By banning (or forcing sale of) TikTok (which I loathe), Congress -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- and a Democratic president just performed extreme censorship of the Internet.

They claimed it was for your privacy, but that is a flagrant and stupid lie.

They believe you have no privacy rights, and deserve none, and have made that clear again and again.

We need public spaces controlled by the public, not rapacious companies and control-freak lawmakers.

Today is an important anniversary.

73 years ago, on April 23, 1951, in Farmville, VA, Barbara Johns led a walkout of her segregated high school to protest the unfair and deplorable conditions of her school.

What?! You don’t know who Barbara Johns was?

She led her walkout more than 4 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, and before MLK, Jr. embraced nonviolence as the way to equality.

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Maybe one day an article like this would be written about a company that collaborates with local artists and writers to produce these books, and a home grown machine translation company, rather than Chat GPT and Google Translate 🤔

I think of the children's stories I heard growing up in Ethiopia, & how specific they were to the context. And when my elders tell me stories about various villages in Eritrea, they are super super specific. Why not preserve that & pass it on?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/13/mali-books-artificial-intelligence-ai/

PSA: Time to delete your Glassdoor account

The TL;DR is: Glassdoor now requires your real name and

*will add it to older accounts without your consent if they learn it,*

and your only option is to delete your account. They do not care that this puts people at risk with their employers. They do not care that this seems to run counter to their own data-privacy policies.

Full text at https://cellio.dreamwidth.org/2024/03/12/glassdoor-violates-privacy.html

Just in case someone here happens to have one: anyone have a link to a post-COVID union contract that has COVID-19 safety provisions in it, bonus points if it's at an academic institution?

Boosts appreciated for reach.