on the way the scales come up.

So it was that a year ago, a group of Tory MPs largely composed of commercial landlords voted down Labour’s amendment to the Housing and Planning Bill that would have required landlords to make their properties safe and “fit for human habitation.”

The Russian Britney Spears Instagram hackers also used satellites to hide their tracks / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/06/08/dvb-s.html

Pity poor Turla, the advanced persistent threat hacking group closely associated with the Russian government who were outed yesterday for their extremely clever gimmick of using Britney Spears’s Instagram account as a covert channel for controlling compromised computers in the field while protecting their “command and control” servers; today, Turla faces another devastating disclosure, a report that Turla exploited gaps in the security model of satellite TV and internet systems to make it possible for compromised computers to contact the C&C servers without revealing their locations.

Satellite internet services that are delivered over DVB-S satellite TV links use unencrypted links: users send data to the satellites through normal internet links, without encryption, that terminate in satellite ground-stations that uplink to the space-based units. The satellites then beam down their communications (again, without encryption) to a region whose footprint has a radius of 600 miles.

Turla intercepted communications destined for the satellite base stations (called “teleport points”) and injected their own data into the streams. The satellites retransmitted this data to a 600 square-mile radius zone. The addressee of the data ignored it, because it had a nonsense port-number associated with it. But Turla was able to receive this data and act on it.

Our brains tell us to avoid people who are sick, even when they don’t show obvious symptom
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/06/09/our-brains-tell-us-to-avoid-pe.html

Media logos were originally physical sculptures / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/05/19/media-logos-were-originally-ph.html

https://i0.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/logo-2up.jpg?resize=600%2C806

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agS6ZXBrcng

#télévision #animation #histoire

Theresa May promises a British version of Iran’s Halal Internet / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/05/19/little-england-little-internet.html

https://i1.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Iran.gif.jpg

The government now appears to be launching a similarly radical change in the way that social networks and internet companies work. While much of the internet is currently controlled by private businesses like Google and Facebook, Theresa May intends to allow government to decide what is and isn’t published, the manifesto suggests.

The new rules would include laws that make it harder than ever to access pornographic and other websites. The government will be able to place restrictions on seeing adult content and any exceptions would have to be justified to ministers, the manifesto suggests.

The manifesto even suggests that the government might stop search engines like Google from directing people to pornographic websites. “We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm,” the Conservatives write.

The laws would also force technology companies to delete anything that a person posted when they were under 18.

But perhaps most unusually they would be forced to help controversial government schemes like its Prevent strategy, by promoting counter-extremist narratives.

#Grande_Bretagne #Royaume-Uni #censure #internet

Les processeurs #Intel « haut de gamme » (en gros ceux qui équipent les serveurs donc, pour une fois, @mmemichu peut dormir sur ses deux oreilles) ont une faille tellement énorme qu’il m’est difficile de ne pas penser à une porte dérobée. Le processeur inclut un serveur Web (oui !!!), activé par défaut et, comme c’est le processeur, il ne dépend pas du système d’exploitation. Même si Windows ou Unix est éteint, ce serveur Web répond. Évidemment, il est protégé par un système d’authentification et, non moins évidemment, ce système est programmé avec les pieds, et est contournable. Ce service se nomme #AMT et fait partie d’un ensemble plus vaste nommé #ME (Management Engine).

Les articles des deux chercheurs qui ont (indépendamment) découvert la faille :
▻https://www.embedi.com/files/white-papers/Silent-Bob-is-Silent.pdf
▻http://www.tenable.com/blog/rediscovering-the-intel-amt-vulnerability

Le truc officiel d’Intel ▻https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/26755

Le serveur en question écoute sur les ports 16992 et 16993. Vous pouvez donc chercher des machines vulnérables sur votre réseau, par exmeple avec nmap (’nmap -p 16992-16993 192.0.2.0/24’) ou Nessus <▻https://www.tenable.com/blog/intel-amt-vulnerability-detection-with-nessus-and-pvs-intel-sa-00075> ou ce script nmap <▻https://github.com/nmap/nmap/blob/7bd54ab0989a8412a000d0475c90da36367eb574/scripts/http-vuln-cve2017-5689.nse> Évidemment, #Shodan trouve des tas de processeurs Intel ainsi accessible de l’extérieur.

Question politique, Cory Doctorow note à juste titre que la faille vient du désir d’Intel de mettre un ordinateur complet dans chaque processeur, afin de contrôler l’usage qu’on en fait : ▻http://boingboing.net/2017/05/09/management-engine.html

#sécurité_informatique #foutage_de_gueule

UK court refuses to let wife divorce husband, tells her unhappiness is to be expected in marriage
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/03/24/uk-courts-refuses-to-let-wife.html

Judge Robin Tolson ruled against Mrs Owens in the family court last year, concluding that her allegations were “of the kind to be expected in marriage” and refused to grant a divorce petition.

How Big Tobacco invented Donald Trump and Brexit (and what to do about it) / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/03/17/scientific-curiosity.html

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/5609471291429d3d0a624bbb1b9007c3.jpg

Economist Tim Harford (previously) traces the history of denialism and “fake news” back to Big Tobacco’s cancer denial playbook, which invented the tactics used by both the Brexit and Trump campaigns to ride to victory — a playbook that dismisses individual harms as “anaecdotal” and wide-ranging evidence as “statistical,” and works in concert with peoples’ biases (smokers don’t want cigarettes to cause cancer, Brexiteers want the UK to be viable without the EU, Trump supporters want simple, cruel policies to punish others and help them) to make emprically wrong things feel right.

This “motivated reasoning” is incredibly hard to undo. Studies of whether presenting refutation to people who’ve bought into a belief system that serves their personal agendas shows that counterpoints can actually strengthen their beliefs (the “rebound effect”).

But one promising approach is to cultivate “scientific curiosity,” which is not the same as being a scientist: people who habitually engage in scientific curiosity are less prone to the rebound effect and more able to overcome motivated reasoning.

#fake_news #post-truth #tabac

Minimalist web publishing platforms / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/03/14/minimalist-web-publishing-plat.html

Check out txt.fyi, a toy “publishing platform” I made. I put that phrase in quotes because it’s designed to be as lightweight as possible: you type in text and hit publish, and your work is live on the internet.

While I worked on it a couple of weeks ago (many thanks go to Ken Snider, @zemnmez, Ben Overmyer, Johannes Kröger and y’all) usage exploded, with front-page items on Hacker News and The Verge. It got 10,000 postings in a day (most of them “testing 123” or “asdfadfgasaf”) and my inbox got hit with everything from thank-yous from activists to bug reports to offers from entrepreneurs to buy it: all fantastic for the ego. It even impressed the proprietors of Brutalist Websites, my favorite art movement!

Whatever nerve txt.fyi strikes, it’s a raw one: I also got some of the most savage and contemptuous hate mail over it I’ve ever enjoyed. And, of course, “I coulda built that in a weekend!”

@mathowie someone told me they could built ▻https://t.co/prKOQJiKjr in a weekend and I had the pleasure of saying I built it in an hour
— Rob Beschizza (@Beschizza) March 3, 2017

Better, it turns out there’s a largely unsung group of web developers who’ve each independently created much the same thing. Check out all of these minimal publishing hosts, each much like txt.fyi but each with its own distinctive flavor:

txti.es is plain and perfect. Unlike txt.fyi it allows post editing for the duration of your browser session. Barry T. Smith made it with Adam Newbold to provide “fast web pages for everybody,” especially those with poor internet and low-end devices. (Newbold also made motherfuckingwebsite.com, itself among the many inspirations for txt.fyi; see also Drew McConville’s bettermotherfuckingwebsite for an idea of what a line of CSS can do for you.)

Said So is “a simple, anonymous, non-indexed, non-searchable microblogging platform,” but with share links, and stylish typography. Writes author Apostolos Pantsiopoulos: "Anonymity was the first thing that interested me. Then after I watched the documentary “helvetica” I was inspired to create a minimal posting service that removes all the unnecessary clutter and deliver the message as emphasized as possible, using a font that has this “authority” effect on people."

Bold.io is a focused-writing platform on the web, with an eye toward fiction. Beautiful, well-crafted web design and functionality creates a native app-like experience. It has user accounts and the HTML is relatively heavy. There’s cool weirdness like ambient sounds (cafe, storm, bonfire, forest, Hogwarts, Castle Black) and a “Hemingway assistant” that nags you when you use adverbs or the passive voice.

Publish.li, by Andrew Chilton, is a nice balance between just-publish-it simplicity and optional features. There are secret Page IDs to allow later editing without logging in or issuing cookies. There are trackers and scripts, but not too many. And it’s open source!

Telegra.ph is a lightweight focused-writing site, but feels more “web-like” than app-like—a good thing, if you catch my meaning. It allows image uploads and you can edit posts. It’s basically perfect: it’s probably what you want if you find txt.fyi too limited but don’t want to sign up for anything.

Write.as Another in the focus-writer vein. You can create accounts and it makes it very easy to do so. It’s not quite so simple as Bold.io or Telegra.ph, but makes it very easy to push your deathless words on to social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Typed has rich text controls and images and an adorable 1990s look and feel. Author xojoc writes that the main feature is the lack of features: “I wanted an online tool with which it was dead simple to share thoughts and ideas.” Like txt.fyi it accepts Markdown. You can set an edit password for each post. An idea list is built in!

Talk To Aliens In Real Time, inspired by the Arecibo message, places your anonymous postings within the fictional context of being sent into deep space to communicate with beings from other worlds.

Binary Task is a minimal “associative matrix” with user accounts and comment threads on your otherwise pleasingly rudimentary postings.

Oh by is a “unversal shortener” that turns “a long message into a short, recognizable code.” Like txt.fyi, it puts your posting at a URL defined by an easily written-down code, but it also displays a security hash and has some useful options geared toward semi-private sharing or use as a memory aid.

The encrypted page maker, by David Partson, is perhaps the most brutalist of the lot, but also a bit more complex and powerful, with lots of options on the posting form and the ability to use javascript and CSS. If txt.fyi and most of the items here are simplified oldschool Pastebins, this one’s kind of like an oldschool Codepen or JSFiddle.

At Ephemeral P2P Hosting, your postings will self-destruct along quantum principles: your “page will live as long as someone, somewhere is viewing it. Once the last person closes their browser, the page will be gone.” (more info)

Greg Taff’s Rich Text Editor is a bit of an odd-man-out here as it isn’t a publishing platform at all, but rather a perfect implementation of rich text editing on the web. It makes me want to implement “richtext.fyi” next!

The OG example for all these shenanigans might be Lowbrow.com, which disappeared at some point in the Web 2.0 era.

I feel a sense of kinship with the people who made these; most of these sites are way more useful than txt.fyi, even if none of them have !hacker mode. (Some of them include trackers and such too.)

The trick here is simple: offer the one feature you do want and impose none of the features you don’t. Instead, these sites feel like secrets hidden in plain sight—and they let you make more of them.

That said, usage of txt.fyi has already trailed off somewhat. It offers a form of techno-hiraeth, a nostalgic sense of place carefully coded to alleviate present-day anguish but fundamentally unable to meet its true needs. If lots of people are to love indie-web participation, rather than simply be pleased it apparently still exists, more features are needed.

Txt.fyi, though, should stay the publishing “toy” that it is. Instead, I’ve been working on something fancier. It’ll be similarly uncompromising about being free of trackers and social network hooks and other third-party gunk, but will have identities and more fun stuff. And an exciting 16-color palette. (If you want to reward me handsomely for this or txt.fyi, you can donate to this patreon I just set up.)

This could have easily become a rambling manifesto, or a kind of web dogme indie credibility-policing bullet list, but that stuff’s pointless. The point is simple: love and trust the indie web and don’t let it die.

THEFT: A History of Music / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/02/25/copyright-copywrong.html

https://i2.wp.com/media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Theftcover-1.jpg

It’s been seven years since we previewed Theft: A History of Music, a comic book that explains the complicated history of music, borrowing, control and copyright, created by a dynamic duo of witty copyright law professors from Duke University as a followup to the greatest law-comic ever published: the book was due out years ago, but the untimely and tragic death of illustrator Keith Aoki delayed it — until today.

Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle, Theft’s authors are a pair of white-hot, brilliant, activist law-professors whose wit, passion, and compassion shine through on every page. If you’re a regular Boing Boing reader, you’ll know their work: Jenkins and Boyle produce the essential Public Domain Day roundups of the materials that we should be getting free access to in the USA, save for the nonsensical retroactive extension of copyright in 1998; they co-produced the free, open intellectual property casebook, which saves law students (and the curious) $160 by replacing a less-good, proprietary version. On his own, Boyle coined the term “Information Ecology” and wrote “The Public Domain,” an essential, witty, important defense of the commons from which we all draw.

#domaine_publique #musique

Diner “overwhelmed with customers” after Michelin star awarded by mistake / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/02/19/diner-overwhelmed-with-custo.html

http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/dimer.jpg

Véronique Jacquet, who runs the café, said it had a regular clientèle of local tradesmen. “Suddenly, we were rushed off our feet. Reporters were coming in and then my son phoned me from Paris, where he lives. He almost died laughing.”

Watching Wikipedia’s extinction event from a distance
▻https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/watching-wikipedias-extinction-event-from-a-distance/95045 #Wikipedia

Western Union fined $586 million for colluding with organized crime / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/01/23/western-union-fined-586-milli.html

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bf/Western_Union_logo.svg/800px-Western_Union_logo.svg.png

Forbes article:

In a statement from the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission on Thursday, authorities describe insufficient or poorly enforced policies that resulted in the funneling of hundreds of millions of dollars in proceeds from illegal gambling, fraud and drug and human trafficking.

...

In one case, illegal immigrants from China sent money back to the people who smuggled them across the border. With the help of employees, the payments were structured so that they didn’t trigger reporting requirements under the Bank Secrecy Act, say authorities.

In another example, Western Union processed hundreds of thousands of transactions for an international scam, wherein fraudsters directed people to send money in order to claim a prize or help a relative. Western Union employees often processed the payments in return for a cut of the proceeds, say authorities.

From CFO:

Wifredo A. Ferrer, the U.S. Attorney in Miami, said the misconduct reflected “a flawed corporate culture that failed to provide a checks and balances approach to combat criminal practices.”

“Western Union’s failure to implement proper controls and discipline agents that violated compliances policies enabled the proliferation of illegal gambling, money laundering and fraud-related schemes,” he added.

#banques #escrocs

James O’Keefe caught trying to bribe protesters to riot at Trump inauguration / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/01/13/james-okeefe-caught-trying-t.html

James O’Keefe is the Breitbart-affiliated fraudster and fake news pioneer who staged the hoax videos about Acorn and Planned Parenthood that disrupted the last two election cycles; his MO is to dress up in disguises and then attempt to trick progressives into saying damning things on camera (he’s not very good at it, having been rumbled by both CNN and Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky).

Lefties at The Undercurrent and Americans Take Action believed that O’Keefe would strike again by trying to entrap them into appearing to take bribes to riot at the inauguration, so they staged a “counter-sting” and recorded the whole interaction, which they’ve now released.

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WDWLeRKc2Y

#USA #propagande #false_flag

How defunding Planned Parenthood killed Star Wars’ Old Republic / Boing Boing
▻http://boingboing.net/2017/01/05/how-defunding-planned-parentho.html

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Of course, talking about this in public has flushed out the trumpist crowd who hate lady-parts so much they’ll defend Revenge of the Sith rather than giving them their due.

If there were any women’s healthcare available, there is no reason why Padme wouldn’t take advantage of it. For one thing, her husband is flipping the fuck out over her possibly dying in childbirth. Why didn’t she visit a doctor in an attempt to soothe his fevered mind?

Even if access to reproductive health services is limited in this galaxy—as in ours—Padme is probably the woman best situated to get it. She’s a sitting Senator residing in Coruscant, the capital of the galaxy. She’s clearly a woman of means, given that she has three elaborate costume changes for every hour of the day. Padme is hanging out in a posh penthouse in the most populous city in the galaxy: if there’s medical assistance out there, she can get it.

Furthermore, there is no bar to Padme and Anakin visiting the OB/GYN together. Although their marriage is a secret, Padme doesn’t hide the fact that she’s pregnant. She still attends Senate sessions, and when Obi-Wan visits her, her baby bump is evident and he even comments on it. Anakin has plenty of innocuous reasons to hang around Padme and even accompany her to a doctor’s office. She’s a Senator, and he’s a super magic law enforcement agent frequently assigned to protect politicians (including her, in Episode II).

And if the couple were still super paranoid about visiting the doctor together, she could just go by herself. It’s not like “ANAKIN SKYWALKER IS THE SECRET FATHER OF MY BABY” is written on her cervix.

Definitely geek :-)

Why are the data-formats in Star Wars such an awful mess? Because filmmakers make movies about filmmaking / Boing Boing
▻https://boingboing.net/2017/01/04/why-are-the-data-formats-in-st.html

Data-storage is one of the steepest technology curves: the cost of storing data is in freefall, as is the bulkiness and unreliablity of media. From floppies to hard drives to SDDs to RAIDs to cloud-based distributed filesystems, storing data is one of the most reliably advancing dimensions of technology.
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There will be outliers — someone drops dead suddenly and their laptop is tied up in probate for a decade before anyone can try to recover their data — but for most of, the destiny of our data will be to move from live, self-healing media to live, self-healing media, without any time at rest in near-line or offline storage, the home of bitrot.
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But this isn’t the experience of the film industry: they are one of the few industries for whom data is still a hard-to-solve problem. High resolution cameras with high framerates capture so much data — and often on location — that the bulk of it is inevitably offline for some or all of the production process. And even the biggest internal servers struggle to store all the intermediate data of a finished film — all the test-renders and uncompressed raw footage and so on — meaning that filmmakers are often at the mercy of getting drives out of vaults and plugged into a server somewhere. The distributed nature of film-work, from location shooting to VFX partners in other cities or other continents, means that film-makers routinely struggle with long file-transfer lags that the rest of us have been largely spared for the past decade or so.

It’s not a coincidence that there are a lot of novels written about the frustrations of novelists, nor is it a coincidence that filmmakers’ tales of dramatic technological struggle look a lot like the kinds of problem-solving that filmmakers go through all day long.

#film #société #technologie

Automated book-culling software drives librarians to create fake patrons to “check out” endangered titles / Boing Boing
►http://boingboing.net/2017/01/02/automated-book-culling-softwar.html

Two employees at the East Lake County Library created a fictional patron called Chuck Finley — entering fake driver’s license and address details into the library system — and then used the account to check out 2,361 books over nine months in 2016, in order to trick the system into believing that the books they loved were being circulated to the library’s patrons, thus rescuing the books from automated purges of low-popularity titles.

Library branch supervisor George Dore was suspended for his role in the episode; he said that he was trying to game the algorithm because he knew that these books would come back into vogue and that his library would have to spend extra money re-purchasing them later. He said that other libraries were doing the same thing.

This is datification at its worst: as Cennydd Bowles writes, the pretense that the data can tell you what to optimize as well as how to optimize it makes systems incoherent — it’s the big data version of “teaching to the test.” The library wants to be efficient at stocking books its patrons will enjoy, so it deploys software to measure popularity, and raises the outcomes of those measurements over the judgment of the skilled professionals who acquire and recommend books, who work with patrons every day. Instead of being a tool, the data becomes a straightjacket: in order to get the system to admit the professional judgment of librarians, the librarians have to manufacture data to put their thumbs on its scales. The point of the library becomes moving books by volume (which is only one of the several purposes of a library), and “the internal framing of users shifts. Employees start to see their users not as raison d’être but as subjects, as means to hit targets. People become masses, and in the vacuum of values and vision, unethical design is the natural result. Anything that moves the needle is fair game: no one is willing to argue with data.”

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Healthcare workers prioritize helping people over information security (disaster ensues)
▻https://boingboing.net/2016/06/28/healthcare-workers-prioritize.html
dont la source est :
▻http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sws/pubs/ksbk15-draft.pdf