RE: https://techpolicy.social/@internetsociety/116296243937904406

This is a huge win for the #Internet and #InternetAccess in general! The movie / TV industry wants to make Internet Service Providers (ISPs) responsible for policing all their subscribers and making sure they aren't downloading pirated content - and responsible for blocking those subscribers.

But... *that's not how the Internet works!*

There could be 10s, 100s, or 1000s of people behind a single IP address - all who would be blocked - but not now.

#Sony #Cox #USSupremeCourt #SupremeCourt

It's a weird time to be working at #LincolnUniversityNZ.

We've bounced back from the earthquakes and covid lockdowns and there's been an optimistic buzz in the air. The earthquake damaged buildings are mostly replaced and in the last few years Lincoln has had some of its highest enrolments ever. Last year it graduated the highest number of graduates in its 147 year history.

Ironically, getting more enrolments than expected has been bad because that doesn't equate to more government funding, which instead continues to decline in real terms. NZ universities receive about *a third* less funding than the OECD average.

The solution, we learned from the Vice Chancellor Grant Edwards yesterday, is that the university is going to have to lose 40 of it's about 700 staff. Presumably those that remain will, once again, need to pick up the slack.

This kind of austerity is squeezing the life out of NZ's universities. The same thing is happening to the science sector. NZ's newly combined Bioeconomy Science Institute also going through redundancies so it can survive on less government funding.

Please remember this at the upcoming election. Investing tax dollars in research and higher education is *good* for the country.

😔

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/590629/lincoln-university-to-cut-40-full-time-equivalent-jobs

https://insidegovernment.co.nz/record-graduation-for-lincoln-university/

#LincolnUniversityNZ #jobcuts #austerity #science #universities #AcademicChatter

Open Source Gave Me Everything Until I Had Nothing Left to Give - Kenneth Reitz

I was at a tech conference in Sweden when it started. I hadn’t slept in days. I was one of the most prolific open source developers in the Python ecosystem, maintaining the most downloaded HTTP library on Earth, keynoting conferences across the world, and I was losing my mind in a hotel room six thousand miles from home.

My first solo-authored publication just appeared in *Linguistic Typology*: "The over-representation of phonological features in basic vocabulary doesn’t replicate when controlling for spatial and phylogenetic effects"

Running a #Bayesian model with #Lexibank data, I show that most previously observed effects that have been claimed to be sound symbolism do **not** replicate. A handful of effects emerges as highly stable though, mostly related to body-parts and the pronominal system.

#linguistics #replication #typology #science #statistics

> https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2025-0050

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@sustainoss/116222229525399859

I jumped on the microphone with @richlitt to discuss the sustainability of regional conferences like @pyconau and how important it is to have a thriving local community!

🎧 https://podcast.sustainoss.org/286

Thanks for having me on Richard, it was a great conversation 🎉

Host Richard (@richlitt) talks with Jack (@gdayitsjack) about PyCon AU (https://2026.pycon.org.au/) and how regional conferences build local connections, support new speakers, and help sustain open source communities.

Listen at 🎙️ https://podcast.sustainoss.org/286

In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the prototype of what became Signal. I argued that the app needed pseudonyms because abusers know their victims' phone numbers. I lost the fight that day. History proved me right, and Signal would move to usernames under @Mer__edith's stewardship.

In this new essay, I trace the line from Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace through smart-home forensics, metadata killings, and Archive Team's non-consensual Tumblr scrape to ask: when did we decide that a jpeg is a photograph, that a profile is a person, that storage is memory?

The answer involves a boat off Honolulu, the early days of Signal, Iran's missiles over Amazon's Dubai AWS facilities, and the communities already building for a world where the server goes dark. This is an essay about infrastructure, memory, archiving without consent, and what we lose when we mistake the filesystem for memory.

It is also the angriest and most personal text I've ever written. I'm furious, and you should be too. We bet an entire civilisation on a brutal and unreliable stack. Now, fate has come to collect that wager.

California has a lot to fucking answer for.

https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/who-will-remember-us-when-the-servers-go-dark/