In my post on tech buzzword panic, I briefly mentioned a situation where Dragon Con bizarrely called the police to expel an exhibitor. Bleeding Cool mentions this situation and a somewhat similar one at Fan Expo Canada:
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EFF has run a valuable campaign on the risks of leaking metadata to third parties. If you upload a photo to a public website, for instance, the file might contain information on exactly when and where you took the picture. A stalker can make use of the information, especially if you upload photographs wherever you go. If you make a phone call or text message, the associated metadata may get less privacy protection than the what you said or typed. The US government has claimed that warrantless searches of communication metadata, which might identify the sender, receiver, and time of a message, are OK. Unfortunately, this has led some people to think that metadata themselves (I’m standing by “data” as a plural) are evil.
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Tom Lehrer’s satirical songs are familiar to many of you, I’m sure. Not many of you will have heard of another satirical songwriter, Georg Kreisler, if only because he wrote in German. If you’re American and have heard of him, it’s probably because of the striking similarities between two of his songs and two of Lehrer’s. Let’s take a look at them.
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Just this post, and I should be done for today. A benefit of the migration is that the ActivityPub plugin now works. You can follow this blog from Mastodon or similar services by subscribing to “@blog@garymcgath.com” just as you’d subscribe to any other account. It might not be available on servers that allow only short-form posts.
This is the first post I’ve made since installing ActivityPub, so it serves as a test and means the feed isn’t empty.
One more thing that broke: The RSS feed URL for this blog has changed, and the old one no longer works. The new URL is https://garymcgath.com/blogging/feed. Again, my apologies.
A recent news article reports on a case where a woman acted like a scumbag but was apparently within her First Amendment rights. Everything about it is strange, and everyone seems to be wrong in important ways.
The article says: “Minnesota prosecutors filed misdemeanor disorderly conduct charges Tuesday against a woman accused of using a racist slur against a Black child at a playground — an incident the woman has since used to raise more than $800,000 after she appealed for help with relocating.” The article doesn’t give her exact words, but the linked official document says she used “the N-word” more than once. The charge is engaging “offensive, obscene, abusive, boisterous, or noisy conduct, or in offensive, obscene, or abusive language that would reasonably tend to arouse alarm, anger or resentment in others.”
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The migration of garymcgath.com to the new hosting is complete! Let me know if you see anything weird.
I think I lost all my email subscribers. Sorry. If you didn’t get an email telling you about this post but you came here anyway, fill in your email address in the left sidebar and click “Subscribe.”
I expect to migrate garymcgath.com to new hosting in late August or early September. This may result in downtime and changes in appearance. It could result in broken links and lost content, though I’ll try my best to avoid that.
My tour of the libraries of Rockingham County is now complete! Here’s the Flickr album.
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The Democrats’ rush to beat the Republicans at the gerrymandering game confirms that America is doomed. Even Barack Obama, whom I regarded as having some degree of integrity, has endorsed the scheme. Meanwhile, the Democrats in Congress aren’t even trying to get Trump removed for his many despotic abuses of power. Most of them are avoiding any hint of impeachment because they’re afraid of losing the pro-tyranny vote. But the Democratic Party isn’t afraid of losing the votes of people who care about fair elections. It doesn’t mind throwing away any suggestion of principled opposition to MAGA.
America as a free country is dying, murdered from within. Who did it? Let’s look at some suspects.
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