All IP laws are fundamentally “honor system”. The idea of digital locks is a pipe dream, only possible as long as legal threats scare people away from looking too closely at how the lock works.

But every digital lock can be broken, because we only know how to make one type of computer: the turing-complete universal von neumann machine. It can run any program, as long as it’s presented the right way.

So yes, it’s piracy. Just like how the crime of “breaking and entering” means “breaking the seal” and entering without permission (not necessarily breaking a physical lock), piracy just means unauthorized use of IP-law-protected content (not necessarily breaking a digital lock).

Breaking a digital lock is an additional crime on top of piracy, under the DMCA. 5 years and 50k fine for a first offense, I believe.

Now as to whether we should even have a concept of “piracy” to begin with… that’s a reasonable question.

I was gonna say… “no internet connection required” is not the key attribute of AirDrop. AirDrop doesn’t even require a network connection. It’s a weird comparison.

Beautifully put.

I especially like that they called out the “it’s just a tool” BS:

Yet technological artefacts cannot be separated from the conditions under which they are created, or from the realities of who controls and profits from them. Today, developing these technologies expands racial capitalism, intensifies imperialist extraction, and reinforces the divide between the global North and South. The technology is inseparable from the labour that produces it — the expropriation of work by writers, artists, programmers, and peer-production communities, as well as the highly exploitative crowdwork of data annotation.

Okay but “Kafka, Esq.” goes hard.

Oh there’s lots of trans people in orchestra

Not sure about Apple-mediated payments, but you can usually support the creator more directly and get an ad-free RSS feed that you can plug into the Podcasts app and it Just Works™. Usually ends up being a better deal for the creator, too.

Idk, for a game where sugar skull pirate puppets race rowboats that can boost and drift, it’s hard to call it out-of-place.

I don’t think there’s any disagreement (among you, me, and Molly White) about who the bad guys are.

The question is: What is an effective legal framework that focuses on the precise harms, doesn’t allow AI vendors to easily evade accountability, and doesn’t inflict widespread collateral damage?

Cory Doctorow has a pretty good stab at that: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Clarification: revenue from advertising their own paid services, not revenue from selling ad space to third parties

People who are discounting this because the project maintainer used sensational phrasing (75%) or because he was monetizing open source are ignoring the important part:

Traffic is down 40%

This is really bad news. All open source projects need attention in order to succeed.

“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free

https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/

Trying desperately to keep the ponzi scheme going, but his biggest customers already have warehouses full of GPUs that will never get connected.

The bubble is full, dude. Just try to minimize the damage from the pop so we don’t try to figure out what size pitchfork your dumb leather jacket is.

It also discouraged you from finding/starting an open source solution for those problems, thus undermining the high-quality open knowledge ecosystem that it relied on in the first place.

Keychron is solid, and offers a wide range of sizes so you can balance real estate vs functionality

One project that can help with this is the OUI-SPY, a small piece of open source hardware. The OUI-SPY runs on a cheap Arduino compatible chip called an ESP-32. There are multiple programs available for loading on the chip, such as “Flock You,” which allows people to detect Flock cameras and “Sky-Spy” to detect overhead drones. There’s also “BLE Detect,” which detects various Bluetooth signals including ones from Axon, Meta’s Ray-Bans that secretly record you, and more. It also has a mode commonly known as “fox hunting” to track down a specific device.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/how-hackers-are-fighting-back-against-ice

I can tell you that when I use GameHub Lite on my Retroid 5, the stats widget sometimes shows Zink, along with DXVK, DXVK+, and VKD3D

Money-making is an orthogonal issue. LLMs subvert engagement with open source projects, which is important for their health whether or not there’s anyone trying to monetize that engagement.

“If you put money in a vending machine and got two items instead of one, would you put additional money in for the second item?”

That is wild.

The vending company factors this into the prices they charge for the items, the amount they spend on the machine to ensure accuracy, and the amount they pay the people who stock the machines to do it properly.

If you take it upon yourself to unilaterally re-balance the equation, you’re not being noble, you’re just a fool.

It’s classic MLM dynamics

• The money makes itself! It’s impossible to not make money with this system!
• You get to be the boss!
• If you’re not making money, you must be doing it wrong — my (paid) training course can help
• Heaps of unsold product rotting in garage/warehouse
• Religious-coded language
• Requires infinite growth to stay profitable for all current players
• FOMO, “getting in on the ground floor”
• Mid-levels taking huge financial risks to onboard more down-levels

Or the original upload: https://youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs

Not to be confused with SOLID, SolidJS, or Solidity.

It’s a neat idea. Because of the need to operate on data close to web servers and backend services for potentially long timeframes, I think we’ll need a widely-adopted CRDT solution in order for something like Solid to really take off from a technical standpoint.

And from a business standpoint, there’s really no upside. Sure, you delegate some cost for storage, but compute tends to be the more expensive aspect, and if you’re spending more time to interact with these external data stores, it may be more expensive in the end.