When you buy software on a DVD, you own the software, at least until you install it and agree to the clickwrap agreement that revokes your ownership.

In the olden days, we installed software by copying it off floppy disks onto our hard drives. There was no clickwrap agreement, because there was no installer. We owned that software.

GOG advertises that purchasers own the software they buy. https://www.gog.com/en/news/welcome_to_gog

Lots of open source software can be owned. You have to do something that grants you ownership in the first place, like buying it on a disc. Downloading it for free might or might not, I don’t know. But no FOSS license I know of has any clause that revokes ownership. The GPLv2 has a specific clause that says

You are not required to accept this License

so you can always choose to reject the whole GPL, and revert back to the implicit rules of commerce, “Pay money, receive thing” which confers ownership.

Did Steam shut down games people bought?

Proton’s systems are built on proprietary software. I don’t trust them.

China is authoritarian. There is no way to nonviolently unify Taiwan under China, because the residents of Taiwan would be forced to live under the Chinese government, which would use violence against them.

Flatpak doesn’t have digital signatures anyway, so effectively nothing is verified on Flathub

You mean get Microsoft to take it down? And then it goes back up on a self-hosted git repo? This does not enable Bambu, Microsoft, or anyone else to sue Rossman in China.

Does Rossman have any presence in China? If not, and if the files are hosted outside China, there’s nothing China can do.

SNAP (food stamps) covers almost nothing. If you have zero income, you get $69 per week (if you’re even eligible). That isn’t enough to feed a person. SNAP benefit scales linearly with income, reaching zero at $12k per year. How is a person making $12k per year supposed to make ends meet on their own?

This program needs to be expanded, not restricted. Or replaced with a larger Universal Basic Income.

I have to use Windows 11 at work. Whenever I complain about it to any of my friends, they say, “it’s easy to work around that. You just have to…” and then they say to modify some registry key, or set up a group policy, or run a powershell command, or use some cleaning tool.

But even if it’s easy to do that, it’s not easy.

1. You have to know about the key or the cleaning tool, and there’s a different one for every problem.
2. You have to keep up to date with the new user-hostile behavior introduced to Windows every month.
3. You have to keep up to date because Microsoft removes those circumventions, because they don’t want you to be able to remove their trash.
4. You have to vet the tools, make sure they’re not malware. And continuously make sure it’s not replaced by malware in the future. There’s no central repository of Windows programs like there is for Debian or Ubuntu, so if you just web search for the tool name every time, you might click on a malvertising link in the search results instead.

LLMs and current generative AI won’t. But there will be better AI systems in the future.

And consider the scale of the datacenters they’re building: New AI data center in Utah will generate and consume more than twice the amount of power the entire state uses. They’re installing 9GW of natural gas turbines on site. They’re planning for better AI that will be much different from the current batch.

While we all know that current AI is much worse than human work, consider that they might just use it anyway, and not care that their product is shit.

Anyone got a mirror of the post? I’m getting this error message:

Sorry, a potential security risk was detected in your submitted request. The Webmaster has been alerted.

Reference ID: 18.a104d217.1777692249.4596f77

You can proceed to www.senate.gov.

If this problem persists, please contact the Office of the Secretary Webmaster at webmaster@sec.senate.gov.

Clicking the www.senate.gov link gives the same error message.

Most of all, the US is being humiliated by US leadership.

A car warranty lasts like 2 years. I can’t afford a car less than 2 years old.

$100-$500 according to the article. No discount for the biometric data they’ll sell.

Web browsers have a huge attack surface, and are most people’s main exposure to potential exploits. Without javascript, 99% of the attack surface disappears, becuase the attacker no longer has a way to run arbitrary code.

A lot of terminal-based browsers don’t do javascript.

If I want to scrape a page, this makes it a pain for both parties. I’m not an AI company, so I can afford the hash tax, but it’s still a pain to spin up Firefox from a from cron job instead of wget. And I’m still doing it, Anubis doesn’t stop small time scrapers like me who aren’t running AI training, and only scrape like one page per day. So now the server has to serve the original page, plus all the Anubis stuff each time my crown job goes off.

It sucks that you can’t browse anywhere without javascript anymore. It used to be that all the open source sites, most news sites, forums running phpbb, even YouTube aside from the actual <video> element all worked without javascript, and as a bonus there would be no ads.

Now, you can’t browse anywhere without these challenges. At least this one is noninvasive, but the Cloudflare one and the Google Recaptcha do a ton of fingerprinting to choose whether to let you in.

USPS has a home-rolled one that requires web assembly enabled, or it silently fails with a blank page. There’s no non-malicious excuse for that.

If this is the future of web browsing, hopefully more sites use systems like Anubis. But I also hope at least static pages can be viewable as plain html.

Their proof doesn’t prove anything if they control the hardware and software scanning your biometrics.

will likely hurt the wealthy in the long run with decreased profits. They don’t care about the long term though.

The ultra wealthy don’t care as much about their own wealth, as much as the ratio of their wealth to the average person. Most billionaires would accept a decrease in their own quality of life in exchange for a bigger decrease in the average quality of life

In 1991, lithium-ion batteries cost around $9,200 per kilowatt-hour — 33 years later, they cost just $78.

Where can I get lithium-ion batteries for $78 per kilowatt-hour?

This affects SD cards, which are extremely common and supported by open source operating systems. This affects Compact Flash cards, which use the same protocol as PATA hard drives, just a different connector.