Sony Pictures Imageworks has made the color management tool OpenColorIO—which was used to create the recent hit animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse—available to the open source community. The tool has now become the second software project of the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), a Linux Foundation-owned open source association.
In addition to Into the Spider-Verse, OpenColorIO has been used in the production of such other films as Hotel Transylvania 3, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Alice and Wonderland.
Writing on Techcrunch, Zack Whittaker (previously)
calls out the timeworn phrase “we take your privacy and security
seriously,” pointing out that this phrase appears routinely in company
responses to horrific data-breaches, and it generally accompanied by conduct
that directly contradicts it, such as stonewalling and minimizing
responsibility for breaches and denying their seriousness. “We take your
privacy and security seriously” is really code for “Please stop asking
us to take your privacy and security seriously.”
Thankfully, Europeans aren’t taking this lying down. With the final vote
expected to come during the March 25-28 session, mere weeks before
European elections, European activists are pouring the pressure onto
their Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), letting them know that
their vote on this dreadful mess will be on everyone’s mind during the
election campaigns.
The epicenter of the uprising is Germany, which is only fitting, given
that German MEP Axel Voss is almost singlehandedly responsible for
poisoning the Directive with rules that will lead to mass surveillance
and mass censorship, not to mention undermining much of Europe’s tech
sector.
The German Consumer Association were swift to condemn the Directive, stating:
“The reform of copyright law in this form does not benefit anyone, let
alone consumers. MEPs are now obliged to do so. Since the outcome of the
trilogue falls short of the EU Parliament’s positions at key points,
they should refuse to give their consent.”
A viral video
of Axel Voss being confronted by activists has been picked up by
politicians campaigning against Voss’s Christian Democratic Party in the
upcoming elections, spreading to Germany’s top TV personalities, like
Jan Böhmermann.
In the meantime, the petition to save Europe from the Directive—already
the largest in EU history—keeps racking up more signatures, and is on
track to be the largest petition in the history of the world.
“Ovia is pitching a paid version of its app to insurers and large employers who want a heads-up on how many of their members or employees want to conceive.”
The Augmented Reality Sandbox (orginally developed by researchers at UC Davis) lets
users sculpt mountains, canyons and rivers, then fill them with water
or even create erupting volcanoes. This version of the device at UCLA was built by Gary Glesener
using
off-the-shelf parts and good ol’ playground sand.
Any shape made in
the sandbox is detected by an Xbox Kinect sensor and processed with open
source software. It is then projected as a color-coded contour map onto the sand.
“My office is next to the big training room,” Mr. Yang
said. “I often hear the surprised sounds of ‘Ah, ah, ah.’” China’s
censorship machine is so well oiled that young censors have to be taught
what they were missing.
This incredible New York Times feature
by reporter Li Yuan offers an intimate peek inside a Chinese censorship
factory, and shows how they train their young human censors – and how
technology supports their work.
“Our short-term goals are to get folks home for the holidays”
• There are more African American men incarcerated in the U.S. than the total prison populations in India, Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Finland, Israel and England, combined.
• Ziegler, a PhD recipient now based in Oakland, explains that a July tweet proposing the app idea gained traction, inspiring him to pursue the concept in a real way.
• While Appolition.us is another towering extension of Ziegler’s contributions towards aiding marginalized people, he knows it’s a small step towards bringing light and hope to the trying effects mass incarceration presents.
