News

Bow, NH school officials attack freedom to protest

This entry was posted in Commentary News and tagged censorship New Hampshire on by

On September 17, 2024, Kyle Fellers and Anthony Foote wore pink armbands with an “XX” on them to a game as a protest against the Bow, New Hampshire school district’s transgender policies. They did not interfere with the game, annoy the players, or do anything else. However, the school officials didn’t like the protest, so they called it “harassment” and issued an order banning the two from subsequent games. This was a classic violation of First Amendment rights, and the two took the town to court. United States District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe has overturned the ban, though for the present they may not wear the armbands at the games.
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Yet another Hugo Award scandal

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Someone tried to buy a Hugo Award by buying a bunch of Glasgow Worldcon memberships and having them vote. Fortunately, the attempt was brain-dead stupid and the Hugo administration team caught it. Details are on File 770.

The stupidity consisted of using obviously fake names for the fake members. “These included, for instance, a run of voters whose second names were identical except that the first letter was changed, in alphabetical order; and a run of voters whose names were translations of consecutive numbers.” 377 votes out of 3,813 were disqualified. The nominee that was being pushed did not win, and the Glasgow committee says there’s no reason to believe that the nominee was responsible for the campaign.
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Update on Smashwords and Draft2Digital

This entry was posted in News Selling your work and tagged draft2digital ebooks publishing smashwords on by

Smashwords is now saying that some accounts will be automatically moved to Draft2Digital. A May 1 email says:

On June 1st, we’ll begin automatically migrating some Smashwords author accounts to Draft2Digital. If you desire more control over the migration process, or want to have your account migrated sooner, please complete the brief questionnaire that was previously sent to the email address associated with your Smashwords account.
 
When Draft2Digital acquired Smashwords in March 2022, we announced that the integration of the two companies would be completed in three phases, with the final phase involving the migration of Smashwords author/publisher accounts over to Draft2Digital. Given the vast number of Smashwords accounts, the migration process itself must be divided into phases to ensure maximum effectiveness and efficiency.

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Kampala in 2028 is looking worse 1

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It’s no fault of the Kampala in 2028 bid committee, but the prospect of a Worldcon in Uganda in 2028 looks more frightening than ever. The Ugandan Constitutional Court has upheld critical portions of a 2023 law that criminalized homosexuality, allowing the death penalty in some cases. This would put some attendees in worse danger than they faced at the Chengdu Worldcon.

As the Freedom from Religion Foundation warns, the ruling “has disastrous consequences for LGBTQIA-plus Ugandans.” I don’t know why they repeatedly used that ever-growing letter salad, when the targets are specifically gays (or gays and lesbians, if you use the former just for men), but that’s just my obligatory jargon nitpick. The point is that con attendees might be in deadly danger just by being there.

I’m sure the bid committee didn’t want this to happen, but SF/F conventions in authoritarian states can put their members at serious risk. Better to hold the con somewhere else.

There are risks everywhere, of course. A man was recently arrested for making a bomb threat against a Michigan hotel while it was hosting a furry convention. The same hotel was threatened during last year’s con, which makes it likely the con was the target.

Grammarly is discontinuing desktop apps

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It’s been a bad February for desktop applications. Two that I use a lot are going away. Twilio Authy, used for two-factor authentication, will not be supported on the desktop after March 19, and it may or may not work at all after that. People who don’t plan for it may find themselves temporarily locked out of accounts that use it for 2FA. On Macs with the Apple processor, the iOS version of the application apparently works, though Twilio hasn’t certified it for the Macintosh. I got it running on my Mac without problems, and I’ve used it for a few days. It works, though its user interface is distinctively inferior on a computer with a keyboard and mouse.

Be careful, though. There are fake apps taking advantage of the confusion; as I’m writing this, there’s a app called “Authhy” (with two h’s) on the App store, which I’m effectively certain is a Trojan horse. I can’t find any way to report it to Apple.

More relevant to readers of this blog, Grammarly is discontinuing its desktop application. According to the notice when I run my app, it will stop working on March 18. It suggests that users go to its website to check their writing.
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