I’ve been half joking about it for a while, but it’s been only a matter of time before copyright was stretched so far that criticism of the work becomes a violation

Unfortunately, it seems to be beginning

Sure you can, outside of a few specific carve outs it’s a civil matter… Meaning it takes money to fight money behind it

They got in the phone anyways, Apple just told the FBI to pound sand if they don’t have a court order… Why would they put man hours towards decreasing their reputation if they don’t have to? They’re probably not even geared to break into their own devices. Then their PR team ran with it while one of many companies with the capability to crack the phone took a paycheck

This is different - this is genuine security, even if easily bypassed with preparation beforehand. Honestly, I credit some random apple dev who may have been looking to fix a bug related to long uptime as easily as they might’ve cared about security. I don’t think this was even on the radar of Apple leadership

This isn’t some moral superiority on Apple’s part, but it is good practice

Sure, F-Droid. It’s an app store that not only is exclusively foss, they only host things they can build from source in house and seem to have a decent review process - they tag anything from ads to integration with paid services, and those features are often buried so it seems like they’re pretty militant about it

It comes with all the drawbacks that entails, but I generally check there first myself

So the CEO gets less than half their salary for the year?

Sounds like a great deal for the company. Until, you know, the whole thing collapses because they laid off the workers who kept the whole thing running

It’s structural - you can be open or locked down, and it’s hard to decentralize if you’re not open

You can make it easier or harder to work with that data, but ultimately it’s obsfucation - you could make it hard to parse and obscure details, but ultimately if you want decentralized federation you can’t hide too much

I just remember the day, as a software dev with a solid understanding of Blockchain, my older dev neighbor started explaining how NFTs worked

I thought he was confused or stupid or something.

“Wait, so like you have these super rare images, proof you own it on a Blockchain, and a link to the place they’re all publicly hosted?”

Him: “Yep”

“And the only use for these right now is as a profile picture?”

Him: Shrug, “yeah, people use them for discord and stuff”

“But… Couldn’t you just download the image and use it anyways?”

Him: “Yeah, it’s all publicly hosted”

And it was about then my brain locked up. I did multiple hours of research later, sure I had to be missing something

I no longer do this.

Not because it’s not delicious (it is), but because it’s a super cheap and easy way to eat 300-400 calories of straight carbs

I’d say don’t knock it until you try it, but just put in a slight effort and snack healthier

A smarter person would have used a fake SSN then claimed success when it never worked

I think this is a non-issue

Captchas aren’t easy to bypass - run of the mill scammers can’t afford a bunch of servers running cutting edge LLMs for this

Captchas were never a guarantee - one person could sit there solving captchas for a good chunk of a bot farm anyways

So where does that leave us? Sophisticated actors could afford manually doing captchas and may even just be using a call-center setup to do astroturfing. My bigger concern here is the higher speed LLMs can operate at, not bypassing the captcha

Your run of the mill programmer can’t bypass them, it requires actual skill and a time investment to build a system to do this. Captchas could be defeated programically before and still can now - it still raises the difficulty to the point most who could bother would rather work on something more worthwhile

IMO, the fact this keeps getting boosted makes me think this is softening us up to accept less control over our own hardware

I think this is a non-issue

Captchas aren’t easy to bypass - run of the mill scammers can’t afford a bunch of servers running cutting edge LLMs for this

Captchas were never a guarantee - one person could sit there solving captchas for a good chunk of a bot farm anyways

So where does that leave us? Sophisticated actors could afford manually doing captchas and may even just be using a call-center setup to do astroturfing. My bigger concern here is the higher speed LLMs can operate at, not bypassing the captcha

Your run of the mill programmer can’t bypass them, it requires actual skill and a time investment to build a system to do this. Captchas could be defeated programically before and still can now - it still raises the difficulty to the point most who could bother would rather work on something more worthwhile

IMO, the fact this keeps getting boosted makes me think this is softening us up to accept less control over our own hardware

Because I think the “rules” are based on what other people did

I select every little bit, which works, but there might be some wiggle room

This is such a simple idea that people seem incapable of understanding

Big companies can’t innovate. They’re pulled in too many directions and create bureaucracies that stifle the individuality needed to push beyond known techniques. At best, they can iterate and imitate - and even that is very hit or miss

There’s this idea companies must grow or die - but in reality, companies grow until they can only perpetuate themselves. They start to only make sense on paper

Individuals drive progress - they need time and autonomy

No, there’s one use for Blockchain. An immutable public ledger with no trusted authority

That’s useful for a lot of things - just not everything (and it has been shoved plenty of places it doesn’t belong)

Wait… Y’all regularly leave your shoes in a normal place?

There’s many reasons people pirate - sometimes it’s a matter of means & availability, sometimes it’s a matter of controlling their paid-for content (like people who actually buy switch games but want to run them on their steam deck), and sometimes it’s basically a hobby

Some people would surely buy some games if piracy wasn’t on the table (assuming the terms were unacceptable to them), but I used to rewatch the same things and play the same games endlessly. I think the vast majority would do without

And rejecting a service you don’t consider worth it isn’t moral. That’s just basic capitalism and self-interest.

This seems to be our core difference. I don’t think capitalism is a moral system, and “enlightened self interest” only works with equity of opportunity and fierce competition - that’s not the world we live in. And even then, I don’t think it’s a very ethical moral framework

I see supporting a service hostile to users as immoral - it’s like enabling an abuser, however slight, you’re contributing to behaviors that are a detriment to others

Because now they have your login and password - not a hashed version they can only validate against, but the real thing that can be used to log into your network. They shouldn’t ever have it, aside from them being able to sell credentials this also means someone else could probably obtain access to all of them

I’m not going to say pirating is some morally superior act, but there is something to be said for refusing to support companies that have user-hostile distribution

And I don’t think that act is cheapened by accessing the content anyways - yes, you are not contributing to the creators while enjoying their content. If you weren’t going to pay into the stream that they get a small part of anyways, then you’re not costing them anything - if you wouldn’t have bought it and didn’t, it’s the same result on their end either way

Ultimately it goes back to piracy being a problem of accessibility, and rejecting an inaccessible service is the moral part, I see the piracy in this context as just neutral

Source?

Steam, case in point. You can find cracked games fairly easily, there’s even games entirely lacking drm that could be passed around effortlessly

But steam is very convenient, the prices are reasonable, and they have good customer support. That’s enough that even people who pirate switch games buy pc games on the same device

We must establish a new order of monks, who all get up at 6am UTC. We can call them in sync