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The Anne Frank Fonds, which holds the Dutch copyright, sued. They argued that because standard VPNs easily allow users to mask their true IP address and spoof a Belgian location, the scholarly website was effectively communicating the protected work to the Dutch public.

'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark Anne Frank copyright ruling | TechRadar

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I considered sending Jeff another DM: “please stop Google from signing the deal if you can.” But that seemed… not likely to do much. “What spurs people like Jeff to action?” I thought. Moral stakes: already present. Sense of ownership: not present. I couldn’t own the project because I had no direct power. As best I could tell, Jeff truly was one of the few people with both the power and inclination to oppose a deal. I wanted him to feel empowered and to know that gdm workers backed him up.

Why I Left Google DeepMind

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Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.

Hobo Ethics - Futility Closet

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In a 2001 interview with Howard Stern, Rollins said that a home visit by Rick Rubin attracted some unwanted attention to his home. The producer was keen to hear the Rollins Band's latest recording The End of Silence a few months before its release, and duly arrived in a Rolls-Royce and brandished a mobile phone. "It's a crack neighbourhood – it's pretty intense," said Rollins. "I loved that neighbourhood. [Rick] comes over with that huge Rolls, he leaves my place. This long-haired guy with an early cellphone in his back pocket; the whole neighbourhood is checking him out. I wrote in my journal that night: 'My place is going to get popped.'

"The senseless, random act of violence against someone so full of life and innocence was mind-blowing, and I hated Los Angeles for a long time after that." How the murder of Henry Rollins' friend inspired two songs on Sonic Youth's 1992 album Dirty | Louder

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If this graph represented stock market prices, a new Olympic record or a medical test result, it would dominate the headlines. Instead, it is being met largely with silence. That silence should concern us just as much as the graph itself.

The Graph That Should Be Front-Page News

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When I see a statement like that from a prospective manager, it says a number of things, not the least of which is “this person has no idea what they are doing”. A lot of reasonably good coders have never seen an example of a good manager, and have all kinds of weird ideas about what management is.

Zig Creator Calls Spade a Spade, Anthropic Blows Smoke

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Disguising itself as the innocuously-titled “Android Developer Verifier” (ADV) process, this trojan horse runs surreptitiously in the background as a system service with full root privileges, quietly awaiting an activation signal. The service cannot be blocked, disabled, or removed. Unlike a commonplace bit of malware, this extraordinary strain won’t be detected and neutralized by Play Protect (the malware scanning and remediation service that is installed on all Android Certified devices). In fact, Play Protect is itself the vector through which this virus is transmitted and installed.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Malware | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository

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Yesterday evening, the United States held its “Freedom 250” celebration – paid for by private companies, organised by the three American embassies in Brussels, marking the 250th anniversary of the US. It took place in Parc du Cinquantenaire – the city's largest park, a few hundred metres from the European Commission. We went there to cover it. We put questions to senior politicians, including the US ambassador to Belgium, Bill White. After attempting to ask a question, we were pulled out of the event by police, had our IDs confiscated and were then questioned – before the embassy instructed the police to escort us off the grounds entirely. The officers, we later learned, had been told that Samuel was an ”active threat.”

The US ambassador had Belgian police stop our reporting | The European Correspondent

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The Trump administration attacking the right to publish or report information is a given at this point. The president has threatened journalists for everything from questioning the wisdom of his failed war with Iran to touching the peeled lining of his renovated reflecting pool. Tantrums like those may now feel routine, but this week marked a new front in Trump’s war on information: Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for transporting a box of zines he didn’t even write. He’s one of eight defendants sentenced on Tuesday to a combined 450 years — the first prison sentences against so-called “antifa” handed down under the framework of NSPM-7, President Donald Trump’s sweeping “counterterrorism” memorandum to clamp down on dissent from the left.

30-Year Prison Sentence In Prairieland Zine Case Is a Free Speech Crisis

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It is as if one of the unwritten laws of his thought processes is: If reasoning and common sense should diverge, then… so much the worse for common sense! What, in the long run, is common sense, other than common?

Essentials - Futility Closet

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Despite this, Judge O'Connor rejected Estrada's position, stating that the act of moving the box of zines was significant in the context of the wider events unfolding during the riot and was considered in sentencing.

Anti-ICE Activist Gets 30 Years for Moving a Box of Antifascist Literature, Longer Than Many Jan. 6 Rioters Received | IBTimes UK

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Freud observed that people who have much in common can still fight bitterly because they grow overly sensitive to the disagreements remaining between them. He called this the “narcissism of small differences.

Shell Attack - Futility Closet

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Political operatives at the NIH passed around lists of words that grants weren’t allowed to use—in either applications or existing, funded projects. Program managers across the NIH and the NSF were told to ask affected researchers whether they’d care to change the language in their research descriptions or risk losing their funding. Some researchers whose grants Norton managed at the NIDDKD called her to say they wanted to preemptively change the language in their grant applications—before they’d been dinged. Norton complained so much that she was placed on administrative leave, although she has since been reinstated.

America’s compact between science and politics is broken | Scientific American

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Rice is a critical staple among the world’s poor, so scientists improved rice. They added beta-carotene, the thing that makes carrots orange and that the body turns into vitamin A. The new rice cooks and tastes the same, but it’s yellow. They called it Golden Rice and licensed it for free to any farmer earning under $10,000 a year. It has been ready since the mid-2000s. Today it grows nowhere. The reason is that it is a GMO. Environmental groups, led by Greenpeace, fought it in country after country for two decades.

A blocked GMO rice could have saved 100,000 children. The same tech makes pineapples pink.

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> "Can you explain why it makes economic sense for landlords in high-priced metros to keep commercial real estate empty for years at a time? … I understand there's a lot of social pressure on landlords to keep rents high or face the wrath of their neighbors, but how can that pressure still work after ten years of losses?" The short answer is both simple and surprising: in many cases, lowering the rent on a building will force the bank to foreclose on it. Foreclosure is very bad for both the bank and the operator, so both parties would rather “extend and pretend,” leaving the building vacant while they wait and hope for the market to change. This seems absurd. Surely everyone would be better off it they just lowered the rent and got some use out of the building — getting some rent must be better than getting no rent, right?

Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? - by Andrew Burleson

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When the Chinese government wanted access to user data, Apple complied, but when the EU parliament voted for their citizens to be able to choose how to share their own data, that put Apple on a “war footing.”

Michael Tsai - Blog - No Siri AI in EU

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Suppose that I am driving at midnight through some desert. My car breaks down. You are a stranger, and the only other driver in this desert. I manage to stop you, and I offer you a great reward if you drive me to my home. I cannot pay you now, but I promise to do so when we reach my home. … If you drive me to my home, it would be worse for me if I pay you the promised reward. Since I know that I never do what will be worse for me, I know that I would break my promise. Given my inability to lie convincingly, you know this too. You do not believe my promise. I am stranded in the desert throughout the night.

Parfit's Hitchhiker - Futility Closet