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6 months agoSoftware architects that don’t write code are worse than useless
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Cake day: August 13th, 2023
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10·7 months agoMy guess: The blocklist is the only way they have of removing it for all those who download it from them when they previously distributed it. And they do that so they can not be held liable for those copies.
A company like News Corp might go “This was downloaded 50 000 times from you and can be used to bypass access control on 10 000 000 of our articles which would otherwise cost $20 each. So we are suing you for 10 trillion dollars in losses. See you in court.”
The purpose of this add-on is solely to circumvent access restrictions to copyrighted works. It is clearly a circumvention tool under the DMCA and therefore illegal to distribute in the USA.
The policy violation is that it breaks US law.
Guessing here, but Mozilla likely blacklisted it to disable it for all those who had it installed and cover their ass legally. Nobody can accuse them of aiding in the distribution of this illegal tool anymore.
While uBlock could be used for the same thing, it has a different primary use (blocking ads, which is still legal), so a similar charge against it might be successfully fought.
The DMCA is a fuck.
My old mother, who is completely disinterested in technology, has used a Linux desktop for a decade now without major issues.
If you aren’t a power user the differences between it and Windows are minor. You have windows, icons, menu bars, x closes the application, the box makes it big, right-click to open a menu, left-click to select, it’s all the same stuff. Besides, most of your time is spend in a browser anyway.
Yeah things break some times, but no more than in Windows. Being on a very default Ubuntu installation she can just search for her problems online and blindly run some random console command that probably fixes it, just like on Windows.
Hardware is easier because drivers are generally just magically there. Software is easier because it’s mostly in a repository which automatically installs dependencies and updates and doesn’t come with malware.
By far the biggest problem has been documents and executables that can only be opened in Windows. Mostly PDF forms (fuck you Adobe).
Office Open XML was only standardized in order to combat the threat posed by Open Document as organisations were starting to mandate use of standardized formats.
You write as if Microsoft did this because they wanted interoperability, when in reality they only begrudgingly accept that some must be allowed in order to avoid losing control of the market.
The real solution would have been to never approve the OOXML standard and not legitimize Microsoft’s attempt to make their proprietary format appear open.
Butter is rather low volume, so maybe it’s doable. But it’s very hard to compete with self-replicating organisms that have evolved specifically to use the energy sources, materials and conditions that are abundant on this planet. I’d be more more interested if someone had made a plant make butter.
Having a bunch of machinery sit idle waiting for power to be cheap isn’t particularly good use of resources either. We’d be better off trying to store the power.
“Savor says they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water”
I’m no expert but direct air capture of Co2 and water electrolysis both use a lot of power. So using them for this purpose is likely just a marketing gimmick that doesn’t make any sense either economically or for the climate.
Just shifting the tax burden from salaries toward capital should make it less of a problem. When capital income is taxed less than salaries wealth concentration gets worse as workers are replaced.
But hey, GDP line goes up, so it must be good right?
Moving fast doesn’t have to mean poor workmanship.
To make an analogy, if you want to be able to make a cup of coffee fast, you need to make sure that the coffee beans, the water, and the brewer are all near each other, that there is electricity and that the water is running. These are all things that enable you to move fast, but they don’t decrease quality, if anything they increase quality because you aren’t wasting time and effort tackling obstacles unrelated to brewing.
Which is in fact the point of the article. That you should make sure you have a good development environment, with support systems and processes, so that you can work effectively even if your developers are not savants. Rather than trying to hire people who are good enough to do a decent job even in the worst environments.
No, that wouldn’t make much difference. I don’t think I’ve seen a real world attack via SMS that even bothered to “forge” the from-field. People are used to getting texts from unknown numbers.
And how would you possibly implement this supposed “caller-id” for a field that doesn’t even have to be set to a number?
Blaming the victim solves nothing.
Scamming is a rapidly growing industry that is becoming more professional and specialized all the time. Anyone can be scammed.
To quote the most salient post
The app doesn’t provide client-side scanning used to report things to Google or anyone else. It provides on-device machine learning models usable by applications to classify content as being spam, scams, malware, etc. This allows apps to check content locally without sharing it with a service and mark it with warnings for users.
Which is a sorely needed feature to tackle problems like SMS scams
Why are there so many emigrants from Islamic countries? Most of them are even Muslims, but still they can’t live safely in their home country?
If you genuinely don’t know, you should abstain from having opinions until you gain a basic understanding of what is going on in the world.
The world is experiencing an unfathomable and worsening refugee crisis with 122 million people currently forced to flee their homes [1]. This is mostly due to overlapping long brutal wars. Refugees seeking shelter in the EU are mostly fleeing from Syria, Ukraine, Afganistan or Iraq. Most of these countries are majority muslim so that’s what most refugees will be.
As for why they can’t live safely in their home country, it’s because it’s a war zone, and has been for many years.
The rioters in Sweden were not “extreme muslims”. They were not particularly devout, but simply angry young men riled up by what they perceived as a racist state-sanctioned attack on their culture and heritage.
Many parties worked to escalate this issue, from far-right assholes looking to sow hate between religious groups, state actors trying to weaken Sweden internally and diplomatically, islamic countries trying to unify their people with a common enemy, as well as religious extremists seeking more influence. That’s why it gained so much attention, and generated so much outrage and violence.
Plenty of people were hurt by the Koran burnings!
Hundreds have been injured in riots directly caused by the these provocateurs, and completely innocent people have been killed by terrorists because of them. 1)
It has also resulted in freedom of speech restrictions, a more polarized society, and less constructive dialogue about Islam.
Wrapping the Koran in bacon and setting it on fire was never meaningful criticism of religion, it was meant to incite violence. And it did!
What do those NGOs have to say about Julian Assange or Steven Donziger
“RSF defends Assange because of his contributions to journalism” https://rsf.org/en/rsf-dispels-common-misconceptions-case-against-julian-assange
“CPJ welcomes reports that Assange will be released in plea deal” https://cpj.org/2024/06/cpj-welcomes-reports-that-assange-will-be-released-in-plea-deal/
“USA must drop charges against Julian Assange” https://www.amnesty.org/en/petition/julian-assange-usa-justice/
“Biden Should Pardon Steven Donziger” https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/01/biden-should-pardon-steven-donziger-before-leaving-office/
I’m getting the distinct impression you have no idea wtf you are talking about
the stories that come out first tend to be most biased
I honestly think the concept of news is actually harmful, because it’s about reporting what happened, not about making the audience understand the subject. It puts a premium on getting the report out as quickly as possible, and favours the most shocking events and interpretations that draw people’s attention.
Ultimately most news are “empty calories” of information that mostly give an illusion of knowledge. “Explosion in Herptown, dozens wounded” does not meaningfully increase your understanding of the world, it mostly just makes you scared. It will take weeks until the cause and consequences of the explosion can be fully understood, and a lot of research to put that into perspective.
If you do not know the extent of pressure asserted on Chinese media that is willful ignorance.
Of course “our media” (whatever you mean by that) is the only media that can report on it as Chinese media is heavily censored.
If you want to know the extent the information easy to find.
Here’s some of what Reporters Without Borders have to say
“The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the world’s largest prison for journalists, and its regime conducts a campaign of repression against journalism and the right to information worldwide.”
“The Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party sends a detailed notice to all media every day that includes editorial guidelines and censored topics.”
“Independent journalists and bloggers who dare to report “sensitive” information are often placed under surveillance, harassed, detained, and, in some cases, tortured.”
Source: https://rsf.org/en/country/china
This is from The Committee to Protect Journalists
“China has long ranked as one of the world’s worst jailers of journalists. Censorship makes the exact number of journalists jailed there notoriously difficult to determine, but Beijing’s media crackdown has widened in recent years”
Here’s Amnesty International
“Chinese authorities continued to severely curtail rights to freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly, including through the abusive application of laws often under the pretext of preserving national security.”
Source: https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/asia-and-the-pacific/east-asia/china/report-china/
Don Lumo is in with them!
This is an event that takes privacy very seriously, where it’s not uncommon for speakers to present evidence of crimes, and where a large antifa-flag hangs over the entrance. I think they’ll be fine.
The other two on stage where journalists, and while I’m not familiar with German law, that likely limits the police’s ability to try to get to Root through them.
If reasonable precations were taken, there will not be any evidence directly tying the person on stage to the crime, and even if there was, them being in costume leaves a lot of room for reasonable doubt about who it actually was.