Public Domain Day is almost upon us! Some highlights:

More Mickey Mouse, including his first speaking appearance.

The Skeleton Dance is finally legal to use for whatever you want!

The Black Watch, which is John Ford's first talkie.

Dynamite, which is Cecil B. DeMille's first talkie.

Popeye the Sailor (with caveats)

Tintin

Buck Rogers (fully free and clear despite previous assertions)

Rhapsody in Blue recorded by Gershwin himself

More goodies and info at:

https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/

Recruiting Survey Participants!

We are running a study on whether Mastodon feeds show us posts that align with our goals of using social media 🙂

Estimated time: 10 mins
Participate for $5 compensation! (currently US only)

We'll try to build a tool to filter Mastodon posts to help us fulfill our goals of using social media. We will experiment with many methods (rule-based, topic models, large language models) to see if they can achieve this 🤔

Click here: https://experiments.braids.social/

Earlier this week, #SpaceX launched it's 7,001st Starlink
satellite! 🤯 Now, some are retired or failed, and so Jonathan MacDowell's stats say that there are currently 6,396 Starlink sats in orbit. Regardless, that is a HUGE number of satellites!

And they just launched 21 more Starlink sats yesterday!

Amazing to see how launch technology has evolved over these years.

- https://www.space.com/spacex-rocket-launches-7001st-starlink-rocket-landing-success
- https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html
- https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1831750461445304788

#InternetAccess #Starlink

Oh hai new article on privacy and remote higher education teaching during the pandemic! Read and tell me what you thought!

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14614448241270406

@thinkmacro