ptz

I went to high school with several people who would be voted most likely to work in the rag they stole from work lol.

Wikipedia is taking legal action against new Online Safety Act regulations it says could threaten the safety of its volunteer editors and their ability to keep harmful content off the site.

The Wikimedia Foundation - the non-profit which supports the online encyclopaedia - is seeking a judicial review of rules which could mean Wikipedia is subjected to the toughest duties required of websites under the act.

It's thought this is the first judicial review to be brought against the new online safety laws - albeit a narrow part of them - but experts say it may not be the last.

"The Online Safety Act is vast in scope and incredibly complex," Ben Packer, a partner at law firm Linklaters, told the BBC.

The law would inevitably have impacts on UK citizens' freedom of expression and other human rights, so as more of it comes into force "we can expect that more challenges may be forthcoming", he told the BBC.

Slightly modified Steve Nelson comic originally posted to !comicstrips@lemmy.world at https://lemmy.ca/post/43589733

A Dartmouth College associate professor of Japanese literature and culture became a narrative consultant for Ubisoft's game Assassin's Creed Shadow (which launched in March). Sachi Schmidt-Hori's job "involved researching historical customs and reviewing scripts, not creating characters," writes the Associated Press.

But when a trailer was released in May of 2024, some reacted to a game character named Yasuke who was a Black African samurai, according to the article, "with gamers criticizing his inclusion as 'wokeness' run amok". And they directed the blame at Schmidt-Hori:

Gamers quickly zeroed in Schmidt-Hori, attacking her in online forums, posting bogus reviews of her scholarly work and flooding her inbox with profanity. Many drew attention to her academic research into gender and sexuality. Some tracked down her husband's name and ridiculed him, too. [One Reddit user described Schmidt-Hori as a "sexual degenerate who hate humanity because no man want her," while another called her a "professional woke social-justice warrior" who confirmed "fake history for Ubisoft."] Learning Yasuke was based on a real person did little to assuage critics. Asian men in particular argued Schmidt-Hori was trying to erase them, even though her role involved researching historical customs and reviewing scripts, not creating characters.

Ubisoft told her to ignore the harassment, as did her friends. Instead, she drew inspiration from the late civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis. "I decided to cause 'good trouble,'" she said. "I refused to ignore." Schmidt-Hori began replying to some of the angry emails, asking the senders why they were mad at her and inviting them to speak face-to-face via Zoom. She wrote to an influencer who opposes diversity, equity and inclusion principles and had written about her, asking him if he intended to inspire the death threats she was getting. "If somebody said to your wife what people are saying to me, you wouldn't like it, would you?" she asked. The writer didn't reply, but he did take down the negative article about Schmidt-Hori.

Others apologized. "It truly destroyed me knowing that you had to suffer and cancel your class and received hate from horrible people," one man wrote. "I feel somehow that you are part of my family, and I regret it. I'm sorry from the bottom of my heart." Anik Talukder, a 28-year-old south Asian man living in the United Kingdom, said he apologized at least 10 times to Schmidt-Hori after accepting her Zoom invitation to discuss his Reddit post about her... He was shocked the professor reached out to him and hesitant to speak to her at first. But they ended up having a thoughtful conversation about the lack of Asian representation in Western media and have stayed in touch ever since. "I learned a massive lesson," he said. "I shouldn't have made this person a target for no reason whatsoever."

Yeah, it's country, but she's got some pipes and it's a beautiful song.

Lots of great times with this song playing in the background.

Also, going to start using song.link URLs when I can since the thumbnails work better than way. If anyone has any objections lemme know.

The VPS hosting provider is having issues in their NY datacenter, and the VM for the hosted Tesseract instance is currently unavailable (as well as another VM I have in the same DC).

Currently do not have an ETA.