I haven't read the text of this Swiss law, but if it's anything like USA's, UK's, or EU's laws, then it regulates "providers" and/or "carriers," not software applications themselves.

If you are sending already-made ciphertext through a regulated service, the service won't be in trouble. But if the service offers to encrypt for you, then they will be in trouble.

It just occurred to me that the now-common conflation between web apps and local apps (to a lot of phone users, these two things look the same) matters.

Maybe ASF just likes whiskey.

White oak has more tyloses and a tighter grain structure than other oak varieties, which cause its barrels to be more waterproof. It chars better. And it generally wins most taste tests. It's just perfect for barrel aging.

Save your red oaks for furniture.

Is Amazon fitting the bill for higher insurance rates?

This question surprised me.

Before we tackle the unlikely possibility that this raises insurance rates, your question makes me realize there's another question you might want to try to answer first:

Who do you think currently pays for the insurance on Amazon's vehicles?

And another: do you think that by Amazon making the choice to deploy an additional piece of driver hardware, the insurance-premium-paying party in the above question, would change?

Ha ha! The github page shows it as last committed "48 years ago." Good one, MS.

I carried my Abacus "The Anatomy of the Commodore 64" around all the time, mostly because it had a somewhat-commented disassembly of the C64's ROMs, which included this interpreter. But actual source would be even cooler.

I remember reading through it and suddenly realizing: "oh, that is why IF..GOTO is slightly faster than IF..THEN, because it skips an unnecessary call to CHRGET."

I'm not affected

Maybe, maybe not. The announcement says Pixel 6 and up, but my wife's 3a (!) got it a few days ago.

It just means that your phone can run on a DigitalOcean VM.

Anyone remember "Friends of Privacy" from Rainbows End? The idea was that people would spam the internet with loads of junk and conflicting "facts" tied to their name, so that googling their name to learn anything about them, was useless.

Now I see the idea has generalized. I wonder if "Friends of the Fire of Alexandria" would be a good name.

Suppose you bought a load of bread at the grocery store. A couple days later, you come home for lunch and get ready to make a sandwich. You find that your loaf of bread is gone, and your bank account has been credited, all without anyone asking you. Would you be ok with that?

If you buy something, it's fine for the seller to make you an offer to buy it back from you, but it should be your choice whether or not to take that offer, not theirs.

Do you search people for phones and break those too? Or are wearables (or even just face-wearables?) a narrow special case of the one type of other-peoples'-computers that are unacceptable?

People obviously don't mind being recorded, or else the "backlash" would have happened decades ago when cameras became ubiquitous.

What they hate, is seeing it. That's the difference with glasses and recording lights. Hide it and they're fine.

DRM means authenticating through a server (someplace), correct?

DMCA defines a "technological measure which limits access" (what we informally refer to as "DRM") in 1201(a)(3)(b) as

a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

Authenticating through a server is one way to implement DRM, but there are many other methods, where DMCA is every bit as applicable.

the DMCA is a thing... but can they do anything if they don't know about you copying/transcoding files to your phone or tablet or whatever?

Generally no, and especially with offline DRM schemes like what DVDs use, the copyright holder can't detect when you read the DVD, so right, you won't get caught. But of course the worst part of DMCA is not that it just prohibits doing things, but prohibits trafficking in tools for doing things. So the software for working with DVD DRM is illegal to create, distribute, sell, etc which means I-know-nothing-about-computers grandma would have to go off the mainstream.

If grandma is a punk rock computer user, no problem. But most people these days apparently want to go to a centralized authority (probably within their own legal jurisdiction) and just click to install things, and any centralized authority is going to be at least somewhat vulnerable to trafficking charges. Or if they solve that problem by being outside US jurisdiction, they might have payment processing issues.

Again, you're not wrong that you can do these things with DVDs (I see how being able to watch them on an unconnected-to-internet bus definitely helps, compared to proprietary streaming) but there are barriers keeping it from being a general solution for everyone. Media without DRM lacks this problem.

DVDs use DRM? Then, how do they work on an offline DVD player?

Yes, they use DRM. It's described here .. though the rest of your post suggests you already knew the basics.

And yes, you can play, transcode, backup, etc the data. You're right about that. But unfortunately, you're also right about this:

They fall under the DMCA, that's it.

And that's what causes many of the activities you describe, to be illegal unless you get authorization from the copyright holder.

I point this out not because I'm some kind of Law Zealot, but because many people have inhibitions about violating the law, and while it's extremely unlikely you'll get caught, it nevertheless does come with some slight risk.

Offering DVDs as an example of "they can't take it away," like I said, is technically correct, but DVDs are nevertheless a poor example, since so many routine tasks involving them, are illegal. Illegality tends to be a barrier to mainstream acceptance, and hampers utility in other ways.

Matroska files would be a better, more consumer-friendly example of "they can't take it away", since working with them doesn't come with as many legal difficulties (since there's no DRM, so DMCA doesn't apply).

Yeah, I was trying to sell some fake patents to Harcourt Fenton Mudd's mother, and she reminded me that unless I presented a fraudulent offer, I might not make a sale to her at all.

Like books, once you own a DVD it's yours. No one can take it away, alter it, or prevent you from watching when you want. It's always yours.

While that is technically correct ("the best kind...") it's legally incorrect.

DVDs use DRM. So, at any time, the copyright holder can revoke your authorization to watch them, even if there's no technical means to prevent you. (That's assuming they ever granted authorization to watch them in the first place, which is actually pretty unclear. Nowhere on a DVD or its case or paperwork have I seen any text suggesting that the copyright holder has granted permission to watch the DVD. I guess it's just sort of implied.)

DMCA makes it illegal to decrypt DRMed content without authorization from the copyright holder. Authorization is not something you buy (check your receipt; do you see it there?), so it's one of those things which can be given and taken away, at will. And (see above) that can be done without any communication or the consumer's knowledge. What you did legally a week ago might be illegal today, without any communication given to you.

Since you own and physically possess the DVD, you can still do it, but it might be illegal.

DMCA needs to be repealed before there will be any coherent policies that consumers will be able to make unambiguous sense of. So I think even for situations where the content isn't licensed, it's probably best to avoid the word "buy" if there's any DRM.