10 Habits of Highly Effective Individuals

Kashmiris will not give up their demand of right to self-determination, say participants

Globally, only 7% of women have financial services as per the World Bank Global Index Report 2017

Also orders power utility to pay Rs3.5m to a victim's familyQ

A fire at a Digital Realty Singapore datacenter by a lithium-ion battery explosion disrupts Alibaba Cloud services.

The trick to merging comfort and style is all about finding pieces that are both functional and fashionable.

Add Western touches to traditional outfits to get the best of both worlds

Today is the youngest you’ll ever be!

Bangs are making a bold statement this year—get ready to find your perfect fringe.

Night owls have a 50% higher chance of developing type 2 diabetes, new research warns of health risks.

Following Sushant Singh Rajput's suicide, Rhea Chakraborty was arrested on charges of procuring drugs for the actor

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Alleged failures to address key issues lead to growing tensions between high-profile industry leaders in tech world

Martyn Ware called the one-time payment "pathetic," given the massive earnings from the game’s predecessor.

Michael Smith’s fraudulent activities cheated them out of millions, and it’s now time for him to “face the music”

Peaking prices of rich, traditional dishes have forced people to embrace frugality this chilly season

A representational image of chimpanzees sitting. — AFP/file

Two Australian mathematicians have questioned an old motto: If a monkey is given an infinite amount of time to press keys on a typewriter, at one point, it will finish writing all of William Shakespeare's...

A representational image shows a bioluminescent comb jellyfish. — X/@maximaxoo

In a groundbreaking discovery, researchers at the University of Bergen in Norway have identified the comb jellyfish , a ctenophore species, as a potential candidate for biological...

Streaming video still provides some meaningful advantages to traditional cable: it’s generally cheaper (assuming you don’t sign up for every service under the sun); customer satisfaction ratings are generally higher; and users have more power to pick and choose and cancel services at a whim. But the party simply isn’t poised to last. Thanks to […]

Never underestimate the amount of effort law enforcement officers will expend to dispense as much cruelty as possible. And never forget these are the people we are expected to believe are actually there to protect and serve. While it’s great there’s a settlement payment on the way, the fact is that this extremely vindictive and […]

The capital city resembles a dry dock where there are containers all over, and a brigade of traffic police

Test tubes labelled "Monkeypox virus positive and negative" are seen in this illustration taken May 23, 2022. — Reuters

LONDON: An infection with the latest mpox variant, clade 1b, has been detected in the United Kingdom for the first time, the UK Health Security Agency announced...

Prince Andrew has realised genuine concerns amongst stake holders as he resists on giving up the Royal Lodge.

The Duke of York, who insists he will be able to manage the staggering maintenance cost of the Windsor abode, is questioned ‘where is the money...

Angelina Jolie brings classic style to 'Maria' premiere night in NYC

Angelina Jolie exuded elegance in New York City on Tuesday as she promoted her upcoming biographical film, Maria.

The 49-year-old actress was spotted heading toward an awaiting car in a sleek, black dress, paired...

Equal pay, top-tier positions and career longevity still remain some of the major issues

In this Quality for life video, Kevin Holston, a certified Black Belt, shares how he uses Six Sigma tools in his everyday life, including providing humorous examples of how keeps his life in order and on track.

The movie will perhaps force us to ask questions about topics usually reserved for the back pages of a newspaper

Layer up and stay warm all season long

Playing dress up with 9 Lines' latest collection

Tips to style your oversized blazer

Playing dress up with Sadia Tariq Güzel

Playing dress up with Mehdi Couture

Make a style statement by reviving fashion elements from the 90s

Decoding the Latest Timepieces

Slaying the Denim Game With These Super Trendy Style Tips

5 Easy Clothing Hacks To Restyle Your Old Wardrobe

Hi Haya,

I’m in my mid-20s and struggle to remain body-positive. I have been working out and taking care of my diet, but this feeling of not looking the best just keeps me mentally exhausted.

It has affected my self-esteem a lot and leaves me...

US Justice Dept announces Haimovich's actions include shipment of components with missile technology applications

More than 100 people remain missing, while some 800 people have been injured

Cloudflare is urging the EU Commission to exclude the company from its upcoming Piracy Watch List, despite requests from several rightsholder groups for its inclusion. The American company says it's committed to addressing piracy concerns but not at the expense of user privacy and security. Instead, the European Commission should ensure that its Piracy Watch List does not become a tool for advocating policy changes.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Should institutions be indebted to political agendas, or be upholders of academic freedom and intellectual inquiry?

By eschewing this emblem of entitlement, the PM is articulating a compelling narrative about modesty, egalitarianism.

I published these immediately after writing this:

Several months ago I drew some Mimi & Eunice cartoons about modern transactivism. As you might guess, these will be very offensive to some people. I have and have long had trans friends, but modern transactivism is no more representative of them, than Zionism is of Jews, . . . → Read More: The Jenndra Identitty Comics

Posts circulating on social media claim that politician and lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan has accused two senior Supreme Court judges, Justice Mansoor Ali Shah and Justice Munib Akhtar, of facilitating a political party.

The claim is false.

On October 23, a user on X posted a...

Pamela Anderson slays in classic style at ‘The Last Showgirl' screening

Pamela Anderson exuded elegance in New York City, as she attended the special screening of The Last Showgirl.

As reported by MailOnline, 57-year-old actress who attended the star-studded event at...

Kate Middleton is expected to showcase a "bold yet sophisticated style" at her upcoming "Together at Christmas" Carol Service, according to a fashion expert.

Speaking with GB News, fashion guru James Harris predicted that the Princess of Wales’ outfit will potentially featuring...

Privacy: Ross Ulbricht handed in his appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court last week, highlighting an important Analog Equivalent Privacy Right in the process: Just because you’re using equipment that makes a third party aware of your circumstances, does that really nullify any expectation of privacy?

In most constitutions, there’s a protection of privacy of some kind. In the European Charter of Human Rights, this is specified as having the right to private and family life, home, and correspondence. In the U.S. Constitution, it’s framed slightly differently, but with the same outcome: it’s a ban for the government to invade privacy without good cause (“unreasonable search and seizure”).

U.S. Courts have long held, that if you have voluntarily given up some part of your digitally-stored privacy to a third party, then you can no longer expect to have privacy in that area. When looking at analog equivalence for privacy rights, this doctrine is atrocious, and in order to understand just how atrocious, we need to go back to the dawn of the manual telephone switchboards.

At the beginning of the telephone age, switchboards were fully manual. When you requested a telephone call, a manual switchboard operator would manually connect the wire from your telephone to the wire of the receiver’s telephone, and crank a mechanism that would make that telephone ring. The operators could hear every call if they wanted and knew who had been talking to whom and when.

Did you give up your privacy to a third party when using this manual telephone service? Yes, arguably, you did. Under the digital doctrine applied now, phonecalls would have no privacy at all, under any circumstance. But as we know, phonecalls are private. In fact, the phonecall operators were oathsworn to never utter the smallest part of what they learned on the job about people’s private dealings — so seriously was privacy considered, even by the companies running the switchboards.

Interestingly enough, this “third-party surrender of privacy” doctrine seems to have appeared the moment the last switchboard operator left their job for today’s automated phone-circuit switches. This was as late as 1983, just at the dawn of digital consumer-level technology such as the Commodore 64.

This false equivalence alone should be sufficient to scuttle the doctrine of “voluntarily” surrendering privacy to a third party in the digital world, and therefore giving up expectation of privacy: the equivalence in the analog world was the direct opposite.

But there’s more to the analog equivalent of third-party-service privacy. Somewhere in this concept is the notion that you’re voluntarily choosing to give up your privacy, as an active informed act — in particular, an act that stands out of the ordinary, since the Constitutions of the world are very clear that the ordinary default case is that you have an expectation of privacy.

In other words, since people’s everyday lives are covered by expectations of privacy, there must be something outside of the ordinary that a government can claim gives it the right to take away somebody’s privacy. And this “outside the ordinary” has been that the people in question were carrying a cellphone, and so “voluntarily” gave up their right to privacy, as the cellphone gives away their location to the network operator by contacting cellphone towers.

But carrying a cellphone is expected behavior today. It is completely within the boundaries of “ordinary”. In terms of expectations, this doesn’t differ much from wearing jeans or a jacket. This leads us to the question; in the thought experiment that yesterday’s jeans manufacturers had been able to pinpoint your location, had it been reasonable for the government to argue that you give up any expectation of privacy when you’re wearing jeans?

No. No, of course it hadn’t.

It’s not like you’re carrying a wilderness tracking device for the express purpose of rescue services to find you during a dangerous hike. In such a circumstance, it could be argued that you’re voluntarily carrying a locator device. But not when carrying something that everybody is expected to carry — indeed, something that everybody must carry in order to even function in today’s society.

When the only alternative to having your Constitutionally-guaranteed privacy is exile from modern society, a government should have a really thin case. Especially when the analog equivalent — analog phone switchboards — was never fair game in any case.

People deserve Analog Equivalent Privacy Rights.

Until a government recognizes this and voluntarily surrenders a power it has taken itself, which isn’t something people should hold their breath over, privacy remains your own responsibility.

Privacy: For our analog parents, a diary or a personal letter could rarely be touched by authorities, not even by law enforcement searching for evidence of a crime. Objects such as these had protection over and above the constitutional privacy safeguards. For our digital children, however, the equivalent diaries and letters aren’t even considered worthy of basic constitutional privacy.

In most jurisdictions, there is a constitutional right to privacy. Law enforcement in such countries can’t just walk in and read somebody’s mail, wiretap their phonecalls, or track their IP addresses. They need a prior court order to do so, which in turn is based on a concrete suspicion of a serious crime: the general case is that you have a right to privacy, and violations of this rule are the exception, not the norm.

However, there’s usually a layer of protection over and above this: even if and when law enforcement gets permission from a judge to violate somebody’s privacy in the form of a search warrant of their home, there are certain things that may not be touched unless specific and additional permissions are granted by the same type of judge. This class of items includes the most private of the personal: private letters, diaries, and so on.

Of course, this is only true in the analog world of our parents. Even though the letter of the law is the same, this protection doesn’t apply at all to the digital world of our children, to their diaries and letters.

Because the modern diary is kept on a computer. If not on a desktop computer, then certainly on a mobile handheld one — what we’d call a “phone” for historical reasons, but what’s really a handheld computer.

And a computer is a work tool in the analog world of our parents. There are loads of precedent cases that establish any form of electronic device as a work tool, dating back well into the analog world, and law enforcement is falling back on all of them with vigor, even now that our digital devices are holding our diaries, personal letters, and other items far more private than an analog diary was ever capable of.

That’s right: whereas your parents’ diaries were extremely protected under the law of the land, your children’s diaries — no less private to them, than those of your parents were to your parents — are as protected from search and seizure as an ordinary steel wrench in a random workshop.

So the question is how we got from point A to point B here? Why are the Police, who know that they can’t touch an analog diary during a house search, instantly grabbing mobile phones which serve the same purpose for our children?

“Because they can”, is the short answer. “Also because nobody put their foot down” for advanced points on the civics course. It’s because some people saw short term political points in being “tough on crime” and completely erasing hard-won rights in the process.

Encrypt everything.

Pirate Parties: This past weekend, elections were held in Luxembourg and the Czech Republic. The Pirate Party of Luxembourg tripled their support and entered the Luxembourg Parliament with two MPs, and in the Czech Republic, the Pirate Party increased their support further – now receiving a full 17% in Prague.

With 6.45% of the votes of the final tally, the Luxembourg Pirate Party is entering its national Parliament, being the fifth Pirate Party to enter a national or supranational legislature (after Sweden, Germany, Iceland, and the Czech Republic). This may not seem like much, but it is a very big deal, for reasons I’ll elaborate on later. A big congratulations to Sven Clement and Marc Goergen, new Members of Parliament for Luxembourg!

Further, the Czech Republic has had municipal elections, and the Czech Pirate Party showed a full 17.1% support in Prague, the Czech capital, making the Pirates the second biggest party with a very narrow gap to the first place (at 17.9%). This may or may not translate to votes for the Czech national legislature, but is nevertheless the highest score recorded so far for a Pirate Party election day. I understand the Czech Pirates have as many as 275 (two hundred and seventy-five!) newly-elected members of city councils, up from 21 (twenty-one). Well done, well done indeed!

For people in a winner-takes-all system, like the UK or United States, this may sound like a mediocre result. In those countries, there are usually only two parties, and the loser with 49% of the vote gets nothing. However, most of Europe have so-called proportional systems, where 5% of the nationwide votes gives you 5% of the national legislation seats. In these systems, the parties elected to Parliament negotiate between themselves to find a ruling majority coalition of 51%+ of the seats, trying to negotiate common positions between parties that are reasonably close to each other in policy. This usually requires a few weeks of intense negotiations between the elections and the presentation of a successfully negotiated majority coalition.

Further, it could reasonable be asked what kind of difference the Czech Republic or Luxembourg could possibly make on their own in the global information repression. The answer is, a whole lot. The key here is realizing that one country is sufficient to break the global repression of information; the repression is completely dependent on every single country keeping watertight doors. If one single country decides to allow the free movement of culture and knowledge, then all such distribution will immediately be based there. The copyright industry lobby in other countries will protest, quite loudly, but there’s not really anything they can do about it.

And since the problem from a policymaking standpoint has been that the industry-age era politicians consider the Internet-related policy areas completely peripheral in the first place, conceding those policy areas will be seen as very cheap price to bind those votes to a majority coalition.

“One country is sufficient to break the global repression of information.”

A relevant comparison is how Canada has now legalized cannabis at the country level, following many state-level initiatives here and there in the world, and at once, the floodgates are open. Not just for the illegal distribution networks, but more importantly, for legalization everywhere else. As a German politician dryly said today, “what’s possible in Canada is also possible in Germany”, proposing that cannabis should be legalized outright in Germany. I would imagine the tone is similar in most places — or, importantly, many enough places.

The Luxembourg and Prague coalition talks have just started, with an outcome typically expected in a few weeks.