“This is textbook compelled speech,” U.S. District Judge Alan Albright ruled in halting enforcement of the law. Texas is appealing.

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OP NOTE: This is actually a week old, today 3 judge panel allowed the ban to go into effect. Here's the author's mastodon post about it. though there are few other details

BREAKING: A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit (Elrod, Haynes, Douglas) allows Texas’s book-ban law to go into effect, issuing an administrative stay of the district court ruling enjoining enforcement of the law.
The court gave no reasoning for its order, which is remarkable given that the law has never been allowed to go into effect, so the order — although posed as merely “administrative” — is a ruling, at least temporarily, changing the status of state law.

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On Monday, a federal judge ruled in favor of booksellers who argued that Texas’s new law banning some books from public school libraries and restricting others through an onerous and complicated regime is likely unconstitutional in an opinion that blasted the law and the arguments the state made in its defense.

“[T]his Court has found that READER likely violates the First Amendment by containing an unconstitutional prior restraint, compelled speech, and unconstitutional vagueness,” U.S. District Judge Alan Albright — a Trump appointee to the federal bench — concluded in issuing a preliminary injunction halting state officials from enforcing the law. Texas already announced that it is appealing the decision.

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“To put the scale of the number of books that would need to be rated in perspective, a librarian in San Antonio for Northside ISD testified that six school districts alone had library collections totaling over six million items,“ Albright wrote. There are more than 1,200 school districts in Texas.

Let’s just get this out of the way: Albright cannot believe this law exists. He also cannot believe the arguments the state made in its defense.

Former GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said Monday she thinks former first lady Michelle Obama will be the Democrats’ 2024 nominee, adding that President Biden is “out.” …

A federal appeals court on Monday sided with the Biden administration against the state of Utah in a lawsuit over the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) “good neighbor” rule, which regulates the flow of air pollution across state lines.

In a single-page ruling, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined to stay the EPA rule, writing that the plaintiffs “have not satisfied the stringent requirements for a stay pending court review.” The ruling states that one of the three judges, Judge Justin Walker, would have granted a stay.

The good neighbor rule regulates the air pollution that 24 upwind states may produce. The state of Utah in June sued over the rule, arguing its regulations of Utah’s pollution would harm the state’s economy and cost millions of dollars in upgrades to its coal plants.

The DC Circuit in March dismissed a utility-backed lawsuit against the rule, but in May, another court, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, granted a request for a stay by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R). Another court, the 5th Circuit in New Orleans, stayed the EPA’s rejection of Texas and Louisiana’s plans. In response, the agency postponed implementation in those three states as well as Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi.

A Times analysis shows that increasingly complex oil and gas wells now require astonishing volumes of water to fracture the bedrock and release fossil fuels, threatening America’s fragile aquifers.

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Along a parched stretch of La Salle County, Texas, workers last year dug some 700 feet deep into the ground, seeking freshwater. Millions of gallons of it.

The water wouldn’t supply homes or irrigate farms. It was being used by the petroleum giant BP to frack for fossil fuels. The water would be mixed with sand and toxic chemicals and pumped right back underground — forcing oil and gas from the bedrock.

It was a reminder that to strike oil in America, you need water. Plenty of it.

Today, the insatiable search for oil and gas has become the latest threat to the country’s endangered aquifers, a critical national resource that is already being drained at alarming rates by industrial farming and cities in search of drinking water.

The amount of water consumed by the oil industry, revealed in a New York Times investigation, has soared to record levels. Fracking wells have increased their water usage sevenfold since 2011 as operators have adopted new techniques to first drill downward and then horizontally for thousands of feet. The process extracts more fossil fuels but requires enormous amounts of water.

Together, oil and gas operators reported using about 1.5 trillion gallons of water since 2011, much of it from aquifers, the Times found. Fracking a single oil or gas well can now use as much as 40 million gallons of water or more.

These mega fracking projects, called “monster fracks” by researchers, have become the industry norm. They barely existed a decade ago. Now they account for almost two out of every three fracking wells in Texas, the Times analysis found.

Since 2015, Be My Eyes has worked to connect our 6.9 million volunteers to users to assist them with everyday tasks. Our mission is to make the world more accessible for people who are blind or have low vision, which is why, seven months ago, our team began working with the blind community to incorporate AI into the existing Be My Eyes platform. Since then, over 19,000 blind and low-vision beta testers contributed to the design and function of our new AI feature.

Today we are thrilled to announce that Be My AI is officially entering an open beta phase for iOS users and in coming weeks will be available for hundreds of thousands of Be My Eyes users worldwide.

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Using Be My AI in your everyday life is quick and simple. Once you have access, open the Be My Eyes app, click on the ‘Be My AI’ tab, and take a picture. Be My AI will give you a detailed description about it, and you can chat and ask Be My AI further questions to get more information. If you like what Be My AI described, you can send its response and photo to others, or use its description in social media.

And don’t worry - if Be My AI can’t answer all your questions, if you want to check its results, or if you just need a little more description than Be My AI can provide or crave the magic and humanity of working with people, you still can easily reach one of our dedicated volunteers, just like before. They will always be there, in 150 languages all across the globe.

If you want to learn more about Be My AI and how to use it at its best, we have collected the most common questions (and answers!) in our Help Center. Make sure to check them out!

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A viral TikTok account is doxing ordinary and otherwise anonymous people on the internet using off-the-shelf facial recognition technology, creating content and growing a following by taking advantage of a fundamental new truth: privacy is now essentially dead in public spaces.

The 90,000 follower-strong account typically picks targets who appeared in other viral videos, or people suggested to the account in the comments. Many of the account’s videos show the process: screenshotting the video of the target, cropping images of the face, running those photos through facial recognition software, and then revealing the person’s full name, social media profile, and sometimes employer to millions of people who have liked the videos. There’s an entire branch of content on TikTok in which creators show off their OSINT doxing skills—OSINT being open source intelligence, or information that is openly available online. But the vast majority of them do it with the explicit consent of the target. This account is doing the same, without the consent of the people they choose to dox. As a bizarre aside, the account appears to be run by a Taylor Swift fan, with many of the doxing videos including Swift’s music, and including videos of people at the Eras Tour.

404 Media is not naming the account because TikTok has decided to not remove it from the platform. TikTok told me the account does not violate its policies; one social media policy expert I spoke to said TikTok should reevaluate that position.

The TikTok account, conversations with victims, and TikTok’s own lack of action on the account show that access to facial recognition technology, combined with a cultural belief that anything public is fair game to exploit for clout, now means that all it takes is one random person on the internet to target you and lead a crowd in your direction.

One target told me he felt violated after the TikTok account using facial recognition tech targeted him. Another said they initially felt flattered before “that promptly gave way to worry.” All of the victims I spoke to echoed one general point—this behavior showed them just how exposed we all potentially are simply by existing in public.

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The A. hitleri beetle has been collected to near-extinction by neo-Nazis, sparking a fierce debate among taxonomists over whether to change offensive species names.

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In 1933, amateur entomologist Oskar Scheibel added an unusual insect to his collection. The specimen turned out to be a previously unknown and rare blind cave beetle from Slovenia. The Austrian engineer named it Anophthalmus hitleri. The first word derived from the Greek for “without eyes,” the second from the leader of Nazi Germany at the time, Adolf Hitler.

Over the ensuing decades, many in the taxonomy community objected to using nomenclature linked to the man largely responsible for the Holocaust. Now that name could be changed – but not for the reason you might think.

Some scientists are proposing the change to protect the beetle. They point out that the tiny blind bug has been driven to near extinction by neo-Nazis unlawfully collecting it because of its infamous scientific title.

“It’s an innocent insect,” a Canadian anthropologist wrote last year in the Economist. “Why not end this illegal trade by changing its name?”

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The practice of using objectionable identifications for fauna and flora has been argued over for years by taxonomists – those responsible for naming new species. Some are asking why these identifications are still in use. Others are defending the nomenclature process, saying that making retroactive changes based on personal sentiment would upset the stability of science communication.

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Two years ago, the metaverse was billed as the next big thing - but many in the tech world have already moved on.

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But almost two years on, Zuckerberg has been forced to deny that he is now jettisoning the idea.

"A narrative has developed that we're somehow moving away from focusing on the metaverse," he told investors in April. "So I just want to say upfront that that's not accurate."

On Wednesday the company holds its annual VR event called Meta Connect.

It's a chance, perhaps, for Zuckerberg to again explain his reasoning for taking an extremely profitable social media company and diverting its focus to an extremely unprofitable VR venture.

How unprofitable? Well, the most recent figures from Meta are eye-watering.

Reality Labs - which as the name suggests is Meta's virtual and augmented reality branch - has lost a staggering $21 billion since last year.

Part of the losses reflect long-term investment. Meta wasn't expecting short-term returns. But the worrying fact for the company is that, so far, there is very little evidence that this enormous punt will work.

Horizon Worlds, a game published by Meta, is about as close as the company has got to creating a metaverse.

Users can hop into different settings - cafes, comedy clubs, night clubs, basketball courts - to hang out and play games.

Meta claims it has 300,000 monthly users: tiny when compared to the billions of people on Facebook and Instagram.

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A small update has gone out for Starfield on Xbox Series X|S, Microsoft Store, and Steam. This update addresses some issues with performance and stability as well as a few general gameplay issues. We are continuing to work on a larger update that will add features and improvements that we noted in our last update notes. Thank you so much for your continued feedback and support of Starfield and we look forward to a future with you on this journey.

General

• Characters: Fixed an issue that could cause some characters to not be in their proper location.
• Star Stations: Fixed an issue where Star Stations would be labeled as a player-owned ship.
• Vendors: Addressed an issue that allowed for a vendor’s full inventory to be accessible.

Graphics

• AMD (PC): Resolved an issue that caused star lens flares not to appear correctly AMD GPUs.
• Graphics: Addressed an upscaling issue that could cause textures to become blurry.
• Graphics: Resolved an issue that could cause photosensitivity issues when scrolling through the inventory menu.

Performance and Stability

• Hand Scanner: Addressed an issue where the Hand Scanner caused hitching.
• Various stability and performance improvements to address crashing and freezes.

Ships

• Displays: Fixed an issue that would cause displayed items to disappear when applied to in-ship mannequins.
• Displays: Fixed an issue that would cause items stored in Razorleaf Storage Containers and Weapon Racks to disappear after commandeering another ship.

How a developer hid Pitfall III inside Pitfall II, and how Activision almost made him delete it.

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The story surrounding Pitall II’s second world has taken on mythical proportions – no doubt in part because recollections have faded over the years and much of the documentation is lost. Some claim you have to collect treasures in a certain order to unlock the second half, which is why it’s an Easter egg. You don’t. Some claim that the extra level is hidden in the other versions. It isn’t. The only way to play it is to finish the first half of Pitfall II on an Atari 8-bit computer or the 5200. If you're curious, you can watch the second world unlock in this WorldofLongPlays video (played via an emulator).

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So Mike started to think bigger, convincing himself that if the original game had 256 screens with seven things – “the alligators and whatnot” – he needed to have 256 screens with seven brand-new things. “One was the rabid bat,” he said, and offered in one of many asides during our conversation: “The rabid bat actually has a repeating pattern, all you had to do is study it.”

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“'We can’t have [that], Brad. We are marketing the two products together and they need to have the exact same gameplay. You are going to have to strip that second game out of the product.' I couldn't change his mind, none of my arguments worked. I drove back to the office trying to figure out how I was going to give Mike this terrible news.”

Fregger recalls that he told Mike that "we are going to have the best, damn, Easter egg ever."

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The ending seemed so elaborate compared to other games, I just had to ask Mike about it – who didn’t disappoint and offered another anecdote:

“I wanted the classic snake-charming music [hums the tune]. And so they brought in a musician and composer, named Ed Bogas, who wrote commercial jingles. Dave Crane is a fucking genius, right? His IQ is off the charts! Ed Bogas is another one. The day he came in to do the music for me, he composed four different sets of music while having a conversation with me. He said ‘give me the translation paper’ and then he memorized it and gave me the notes in hex. While creating four other pieces of music. That’s probably the person with the most bandwidth, the most simultaneous processing I ever saw.”

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From September 2024, any games featuring simulated gambling (such as social casino games) will be rated R18+. R18+ is a legally restricted category in Australia, and games rated R18+ cannot be sold to people under 18.

Additionally, the minimum rating for “games containing in-game purchases linked to elements of chance, including paid loot boxes” will be M. Games rated M in Australia are recommended for people over 15, but this is advisory only; M is not a legally restricted category.

The changes will only apply to games that are released from September next year, and will not apply retrospectively.

From September 2024, any games featuring simulated gambling (such as social casino games) will be rated R18+
According to pre-pandemic figures, Australia has the greatest per capita gambling losses in the world, and is a staggering 40 per cent clear of second place.

The introduction of mandatory minimum classifications for gambling-related content was one of the recommendations from a review Australia’s classification regulations that was undertaken in 2020 and published earlier this year.

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If you're in the US and buy a PlayStation 5 console between now and October 20, 2023, you will be entitled to a free PS5 digital game of your choosing. This brand-new deal is eligible for any who will buy or have bought the console since September 20. This could be a great offer for anyone who is picking up a PS5 in the near future (or before Spider-Man 2 exclusively launches on the console), and well worth keeping an eye on.

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