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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • DMCA is a tool for suppression of free information. It doesn’t require evidence that you’ve made a good faith effort to consider fair use or other legal complexity as it’s meant to take down the information before that is settled in court, but most commonly used to suppress information from a person or group who can’t afford to fight it in court. Microsoft’s Github has a history of delete first without risking their own necks to stand up for obviously fraudulent takedowns much less ones with unsettled law like APIs/SDKs.





  • To some extent, that’s true. But getting the data off of your phone is the first step. And that is where you have the most control and the bottleneck of poor internet service and data caps prevents transmitting too much data for now.

    Audio data can only be compressed so far before it becomes impossible for a server to transcribe it. And you’re talking about a constant stream of background audio which means you can’t afford to lose much of that data to compression at all. The device might be able to differentiate speech from background noise and only send the stream to the server when someone is speaking, but that’s about it for the large majority of devices.

    To be able to interpret all speech, including accents, takes a server still, unless it’s a high end device and you don’t mind battery drain making the user suspicious. It’s just not feasible with current processor, battery, and bandwidth limitations to listen to everything.


  • I don’t think the NSA gets it directly unless they installed an app on your device which if they’re using Google and Apple to do that for them could be fairly hidden.

    But a lot of the apps people have installed do listen when people don’t expect it, for commercial purposes. That information is then available to the NSA or any other law enforcement around the world basically at will. But there are things you can do to prevent that. Like not installing untrustworthy apps and if you have to, disabling their access to the microphone, storage, etc., if you have a device that allows that level of control.

    But there isn’t a blanket, listen to everything and record it kind of thing going on or you’d be using a lot more bandwidth. Most devices aren’t powerful enough to even do voice recognition beyond a few key words, but definitely not full realtime transcription, so the audio would have to be passed to a server.

    The real issue for now is things like keyboard apps and messaging apps that send everything you type, or the multitude of apps that don’t actually do user to user encryption, but decrypt in the middle so the data can be stored, combined, and compressed which makes it available to commercial interests and law enforcement.





  • It’s not much power, so it’s not likely to cause major or permanent damage, but it may affect others differently and could cause burns if left on too long like if someone is less sensitive and doesn’t think it’s live.

    And if the person is grounded and if they touch the hot side of the battery first there’s a chance the charge could travel through the body rather than just the tongue. It’s not enough to affect a heart, but might disrupt a pacemaker or other embedded device.

    And of the battery is leaking, it could cause permanent damage from chemical burns from the alkaline and poisoning from heavy metals which while unlikely to be deadly with just one battery, heavy metal poisoning is cumulative across a lifetime.

    So under ideal circumstances it is safe, but there are always risks with electricity and toxic chemicals, though relatively small.





  • Glad I moved away from Windows on all my personal computers. Fedora with Plasma is so similar to Windows and so much better. If my non-tech partner can use it, then anyone can.

    Only problem is that Windows is better at resizing content on high resolution (4K) monitors. And ordering multiple monitors on the login screen doesn’t always work right, but it’s fine once logged in. And it takes a bit more to set up than preinstalled Windows that’s on most computers when you buy them. But if it was preinstalled and set up already for the hardware like Windows usually is, it would be way better for nearly everyone.




  • The answer to your question of why it’s so hard to give artists your money is exactly the same as it has been for ages for all media. The few companies who survived the consolidation of the industry have done everything in their power to make sure they are the gatekeepers of content. They buy and merge or kill off any competing companies or technologies.

    They weren’t successful with MP3s or with streaming because they didn’t bother to understand the technology or that the Internet was the new marketplace and thought they could just do what they had done with physical media and pay for laws that protected their interests and sue everyone, but they ultimately lost control because you can’t sue hundreds of millions of people like you can sue a few thousand stores. So they had to give the people what they wanted for a while so they could have time to buy up all of the companies.

    But they’ve now done that and paid enough to get the laws and precedents on interpreting those laws that they wanted, so courts are becoming better at enforcing those laws more quickly. So they can pressure new tech that pushes the limits on interpreting the laws to not last long enough to get people hooked. And now that they’ve reconsolidated most of the market and technologies as capitalism tends to do if you’re patient enough and there’s no possibility of monopoly regulation or market disruption, we’re stuck with pirate or use the garbage they feed to us and most artists are back to having to sign their art away and sleep with executives to get the marketing and distribution from the gatekeepers just to get a chance at success. The rest have to rely on word of mouth and self distribution which even online can be expensive without the advantages of centralized hosting providers, merchant accounts, and bandwidth.




  • Docker automatically upgrades if you tell it to by specifying “latest” or not specifying a version number. But it only upgrades if you issue the pull command or the compose up command. There are ways to start without a pull like using start or restart. So yes, there was warning and something you did actively told it to upgrade.

    And it’s really bad practice to update any software without testing, especially between breaking/major version numbers.

    Finally, it’s not uncommon for a platform to release its update and then the plugins or addons to follow. Especially with major updates that require lots of testing before release. This allows plugin/add-on makers to fully test their software with the release version of the platform rather than all of the plugin makers having to wait for one that may be lagging behind.