Aestetix sez, "2600 Magazine has hosted the biennial Hackers On Planet Earth conference since 1994. However, for 2020 the host hotel, the Hotel Pennsylvania, has tripled the fee charged to the conference. Rather than raising ticket prices and making the event inaccessible to all but the rich, HOPE is reaching out to the community to help solve the crisis." Read the rest

Apparently July 17 is National Tattoo Day (it's also my birthday, which means I spend it offline, not paying attention to the internet); to celebrate, the NYPL rounded up a gallery of its workers' literary tattoos. Read the rest

NYC Mesh -- the meshing, neutral, community based wireless ISP in New York City -- has undergone a drastic expansion beyond its initial supernode. Read the rest

Queens is the most populous district in the USA, with a population (2.359m) larger than many states; the District Attorney of Queens wields incredible power, and now that power has shifted dramatically. Read the rest

Tenants in New York City have reached a settlement with their landlord requiring the landlord to install actual locks with actual keys on demand, rather than insisting that all tenants use locks from Latch, the leading Internet of Things "smart lock" vendor, whose products conduct fine-grained surviellance on their users, which the company reserves the right to share with third parties. Read the rest

Next weekend, PEN America is throwing its World Voices Festival, including a McSweeney's-sponsored panel on algorithmic bias called The Bigot in the Machine, featuring poet/media activist Malkia Cyril, and Equality Labs founder Thenmozhi Soundararajan, moderated by investigative journalist Adrianne Jeffries: it's on May 11 at 2:30 at Cooper Union's Frederick P. Rose Auditorium. Tickets are $20. Read the rest

Last week's NYC book launch for Radicalized took the form of a fantastic conversation with the journalist Julia Angwin; the Strand folks were kind enough to video it and they've posted it to Youtube. Julia is incredibly smart and a wonderful interviewer, and we had some great Q&A as well. Read the rest

Generative Adversarial Networks use a pair of machine-learning models to create things that seem very realistic: one of the models, the "generator," uses its training data to make new things; and the other, the "discerner," checks the generator's output to see if it conforms to the model. Read the rest

NYC punk band The New York Rats is launching their new album on Sunday: it's a heavy vinyl LP with amazing sleeve art by Andrea Sicco; the album itself is Ramones-y, Husker-Du-ish uptempo punk that I've had on heavy rotation all week: it's 7:30PM on at Our Wicked Lady, 153 Morgan Ave, Brooklyn. Read the rest

Whether you love them or hate them, rideshares like Uber and Lyft have become a daily part of life for millions of New Yorkers. These app-based services make it easy to pay for your ride, but while the privacy cost isn’t always as clear, it’s about to get a lot larger. These apps have tracked our movements since they launched, but as of this month, the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) started tracking us too. Read the rest

The Sackler family (previously) is one of the richest in the world, and if you've heard of them, it's probably because their family name adorns so many art galleries, museums, and academic institutions around the world: but they way they got that money is less-well-known. Read the rest

After the 2020 census, the nation's electoral districts will be redrawn and it's a widely accepted fact that New York City will lose a seat, despite its growth since the 2010 census. Read the rest

Amazon is already known for providing dangerous working conditions, anti-union activities and treating their blue collar workforce like a disposable commodity. Since they're already screwing folks at work, it must have seemed like a natural progression to screw them at home too.

From Politico:

Amazon’s plans to expand into Long Island City may cost Mayor Bill de Blasio — and New York City — approximately 1,500 units of affordable housing.

Two sites that will house the future offices of the e-commerce giant were originally intended for residential development, before Amazon chose them in a nationwide contest for its new headquarters.

Most — if not all — of that intended housing is now off the table.

According to Politico, the 14.7 acres of land Amazon's plopping out of their grossly subsidized new headquarters complex in Long Island City is owned by a company called Plaxall. Before Amazon came along, Plaxall was gearing up to ask New York City administrators for permission to build close to 5,000 new homes on their property. 1,250 of these homes would have been earmarked for use by low and middle-income earning families. In addition to this, Amazon's NYC complex is also eating up turf from a second company, TF Cornerstone: they were ready to build a complex that would contain 250 low-income housing units on the dirt where Amazon is building their new HQ. That's not going to happen anymore, either.

Greed is nothing, if not consistent.

Image via Wikipedia Commons Read the rest

Big library systems struggling with the task of sorting interbranch requests for distribution on the library's delivery vehicles can buy a $2 million Lyngsoe Systems Compact Cross Belt Sorter, whose conveyor takes precisely hand-placed materials down a line of bins, scanning each item and tipping it into a bin destined for the right branch. Read the rest

The Bklyn BookMatch is a free service that matches readers with custom lists of recommendations: fill in a webform with "the titles, authors, and/or types of books you enjoy, and why" as well as "movies, TV, games, and other interests" and any books you dislike, as well as format and age preferences and within two weeks, a librarian will send you a customized reading list that you can check out of the Brooklyn library (or your own local library -- the service seems to be open to everyone!). (via Kottke) Read the rest

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS STORY, AND WILL BE UPDATED. Authorities in New York are holding a press conference on 7 or more suspicious packages, some of which contained pipe bombs, sent to political targets, mostly in New York state. On the face of it, the coordinated attack appears to be an attempt to assassinate up to 7 different perceived political enemies of President Donald Trump. Read the rest

"Today is kind of a sucky day," Village Voice owner Peter Barbey told newspaper staff in a phone call Friday. "Due to, basically, business realities, we're going to stop publishing Village Voice new material.” Read the rest