'"Your ID" for age verification' is bullshit.

So I upload a photo of my passport or driving license to "prove" my age. How does it know it's my passport? It doesn't, it just assumes that I'll only have access to my own passport.
Fine, so I'll upload a photo of my passport, but with my name and passport number blacked out, so it can only see my date of birth. That's no different from its point of view, the same assumption (I've only got access to my own passport) is just as valid (weakly valid) as before. But guess what, it'll reject that, it wants to see my name. Why? Because it's not an age verification check, it's an ID check. Age verification is just the excuse to ID you.

Interviewee in the article said:
"You aren't screwing podcasters. You're screwing artists who could be using podcasts to help promote their music.

Yes. And?

UMG doesn't give a shit about artists. They screw over artists in every other aspect of their business, don't be surprised they're screwing them over in this too.
The only time UMG even pretends to care about artists is when they go to Congress asking for another copyright term extension or some bs like the DMCA. And even then, the artists they use to front their campaign are only there under contractual duress and extreme NDA conditions.

We should reduce the copyright in music compositions and recordings to five years from publication. But it'll never happen, because they've successfully written minimum terms into international treaties that neither Congress nor any other country has the power to abrogate.

There was an interesting interview between Jon Stewart and Ezra Klein (both liberals) in which Klein explained to Stewart why nobody had actually been given Internet access under the "Inflation Reduction Act" (in which this Digital Equity Act is embedded) because of the sheer levels of bureaucracy built into it.

Judging the programs success after "funds have been allocated" is crazy in itself, but in this case, "funds being allocated" doesn't even really have a clear meaning at all: there are literally over a dozen different stages at which you could say "this is the stage where the funds are allocated" - and not before.

You can find this interview on Youtube, although mostly when picked up by Fox, independent conservative news sites and so forth, so I guess it won't change any minds because of liberals' allergic response to watching conservative media, even if its just clips of a liberal show.

Ad hominem labelling instead of engaging with the point being made. Typical libtard!

See? anyone can do this.

Let's not.

Especially, not on Slashdot.

I wonder how many small and micro entities could possibly have been aware the fees had been reduced for them?
And if they weren't aware, how could it have possibly changed their behaviour?

I suspect the Patent Office was fully aware of this. Had it driven a huge upsurge in submissions, that would have almost certainly been accompanied by a dive in the quality of submissions, as hiring a good patent lawyer is by far the main part of the total cost. Any increase attributable to lower fees would likely correlate strongly with those that didn't hire a good patent lawyer. The Patent Office would surely hate getting a flood of poor quality applications, so I suspect wouldn't have done this if they had any expectation this would be the result. Therefore the most likely explanation is that this experiment was motivated not by a desire to boost applications, but by a desire to justify their current fees.

I don’t know who is getting unfiltered access to manipulate celebrity images. When I tried to get Gemini to touch up an AI generated image of myself (based on photos of myself I uploaded to a different model), it said that it could not work with images of real people.

The text quoted from the license doesn't mean what you say in the headline.

It's not "ownership", it's a limited license for a limited purpose.

Does that include the art assets, or just the software?

I mean, it's still interesting if it's just the software, but releasing the complete game open source to tinker with would be doubly so.

I was ChatGPT subscriber as soon as I could get an account, and also have an API account. But in the last few weeks I've almost stopped using both.

Recently, I've just found Grok better than ChatGPT as a chatbot. I've also just discovered Cline for coding (I'm not a dev, but am interested in hobbyist tinkering) and am finding that Claude 3.5 Sonnet is considerably more reliable than OpenAI, at least in the Cline environment. Which leaves OpenAI out in the cold, for me.

For those here complaining that all they want is to watch their own media from their own server, may I suggest you check out Kodi https://kodi.tv/ ?
It does just that, and in my experience very well.

Plex and Emby and Jellyfin are for streaming content. Do you even want streaming?

If you just want a 10-foot media player for content on your own NAS/local server, that's where Kodi excels.

I don't mean the dodgy "Kodi boxes" you see sold on Ebay (occasionally) and certain shady online stores. These come with not just Kodi preinstalled, but a bunch of plugins to dodgy streaming services. I mean the Open Source software. Be a good Slashdotter and download and install a clean copy of Kodi yourself, and have easy, local, private access to your own media. You can choose whether to pick a binary or if you prefer to build it yourself.

And if you want to track your what you've watched across multiple installations around the house, you can shift its library not to a cloud service, but to your local mysql installation.

There is a plugin system for additional functionality; if you want to stream across the Internet, either to your living room or from your living room to your hotel, it can be done. That takes Kodi into competition with Plex. Heck, there's even a Plex plugin for Kodi. But for basic CIFS or NFS access to your own media on your own server in your own home, from a beautiful and user friendly 10-foot interface, it does an excellent job in a default install.

Of course the charges are presented as being about some ordinary criminal violation. You wouldn't expect the FBI to say "we're arresting you because you helped Trump win".

But it's only really "nothing to do with the election per se" if the FBI would have still come after Polymarket this week if they'd been saying everyone was betting on Kamala winning, instead of Trump.

That would be a lot easier to believe if there hadn't been a constant barrage of lawfare against Trump and his administration and associates, starting with the bogus "Russia collusion" investigation at the very start of his first administration, and continuing to this day.

Several decades ago an employment agency measured my typing speed. To get a typing job I needed to be a touch typist with over 100 wpm with accuracy above a measured level; I can’t remember what that was. Although I only use four fingers, which doesn’t officially qualify as touch typing, I managed, barely, to meet their threshold, when concentrating hard on copy typing. So I guess my regular typing is probably 20% less than that.

They've been saying this since they introduced Windows 10. They haven't done it, because the control panel contains a vast amount of configuration, because users need and want to access that, and because their whole concept of "Settings" is to dumb that down with something that doesn't show most of the configuration, on the grounds that most users don't need it most of the time, which is inherently in conflict with the fact that at least some users need something obscure some of the time.

There's only a few ways to square this circle:
- Leave Control Panel in place
- Push ahead, tell users the only way to access advance settings is through professional admin settings (system policies), and face massive backlash
- Try to compromise by extending settings, ever and again, and end up making setting much more complicated and hard to use than control panel ever was

What's more, Microsoft obviously knows this, and there's obviously been massive internal infighting over exactly this point: that's the most plausible explanation for why Microsoft keeps promising/threatening this, but so far has never actually done it.

This is being presented as protection against AI fakes. But if its a saleable right, it’s no such thing, it’s just an extension of copyright for the benefit of the copyright holding conglomerates, who will purchase that right in every performance contract, right down to the extras.

SCOTUS says that First Amendment rights belong to Facebook, Google and Twitter, not to the users of those platforms.