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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2025

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  • The license is royalty free. AOMedia requires it’s contributors to contribute royalty free, and AOMedia has worked hard to ensure it doesn’t infringe anyone else’s IP, but that doesn’t stop other companies (some patent trolls) from asserting “You can’t do xyz without infringing some obscure patent I own.” These companies (like Dolby) target the companies that license AV1, and say “You’ve infringed my IP. Pay me $x per product that implements AV1, or I will sue you for much greater damages.” So AV1 really is licensed royalty free, what we have here is a third party that isn’t part of AOMedia (that really liked making money the old way) trying to extract revenue on dubious claims of patent essentiality.

    The fun part is that nobody really knows (or cares) whether AV1 is really infringing any IP. They know that the threat of litigation is likely to induce enough people to just pay that the whole charade is worth it. And perhaps ironically, the companies like Dolby want to litigate even less than the companies they are threatening because litigation tends to be a winner take all thing. If they lose, then nobody pays them; not even the companies they bullied into paying. The video codec IP world has operated this way for decades. This is what AOMedia hoped to change. It’s Governing Members are some heavy hitters. If they were to defend AV1, they could easily out-muscle players like Dolby. That might happen, but these sorts of things play out over a very long time horizon.



  • I was thinking along the same lines, like they probably spend more on fuel. I remember when Honda pissed everyone off in the 1990s after inflating F1 budgets and then suddenly leaving the sport when the Japanese market crashed. At the time they had Honda factory R&D teams designing and building engines just for F1 teams; that was probably tens of millions a year that wasn’t even part of a team’s budget… in the 80s and 90s.

    Anyhow… F1 teams have a budget cap for several years now. For 2026, it’s $215 million, and that doesn’t include engines, nor driver and team manager salaries.









  • chillpanzee@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlIs GPS private?
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    1 month ago

    It depends on the device.

    If the device requires an account and uploads data to the cloud, it’s almost certain that they are recording your location (plus likely a heap of other sensor data). GPS receivers are in a lot of devices that are designed to track your location (like like smart watches, fitness trackers, cars, handheld GPS, PLBs, and so on). The tracking is often a key feature we want for our own benefit, we just don’t want or need that data to be used against us by advertisers and governments.

    If you have a device that only receives GPS and has no wifi, bluetooth, or other radio or network connection, and doesn’t use a cloud account, then perhaps that device doesn’t track your location. I’d bet that there aren’t that many of those on the market though.



  • chillpanzee@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlIs GPS private?
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    1 month ago

    GPS is not bidirectional communication, so the systems themselves (ie GNSS) aren’t tracking you just because you receive the signal. But…

    • In addition to GPS, airplane mode also doesn’t shut off the Wifi or bluetooth radios; it’s usually just the cell radio.
    • Your phone OS has several ways of tracking and recording your location, activities, and movements, and it generally does this at all times. For example, Find My even works when the battery on an iPhone is “dead.”
    • Phones may fallback to BTLE mesh networks (like AirTags), or do background WIFI location scanning to track and record your phone’s location. Turning these off does prevent you and 3rd party apps from using the features, just not the OS.





  • It’s sorta the opposite. It’s not that privacy and security are afterthoughts, it’s that oversight and monitoring are baked into everything. They lean into lockdown browsers, mandatory on cameras for assessments, and a whole bunch of anti-cheat tech. Privacy and security are on the mind, they just want none of it.

    Worse than that though, it’s a carefully crafted economy where vendors knowingly supply incomplete and broken systems so that they have a continuous need to also sell professional services, training, and technical support. It’s just like textbooks and curricula; crooked AF because they know that nobody is paying attention, and the entire system operates with an expectation of profound inefficiency.


  • I think we’re using “privatized” to mean different things. You’re saying airlines should pay for their own security. That’s a reasonable position.

    This administration would never let that happen. Privatization to them is about robbing the public trust. They would keep it a taxpayer funded program, but they’d triple the budget, halve the staff, and decimate the effectiveness. They don’t care how dysfunctional or corrupt it is; it’s about stealing from the public in every way they can.