deleted by creator

I have not heard a car for a few hours. Not even the rumble of traffic in the distance and I can see the night sky without light pollution. It is a very privileged experience in some ways and while it has its advantages we are measurably disadvantaged in most human development metrics: health, education, income etc compared to people living in urban areas of our own country. The disadvantage is real and pops up everywhere from cancer survivability to suicide rates. Equitable internet access is more important than many people appreciate. If we can improve services to everyone AND protect radio astronomy that is a worthy goal.

True that copyright always existed to protect publishers and not creators. But in pre-digital times there were considerable barriers to publishing and distributing creative works at scale so while publishers in all media have often abused creators they were a necessary evil if you wanted to make a living.

The worst trick greedy capitalists have pulled recently it to bypass copyright and steal the entire digital record of human creative labor to incorporate into proprietary models and services for their own enrichment. I have no idea how society and our political representation has slept through that. The second worse is insanely destroying their own industry by fucking over both consumers and creatives with increasingly unsustainable greedy and dumb bullshit.

Access to education and other equitable causes really should be fair use. If everyone pirated, and the way things are going it will be the only sane way to get content, then new content is going to dry up unless people are happy with AI slop. We will still see indie self-published works but necessarily the creators won’t have access to the same resources we saw when they were part of an exploitative but productive industry. That sucks. A lot of people are happy to pay for convenient and affordable access to content under reasonable conditions and piracy is something they only resort to when that is denied.

The loss of life from WWI and WW2 in particular had a huge impact on country towns. They planted avenues of trees, named roads, engraved the names of young people on walls.

Election cycles are seasonal events and there is a traveling circus that supports them across the English speaking countries. There is also trans-national movement within political influence businesses like News Corp and other lobby groups.

Historically Australia has often adapted media from elsewhere whether it be advertising or television formats and much of the country was so isolated pre-Internet that we never noticed that football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars was a ripoff of hot dogs, apple pie and chevrolet.

I expect over negative/false/deceptive campaigning would be regulated as we have a comparatively robust and fair electoral system. AI is built into popular image editing tools and political staffers aren’t necessarily great graphic artists so I expect we will see more low effort AI images in political advertising and everywhere else as society continues to embrace mediocrity and deskilling.

Pretty much the entire Internet runs on Linux or BSD. The systems are cheaper, more reliable and more flexible than Windows. Also you put only what you need in a container or virtual machine and it runs with such limited privileges there is really no need to have intrusive one-size-fits-all malware detection systems as it would only increase the attack surface and make the system more fragile.

Microsoft spent a lot of money increasing mind share in education and creating developer tools in the past that led to a massive ecosystem developing business logic with their tools. It created a huge software legacy that isn’t going to be replaced any time soon. That leaves enterprise IT in a very different position to orgs running Internet services as enterpises need to secure this legacy from modern threats while facing budget and staffing pressures that are sometimes self-inflicted. My opinion is that enterprise IT has embraced some very bad practices and sought to normalize them but I also don’t work in that environment and it is easy to be critical if you don’t have to deal with the same shit.

Most Internet facing services were created more recently with tools popular at the time (Rails and PHP at the time of Twitter/Facebook), then Golang, Python, nodejs, and more recently lemmy uses Rust which has only been in stable release for a decade. While these languages and associated tools run cross platform, Linux is generally preferred for deployment and often has the most mature support though I believe Netflix is a heavy user of FreeBSD.

The only notable Windows backed “Internet scale” website that isn’t a frontend to some internal business system that I can think of was Stack Overflow though there are probably others.

Linux/BSD threats differ from those on Windows as do the mitigations. Some best practices in Windows land would be considered highly irresponsible in Linux land and the reverse is also true.

What is the appropriate response to fascists though? Can we joke about them getting hung from lamp posts or is it too soon?

I am driving in country SA this morning and I see a fossil in a red trump hat walking in the car park in front of my bumper. He would have been fucked if I was driving a Tesla or one of those stupid yank tanks. Thought about telling him to fuck off back to America or throwing a Seig Heil but I think the sad old fuck was just looking for attention and I wasn’t going to play. His grand kids probably don’t talk to him anymore since they succumbed to the “woke mind virus”. Poor fucker, joining a doomsday cult must be isolating.

Over a century ago the locals were goose stepping down the street in support of the Kaiser. Nothing much has changed I guess. While we will be dealing with the consequences if the US fucks things up this isn’t our war. People who are disconnected from society think it is but why become one of those sad fucks.

Have always said this. My preferred deep fried crumbed pub protein is a massive Weiner Schnitzel with gravy.

A camera in every pocket isn’t so good for the ASD kid being mainstreamed into high school with a severe phobia of having his picture taken.

Got several kids at regular public schools (not in US) and their policy never allowed phones during school hours from the start. It is pragmatic and doesn’t cause any drama. The kids get messages home if needed and can collect phones when they leave. It is a relatively normal society where kids walk and ride to school by themselves and parents aren’t obsessed with stalking kids or bubble wrapping them.

Schools have a duty of care and sadly are as much baby sitters for working parents as they are places of learning and phones create more problems than they introduce opportunities.

This policy is not genuine. The intention is to delay or destroy fossil fuel alternatives to protect fossil fuel investments. If it creates political division and an impression of leadership then it is icing on the cake. I would expect the coalition to become increasingly divided if this was ever realistically pursued. Coalition voters do not want to foot the bill for this idiocy. The market has already voted. Renewables won on time to market and ROI.

For context I am not opposed to nuclear power generation at all. There has been a lot of misinformation about safety and waste for generations that has poisoned debate and I would like to see a more rational debate. I think it irresponsible for countries like Germany to turn away from nuclear and create huge energy security issues as well as increased emissions.

Carbon emissions are a global problem and each country has a responsibility to address it as effectively as they can. We can support nuclear power by supplying uranium and it doesn’t matter for carbon reduction if the reactors are in Australia or overseas.

Our construction costs are very high and we don’t have local expertise. Our research reactor was designed by Argentina. As much as some of us would like to see nuclear power come to Australia it is fantasy economics.

It makes no economic sense. Fucking idiot.

I usually roll on desktop/laptop and upgrade on headless. Just seems most practical.

So basically the same as half the school administered laptops full of remote spyware. We had one of those bought home, supplied to teaching staff, the spyware was never disclosed and it used to sit on a desk in the bedroom. The rule now is we buy and control our own devices, even if they have to run shit like Windows for compatibility on some. Enterprise versions of Windows will almost certainly ship without crap like Recall as it might conflict with the enterprises third party spyware. Unfortunately there is still intense institutional resistance to moving away from the Microsoft ecosystems in some organizations.

No it isn’t racist anymore than consensual sex is rape. There is nothing adverse or hateful here. I wish groups like this didn’t exist. I wish women didn’t need to circle the wagons and create safe spaces and we could all participate in open source as peers. I don’t know if people troll with these sorts of comments or lack emotional intelligence. If you don’t want these divisions to exist then don’t be part of the problem.

I have been wanting to watch this since release but it isn’t showing anywhere near me or streaming or available to purchase and ironically I haven’t pirated because I figured everyone was in the same situation so good quality rips would be scarce. This movie is a spectacular example of all that is wrong with geographical distribution rights. I will probably still wait for a legit stream on this one because I want to send a positive signal if any service grabs the rights but I can’t blame people for making other choices. Copyright is supposed to protect the rights holders so they can profit from their work but in cases like this it just stops them connecting with their audience and they get nothing, neither money or exposure. I don’t think piracy is harming anyone in this situation.

Wait until they hear the language used to implement OpenBSD. Imagine being one of the authors of seL4 encountering a member of the rust cult.

I think we are more or less on the same page within the bandwidth limits of online conversation.

Australian courts can’t enforce their orders directly outside Australia. That is just a fact so there is no point even entertaining it except to incite a mob that doesn’t know better.

The only way such things happen is through international agreements. IP and CSAM are just about universal. I don’t think many services would refuse to take down revenge porn so that is something else that doesn’t seem controversial.

Musk seems intent on turning his plaything into 4chan. Any normal large media company would likely have complied without the tantrums. Anything to get attention I guess.

We might be a bit ahead of the curve with respecting adult victims of crime. Not always a bad thing. We were ahead on tobacco packaging, plastic money, HPV vaccines and other things. The US still can’t adult when it comes to sensible gun regulation. I don’t think we should apologize for trying. This is the rule of law in a moderately functional liberal democracy and couldn’t be further from authoritarianism. It is an overreach for sure but Musk has been aiming for Mars for years.

It is reasonable for courts and legislation to have powers to protect victims of crime and their families from distribution of images and video of their suffering. It is a secondary victimization. How far that protection should extend is up for public debate. Our courts have a limited jurisdiction and it is just a matter of fact that we can’t enforce our domestic laws outside out borders anymore than an autocracy can suppress foreign reporting of their human rights abuses as much as they may try.

We broadly have two fairly obvious sets of international agreements that can get material taken down through most of the world. The first is child abuse material and the second is IP infringement.

Be a 24 year old Aussie battler with a part time job. Copy a Japanese manufacturer’s shitty kid’s game. You now owe $1.5 million dollars. Copyright is enforceable in practically every jurisdiction we care about.

Find the person who took the video, fairly compensate them for the rights, then issue a DMCA notice to Twitter. Job done. Censorship already exists. It is called IP rights and is enforced internationally through treaties.

I think we could have an argument that on the scale of stuff that should be censored to stuff that shouldn’t, protecting adult victims of violent crime seems like it should fall somewhere between child abuse and IP rights. It is a straw man argument to lump it in with the censorship demanded by authoritarian states.

It might be better to legislate more power and enforcement capabilities to regulate social media companies. Many of them are close to monopolies in their niches and their network effects make competition almost impossible.

I do believe there are areas where it is more ethical and efficient for government to operate services (eg policing, public hospitals, emergency services, schools) but I don’t believe social media is one of them.