If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. More controversy is developing in the UK, this time in Scotland, around the use by law enforcement of cameras equipped with live facial recognition technology. Reports say that the police in Scotland may intend to start using this tech to catch shoplifters and persons who break bail conditions. But civil rights group Big Brother Watch is warning against any kind of deployment of live facial recognition as incompatible with democracy – primarily because it indiscriminately jeopardizes the privacy of millions of people. To make sure this is not happening, the non-profit’s head of research Jake Hurfurt has told the press that the tech should be banned. That would be an improvement also from the point of view of legal clarity around how AI and big data are used by law enforcement; since currently, Hurfurt remarked, the government and the police “cobble together patchwork legal justifications to experiment on the public with intrusive and Orwellian technology.” Big Brother Watch offered another observation – the UK is a rare country outside of China and Russia (apparently, even the EU is “scaling back”) that is ramping up this type of surveillance. The previous heated debate over live face recognition had to do with the London police, and at the moment, the Met’s decision to deploy it – besides being “a multi-million pound mistake,” is also facing a legal challenge, the group said. They are hopeful this might serve as a teachable moment for the police in Scotland and dissuade them from repeating the same costly “experiment” of trying to usher in a “hi-tech police state.” Meanwhile, press reports in the UK are confirming that Scotland police are considering using the technology, which works by trying to match images of people recorded by surveillance cameras with existing police databases. The problem with using this as a method of policing in crowded streets is that it turns every citizen who happens to pass by one of the cameras into a justified – as far as the authorities are concerned – target, as a “potential suspect.” And, the target may be shoplifters today – but who knows who might be another, if, as Big Brother fears, “we’re sleepwalking into a high-tech police state.” The fear that Scotland may be on the way toward introducing live facial recognition as a police tool originates from a Scottish Police Authority conference on biometrics, where Assistant Chief Constable Andy Freeburn said: “I think we do need to get into the difficult and potentially divisive topic of live facial recognition technology; we need to look at the limits of AI – and I hope that today is the first step in a wider debate.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Scotland Plans Live Facial Recognition Technology appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Sign Up To Keep Reading This post is for Reclaim The Net supporters. Gain access to the entire archive of features and supporters-only content. Help protect free speech, freedom from surveillance, and digital civil liberties. Join Already a supporter? Login here If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Assange’s Plea: A Controversial End to a 14-Year Legal Struggle and the Impact on Free Speech appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Guess Who Voters Think Will Defend Democracy Better... Hint: It Isn't Joe Biden.

Matt Yglesias on 'Elite Misinformation'

Scientists have come together to identify the most important hotspots for biodiversity, whose survival is essential if the era of human domination is to avoid ranking with Earth’s worst periods. Combined, the locations involved are smaller than Iran, but time is running out.Five times in the planet’s history the Earth is known to have lost the majority of living species during a short period of time. It’s likely this occurred on earlier occasions as well, but the record is obscured. Fears that this is happening again, not from an asteroid or super-volcano but human activity, may be premature but will be fulfilled eventually without deliberate action. It might seem simple to choose the areas most in need of protection to avoid this. It’s well known that locations like tropical rainforests are bursting with life and contain an astonishing proportion of the Earth’s land-based species. However, saving the whole of these regions is ambitious given current trends, perhaps too ambitious. The most efficient path to species protection turns out to be somewhat different.“Most species on Earth are rare, meaning that species either have very narrow ranges or they occur at very low densities or both,” said Dr Eric Dinerstein in a statement. “And rarity is very concentrated. In our study, zooming in on this rarity, we found that we need only about 1.2 percent of the Earth’s surface to head off the sixth great extinction of life on Earth.”This 1.2 percent is made up of almost 17,000 sites, and represents a 46 percent reduction on previous estimates though improved targeting. Co-author Professor Carlos Peres of the University of East Anglia claims this preservation “is a financially viable proposition, but I'm afraid this viability will rapidly decline over time." For this reason, the study’s authors are calling for protection by 2030.Currently, areas chosen for protection often have more to do with politics and cost than the number of species that can be saved. It’s easy for a government to legislate a National Park in an area with few competing interests, or around a beloved tourist attraction. Much harder to do the same for the only home to many species with the misfortune of sitting above an oil field. The authors quantify this truism, noting that 1.2 million square kilometers of land (0.47 million miles) gained protection between 2018 and 2023, but that less than 10 percent of this would be prioritized for species protection.Whether it is within our capacity to protect some of these areas from the consequences of climate change and invasive species is uncertain, however, even if we assume illegal poaching and deforestation can be prevented.Still, the authors want us to focus on what can be achieved, not what can’t. They note that 38 percent of the areas they identify lie close to locations that are already protected, and could often be incorporated with ease.“These sites are home to over 4,700 threatened species in some of the world's most biodiverse yet threatened ecosystems,” said Andy Lee, who like Dinerstein is from the NGO Resolve. “These include not only mammals and birds that rely on large intact habitats, like the tamaraw in the Philippines and the Celebes crested macaque in Sulawesi Indonesia, but also range-restricted amphibians and rare plant species.”By looking at the costs incurred for similar areas that have already been protected, the authors make an estimate of the price. They acknowledge there are often differences between locations even in economically similar regions, but across enough sites, these should cancel out. All up, the team produces a figure of $169 billion a year for the next five years to acquire the land and preserve it. Limiting the project to the tropics, where the majority of species lie, reduces the cost to $34 billion a year. Intimidating as this may be to anyone other than a handful of the planet’s richest people, Lee noted: “This represents less than 0.2 percent of the United States' GDP, less than 9 percent of the annual subsidies benefiting the global fossil fuel industry, and a fraction of the revenue generated from the mining and agroforestry industries each year.”Cost may not be the only obstacle, however. Maps of the priority areas reveal clusters in war zones like Somalia and Yemen.The authors also note the areas are vital for stopping global heating, given their vast carbon storage will be lost if the biodiversity is destroyed.“What will we bequeath to future generations? A healthy, vibrant Earth is critical for us to pass on,” said Dinerstein. “So we’ve got to get going. We’ve got to head off the extinction crisis. Conservation Imperatives drive us to do that.”The study is open access in Frontiers in Science. 

Under the shadow of night, criminals have put an end to an important field test in Italy. Scientists had planted a new experimental variety of rice that could be the answer to one of the most destructive diseases this crop faces – but the field was recently broken into and destroyed.If you have ever had a good risotto, you most likely had it with arborio rice. This variety is ideal for that kind of dish based on the consistency of its grains when cooked. But the popular Italian variety is also susceptible to a deadly fungus, Pyricularia oryzae. Every year, the fungus destroys an amount of rice that could have fed 60 million people.There is little to be done to stop the fungus. Fungicide treatments have been effective for a while, but it has pushed the fungus to adapt to them and left us to ingest the fungicide. A potential solution came in 2017 with the development of RIS8imo, a variety of rice resistant to the dangerous fungus that has many nicknames such as rice blast, rotten neck, and rice seedling blight.The variety was created with the revolutionary genetic technique CRISPR-Cas9. The pioneers of it, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna were honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. In Italy, it is illegal to plant genetically modified organisms (GMOs) but this variety of rice is not a GMO.There are three genes in the arborio rice that make it more susceptible to the fungus. Using the technique, the team made sure that those genes were inactivated variants. There's nothing added to the rice – some species of rice naturally do that.The destroyed field. The name of the rice, RIS8imo, is a pun in Italian. It means Best Rice.Image Credit: Vittoria Brambilla/Università Statale di Milano The only difference is that this natural development was made in the lab when it comes to RIS8imo. For this reason, in Italy this falls under the TEA category: assisted evolution techniques in agriculture. A law was passed last year to put specific requirements into testing potential crops developed like this.The rice field in this case was 28 square meters (302 square feet), planted on May 13. It was fenced and surrounded by another fenced field of 400 square meters (4,306 square feet) field to make sure that no rice could be spread beyond either through the weather or animals. Just over a month later, on June 21, the field was destroyed.In a press release, the creators of the rice, Vittoria Brambilla and Fabio Fornara, Università Statale di Milano explain how the goal of their research is to create sustainable agriculture that is not dependent on chemical fungicides. The work on the site came after a broad agreement from the local community and other stakeholders.“As publicly-funded scientists we express shock and sadness at having suffered this unjustified violence, the result of obscurantism and anti-scientific impulses,” Brambilla and Fornara stated. The team is expected to continue the work, given it could provide food for so many people, expressing hope that the Italian government would step up by protecting such experiments.

In a cozy home filled with love and laughter, a heartwarming friendship has blossomed between a Golden Retriever named Buttercup and a baby girl. This charming bond has captured the attention of everyone around them, especially the baby’s mother, Carrie. Buttercup’s devotion to the baby is apparent, as she watches over her with unwavering attention.... The post Mom lays baby down by Golden Retriever and captures the cutest ‘conversation’ appeared first on Animal Channel.

In a cozy home filled with love and laughter, a heartwarming friendship has blossomed between a Golden Retriever named Buttercup and a baby girl. This charming bond has captured the attention of everyone around them, especially the baby’s mother, Carrie. Buttercup’s devotion to the baby is apparent, as she watches over her with unwavering attention.... The post Mom lays baby down by Golden Retriever and what happens next is melting hearts appeared first on Animal Channel.

Welcome to Woke of the Weak, where I’ll update you about the most woke, progressive, insane, and crazy clips and stories that the left thinks is tolerable and well, point out why exactly they’re nuts. It’s the final week of pride month 2024 (PRAISE GOD), and the left made many attempts to finish out the month strong.  This week, we saw both Spirit Airlines and Alaska Air share just how pro-pride their companies are. Similarly, a pride parade took place at none other than DisneyLand in California - yeah, because kids really need MORE pride propaganda shoved down their throats! One school thought similarly to Disney when it made kindergarteners watch a drag show during school. Speaking of drag queens, it seems that they LOVE children. In one video, a drag queen was dancing around in his thong, saw a child and welcomed her in for a hug.  That's child abuse that will lead to kids having no idea what is reality and what is delusion and could lead them down a path of that same sort of confusion. That same sort of confusion that tells kids that mutilating their perfectly good, God-given bodies is a great idea - or that tells them that men can get periods. Towards the end of the episode we saw a group of queers let out a little cultish-chant. Are trans witches a thing? Finally, we saw a grandpa strut his stuff in a black dress, stockings and high heels. Somebody come get him!

As the Wednesday edition of MSNBC’s Ana Cabrera Reports waited for and then reacted to the day’s Supreme Court opinions, the assorted legal minds assembled to promote multiple conspiracy theories about the Court. One was the idea that the Court is slow-walking former President Donald Trump’s immunity case to help him win the election, while another tried to claim there are no liberals on the Court. Regarding the immunity case, Cabrera asked Law Prof. Leah Litman, “When it comes to cases, though, that could impact the election, like abortion or immunity specifically, should they consider whether they're leaving voters hanging? Do they have the ability to really prioritize or fast track certain things?”     Litman claimed it could and cited two examples: So we know that they absolutely do have that ability and that they've exercised it before. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the decision out of Colorado, that the Colorado Supreme Court initially ordered Donald Trump off the ballot, finding that the 14th Amendment disqualified him, the Supreme Court acted quite quickly and opted to release a decision within 50-some days of when they agreed to hear the case and they also released the decision before Super Tuesday so that voters could go to the voting booth and know whether one of the candidates was actually disqualified from office.  The second one was, “In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court acted extremely quickly and issued a decision basically one day after oral argument in this case. So, the Court has acted quickly when an electoral timeline has suggested that acting quickly would be in the nation's best interest.” Those two cases involved actual legal electoral deadlines involving primary election days and Electoral College certification. The immunity case is not connected to the election except for the fact that liberals want it to be because they think additional Trump convictions will benefit them. Nevertheless, Litman declared, “So I do think it's telling that they have apparently declined to do so in the Trump immunity case.” Later, legal analyst, former Obama solicitor general, and self-described “extremist centrist” Neal Katyal was alluding to the Court’s Wednesday ruling that held that states and certain individuals did not have standing to sue the feds over censorship claims when he assessed the Court’s various factions, “Well, in a lot of the politically-charged cases, you know, when I'm there, I tend to think about it as three blocks of the Court. There's the three so-called liberals: Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson.” Denying that liberals are liberals disqualifies you from calling yourself a centrist, but Katyal’s faux centrism was only just beginning to reveal itself, “There's the three much more die hard conservatives, Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas, as Melissa points out, and then there are the three justices in the middle of the Court, not in the middle of American public opinion, these three are far to the right, I think of mainstream public American opinion, but on the Court, the chief justice, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Barrett do play that role.” Apparently Katyal views himself as the definition of the political center, but he was not done pretending the liberal wing of the Court does not exist, “in this case, you see that same lineup happening with the three more moderate conservative justices joining the three so-called liberal justices for that alignment there.” Katyal’s analysis is just an exaggerated form of a typical media problem. The liberal position is defined as moderate, and so anyone who isn’t a liberal must be a wingnut. Throw in some bad analogies courtesy of Litman and you get typical MSNBC legal analysis. Here is a transcript for the June 26 show: MSNBC Ana Cabrera Reports 6/26/2024 10:07 AM ET ANA CABRERA: When it comes to cases, though, that could impact the election, like abortion or immunity specifically, should they consider whether they're leaving voters hanging? Do they have the ability to really prioritize or fast track certain things? LEAH LITMAN: So we know that they absolutely do have that ability and that they've exercised it before. When the Supreme Court agreed to hear the decision out of Colorado, that the Colorado Supreme Court initially ordered Donald Trump off the ballot, finding that the 14th Amendment disqualified him, the Supreme Court acted quite quickly and opted to release a decision within 50-some days of when they agreed to hear the case and they also released the decision before Super Tuesday so that voters could go to the voting booth and know whether one of the candidates was actually disqualified from office.  We know years ago in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court acted extremely quickly and issued a decision basically one day after oral argument in this case. So, the Court has acted quickly when an electoral timeline has suggested that acting quickly would be in the nation's best interest. So I do think it's telling that they have apparently declined to do so in the Trump immunity case. … NEAL KATYAL: Well, in a lot of the politically-charged cases, you know, when I'm there, I tend to think about it as three blocks of the Court. There's the three so-called liberals: Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, there's the three much more die hard conservatives, Gorsuch, Alito, and Thomas, as Melissa points out, and then there are the three justices in the middle of the Court, not in the middle of American public opinion, these three are far to the right, I think of mainstream public American opinion, but on the Court, the chief justice, Justice Kavanaugh, and Justice Barrett do play that role and I think Melissa’s absolutely right, as usual, she is, to point out that, you know, in this case, you see that same lineup happening with the three more moderate conservative justices joining the three so-called liberal justices for that alignment there. I don't know that it necessarily tells us much about where the immunity case is going or any other case. These are pretty stable blocks across one case to another. It wouldn't surprise me if we saw something like that in the immunity case, but, you know, I think as Melissa says, it's just a tiny tea leaf of what might be to come.