ProPublica: TurboTax Parent Company’s Latest Argument Against Free Tax Filing: It Will Harm Black Taxpayers. “Articles published around the country repeat Intuit’s assertion — sometimes almost word for word — that the upcoming IRS pilot program would hurt Black Americans. A researcher whose work is cited by Intuit says the company is misstating her findings.”
Markets Insider: Remember when NFTs sold for millions of dollars? 95% of the digital collectibles are now probably worthless.. “A report by dappGambl found that 95% of non-fungible tokens are effectively worthless. Out of 73,257 NFT collections, 69,795 of them have a market cap of zero ether, based on data provided by NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap. By their estimates, almost 23 million people hold these worthless assets.”
Reuters: OpenAI’s Sam Altman launches Worldcoin crypto project. “Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, launches on Monday. The project’s core offering is its World ID, an account that only real humans can get. To get a World ID, a customer signs up to do an in-person iris scan using Worldcoin’s ‘orb’, a silver ball approximately the size of a bowling ball. Once the orb’s iris scan verifies the person is a real human, it creates a World ID.” I will not share my opinion on this endeavor with you because doing so would violate every obscenity ordinance in a 200-mile radius.
StarTribune: Twitter rejects blue check mark verification for former Viking, Minnesota Supreme Court Justice Alan Page. “A spot in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, a seat on Minnesota’s highest court and a shiny medal symbolizing the nation’s highest civilian honor. Apparently Alan Page needs to work a little bit harder to achieve the ‘notability’ that Twitter requires before it bestows one of its coveted blue check marks signaling verification of authenticity.”
Stuff New Zealand: Google blocks ads for disability documentaries, labelling them ‘shocking content’. “An Auckland production company is calling on Google and YouTube to change their ad policies after adverts for documentaries about medical conditions and people with disabilities were blocked for breaching rules around ‘shocking content’.”
Wall Street Journal: Hospitals Hide Pricing Data From Search Results . “Hospitals that have published their previously confidential prices to comply with a new federal rule have also blocked that information from web searches with special coding embedded on their websites, according to a Wall Street Journal examination. The information must be disclosed under a federal rule aimed at making the $1 trillion sector more consumer friendly. But hundreds of hospitals embedded code in their websites that prevented Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other search engines from displaying pages with the price lists, according to the Journal examination of more than 3,100 sites.”
ProPublica: A Teenager Didn’t Do Her Online Schoolwork. So a Judge Sent Her to Juvenile Detention.. “A 15-year-old in Michigan was incarcerated during the coronavirus pandemic after a judge ruled that not completing her schoolwork violated her probation. ‘It just doesn’t make any sense,’ said the girl’s mother.”
CNN: FDA commissioner refuses to defend Trump claim that 99% of Covid-19 cases are ‘harmless’. “The commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration on Sunday declined to defend President Donald Trump’s unfounded claim that 99% of coronavirus cases are ‘totally harmless’ and repeatedly refused to say whether Trump’s remark is true or false.”
The Register: Remember when Republicans said Dems hacked voting systems to rig Georgia’s election? There were no hacks. “On November 4th, 2018, now-Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp announced an investigation into his rival Democratic party, accusing the organization of trying to hack the US state’s voter registration system…. On Friday, ProPublica and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) found ‘no evidence of damage to (the Secretary of State’s office) network or computers, and no evidence of theft, damage, or loss of data.’”
Gotham Gazette: Front-Line Workers Must Prove They Contracted Coronavirus on the Job to Receive Workers’ Comp. “Infected front-line staff, from health-care workers to grocery store clerks, are being asked to prove they contracted the virus on the job in order to receive workers’ compensation and death benefits, union leaders and elected officials say. In some cases, insurance companies are asking nurses to identify which patient may have exposed them to the virus or when they had a breach of personal protective equipment, the officials said.”
This is wrong and it needs to stop now. Techdirt: Bogus Automated Copyright Claims By CBS Blocked Super Tuesday Speeches By Bernie Sanders, Mike Bloomberg, And Joe Biden. “Another day, another example of copyright out of control. The latest, as highlighted by Matthew Keys, is that bogus (almost certainly automated) copyright claims by CBS ended up blocking a live stream of a Bernie Sanders speech, but similar notices also interrupted speeches by Mike Bloomberg and Joe Biden.”
New York Times: National Archives’ Emails Show Little Debate Over Altering Photo of Women’s March. “Historians and archivists said the agency had violated the public’s trust. March organizers called it an attempt to silence women. And on social media, some questioned whether Mr. Trump himself had ordered the alterations, recalling his fury over a photo of his inauguration crowds. But in dozens of emails released by the National Archives about the image, officials appeared more concerned about the costs of licensing the photo than the ethics of changing it.”
BetaNews: Facebook will pay you for your voice recordings. “If you feel you should be able to benefit financially from sharing information with Facebook, there’s some good news: the company is willing to pay you for your voice recordings. The scheme is part of the social network’s Pronunciations program, and it sees Facebook trying to improve its speech recognition capabilities. But if you’re hoping to get rich, you might be a little disappointed.” No. No. A thousand times no.
Techdirt: CBS Gets Angry Joe’s YouTube Review Of ‘Picard’ Taken Down For Using 26 Seconds Of The Show’s Trailer. “Joe Vargas, who makes the fantastic The Angry Joe Show on YouTube, isn’t a complete stranger to Techdirt’s pages. You may recall that this angry reviewer of all things pop culture swore off doing reviews of Nintendo products a while back after Nintendo prevented Vargas from monetizing a review of a a game…. CBS recently got Angry Joe’s YouTube review of ‘Picard’ taken down, claiming copyright on the 2 thirteen-second videos of the show’s publicly available trailer that Vargas used in the review.”
Washington Post: National Archives exhibit blurs images critical of President Trump. “The Archives acknowledged in a statement this week that it made multiple alterations to the photo of the 2017 Women’s March showcased at the museum, blurring signs held by marchers that were critical of Trump. Words on signs that referenced women’s anatomy were also blurred. In the original version of the 2017 photograph, taken by Getty Images photographer Mario Tama, the street is packed with marchers carrying a variety of signs, with the Capitol in the background. In the Archives version, at least four of those signs are altered.” The National Archives has apologized for what it characterized as a “mistake.”
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