This is why I say, with not a single drop of irony, that piracy is a public service.
This is why I say, with not a single drop of irony, that piracy is a public service.
VLC is just a media player. It isn't on them if anyone is using it to watch or listen pirated content just as much as it isn't on Adobe or Microsoft if people use them to read pirated books. They aren't the one hosting or distributing the pirated content
Really, I get an off feeling just by trying to parse out what is your reasoning here. Did we get to a point that technology is so corporately-controlled that the idea of a program can freely open files of a certain type is inherently subversive, as opposed to a service or storefront where everything is tied to some corporately-owned licenses?
But I shouldn't be alarmist and make too many assumptions. What is the "legal gray area risk" that you mean here?
Servers with ANY content not suitable for 10 year olds are now prohibited
This is just ridiculous. What makes them think they get to decide what grown-ass adults do in their own private servers?
They are about a decade too late to child-proof Minecraft. A lot of the children they might even claimed to want to protect are adults by now.
I get wanting to keep porn away from children, but on the flipside I don't trust governments with a history of criminalizing homosexuality with my porn history. Looking up, it seems that these states even kept laws against sodomy in their books.
Honestly at this point I feel worse for the guy who made the threat than anyone else. Can you imagine what is like working with those sort of bosses with such exploitative tendencies and an utter disregard for an entire industry? They get to ruin countless lives but if anyone gets mad that's the unacceptable one who is punished.
Fee speech, pay $8/mo to post hate speech at your leisure.
You think being inevitably forced to see every bit of harassment and spam is going to make that platform more popular and financially viable? Nah, if anything this is free advertising for Mastodon.
Our society is long overdue giving con men the ass kicking they deserve.
Well that sounds terrible. At least with the blue logo you can just hide or block their posts to get to the organic engagement.
Just once I would love to open one of these threads without seeing people shitting... on Linux.
Linux is not even the one doing anything wrong but people gotta rag on whoever recommends it as an alternative. This is getting more annoying than however annoying they say Linux users are.
edit: Just to make clear because some folks aren't getting it, this is not an invitation to argue about how you feel about Linux and Linux users. I. don't. fucking. care. I don't even use Linux. Take it to someone who cares.
The Internet Archive has special status that gives it protections. What might kill it is the erosion of support for public libraries and such. The advancement of media companies' attempt to have absolute control over everything they release, by binding it into their own services.
I see people going "this is what you get for buying digital", and that's what they are not seeing. This is not about digital being more unreliable than physical. This is an attack at the concept of customer ownership itself.
You are underestimating how much bulshit people are willing to put up just to not have to make any change.
I was fine with ads a couple years ago, but the number, length and frequency of them keeps ramping up. This wouldn't need to be such a struggle if they just were reasonable about it.
This is a distinction that some defenders miss. A lot of people who use ad-blockers would be fine with ads if they were restrained and not too obtrusive. But the amount and frequency of ads only seem to increase. Something that would be difficult to justify, because time does not suffer inflation.
We went from 1 skippable 5 second ad per video to multiple ads every 10 minutes or so, sometimes even unskippable 15+ second ads or even more ads in a row. When is it going to be enough? Are we supposed to take them on their word that this is necessary, simply assuming that they need it because they don't even share financial numbers? Is our only other option to pay up, once again, the amount that they decided is a fair compensation and also keep increasing?
Seems that at the very least some way for the users to negotiate what they believe is fair is lacking in this matter. On the lack of that, no wonder some people just decide they refuse to be squeezed forever.
It's a matter of self-preservation to get away from Unity as soon as possible at this point.
I didn't know what this was about. I found this that can serve as context for others unaware: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/26/1159580425/newspapers-have-dropped-the-dilbert-comic-strip-after-a-racist-rant-by-its-creat
[...] Adams urged white people "to get the hell away from Black people" during a racist rant on his online video program last week, during which he labeled Black people a "hate group."
On his video show last week, the 65 year old said he had been identifying as Black "because I like to be on the winning team," and that he used to help the Black community. Adams said the results of the Rasmussen poll changed his mind.
"It turns out that nearly half of that team doesn't think I'm okay to be white," he said, adding that he would re-identify as white. "I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off," he said. "I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying."
This is not the first time Adams' strip has been dropped. Last year, The San Francisco Chronicle and 76 other newspapers published by Lee Enterprises reportedly dropped Dilbert after Adams introduced his first Black character. Quinn noted that the move was "apparently to poke fun at 'woke' culture and the LGBTQ community."
There used to be laws against this shit.
Not to mention that a lot of women have bad experiences with online gamer guys being sexist assholes, so they might not want to call attention to themselves.
For that you need passionate people who are wealthy and not primarily driven to acquire more wealth. That seems to be very rare in large scale businesses.
I'm as suspicious of "think of the children" stuff as anyone here but I don't see how we are fighting for the rights of the people by defending non-consensual deepfake porn impersonation, of children or anyone.
If someone makes deepfake porn of my little cousin or Emma Watson, there's no scenario where this isn't a shitty thing to do to a person, and I don't see how the masses are being oppressed by this being banned. What, do we need to deepfake Joe Biden getting it on to protest against the government?
Not only the harassment of being subjected to something like this seems horrible, it's reasonable to say that people ought to have rights over their own likeness, no? It's not even a matter of journalistic interest because it's something completely made-up.
I don't know what France is like these days, but as I see the US and my country flirting with conservative homophobic politicians, I absolutely refuse to tie the porn I browse to my government ID.
The movie industry can't bother to provide and preserve the movies they make, they should shut the fuck up.
OpenAI is definitely not the one arguing that they have stole data to train their AIs, and Disney will be fine whether AI requires owning the rights to training materials or not. Small artists, the ones protesting the most against it, will not. They are already seeing jobs and commission opportunities declining due to it.
Being publicly available in some form is not a permission to use and reproduce those works however you feel like. Only the real owner have the right to decide. We on the internet have always been a bit blasé about it, sometimes deservedly, but as we get to a point we are driving away the very same artists that we enjoy and get inspired by, maybe we should be a bit more understanding about their position.
Seems pertinent that US politicians suddenly mentioned a totally reliable account about possible aliens just as people's unrest over their cost of living and the excesses of the wealthy has been rising.
If he was competent at that, he wouldn't be sinking it alongside his own reputation, he'd get his puppet CEO to undermine it and then call it inevitable.
I think he wants this X app to be a thing, he just has no idea what he's doing
Ironically just yesterday I needed Google Cache because a page I needed to read was down and I couldn't find the option anymore.
Are we going to need to go back to personal web crawlers to back-up information we need? I hate today's internet.
I feel bad for the regular workers there who can't choose the direction of the company and need that job to live.
But frankly if they were all directed just to the CEO, I couldn't be less bothered. Wealthy assholes don't have empathy, don't listen to reasons, aren't bound by rules. Even lawsuits today are decided more by who has the most money than who is in the right. Maybe it's not so bad if folks put some fear in him, specifically.
Sure, there are more worthy causes to direct that sort of outrage to. Then again there's the livelihood of a large number of smaller creators to consider. This isn't just about a fictional thing not being the way someone wanted.
The most likely option is that they will rebrand and we will have to push back against a "completely new, completely different functionality" in a few months.
If Silksong is delayed because of this I'm going to riot!
People keep repeating this for easy self-righteousness. Again, what about small artists whose careers depend on their social media following?
Fuck Musk, but for better or worse this isn't just about him.
Some people seem to believe the customers are suckers who will eternally take the price hikes, but even the most gullible fool still doesn't have infinite money. At some point they'll have to cut something or the bank will cut it for them.
Well, back to the seas it seems. It was fun while it lasted. One might as well pay for a VPN instead.
Easy for you to say. Are you even an artist?
Small artists need a convenient way to get their work to the eyes of regular people. If their self-hosted gallery is seen by no one, it doesn't facilitate their career. They generally can't afford to buy ads and are not popular enough to get a fan made groups spreading the word everywhere else.
Not to mention that this is such a callous attitude in general. Because you in particular aren't susceptible to this manner in which wealthy assholes are screwing people, then it's their fault for needing it?
When the series creator is vocally advocating to marginalize transgender people and financially supporting other members of the hate movement, it takes more than a token NPC to make up for it.
Most likely that character is an insincere PR move from Warner Bros, but some trans people also pointed out that naming her Miss Ryan was probably done in bad faith. If anything, sounds exactly like the kind of tasteless thoughtless naming that JKR is infamous for.
The problem is that game companies are no long interested in prolonged lifetime they can't directly monetize. Who cares that mods add a decade of additional sales if people are modding costumes instead of buying them from the cash shop.
And this sort of attitude is making me wonder if it's still worth buying from these companies.
Seems to me like Outer Wilds outshone Outer Worlds if anything. I never hear anyone talking of Outer Worlds anymore, but Outer Wilds is still brought up as one of the greatest indie games out there.
Wild that since the rise of the internet it's like they decided advertising laws don't apply anymore.
But Copyright though, it absolutely does, always and everywhere.
These days "free speech absolutist" is used more as an excuse to defend hate speech than actual opposition of censorship. Elon was always inclined to censor whoever he finds inconvenient (company whistleblowers, plane tracker), and many of his fans are similarly inclined, say, against LGBT people, socialists, and other groups they dislike.
tbf I get it. Sometimes you just want to be mad.
But like, it's Microsoft's fault.
Right-wingers only seem to care about free speech when it applies to themselves. Anyone else and they'll get talking of "defeating the woke mind virus" or whatever ridiculous way they decide to demonize others.
Reminds me of that Sartre quote