Just another WordPress site
So now that you’ve got all the knives, multitools, flashlights, and other accessories, you need a place to keep them at the ready. Everyday Carry shares eight of their picks for great pouches you can use to house and organize all of your small EDC tools.
Dell’s P2715Q 4K monitor has always been one of the most affordable 27” 4K IPS display on the market, but today, it’s all the way down to $364, the best price we’ve ever seen.
If you aren’t familiar, IPS displays boast superior color accuracy and viewing angles compared to the TN panels you’ll find in most inexpensive 4K monitors. I own the 24” model of this exact monitor, and I absolutely love it, just make sure your computer is powerful enough to drive it.
via Lifehacker
Our Favorite 4K Monitor Has Never Been Cheaper
It’s been well over a month since the Kilauea volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island started erupting, and molten lava continues to pour into the ocean at a steady pace. New footage shows the dramatic extent to which the lava is producing “laze”—an unholy and potentially deadly mixture of steam, toxic gas, and tiny shards of volcanic glass.
The US Geological Survey captured the stunning video just after 6:00 am local time on June 4, and again in the early afternoon. The wall of laze along the front of the flow is about a half-mile wide.
By the time the morning segment of the video was taken, lava from Fissure 8 had been pouring into the ocean for at least seven hours straight. As it cools, the molten material is forming an entirely new delta in Kapoho Bay. By the time of the afternoon footage, lava had practically filled the shallow bay. This volcano is literally changing the shape of the island before our very eyes.
Advertisement
The laze, a portmanteau of “lava” and “haze,” may look beautiful, but it’s potentially deadly. When the 2,140-degree-Fahrenheit lava hits the ocean, a chemical reaction occurs, producing a mix of hydrochloric acid, steam, and tiny particles of glass. The ensuing clouds of laze can cause lung damage, eye and skin irritation, and death in some extreme cases.
In case you’re wondering, the residents of the homes behind the creeping wall of noxious gas have fled. To date, over 2,500 people have had to evacuate, and more than 300 people are currently seeking refuge at community centers.
[USGS]
via Gizmodo
This Footage of Kilauea Lava Pouring Into the Ocean Is Completely Bananas
Dilbert: I told our boss his presentation had a low signal-to-noise ratio and he thought it was a compliment. Wally: I think you just invented my new favorite game. Working for you is like boiling an ocean. Boss: Thank you!
A chameleon spies his crush while waiting for the subway, and aims to impress her with a gift. But Darrel doesn’t exactly have the best of luck in this amusing and award-winning animated short film out of Spain, directed by Marc Briones and Alan Carabantes.
The Copia Institute was not the only party to file an amicus brief in support of Airbnb and Homeaway’s Ninth Circuit appeal of a district court decision denying them Section 230 protection. For instance, a number of Internet platforms, including those like Glassdoor, which hosts specialized user expression, and those like eBay, which hosts transactional user expression, filed one pointing out how a ruling denying Airbnb and Homeaway would effectively deny it to far more platforms hosting far more kinds of user speech than just those platforms behind the instant appeal.
And then there was this brief, submitted on behalf of former Congressman Chris Cox, who, with then-Representative Ron Wyden, had been instrumental in getting Section 230 on the books in the first place. With this brief the Court does not need to guess whether Congress intended for Section 230 to apply to platforms like Airbnb and Homeaway; the statute’s author confirms that it did, and why.
In giving insight into the statutory history of Section 230 the brief addresses the two main issues raised by the Airbnb appeal – issues that are continuing to come up over and over again in Section 230-related litigation in state and federal courts all over the country: does Section 230 apply to platforms intermediating transactional user expression, and does Section 230’s pre-emption language preclude efforts by state and local authorities to hold these platforms liable for intermediating the consummation of the transactional speech. Cox’s brief describes how Congress intended both these questions to be answered in the affirmative and thus may be relevant to these other cases. With that in mind, we are archiving – and summarizing – the brief here.
To illustrate why Section 230 should apply in these situations, first the brief explains the historical context that prompted the statute in the first place:
In 1995, on a flight from California to Washington, DC during a regular session of Congress, Representative Cox read a Wall Street Journal article about a New York Superior Court case that troubled him deeply. The case involved a bulletin board post on the Prodigy web service by an unknown user. The post said disparaging things about an investment bank. The bank filed suit for libel but couldn’t locate the individual who wrote the post. So instead, the bank sought damages from Prodigy, the site that hosted the bulletin board.
[page 3]
The Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy decision alarmed Cox for several reasons. One, it represented a worrying change in judicial attitudes towards third party liability:
Up until then, the courts had not permitted such claims for third party liability. In 1991, a federal district court in New York held that CompuServe was not liable in circumstances like the Prodigy case. The court reasoned that CompuServe “ha[d] no opportunity to review [the] contents” of the publication at issue before it was uploaded “into CompuServe’s computer banks,” and therefore was not subject to publisher liability for the third party content."
[page 3-4]
It had also resulted in a damage award of $200 million dollars against Prodigy. [page 4]. Damage awards like these can wipe technologies off the map. If platforms had to fear the crippling effect that even one such award, arising from just one user, could have on their developing online services, it would dissuade them from being platforms at all. As the brief observes:
The accretion of burdens would be especially harmful to smaller websites. Future startups, facing massive exposure to potential liability if they do not monitor user content and take responsibility for third parties’ legal compliance, would encounter significant obstacles to capital formation. Not unreasonably, some might abjure any business model reliant on third-party content. [page 26]
Then there was also a third, related concern: according to the logic of Stratton Oakmont, which had distinguished itself from the earlier Cubby v. Compuserve case, unlike Compuserve, Prodigy had "sought to impose general rules of civility on its message boards and in its forums." [page 4].
The perverse incentive this case established was clear: Internet platforms should avoid even modest efforts to police their sites. [page 4]
The essential math was stark: Congress was worried about what was going on the Internet. It wanted platforms to be an ally in policing it. But without protection for platforms, they wouldn’t be. They couldn’t be. So Cox joined with Senator Wyden to craft a bill that would trump the Stratton Oakmont holding. The result was the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act, H.R. 1978, 104 Cong. (1995), which, by a 420-4 vote reflecting significant bipartisan support, became an amendment to the Communications Decency Act – Congress’s attempt to address the less desirable material on the Internet – which then came into force as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. [page 5-6]. The Supreme Court later gutted the indecency provisions of the CDA in Reno v. ACLU, but the parts of the CDA at Section 230 have stood the test of time. [page 6 note 2].
The statutory language provided necessary relief to platforms in two important ways. First, it included a "Good Samaritan" provision, meaning that "[i]f an Internet platform does review some of the content and restricts it because it is obscene or otherwise objectionable, then the platform does not thereby assume a duty to monitor all content." [page 6]. Because keeping platforms from having to monitor was the critical purpose of the statute:
All of the unique benefits the Internet provides are dependent upon platforms being able to facilitate communication among vast numbers of people without being required to review those communications individually. [page 12]
The concerns were practical. As other members of Congress noted at the time, "There is no way that any of that any of those entities, like Prodigy, can take the responsibility [for all of the] information that is going to be coming in to them from all manner of sources.” [page 14]
While the volume of users [back when Section 230 was passed] was only in the millions, not the billions as today, it was evident to almost every user of the Web even then that no group of human beings would ever be able to keep pace with the growth of user-generated content on the Web. For the Internet to function to its potential, Internet platforms could not be expected to monitor content created by website users. [page 2]
Thus Section 230 established a new rule expressly designed to spare platforms from having to attempt this impossible task in order to survive:
The rule established in the bill […] was crystal clear: the law will recognize that it would be unreasonable to require Internet platforms to monitor content created by website users. Correlatively, the law will impose full responsibility on the website users to comply with all laws, both civil and criminal, in connection with their user-generated content. [But i]t will not shift that responsibility to Internet platforms, because doing so would directly interfere with the essential functioning of the Internet. [page 5]
That concern for the essential functioning of the Internet also explains why Section 230 was not drawn narrowly. If Congress had only been interested in protecting platforms from liability for potentially defamatory speech (as was at issue in the Stratton Oakmont case) it could have written a law that only accomplished that end. But Section 230’s language was purposefully more expansive. If it were not more expansive, while platforms would not have to monitor all the content it intermediated for defamation, they would still have to monitor it for everything else, and thus nothing would have been accomplished with this law:
The inevitable consequence of attaching platform liability to user-generated content is to force intermediaries to monitor everything posted on their sites. Congress understood that liability-driven monitoring would slow traffic on the Internet, discourage the development of Internet platforms based on third party content, and chill third-party speech as intermediaries attempt to avoid liability. Congress enacted Section 230 because the requirement to monitor and review user-generated content would degrade the vibrant online forum for speech and for e-commerce that Congress wished to embrace. [page 15]
Which returns to why Section 230 was intended to apply to transactional platforms. Congress didn’t want to be selective about which types of platforms could benefit from liability protection. It wanted them all to:
[T]he very purpose of Section 230 was to obliterate any legal distinction between the CompuServe model (which lacked the e-commerce features of Prodigy and the then-emergent AOL) and more dynamically interactive platforms. … Congress intended to “promote the continued development of the Internet and other interactive computer services” and “preserve the vibrant and competitive free market” that the Internet had unleashed. Forcing web sites to a Compuserve or Craigslist model would be the antithesis of the congressional purpose to “encourage open, robust, and creative use of the internet” and the continued “development of e-commerce.” Instead, it will slow commerce on the Internet, increase costs for websites and consumers, and restrict the development of platform marketplaces. This is just what Congress hoped to avoid through Section 230. [page 23-24]
And it wanted them all to be protected everywhere because Congress also recognized that they needed to be protected everywhere in order to be protected at all:
A website […] is immediately and uninterruptedly exposed to billions of Internet users in every U.S. jurisdiction and around the planet. This makes Internet commerce uniquely vulnerable to regulatory burdens in thousands of jurisdictions. So too does the fact that the Internet is utterly indifferent to state borders. These characteristics of the Internet, Congress recognized, would subject this quintessentially interstate commerce to a confusing and burdensome patchwork of regulations by thousands of state, county, and municipal jurisdictions, unless federal policy remedied the situation. [page 27]
Congress anticipated that states and local authorities would be tempted to impose liability on platforms, and in doing so interfere with the operation of the Internet by forcing platforms to monitor after all and thus cripple their operation:
Other state, county, and local governments would no doubt find that fining websites for their users’ infractions is more convenient than fining each individual who violates local laws. Given the unlimited geographic range of the Internet, unbounded by state or local jurisdiction, the aggregate burden on an individual web platform would be multiplied exponentially. While one monitoring requirement in one city may seem a tractable compliance burden, myriad similar-but-not-identical regulations could easily damage or shut down Internet platforms. [page 25]
So, "[t]o ensure the quintessentially interstate commerce of the Internet would be governed by a uniform national policy" of sparing platforms the need to monitor, Congress deliberately foreclosed the ability of state and local authorities to interfere with that policy with Section 230’s pre-emption provision. [page 10]. Without this provision, the statute would be useless:
Were every state and municipality free to adopt its own policy concerning when an Internet platform must assume duties in connection with content created by third party users, not only would compliance become oppressive, but the federal policy itself could quickly be undone. [page 13]
This pre-emption did not make the Internet a lawless place, however. Laws governing offline analogs to the services starting to flourish on the web would continue to apply; Section 230 simply prevented platforms from being held derivatively liable for user generated content that violated them. [page 9-10].
Notably, none of what Section 230 proposed was a controversial proposition:
When the bill was debated, no member from either the Republican or Democratic side could be found to speak against it. The debate time was therefore shared between Democratic and Republican supporters of the bill, a highly unusual procedure for significant legislation. [page 11]
It was popular because it advanced Congress’s overall policy to foster the most beneficial content online, and the least detrimental.
Section 230 by its terms applies to legal responsibility of any type, whether under civil or criminal state statutes and municipal ordinances. But the fact that the legislation was included in the CDA, concerned with offenses including criminal pornography, is a measure of how serious Congress was about immunizing Internet platforms from state and local laws. Internet platforms were to be spared responsibility for monitoring third-party content even in these egregious cases.
A bipartisan supermajority of Congress did not support this policy because they wished to give online commerce an advantage over offline businesses. Rather, it is the inherent nature of Internet commerce that caused Congress to choose purposefully to make third parties and not Internet platforms responsible for compliance with laws generally applicable to those third parties. Platform liability for user-generated content would rob the technology of its vast interstate and indeed global capability, which Congress decided to “embrace” and “welcome” not only because of its commercial potential but also “the opportunity for education and political discourse that it offers for all of us.” [page 11-12]
As the brief explains elsewhere, Congress’s legislative instincts appear to have been born out, and the Internet today is replete with valuable services and expression. [page 7-8]. Obviously not everything the Internet offers is necessarily beneficial, but the challenges the Internet’s success pose don’t negate the policy balance Congress struck. Section 230 has enabled those successes, and if we want its commercial and educational benefit to continue to accrue, we need to make sure that the statute’s critical protection remains available to all who depend on it to realize that potential.
Permalink | Comments | Email This Story
via Techdirt
Highlights From Former Rep. Chris Cox’s Amicus Brief Explaining The History And Policy Behind Section 230
Gauge Instruments makes minimal analog watches inspired by precision instruments and vehicles. Their Classic Black and Classic White are prime examples of their approach. The watches have 42mm metal cases, a butterfly buckle and an anti-reflective sapphire crystal.
After showing it off last year at AWS re:Invent 2017, Amazon Web Services announced Wednesday that its new cloud graph database, Amazon Neptune, is ready for the general public to take it for a spin.
Amazon Neptune fills a gap across the array of databases AWS customers can choose to run on its cloud, giving the company its own graph database product to offer next to open-source graph databases like JanusGraph and commercial products like Neo4j. AWS now offers six managed and generally available databases on its cloud service as well as a database migration service for moving hosted databases into the cloud.
Graph databases are designed for applications that need to quickly make sense of the associations between different groups of data. They allow users to store related bits of data as a graph that can be accessed in a single operation, rather than a bunch of individual queries for all that data.
Companies building social networks, fraud-detection apps or personalization features for existing apps, for example, can take advantage of graph databases to deliver more flexibility and speed. AWS rival Microsoft’s Azure Cosmos DB also offers graph database capabilities.
Amazon Neptune will replicate six copies of your data across three availability zones within AWS computing regions, and AWS said it was designed for 99.99 percent uptime. It is available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland) regions, with more expected to arrive later this year.
via GeekWire
Amazon Web Services’ newest database, Amazon Neptune, is now generally available
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is Oracle’s second-generation cloud infrastructure. These new datacenters were built with the latest high-performance servers (Oracle’s X7 Servers) and were designed to eliminate network and CPU oversubscription. Due to high-performance systems and the multiple availability domains (ADs) in each region, these are the preferred environments for deploying MySQL. Since MySQL deploys on Compute services (IaaS), look for “Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute” (not Classic) on this region map.
Beyond the benefits of the second-generation datacenters, why deploy MySQL on Oracle’s cloud? Here’s a few of reasons people are choosing MySQL on OCI:
As a new platform, extra steps are required to install the MySQL Cloud Service. Otherwise, the install will default to OCI-Classic and you’ll miss the benefits of the second-generation datacenters.
If you don’t have an Oracle Cloud account, get started for free: https://docs.oracle.com/en/cloud/get-started/subscriptions-cloud/csgsg/sign-free-oracle-cloud-promotion.html
LOGGING IN AND SETTING UP YOUR ENVIRONMENT
Sign in to your Cloud Account (cloud.oracle.com) and go to My Services Dashboard. Click the Navigation menu icon navigation menu in the top left corner of the My Services Dashboard and then click Compute.
This will bring you to the OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, console.
Create a compartment called “demo”.
2. CREATE A NETWORK
Then, create a virtual cloud network with three public subnets, which will span 3 Availability Domains (AD). Although it includes a built-in firewall to prevent intrusion, a more secure network should be used for production systems ( see VCNs and Subnets ).
Complete the following fields:
3. ENABLE PLATFORM AS A SERVICE (PaaS) ACCESS
This next step enables the MySQL Cloud Service to access the underlying compute and storage resources.
[ note: if you chose a different compartment name than demo, substitute accordingly in the following statements]
Allow service PSM to inspect vcns in compartment demo
Allow service PSM to use subnets in compartment demo
Allow service PSM to use vnics in compartment demo
Allow service PSM to manage security-lists in compartment demo
4. CREATE A BUCKET FOR OBJECT STORAGE
Next, create a swift password to authenticate to the object storage. This will be required when setting up MySQL.
If you have issues, the above steps are well-documented here.
Before continuing to the next step, please write down the following from the current OCI console. You’ll need this info for the next steps.
5. DEPLOY THE MYSQL CLOUD SERVICE
First, navigate from OCI (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure) to the MyServices console. On the very top menu, click My Services. This should bring you back to the MyServices Dashboard.
To view the MySQL Cloud Service, either click Customer Dashboard” or click the navigation menu ( three parallel lines) in upper left corner.
Click MySQL and choose Open Service Console and then Create Instance.
The following screenshots show appropriate field entries. Once you select “Region”, additional fields will display:
Availability Domain: Select AD1
Subnet: This was setup in step #2.
Click Next and complete Service Details.
A full explanation of fields are available in the online documentation. However, Backup and Recovery Configuration requires further explanation.
Cloud Storage Container: The OCI format is https://swiftobjectstorage.<region>.oraclecloud.com/v1/<namespace>/<container>
For me, the region is us-ashburn-1, but this may vary depending on your location and your account. The namespace is the tenancy and it’s the name of your oracle account (hint: it’s in your current URL: https://psm-<tenancy>.console.oraclecloud.com). We named our container MySQLBackups. In my case, the URL is https://swiftobjectstorage.us-ashburn-1.oraclecloud.com/v1/015010/MySQLBackups. You will need to change the tenancy (015010) and possibly the AD (us-ashburn-1).
Username: This is the user for which we created a token when setting up OCI. It’s not the name for which you sign into your MyService Dashboard.
Password: This is the authentication token created in Step #4.
COMPLETION
Click Next and Create. After a few minutes, your MySQL instance will be running. This process has deployed MySQL onto an Oracle Compute instance (similar to EC2 instance) on the next generation datacenter. Once it’s created, identify the public IP address and ssh into the instance. Use ssh opc@xxxxxx to log into the instance. From here, you have full control of your instance.
NEXT STEPS
Of course, that’s a lot of steps to create a MySQL Cloud Service. Further automation is in development. In future blogs, I’ll include terraform automation instructions. Additionally, with multiple AD’s, we can set up replication for high availability.
Thanks for reading. I hope this was helpful.
via Planet MySQL
Deploy MySQL on Oracle’s High-Performance Cloud (Step-by-step Guide)
If you’ve seen our excellent series on different species of wood, by looking at boards you can identify the ones most commonly used in furniture and homebuilding. But do you know what an actual Poplar, Walnut or Zebrawood tree looks like? Could you actually draw one if you were playing some forestry version of Pictionary?
Well, here’s a visual guide if you’re curious:
via Core77
Visual Guide: What the Actual Trees of 52 Different Wood Species Look Like