He’s a doctor of economics, he has a PhD. He’s not exactly a tech bro by any stretch.

The paper I linked is literally an example of him making something. Unless you somehow erroneously think that research papers aren’t entitled to copyright protection, which, surprise, you’re wrong.

This isn’t even worth replying to. Get your head out of your ass, man. Plenty of people who make things that are copyrightable promote shortening and amending copyright, including author Cory Doctorow, the man who coined the term “enshittification.”

I’ll quote Mark Hosler of the band Negativland, who made a shitload of art. Negativland was also instrumental in designing early Creative Commons licenses.

“If you really want to keep control of your art, keep it in your house, don’t share it with anyone, don’t share it with the world.”

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf

The research has been done, and speaks for itself.

Copyright needs to be shorter for a lot of reasons, but one of the main ones would be that if copyright was a reasonable length (15 to 30 years), this would all be a moot point and everyone could use books from within a recent timeframe for any kind of use, including AI training.

Further, this would make it feel a lot less hypocritical like piracy is okay for giant corporations and their products as long as they make oodles of money but piracy for regular people is still bad. I mean for fucks sake they put the guys from The Pirate Bay in prison for less, under the same argument: that they were profiting off of pirated works, just like AI companies are. Yet somehow it’s totes okay for OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Meta, and Twitter, and they’re not being sent to prison over it. It really re-enforces the feeling that there’s two justice systems, one for the obscenely rich where as long as they make crazy profit they can do whatever the fuck they want, and one for the poor where they get fucked six ways to Sunday for doing on a small, individual level what giant corporations do at industrial scale.

The solution is to fix copyright and make more works public domain and then nobody is going to prison and nobody is getting a free pass over what’s considered illegal for others.

All of this is so on the nose except the updates bit.

Sorry, mate, but if you skip an update because you don’t feel like keeping up and it’s because there’s a massive security flaw that leaves your PC up to easy compromise, that’s genuinely a bad thing.

Yeah, most times updates are just new features but if you’re not paying attention you have no idea if it’s a feature update or a security update, do you?

If only you have physical access to your computers and they’re firewalled properly sure, maybe it’s safe enough, but the vast majority of people don’t have things firewalled properly at the very least.

I don’t know, that’s the only bit that seems a bit short-sighted to me, especially when it comes to more casual users.

12345

That’s amazing. I’ve got the same combination on my luggage!

I have so many reasons to not use Kagi.

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20240412153748/https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770/

RSS support is absolutely my favorite old-web thing that’s still around. It truly is fantastic to have your own curated RSS feeds.

The Fediverse specifically lets you create them really granularly as well!

Misleading title.

There are indeed “weird blogs” they just have to be devoid of capitalist funding.

Corey Doctorow’s Pluralistic seems in many ways to be a natural extension of his BoingBoing days albeit a bit more serious than the lighthearted BoingBoing.

MetaFilter fully became a non-profit and still retains a more a blog-esque format than it’s contemporaries.

Mother Jones has a strong online presence and has avoided the capitalist machine for it’s entire existence.

The thing is (and the more important part of this story is) that submitting to the capitalist machine is to submit to its machinations and unwillingness to adhere to the age-old social contract of a business producing profit to be sufficient enough for a business to exist. Modern capitalism is indeed a shell-game of extracting maximum value, essentially truly squeezing blood from a stone until the stone no longer even exists. Anyone who willingly plays this game will be bitten by this game, unless they themselves become ruthless capitalists and focus all their energy on shell-game chicanery over producing actual products, services, or content. There is no end-game here where the plucky capitalist-minded business-owner can overcome all and become the master of their own domain. The few who have (Valve, for example) had a solid financial footing to begin their more unique forays into profit-driving and they have stayed independent companies instead of publicly owned companies. That alone has saved them, and most of them (again, like Valve) started in an era before the behemoth of VC (Vulture/Vampire Capitalism) took hold, and made their early profits soon enough to not need such outside funding. Starting such a company today? Without outside funding? Get real. You’d have to be someone like Gabe Newell, who exited Microsoft with enough money to take a risk to make a profit of his own without needing outside stake, and the number of Gabe Newell’s exiting industry to make their own goes at new business are exceedingly rare. The ones that actually succeed in making a profitable company are even rarer.

In capitalist America, the “free market” binds you and dictates your future.

Soon:

ISPs: “We fired all our junior Cybersecurity employees and replaced them with AI.”

Bubsy: “What could pawssibly go wrong?”

If European companies didn’t already have good reasons to pull their data of US data centers, they sure as fuck do now.

Never believe that corporations ever cared about pesky things like human rights or that all human lives have value.

No, corporations started hiring and selling products to women, to people of color, to LGBTQ+ groups because it made them more money. They never cared about any of these groups at all or their rights. They just knew that not hiring the best workers from each group and not being willing to sell them products was leaving money on the table. They wanted that money more than they wanted to openly exhibit how racist, misogynist, and homophobic they are.

So really the decision here follows from that exact same logic. They hid behind neutrality while keeping the person who made them more money. As sad as it is to say, this is the same logic that got them to accept and sell products to these groups to begin with. In the end, it’s literally always been about money and nothing else. They hide behind lofty values as a PR move, and nothing else deeper than that. It’s always just been propaganda to increase profits.

The only color they care about is green.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1436186

Rufus Pollock’s math agrees. I am so bummed he recently took this down from his personal website where it had been available for 15 years

Now it just resolves as a 404 not found:

https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf

For sure, but like expecting average people to understand the more technical side of Linux right off the bat, expecting average people to even understand that is an option is, frankly, elitist. The vast majority of humans just don’t even fundamentally understand the difference between “Windows 10” and “Windows 10 LTSC” and we’re not heading into a future in which they will all suddenly turn around and become computer literate when a vast amount of the world is barely regular literate.

We have got to stop expecting so much from average people and do a better job helping them.

I know maybe that’s what you intended to do, but if I was an average person, I wouldn’t have had any clue what LTSC and IOT meant without a lot of filling me in. Just food for thought, we have to spoon-feed this stuff to a lot of people, and be kind to them when they struggle with it.

but I have been assuming this is because my VPN shows me in Europe.

Glad you found the info yourself, but your version of Windows will still register as a US version. Being behind a VPN doesn’t change your OS fingerprints, especially since a VPN is layered on top of your OS, and MS essentially has direct access to your OS underneath that VPN layer. Unless you’re running your VPN on your router and all your traffic in and out of your router is pushed through the VPN, then it might make a bit of a difference.

or they are in Europe and they get to wait an extra year.

This is being offered in the USA, too, you know. You have to submit to logging in with a Microsoft account and allowing them to back up your system preferences to the cloud.

Secondly, the onerous TPM 2.0 requirement is actually what is going to stop a lot of those low-end computers from upgrading. I recently was helping a friend with what seemed like a relatively recent machine and I was shocked to find it still has a BIOS and not a UEFI and I had to redo my installation disk to support MBR partitioning instead of GPT partitioning. People like that will be SOL and simply won’t be able to upgrade, even if they want to.

As I have been saying for a year now, I foresee a Windows 7 situation all over again that despite Microsoft’s best efforts to bully people into upgrading, that eventually they will continue offering updates for Windows 10 that they didn’t want to have to offer simply because so many business machines will still be running it to support other legacy software.

If a third of Steam users are still using it, you can bet that it’s a similar number of small businesses without the resources to upgrade, especially when the real economy is in a free-fall.

Americans can’t have that, and are forced to upgrade regardless.

No, I’m in the USA, this is what they’re offering in the USA, a year of extra security updates if you log in with an MS account and backing up the system to the cloud.

I’m actually a bit surprised the EU would allow it instead of just forcing MS to give everyone another free year of updates.

But I still see a potential Windows 7 situation happening, where they try to force the change, but so many people stay on Windows 10 and just accept the lack of updates that Microsoft will be eventually forced to push more security updates to not appear to endorse letting millions of machines become parts of botnets.

You can still get an extra year of security updates, though

If you submit to Microsoft and log in to your Windows 10 machine with a Microsoft account and allow them to backup your system into the cloud.

Actually digging deeper, I just came across this from late last month (3 weeks ago exactly):

https://docs.bsky.app/blog/plc-directory-org

So they’re making headway towards removing the PLC from their own control and putting it under a more “neutral” third party (that’s going to be open to debate). I wish they were working faster on these aspects though, because I think the AT protocol is very nice, I just am hesitant with how it’s currently organized. Once there is an independent PLC, that’s a step in the right direction, but we also need things like PLC mirroring and alternative PLCs that can federate with the initial “neutral” PLC.

You can use your own PDS (Personal Data Server), but to my understanding, you’re still using the Bluesky maintained PLC (Public Ledger of Credentials) which manages the DID identifiers. That still makes it very much centralized and while you technically can self-host, it’s still somewhat tied to the BS company.

Was kind of excited to see something using the AT protocol other than Bluesky but then saw the big… “Login with Bluesky” and rolled my eyes so fucking hard while hitting the back button.

Until AT is truly decentralized I can’t justify joining up.