Both ends of this are frustrating. Buying a domain either as a purely speculative asset (as the judge correctly labeled this purchase as) so you can 1) get under someones skin enough to make them want to buy the domain from you, or 2) just buying up every popular or potentially popular domain just to sell if off is scummy behaviour that ideally this guy should never have been able to do in the first place.

The other end of this I don’t like though is the possibility of somebody being able to convince a judge that they should own your domain and then just being able to take it. In this case I think the judge ruled correctly but the idea that somebody (especially in the US government) would be able to just take away my domain on a whim is terrifying when you can’t just go to people and say “hey, the person you are going to this domain for has now moved and is now here”. Things like e-mail address, monitoring, firewall exceptions and many self-hosted sites assume that the owner of the domain does not change hands without permission, and trust the domain blindly. Taking away a domain isn’t just like taking away somebodies nickname. It’s taking away their online identity and forced impersonation.

I really wish there was a way to address each other in a decentralised way that doesn’t just push the problem down to something like a public key, where the same problem exists except now you worry about the key being compromised.

The fact that we have ways to coordinate globally unique addresses that we collectively agree on who owns what is a feat. It just sucks that it’s also something which somebody can take away from you.

Oh absolutely! The ban makes far more sense as an algorithm ban rather than a social media ban and to the extent that you’re curtailing various mental issues that come with comparing yourself to others and being fed a narrative that is a good thing, versus banning interaction among friends. That doesn’t at all excuse the ban of course. It’s bad and to an extent doesn’t even target the core of the issue: you are still being fed this information whether you have an account or not. You don’t need an account to watch Tiktok, YouTube or Reddit. The issues of the algorithm are still very much there, it’s just that <16s can’t post/comment anymore.

Discord isn’t covered by the ban surprisingly enough despite being one of the platform more ripe for exploitation. I get that you’d want kids to be able to DM each other and voice chat but Discord is closer to a forum than it is to say, Signal.

Wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up on the ban list later on.

Now THIS is art!

The key is that they target what most people need, and given the average Steam user has a 3060, the bar isn’t set very high. It also doesn’t have to be when your competition is consoles. Anybody who isn’t dumping their salary into PC upgrades will brag about it when they finally upgrade to a new machine, but in that 5+ year gap between upgrades, they will drift towards the average. If Valve prices it right, then they’re just selling you the equivalent of a 3 year old machine but with new parts, and that’s fine at the right price.

“We should privatise service X so it’s more efficient” X collapses “We can’t afford to let X fail despite the fact that it ran at massive profits all the way to it’s collapse so we’ll bail it out” THEN WHAT WAS THE POINT OF PRIVATISING IT IN THE FIRST PLACE?!

You can take on the burden of running the thing and therefore the cost of making it public, or you can allow it to be private with the caveat that they must pay a substantial (enough for the government to not be at a net loss) tax as a kind of insurance in the event a bailout is needed, but don’t take on the worst of both worlds where the profits are private and the losses are public.

It surprises me that companies like Uber depend on them. You’d think that by the time you’re as big as Uber that you’d be able to just endure a DDoS but I guess the threat of multi-terabit DDoSs and the cost of the associated downtime would be enough to scare anybody smaller than AWS.

What about 2nd 54th route?

I understand (to agree degree) going after AI companies for reproducing the lyrics in a way that would not normally be protected by copyright but outright scraping is going too far from a moral standpoint.

There’s a good argument to be made about abusing their resources to do the scraping as I’ve heard complaints of site owners getting overwhelmed by AI crawlers but provided you’re not doing that I think scraping should be allowed generally speaking even if the operator disallows it, since without that search engines break and archival (especially to prove malice) go out the window.

I’m inclined to take an approach of “you can ingest whatever you want, but you are liable for reproduction, and if preventing reproduction is too onerous, then you probably should get the licences to permit it or don’t ingest that data”. Even that has some caveats since that reasoning would decimate social media services and personal/community spaces if actually enforced which is kinda what Safe Harbor helps protect.

It would help! It would establish that an archive was made no later than the date it was recorded on a blockchain (assuming the archiver isn’t also the one the made the original content in which case they can upload it after making the “archive”). You would still need to prove the trustworthiness of the archived data and at the moment the only thing we have for that is just trusting the archiver.

You could do something like have multiple archivers archive the same site in s stripped down for like plain text (so that differences caused by time or day, ads, etc don’t change the hash) and that way you can say that X amount of archivers agree that the site looked like that at that time.

It occasionally catches things that archive.org misses too. Also really nice to have an alternative.

It’d be nice to have a way of doing decentralised archiving while still keeping the trust. If you’re trying to prove that a site really said something at a certain date to another person, pointing to your own archive is kinda useless.

[REDACTED] deleted

Signal does have a censorship circumvention feature in the advanced settings on iOS which may work when this hits provided you already have the app installed. Never had to use it though.

And Microsoft ended up providing their own compiled version of OpenJDK to get around the non-commercial use part of the licence to do it.

The everlasting desire to have my own web archive being combatted the the knowledge of just how bad an idea it would be only just keeping it at bay.

I could see it being an issue for more privacy-oriented sites. I imagine some Lemmy and Mastodon users might be less inclined to have to login to Apple, Google or Microsoft to be able to interact with others even if the vast majority of users are fine with it. Would be nice for somebody to come up with an open-source service that handles some more basic age verification so other services can just self-host it instead of each platform implementing their own logins. By basic age verification I mean things like matching user behaviour to users with a known age and maybe some face scanning. Nowhere near perfect and it’s a constant cat and mouse game, but maybe enough to be compliant with the law.

If age verification wasn’t being made mandatory in Australia for social media sites I think it could be a great idea for some services especially if the verification is done by the government with the same level as photo ID. Think dating apps, finance and marketplace sites where having a higher level of confidence that the person you are talking to is who they say they really matters, especially if law enforcement need to be involved down the line. Even if you the user can’t verify the identity of the other person, law enforcement could, and the site might be able to block alt accounts. The credential theft problem still exists of course so it’s no silver bullet, but it’s a lot better than what we have now.

Seeing as these companies would try and dodge accountability for providing these useless products, perhaps we should be including a tax on sunscreen to help pay for the medical treatment costs this will incur on the health system as well as help fund more testing.

Could be a money maker for them. Let the AI slop through, make some money off it for a bit, ban the creator for a violation then delete the video. Far more space efficient than having to deal with real channels that have hundreds of GBs of legacy videos you need to keep around forever and fans who actually care about said creator and legacy. I’m fully expecting the jump where they start producing the slop themselves instead of having to share a percentage with the creators.

It’s not morally good of course. That slop is cancer.

Even after working with servers with hundreds of GBs of RAM it still amazes me how much RAM you chew through running even a small number of VMs. I built a new machine to do VMs and run a gaming VM with GPU passthrough not long ago and am already considering jumping from 64GB to 128GB on the host.

I was able to stick to 16GB on my Windows 11 gaming VM for ages. Only recently cracked because I was using the OBS replay buffer that was using 2-4GB so I upped to 24GB.

I would never recommend somebody build a new gaming system with less than 32GB now though since you will need an upgrade at some point. If you’re already running 16GB then it’s probably fine to just wait until you do a full re-build.

That said, 16GB is probably the new standard for normal PCs if you’re hoping to get 5 years out of them.