News

This is a great profile from the Washington Post on Devon Henry, the contractor who took on the city of Richmond’s contract to remove their confederate statues, and the challenges he faced along the way.

This is a hell of a speech from New Zealand’s PM on the Christchurch shooting. We cannot know your grief, but we can walk with you at every stage. We can.

Swatting is the disturbing practice of calling in an anonymous police report in order to trigger a SWAT response to a person’s home. It’s been in the news more and more recently, with a number of prominent feminists in the tech industry being targeted in particular.

Found via Warren Ellis: The AFP is reporting a story in which the Egyptian government is struggling to dispel a widespread rumor of an SMS "from unknown foreign quarters" that kills.

Well, there has been a whole lot of hubbub on the net regarding Flickr’s announcement of an upcoming policy change, which if you are not a Flickr user you probably haven’t seen as it is only internally displayed.

Via Boing Boing: I’m a little late on this one, especially since I took my unplanned blog vacation. If you haven’t seen the footage of Jon Stewart intellectually pounding conservative pundit Bill Bennett, you are missing out.

If you haven’t heard about Stephen Colbert’s scathing performance at the Annual Correspondent’s Dinner, I’m not surprised. As near as I can tell, the traditional media isn’t really covering it in much detail.

Via /.: Wisconsin may soon become the first state to ban the practice of mandatory microchip implants in human beings. State Representative Marlin Schneider has authored a proposal that will make it illegal for governments and companies to require RFID chips, or implanting them in employees without their knowledge.

Phillips, the entertainment technology corporation, has recently applied for a patent on a new software for your digital receiver/recorder that will force you to watch commercials. The software looks for digital flags which would be embedded in the broadcast that will lock your channel in place when commercials begin, restricting you for flipping to another station during the ads.

The Bush administration has a new version of DMCA to offer you, and it’s so much worse. In this article, Declan McCullagh of CNET news describes the Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006 that the administration plans to propose via their lackey Representative Lamar Smith.

A recent article in Wired News discusses the difficulties podcasting is creating for NPR. With free podcasts finally becoming more common for NPR programming, more and more listeners are turning to them in order to listen to their shows whenever they want, and in some cases to avoid pledge drives.

Via Warren Ellis: I am disturbed. Charikot, Dolakha, March 29 - The birth of a bizarre-looking baby in Charikot, the headquarters of Dolakha district, on Wednesday, drew a huge number of onlookers to witness the astonishing sight.

Via Digg: Keith and Chemda of the Keith and the Girl podcast recently received a copy of the Podshow contract via an anonymous listener before they entered into a non-disclosure agreement with the folks at Podshow.

Via Warren Ellis: This is a sort of exciting development in the South Dakota abortion story. The president of the Oglala Sioux tribe of South Dakota, Cecilia Fire Thunder, is so upset that she has stated she intends to set up a Planned Parenthood clinic upon her personal land within the boudries of the reservation where South Dakota’s government has no jurisdiction.

Via Digg: You absolutely need to read this hilarious article about a drunken rumble-that-almost-was between employees of ATI and NVIDIA employees at the CeBIT conference. It appears to have started after the ATI folks showed up during an NVIDIA and started hitting on one of the female NVIDIA employees.

I just read an article in Wired about a robot designed by the Virginia Military Institute that can troll around your yard recognize and collect ticks. The ticks are then placed inside the robots denim skirt, which ticks cling to naturally.

If you’ve been following the news carefully you have already heard that the South Dakota senate has passed a bill to ban abortion except in cases where the life of the mother is in danger.

I just read an article that the governor of my adopted state has just signed into law a bill that will require future touch screen voting systems to be open-source software.

I just found an entry on Boing Boing that informs us that Patricia Santangelo, the mother who refused to settle out of court when the RIAA’s goons came to her door.

Scientists have finally captured footage of a living giant squid! I’ve been waiting for this for years. For those of you not familiar with the significance of this discovery, while we have known of giant squids as well as seeing the wounds from their attacks on whales and have occasionally discovered dead ones that have drifted to shore, up until this point no one had succeeded in seeing one live.