pelespirit

An old one, but seems appropriate for what I've seen start ramping up lately.

The National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which stored police records documenting misconduct, is now unavailable, the Washington Post first reported.

The US justice department also confirmed the database’s elimination in a statement issued online.

“User agencies can no longer query or add data to the NLEAD,” the statement read. “The US Department of Justice is decommissioning the NLEAD in accordance with federal standards.”

I think both sides of the aisle would love it, he wouldn't have to go to stupid meetings or handle anything, and he would go out with a huge fan base.

You're an old dude with plumbing problems, why are you still working?

From the article:

Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica and other publications such as Wired and The New Yorker, was joined in the lawsuit by The Atlantic, Forbes, The Guardian, Insider, the Los Angeles Times, McClatchy, Newsday, The Plain Dealer, Politico, The Republican, the Toronto Star, and Vox Media.

From another article:

The founders sold Reddit to Condé Nast for $10M less than a year after launch (in 2006). Ohanian and Huffman stayed on for a few years after the acquisition but, eventually, both went on to start other projects. Neither of them would be gone for long.

So, does Condé Nast own Reddit? Not exactly. Condé Nast owned Reddit until 2011 when Reddit became an “independent subsidiary” of Advance Publications—the company that owns Condé Nast, among others.

https://www.makeuseof.com/who-owns-reddit-company-founders/

Congressional Democrats were barred from entering the Department of Education's headquarters on Friday morning as they tried investigate billionaire Elon Musk’s “DOGE” takeover of sensitive data within.

“They’ve called armed federal officers to the scene. We aren’t dangerous. We are here to represent our people. To defend public education,” Frost wrote in another post to Bluesky. “This is an authoritarian regime.”

The United Kingdom has issued a secret order to Apple. It wants the corporation to build a backdoor for Britain’s security services that it could use to access the cloud accounts of any iPhone user across the planet.

As first reported by The Washington Post, Britain issued the order in secret last month. The U.K. isn’t looking to root around in a specific account for a specific security reason. No, it wants free access to all a user’s encrypted material, full stop. The U.K is making the demand under a 2016 law called the Investigatory Powers Act, derisively known as the Snooper’s Charter.

Plastic levels are tricky to measure. To get the full picture, researchers used several different methods to measure MNPs in 91 brain samples collected from people who died as far back as 1997. The measurements all pointed to substantial increases over the years. From 2016 to 2024, the median concentration of MNPs increased by about 50 percent, from 3,345 micrograms per gram to 4,917 micrograms per gram.

“The levels of plastic being detected in the brain are almost unbelievable,” says study coauthor Andrew West, a neuroscientist at Duke University. “In fact, I didn’t believe it until I saw all the data” from multiple tests with different samples.

A Florida mom is suing a company that vets guests for Airbnb after she says she was banned from the short-term rental platform over a pair of past felony convictions that have since been expunged.

The mistake, which the lawsuit argues never should have happened, left the woman unable to take her daughter to a series of potentially lucrative rodeo competitions, and prevented the girl — whose winnings provide the family’s main source of income — from qualifying for the barrel racing national championships.

January's list includes papers on using lasers to reveal Peruvian mummy tattoos; the physics of wobbly spears and darts; how a black hole changes over time; and quantum "cat states" for error correction in quantum computers, among other fascinating research.

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will "eat just about anything that finds its way inside."

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It's not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an "infinite maze" of static files with no exit links, where they "get stuck" and "thrash around" for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That's likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.