FriendOfDeSoto

And spray paint may be used for graffiti.

Bootleg records were a thing in Europe in the days of reel to reel tape as the only alternative. It wasn’t so much that people did it privately but people would try to make a buck through re-sale and especially on flea markets where oversight by the law was virtually nonexistent. Rare records have always been a thing. Bootleggers tried to profit off it.

I was bequeathed my parents’ record collection of about 200 LPs. One was a bootleg they kept, some rare Beatles stuff. Other ones were thrown away because the quality was bad or would have been deteriorating to a point where it became unlistenable.

How can you live anonymous? Off the grid maybe in a log hut in the woods. If you’re in a vehicle, you’ll need license plates. If you buy land there needs to be a name on the deed. You can obscure those maybe behind company names if you make the effort. But there will be a paper trail.

If you buy land, you might as well invest into a more comfy tiny house with solars on the roof and dig a nice pit for the toilet. Keep chicken and grow veggies or something.

Define “worth it.” I think Mullvad is a tad expensive but for protection while surfing the web it’s a good service. And the fact that they take mail-in cash is unique.

You can just look for a pre-paid credit card wherever you are. You may have to sacrifice your name and number but you don’t have to wrestle with the post office.

The UK government is giving Apple and Google three months to build on-device scanning infrastructure.

Nothing has gone through parliament yet. That’s not to say that a majority of twats couldn’t be found there. But crucially I think this is not something a floundering PM can decree on his own authority. So far this threat is about as believable as any statement by the incumbent American president on Iran.

The ruling isn’t final.

On that we are agreed. The headline speaks of a landmark ruling, which I think is too much acclaim for a decision a higher court could just dismiss.

I think my sniping at Bavaria speaks for itself.

They don’t need sway as much as money and lawyers, which I imagine they have. And this verdict is probably on the worst outcome end of the scale for them. I cannot imagine they will accept a ruling that calls them daft like this one does. They will try to water down liability for their model’s fantasy summaries. Whether they succeed is a different question. But they will try, so they will appeal, so this verdict isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. Yet.

All I said is that this verdict isn’t effective yet. These headlines and sadly this article buries this fact in a sentence in the last paragraph. Blink and you miss it stuff. Lemmies tend to overlook this and declare victory over Google when this was merely the first battle of the war.

This isn’t final. Google has time to appeal. Let’s hold off on the label “landmark” until it reaches legal effectiveness. Which it probably won’t, however good a verdict by a German regional court, much less one based in Bavaria, this is in my opinion.

Google lawyers arguing in court that Google’s so-called AI results are shit anyways and people should know it is chef’s kiss.

“We will change the law” means they haven’t changed it yet. And this PM is so god damn popular in his own party, they are just trying to get his possible replacement in in an otherwise unnecessary byelection. This sounds decisive but isn’t a fait accompli by any stretch of the imagination. The tech big guns will sound amenable to such a policy but will do fuck all.

Even for a non-bank website, I imagine there is an octogenarian federal judge somewhere in the States who is still puzzled by fax machines who made a ruling holding website owners liable if they didn’t do this when they know of any vulnerability that could affect the user. So there is a possible legal angle as well.

The people who use browsers other than the ones listed will either never see this message or know how to upgrade on their own.

I think this is not a clean cut case of evil planned obsolescence. There are valid security concerns, as browsers are a common attack vector. You should get that updated, also to protect your privacy while surfing online. So for a banking site or similar, I kind of get it. (I recognize there is a possible conundrum when people can’t go bank in person because the bank no longer has branches and/or get excluded by their old hardware/economic reasons from doing it online. Should they be able to choose risking it if the bank knows about a flaw they then leave exposed? Shit’s complicated.)

That being said I’m sure this banner of corporate concern was not primarily motivated by the security and privacy of their users.

Unless you’re running a model on an air gapped machine that will never connect to the internet again, there is no privacy preserving way to use so-called AI today. All the providers will tell you it’s no problem. But then you read the news about which model fucked up what today. And it’s a lot. Anybody using so-called AI today is voluntarily participating in a massive, not well organized beta test. At their own jeopardy.

So don’t give it your medical history and don’t talk to it about your innermost thoughts. Try to keep it out of your internet browser and history if you can.

Didn’t have it for ET but for Disney movies that weren’t published on VHS at all because in my region they just kept rereleasing Snowwhite and Jungle Book in theaters periodically.

I’ve recorded songs off the radio too. I have copied VHSs as well later in life when a buddy had to bring over their recorder so we could hook them up to each other.

And the first music torrent was in maybe 7th grade and up. Somebody would get a new CD for their birthday or xmas and after a couple of weeks of exclusive listening Guns’n’Roses or Metallica would go from friend to friend where everybody got themselves a copy on cassette tape. There would be strategic planning like you get Michael Jackson (we didn’t know back then) and you get U2 or whatever around December.

Yeah but it isn’t here.

If you want to get picky, Xwitter didn’t enshitify as laid out as a concept by Cory Doctorow. The best example is probably Amazon which went from being insanely user friendly to lock in users, to supplier-friendly and increasingly less so for users, until it had squeezed and shafted both groups. That’s enshitification and it doesn’t apply to Xwitter. They had problems to make money before a certain somebody bought it. They’ve been bleeding users since the eventually Nazi saluting manbaby bought it, who then wanted to sue advertisers who refused to buy ads on his service. There was no user lock-in and then a supplier lock-in. There was just shit. All their current problems are man made. By one specific man.

I would argue you cannot enshitify a service that was already shit. At this point this is more of a conshitidation.

Oh, man, this will affect tens of people.

I was looking for something similar late last year. I dare say there is no good and FOSS solution right now on Android.

Since the UK brexited out of the Union, this link may be more tenuous to the continent.