Jul (they/she)

That goes for most industries. No need to protect your reputation or be ethical in a monopoly or even really in a duopoly. End-stage capitalism consolidation at its finest.

I mean it is a similar intent to a warrant canary, though more active. What they should have done is make sure all of the data is stored in their country if it’s that sensitive or use only products that allow full encryption and don’t store much metadata. There are ways to do these things if you aren’t lazy and actually hire an experienced architect (I’m one for example).

This was definitely much more of a legal overstep with explicit intent to subvert court orders than a warrant canary, though, and this unethical in it’s implementation if only questionable in its intent. However, the fact that the secretive orders exist in the first place and are not done just in cases where lives or true national security are at stake and only for limited amounts of time before being disclosed or something like that as most were originally intended outside of nations with fascist-leaning administrations like the US, China, India, etc., is the real issue and the reason for both this and warrant canaries to be necessary even if it wasn’t a fascist leaning administration doing it for possibly malicious reasons.

I’d hope so considering the current US administration is friendly with multiple people they have charged and issued warrants for such things as crimes against humanity and genocide. And the US has access to Microsoft data which likely includes all documents stored in any Office cloud products.

I mean probably true, but that shouldn’t stop them from being liable if ordinary individuals are liable for the same actions. Sure, punish your employees, but if a parent is responsible to pay for a child’s pirating then an employer should be just as responsible for paying for an employee’s pirating.

Yeah, but this will not require any people to add content since it’s all stollen and simply manipulated which is easier to automate than producing original content which AI can’t be trusted not to hallucinate about quite yet. The idea is to then get the search engine AIs to point there as much as possible as it will likely be optimized for AI scraping rather than human browsing. Then since the AI results are prioritized more and more, they can get their truthiness to be what people see over actual reality.

Nah, the only thing the old analog 625-line resolutions looked OK on were things like my small bedroom TV in the 90s (though the refresh rates are major improvements in some media). The smaller living room TVs look way better with 720p and regular sized modern living room TVs are significantly better at 1080p. (Note that 4:3 ratio TVs had smaller advertised inch sizes than similarly sized 16:9 ratio TVs since they’re measured diagonally so I’ll avoid using actual sizes since they aren’t comparable.)

Depends on the physical size of the screen. Which is why mostly only wealthy people with 90-inch+ screens really have ever cared about 8K. 4K is a noticeable improvement on a 60 or 70 inch screen, but the extra cost of content isn’t anywhere near being worth it for most people.

That’s going to be a disaster. It’s going to overly reinforce toxic sex understanding due to lack of sexual education. Most porn already does that, but is limited by what a human body can actually perform. AI will be able to make what is essentially sexual torture look like it’s what someone should normally expect sex to be like and make it look like the recipient is enjoying it…among many other issues.

X is a right-wing propaganda platform now. Bluesky is not a good alternative though. It’s just as controlled and toxic as X was just before Elan bought it and will eventually become what X is now when a major corporation or rich person decides to grab it or it goes public. The federation functionality is just for show and marketing. I wish people would stop just jumping when platforms become truly horrible and then jumping to something that will be made as horrible very easily after it becomes popular enough.

Unfortunately, the current state of the patent office is extremely understaffed and mostly nontechnical. So, there’s not enough qualified examiners to examine patents, not just in software, but medical devices, voting machines, and lots of other industries. So essentially if a patent is submitted by a major company, it just gets rubber stamped. And it’s up to the courts to sort it out. Unfortunately that sorting out is biased and understaffed, too, so usually the initial case will go to the patent holder by default and it’s not until an appeal or two on those biases and technical misinterpretations that it can be invalidated. So it’s rare for a smaller company to be able to spend that much money to invalidate an obvious idea like this. Of course this is by design to give large corporations an unfair advantage. If they want some tech, they just sue for a stupid patent, wait until the company either folds and then they can steal it legally, or goes bankrupt fighting it and they can acquire them hostilely.