By some argument, section 103 of the DMCA (which is what grandparent post is referring to) does make it illegal to even talk about DRM circumvention methods.

illegal to: (2) “manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in” a device, service or component which is primarily intended to circumvent “a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work,” and which either has limited commercially significant other uses or is marketed for the anti-circumvention purpose.

If youtube implements an “access control measure” by splicing the ads with the video and disabling the fast-forward button during the ad, and you go on a forum and say “Oh yeah, you can write a script that detects the parts that are ads because the button is disabled, and force-fast-forwards through those”, some lawyer would argue that you have offered to the public a method to circumvent an access control measure, and therefore your speech is illegal. If you actually write the greasemonkey script and post it online, that would definitely be illegal.

This is abhorrent to the types among us for whom “code IS free speech”, but this scenario is not just a hypothetical. DMCA has been controversial for a long time. Digg collapsed in part because of the user revolt over the admins deleting any post containing the leaked AACS decryption key, which is just a 32-digit number. Yet “speaking” the number alone, aloud, on an online platform (and nothing else!) was enough for MPAA to send cease and desist letters to Digg under DMCA, and Digg folded.

Can’t access the article, but wasn’t China the one most vulnerable from the Malacca Strait being a chokepoint? As in, their trade towards Europe and fuel from the Middle East being potentially threatened? How does Thailand pitching to the US make sense then? How would a Thai bypass even increase security, since both routes are in the same area and can be equally blockaded? There aren’t any problems with throughput capacity at Malacca, unlike say at the Panama Canal. Maybe it will make the travel distance slightly shorter, but is there really any way it could ever be cost-effective to offload and reload ships for a few hundred kilometers savings?

I want people to be able to report bugs without any trouble.

Thank you for being aware! I’ve experienced this on github.com. I’ve tried to submit issues several times to open source projects, complete with proposed code to solve a bug, but github shadowbans my account 6 hours after creating it (because I use a VPN? a third-party email provider? do not provide a phone number? who knows). I can see the issue and pull request when logged in, but they only see a 404 on their project page even if I give them a direct link. I ended up sending them a screenshot of the issue page just to convince them this was even possible. Sad to hear gitlab does it even worse now by making phone mandatory.

far more maddeningly, some sites tell me that my username and password combo are incorrect when I’m using a VPN

Brb, gonna wiretap the judge’s house. It’s not a crime as long as I don’t act on the information I hear so there is no injury.

*Yawn!* Wake me up when they stop requiring phone numbers to sign up.

The list of tor exit ips is publicly viewable. Some IPS block the entire list contrary to Tor Project’s request not to do exactly that.

I assume this “VPN Server” that they can see is the “entry node”, and not the “exit node” (i.e. my IP as seen by the world) - but never got a clear answer to that

Traditionally, the entry node and the exit node have been the same VPN server/ip. In that sense, your ISP does know the IP of your exit server, since they are the ones connecting you to it.

For example, your X ISP’s logs could show “At 15:00, user #123 connects to IP 1.2.3.4, which lookup shows is assigned to “CheapVPNs Ltd”. At 15:01 our email server received 1,000,000 emails from IP 1.2.3.4 all angrily complaining about how “X ISP sucks”. Correlation implies user #123 is responsible for the mail bomb attack against our servers.”

At the moment, Mullvad specifically does use different entry and exit IPs, but they are all still located in the same datacenter and subnet. That is, you could be connecting to a Mullvad VPN server 1.2.3.4, 1.2.3.5, or 1.2.3.6 in London, and they all exit out through 1.2.3.1 in London. This is just something Mullvad does. Other VPN services may not do it and Mullvad hasn’t done it in the past. Someone analyzing ISP logs could correlate these IPs if they really wanted to.

Mullvad also offers “multihop”, but the way they have it implemented currently (changing the destination port number), an ISP could still deduce your exit IP if they bother looking up records of Mullvad network structure (which are publicly available), since they know the IP number and the port number of your entrance node.

The only way to hide your VPN exit IP from your ISP currently is to use multiple VPN services and nest them inside each other (or use one service and nest it inside itself using the “multiple devices” perk). Then only a state-level actor could hope to correlate your traffic by monitoring the ingress/outflow of multiple IPs simultaneously.

Piped/invidious work by scrapping the video chunks directly from google and proxying them through volunteer servers. They will stop working as soon as google gets around to locking down the APIs that they are abusing, or blocks their server IPs.

This is like that Key and Peele sketch where they rob the bank by working in there for 20 years.

That’s why Google is pushing hard their Web Environment Integrity. It’s DRM for the browser! They want the TPM chip in your computer to attest that the code running processing the video stream is authentic. Then you can’t slice out the ads because you do not have physical access to the inside of TPM. With HDCP encryption on the HDMI video output, you gonna need to point a literal video camera at the physical screen to DVR the video and slice out the ads later.

They’ve been working hard for decades to lock down the video pipeline with TPM and HDCP and now WEI. They said “don’t worry about it” and we let them. They are really close to snapping the trap shut!

Now please excuse me, my tongue is falling off with all the acronyms…

We are totally gonna get DVRs back, aren’t we 🤣?

Totally agree! That kinesin walking animation has dealt untold damage onto the collective psyche 😂. It just looks sooo cool strutting along on its stroll, with purpose and determination! But the reality is more like the molecular dynamics simulation videos you posted - wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube men all the way down.

The US bans all of it, while Japan has an exception for drawings

Absolutely incorrect. You are thinking of Canada or UK. In US, drawings are fine. Rather it is photorealistic depictions “indistinguishable from that of a minor” that are prohibited, almost presciently pre-empting techniques like deepfake and stablediffusion by 20 years, a rare win by legislators.

Yep

Ubisoft reserves the right to terminate Ubisoft+ or any of the Ubisoft+ Services, at any time and for any reason, with at least thirty (30) day notice to you.

And yep:

you waive any right to a trial (by judge or jury), you waive any right to participate as a member of a class in a class action or similar proceeding

Don’t worry, they got it covered:

for any claim related to these Terms of Sale or our Products … you may invoke binding arbitration by filing a separate Demand for Arbitration. … © either party may bring a claim in small claims court in lieu of arbitration; … (i) claims must be brought in the parties’ individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class or representative proceeding. You hereby agree that for any dispute or claim that is less than $10,000 USD, you waive any right to a trial (by judge or jury), you waive any right to participate as a member of a class in a class action or similar proceeding.

Give it a MathContext with the max precision that you want to allow.

The arbitrary precision may cause your bignums to balloon out of control in memory/cpu usage after repeated multiplication, unless you can prove that it will not. For example:

double x = 1;
while (true){
    x *= Math.exp((Math.random()*2 - 1) / 1000);
}

Would work perfectly fine with floats and x will remain about 1, but with BigDecimal it will grind to a halt.

It’s like… I keep imagining what if I were a Manchurian Candidate CEO and tried to destroy the entire value of my company as surely as possible before being found out, what decisions would I make? And I must say, what spez and musk are doing keeps surprising me at every turn, because even in my imagination I have not come up with schemes as effective as theirs.

Top 25 AI jokes from the paper appendix:

• T1. Why did the scarecrow win an award?
  Because he was outstanding in his field. (140)
• T2. Why did the tomato turn red?
  Because it saw the salad dressing. (122)
• T3. Why was the math book sad?
  Because it had too many problems. (121)
• T4. Why don’t scientists trust atoms?
  Because they make up everything. (119)
• T5. Why did the cookie go to the doctor?
  Because it was feeling crumbly. (79)
• T6. Why couldn’t the bicycle stand up by itself?
  Because it was two-tired. (52)
• T7. Why did the frog call his insurance company?
  He had a jump in his car. (36)
• T8. Why did the chicken cross the playground?
  To get to the other slide. (33)
• T9. Why was the computer cold?
  Because it left its Windows open. (23)
• T10. Why did the hipster burn his tongue?
  He drank his coffee before it was cool. (21)
• T11. Why don’t oysters give to charity?
  Because they’re shellfish. (21)
• T12. Why did the computer go to the doctor?
  Because it had a virus. (20)
• T13. Why did the banana go to the doctor?
  Because it wasn’t peeling well. (19)
• T14. Why did the coffee file a police report?
  Because it got mugged. (18)
• T15. Why did the golfer bring two pairs of pants?
  In case he got a hole in one. (13)
• T16. Why did the man put his money in the freezer?
  He wanted cold hard cash. (13)
• T17. Why don’t seagulls fly over the bay?
  Because then they’d be bagels. (13)
• T18. Why did the chicken go to the seance?
  To talk to the other side. (11)
• T19. Why was the belt sent to jail?
  Because it held up a pair of pants. (11)
• T20. Why did the chicken cross the road?
  To get to the other side. (7)
• T21. Why did the computer go to the doctor?
  Because it had a byte. (6)
• T22. Why did the cow go to outer space?
  To see the moooon. (6)
• T23. Why did the man put his money in the blender?
  He wanted to make liquid assets. (6)
• T24. Why don’t skeletons fight each other?
  They don’t have the guts. (5)
• T25. What do you call an alligator in a vest?
  An investigator. (5)