Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

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This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.

I've seen some people praising this mass layoff as being better and less ghoulish than most others, but that's pure marketing. The severance package being more generous than it had to be is purely a marketing expense, like any other marketing expense. We should be both 1. glad for those affected that they're not being screwed harder than they had to be while also being 2. clear-eyed that Dorsey is doing that to do a bit of reputation laundering. A tactic to try to get people to think of him as being less ghoulish than we should properly regard him as. Just as his scapegoating AI (it's not AI) and his remarkably human and non-robotic announcement are designed purely to make him look good and discourage us from thinking he is a ghoul. But don't be fooled. He's a ghoul.

The existence of countless freemium businesses disproves the validity of that take on its face.

I would say more, but I already wrote a more detailed response to a similar point here.

That's a pretty contrived hypothetical that AFAIK has never been litigated before.

Regardless, I don't see a problem with people doing that being legal. I'm not sure many other people would have a problem with it either.

That take is oft-repeated, but I just don't buy it. Never have.

File sharing being legal does not make it impossible for authors in any medium to make money. Anyone who believes that simply lacks imagination.

More than that, by now after decades of seeing new business models evolve with the internet, it's fair to say that to subscribe to that take lacks more than imagination â" it lacks observation. Many modern content creators incorporate the reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable into their business models. The most obvious examples are the countless successful freemium businesses.

If we did legalize file sharing, the result would be 1. little would change because most of the people who would freeload already were freeloading and 2. we'd see even more creative business models emerge to ensure creators continue getting paid now that nobody would be in denial anymore about the existence of a large, inevitable group of freeloaders in all aspects of content consumption.

Free at the point of consumption and creators getting paid are not mutually exclusive. Putting these two things in tension and creating artificial scarcity because for one side to win, the other side must lose is fallacious, zero-sum thinking. We can do better than that as a society, and I hope some day we will.

We all have strong opinions about rms. Some of his ideas are wacky. Some of his ideas are brilliant. I think this is one of his more insightful takes.

Copyright law has a distinction between commercial for-profit infringement, which is regarded as a criminal offense vs. noncommercial infringement which is regarded as a civil offense.

I think this distinction is useful, but it's one degree too severe. For-profit infringement should be the civil offense, and noncommercial infringement (consumer copying) should be fully legal, just as rms is saying.

Why? Because copyright wasn't created to allow authors to impose a toll on every individual consumption of every individual work, otherwise libraries wouldn't have been widespread alongside early copyright laws.

Instead, copyright law was created to make sure the author of a work was the only one who had any right to make any profit at all off of their work.

People often forget this, but the origin of copyright law is important to remember. The Statute of Anne was passed to address the growing problem of people making and selling copies of books they were not the author of, an activity which became much more common once the printing press was invented. The law was passed with the intention of protecting London's publishing business from this unfair competition and in the centuries that followed, other countries passed similar laws. Notably absent from this law: a ban on libraries or noncommercial sharing of books.

That's why file sharing should be legal, and business models should adapt to the decades-old reality that file sharing is widespread and inevitable. Some businesses have adapted rather well. While it's unfortunate that DRM is widespread, things like streaming services aren't that bad an adaptation. They just need a bit more adapting to truly embrace the 21st century.

Also, as a fun aside, one thing that baffles me is if for-profit copyright infringement is a criminal offense, as described above, then why aren't the major AI companies who commit mass copyright infringement with a profit motive in the training and development of their models being held criminally liable for their actions? The courts are currently twisting themselves into pretzels to try to invent some kind of fair use exception for them out of whole cloth because it feels wrong to charge them all with criminal behavior. But the truth is the law is not being interpreted in good faith, in part because the law itself is horrifyingly outdated and needs to be updated and modernized.

But the modernization we need is simple: Reduce for-profit infringement to a civil offense and reduce noncommercial infringement to being legal. We don't need to tinker with copyright terms, we don't need a vast expansion of the public domain, none of that. Just make file sharing legal.

We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

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If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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Popeye's great, and they're still making the comic strip. Nancy's gotten pretty good again. Little Orphan Annie eventually got canceled, but man, it was just insane after around 2000 or so.

Patents keep getting longer too. They used to be 14 years long, and now they're 20.

My proposal has been requiring authors to take affirmative steps to get a copyright (it's not automatic or free, though the fee is nominal), so that we only have to worry about the works the author specifically wants to protect, and that the terms would be 1-year with renewals. The number of renewals would depend on the type of work, but in no event would be all that long.

There was a study some years ago that suggested that 15 years was optimal in general. I'd like to see more investigation of that.

Strong disagree. First, life terms are too unpredictable (and might be shorter than fixed or renewable terms of years). Second, part of the goal of copyright is to encourage the creation of unauthorized derivative works; that's why we have limited terms to begin with.

If an author writes a series of books over years in a common setting, with common characters, the first one entering the public domain only opens up the setting and characters as they were in the first book; third party authors can fork it -- instead of the character of John Smith remaining in Everytown USA on his farm, which was what the original author kept writing about, the new unauthorized one has him set out on magic spy adventures in space. The market can sort out whether this is popular or successful.

This sort of thing has worked out okay before. The Aeneid is just the pro-Trojan, pro-Roman fanfic sequel to the Iliad. (Virgil: "Turns out some of the Trojans survived the war and escaped and had crazy adventures! Let's follow them instead of continuing with Odysseus or Agamemnon.")

No, it's not. This is, no pun intended, patently obvious -- look at all of the unsuccessful artists out there, who will never be successful by virtue of their art even if the copyright lasted a billion years.

Copyright gives people a shot at success, but ensures nothing. Most works are, with regard to copyright-derived income, total flops. Most artists don't get reasonably paid from their copyrights.

It's a lot more like a lottery ticket; lots of people try their luck, and all but a handful lose. The tiny number of big winners, combined with the poor math skills of the average artist or gambler, result in people trying again and again and again, almost always fruitlessly.

But as a side effect, our culture gets enriched with all of this art. Maybe not much, if it's bad, but the only way to get more good art is to have more art created period.

I agree that it should vary, probably by medium. Different media have different viable commercial lifetimes, ranging from less than a full day, in the case of a daily newspaper, to usually no more than a couple of decades (and possibly less, now) in the case of TV and movies. On the other hand, I don't think we need guaranteed minimums at all. If an author wants a copyright, let them apply for it -- by as simple a means as possible, but still requiring an affirmative act and the payment of a token sum, such as $1, so that they have to put in at least a little thought. In many cases, the author won't bother, in which case, why should we be putting a copyright on it anyway?

So what if instead there is an auto mechanic who dies unexpectedly at a young age, and who left behind a young family with children that had depended on their income? Do they get a royalty on the cars he fixed, or do you say fuck his family, he should've been a successful artist.

No reason for there to be a special solution that only benefits young, dead, successful authors and their surviving families. Everyone dies, and plenty of people die young or otherwise leave their family in dire straits. And the vast majority of creators are never successful in the first place, whether during their lives or posthumously.

Better then to have a more generalized solution: encourage people to get life insurance policies, regulate the insurance market so that they actually pay out, and provide a social safety net just in case. This solution doesn't fuck up our copyright laws, helps more people, is more reliable (what if the work suddenly stops being popular?), and is just plain better in every imaginable respect.

Copyrights have their uses, but providing for one's widow and orphans is not one of them. That's just a red herring meant to play on people's sympathies.