In an open letter to the EU and European national officials who are negotiating the final form of the new Copyright Directive (by all accounts, a hot mess), some of… Read the rest of the article: Europe's biggest sports leagues and movie studios disavow #Article13, say it will give #BigTech even more control
Timothy from Creative Commons writes, "In the US beginning Jan 1, 2019–after a devastating 20 year drought brought on by the infamous 1998 'Mickey Mouse Protection Act.' Creators, commons advocates,… Read the rest of the article: On January 1, America gets its public domain back: join us at the Internet Archive on Jan 25 to celebrate
Laurie Penny (previously) got sent on the 2018 CoinsBank Blockchain Cruise — a four-day cruise filled with "starry-eyed techno-utopians and sketchy-ass crypto-grifters" who solved the fact that there almost no… Read the rest of the article: What it's like to be a woman reporter on a cryptocurrency cruise where nearly all the other women are sex-workers
Peter writes, "ThingsCon, our Berlin-based non-profit for a more responsible IoT, launches a trustmark for IoT – the Trustable Technology Mark. Cory gave some input to it a while back… Read the rest of the article: A Trustmark for IoT: separating the Internet of Shit from the Internet of Things
Pro Office Calculator is obviously just a normal (Mac/Win/Lin) calculator, right? Wrong. I love this shit. (via Waxy)
This year, the people of Wisconsin pronounced their verdict on the GOP legislators who seized control over the state through gerrymandering and voter suppression: overwhelmingly, they voted to replace those… Read the rest of the article: See you in court: amid protests, shameless Wisconsin GOP neuters the incoming governor in an all-night, lame-duck session
Damian Collins chairs the UK Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee; it was he who ordered the Parliamentary Serjeant at Arms to drag a visiting US tech executive… Read the rest of the article: British Member of Parliament publishes 250 pages of damning internal Facebook documents that had been sealed by a US court
From 1955 to 2015, John D. Dingell served in the US House of Representatives, making him the longest-serving Congressman in the country's history: now, in the Atlantic, he warns that… Read the rest of the article: The longest-serving Congressman in US history proposes a four fixes for American democracy
They're burying George HW Bush today and even before they planted him, the whitewashing began: we've heard an awful lot about how kind he was to his service dog and… Read the rest of the article: RIP, George HW Bush: a mass-murderer and war-criminal
Long before Quora admitted to being breached and losing 100,000,000 million users' account data, it had disqualified itself from being used, by dint of its impulse to hoard knowledge and… Read the rest of the article: Not just breaches: Never, ever use Quora
In the Occult Defence Agency Budgeting Simulator, you are placed in charge of the budget for an organisation whose mission is "defending the United Kingdom from paranormal threats. Vampire covens,… Read the rest of the article: The Occult Defence Agency Budgeting Simulator: a text adventure that pits monster-slaying against austerity
Poor people were not the primary target of Obamacare; as a group, their care is more likely to be "non-compensated" (trips to the emergency room while classed as "indigent" and… Read the rest of the article: Obamacare study: 25% decline in home delinquencies among newly insured poor people
In 2011, Europeans rose up over ACTA, the misleadingly named "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement," which created broad surveillance and censorship regimes for the internet. They were successful in large part thanks… Read the rest of the article: Poland rejects the EU's copyright censorship plans, calls it #ACTA2
There are dozens of free "peoplefinder" sites that buy up commercial databases and combine them with other sources to make your home address searchable. You can find instances where this… Read the rest of the article: A tip to keep your home address off the internet
When a rightsholder complains to Google about a website infringing its copyright, Google will generally delist the site, but allow the site's owner to contest the removal through a process… Read the rest of the article: Malware authors have figured out how to get Google to do "irreversible takedowns" of the sites they compete with
LA's John of Beans makes shells with teeth! Choose from the Smooth Shell With Lowers and the Snail with Molars (both $90) or a Mussel and Barnacle with Molars ($35)… Read the rest of the article: Shells with teeth
Facebook's walled garden/roach motel strategy made it progressively harder and harder for charities to reach supporters on the web, driving them within Facebook's confines, where they devoted thousands of hours… Read the rest of the article: Facebook lured charities to its platform, then abandoned them once they got hacked
8 years after Scott Walker and his Koch-backed GOP used voter suppression and gerrymandering to steal control over Wisconsin, Wisconsites finally pried his crooked ass out of the governor's chair,… Read the rest of the article: Thousands of Wisconsinites turn out to protest outgoing Republicans' plan to seize power after electoral defeat
From the beginning, Facebook's strategy was to build a walled-garden-cum-roach-motel: content and users checked in, but they never checked out, so over time, everyone and everything was captured within the… Read the rest of the article: Facebook made itself indispensable to media companies, "pivoted to video," changed its mind, and triggered a industrywide mass extinction event
When MP3s conquered music, it depended on three key technologies: CD ripping software, file-sharing software, and MP3 playing software, primarily Winamp.
