It’s the fault of copyright. Restricting what shows you can stream to your users instead of, for example, being required to pay a royalty, inevitably leads to this situation. Netflix being the sole company allowed to stream every show and film would result in a monopoly that would be bad for everyone as they progressively sought to increase profits year over year. One company having all that power would not be a good thing for anyone, including content holders.

The solution is simple: every streaming service should be allowed to stream every show/film in every country. Then, piracy can only compete on price. That requires significant copyright reform, however, and is very unlikely to happen.

In case anyone was wondering what TorrentFreak thinks of this whole thing: https://torrentfreak.com/you-cant-defend-public-libraries-and-oppose-file-sharing-150510/

Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)

British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.

The TorrentFreak article might have more information; I skimmed it. I don’t live in India, so I don’t know. Apparently, only the raw.githubusercontent.com domain was blocked, so Indian users should have still been able to access the main github.com domain. It’s the direct link to the files that was apparently blocked. But cloning repositories probably wasn’t affected?

The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.

Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.

It’s kind of funny, but it’s also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.

Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?

Maybe a different perspective could help?

YouTube advertising works a little differently to, say, Facebook. For advertisements longer than 30 seconds, the advertiser doesn’t pay if the user hits “Skip”. Ad-blocking users are far less likely to watch ads to completion, so I can imagine this having almost no impact on conversion.

I believe this change, if it is successful in blocking ad-blockers, will generally be detrimental to advertisers. It means advertisements shorter than 30 seconds (so, unskippable ads) are now shown to a larger proportion of people unlikely to be interested or paying attention to the advertisement. It’s beneficial to YouTube because they can claw back some of the money they spend serving ad-blocking users videos—that ain’t free. That being said, YouTube is still probably one of the most friendly big platforms to advertisers because of how flexible they are. While it uses the Google Ads system, it’s more friendly than Google search ads…

I missed an opportunity to ask someone who did a lot of YouTube advertising whether they noticed any impact at all from the recent ad-blocker blocking change recently, so this is all speculation.

Red Hat, the world’s largest provider of open source software, would begin to reserve the source code of its flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to paying customers only.

I think they should have done that in the first place. You can sell open source software just fine; you shouldn’t be expected to make the sources public—only to those with a binary copy of your software who ask for it. Organizations that write and maintain open source software should be paid for their work.

In 1984, a researcher named Richard Stallman released a software project called GNU. Stallman licensed GNU for free, with his only stipulation that users sign an agreement called the GNU General Public License. […] To Stallman, freedom meant no restrictions — not necessarily no costs. “Think free as in free speech, not free beer,” he is quoted as saying.

Yes. Stallman sold copies of GNU Emacs on physical media back in the day.

This article doesn’t touch on the contentious issue, which is that RHEL’s terms say, if you share the Red hat sources as a customer to a non-customer, Red Hat may stop serving you as a customer. The controversy isn’t about cost. It’s about being punished for exercising the freedoms Red Hat gives you.

Of course, SUSE and Ubuntu Enterprise have had the same terms for years. Red Hat was the outlier until now.

I don’t try explaining this stuff anymore. I’m extremely bad at it and I know most people will either not care or not care enough. And that’s fine. It’s easier to let people think I’m a luddite. I prefer to wait for them to ask me why I use technology differently than to preach to them, and most of the time, they don’t ask. It’s always easier to let people convince themselves than to try to convince them.

I tell them to install Signal and message me there, and if they don’t want to do that, they can SMS me. Signal is a better idea if they want faster responses as I rarely check my phone but do check Signal Desktop fairly regularly. I have tried to get KDE Connect working so I can respond to SMS more timely but it was annoying and I gave up.

It doesn’t really mean anything on its own. It’s romanized as “Shi”. If you know your Japanese, you’ll know “Shi” is how you pronounce 死; or “Death”. The word is not usually written in Katakana, though. There’s also ツ, which is romanized as “Tsu”.

Interesting choice to romanize Japanese. Now you have to figure out which romanization system to use (I was surprised を was romanized as o and not wo). But I do get it, I guess, because you have to wonder it would only use Hiragana or mix Kanji in:

• 大文字と小文字を無視する
• だいもんじとこもじをむしする

Well, for the sake of being international, we should just use Katakana everywhere. That’s the sanest suggestion (who’s with me?):

• ダイモンジトコモジヲムシスル

Of course, you’re kind of screwed on a TTY, since they don’t generally render unicode…so let’s go back to figuring out which romanization system to use.

I haven’t missed a thing. I don’t even get most of my news from Lemmy or Reddit communities; I get it from RSS feeds or books. I lurked /r/linux for a long time after I stopped actively contributing. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I started contributing to Lemmy, the first collection of online communities I’ve been a part of in years. I’m of two minds about it.

I’m actually grateful for it because I started complaining about things that have bothered me for a long time, and The Great Lemmy Migration made me realize, well, there’s no reason I can’t do something about that. It helped me change my attitude. So, in a very real way, I’ve contributed to several upstream projects because Lemmy made me rethink things and I am now less annoyed. It’s weird how Lemmy feels like an actual community in the way no other social site (including Reddit) has.

On the flip side, I think I spend too much time on Lemmy…but this week has been uniquely rough.

So how else would you combat malicious forks like what happened to new pipe?

Trademarks. Anyone malicious can take your source-available code anyway, but if they infringe on your trademark by calling it “Firefox” or “Newpipe”, you are legally in your right to take it down. Trademarks deal with fraud; copyright doesn’t.

Iceweasel is a classic example of what happens when free software projects like Firefox seek to defend their trademark. They didn’t want to allow Debian to use the Firefox name, as that may cause users to attribute quality problems to Mozilla when Debian is actually responsible because of the patches they had made.

Want to remove an app using the GrayJay name without your permission if it’s a registered trademark? Here’s a link to report it to Google Play.

Honestly I laugh at the people whining about password sharing getting shut down. It was never really intended to be used that way

To quote Netflix, “Love is sharing a password”: https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

I haven’t been subscribed to a streaming service for about five years. Well, sometimes I pay for a month of Hidive. I usually just buy the show/film on disc and rip it. A decent amount of the shows I want to watch are old and not even on a streaming service.

It’s a good movie, but I find myself completely confused by the driving part at the end. The people who were in the van manage to catch up to him almost immediately, suggesting that the other guy could have just run across the distance to get to the van in the first place, saving everyone all the drama and hilarity.

I thought Wargames was a pretty good one too (mostly). It’s by the same writers.

The NET is…fun…

That’s a nice piece of hardware you’ve got there.

As the OSI says in the post linked above:

This is not to say that Elastic, or any company, shouldn’t adopt whatever license is appropriate for its own business needs. That may be a proprietary license, whether closed source or with source available. […] What a company may not do is claim or imply that software under a license that has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative, much less a license that does not meet the Open Source Definition, is open source software. It’s deception, plain and simple, to claim that the software has all the benefits and promises of open source when it does not.

A lot of companies are trying to redefine what “open source” means. And regrettably, this is probably something that was inevitable with a name as open to interpretation as “open source”, but it’s unfortunate that the OSI was denied the trademark for the term. If they owned the trademark, nobody would believe projects like ElasticSearch and MongoDB are open source when they do not meet the Open Source Definition (OSD), because those companies wouldn’t be able to claim they are.

Open source was never about preventing people from making a profit. That sounds more like the original Linux license, where Linus Torvalds didn’t want money to change any hands in the process of conveying the software. I can’t imagine how much worse things would be if Linus never transitioned to a license that met the OSD. My belief is that there is nothing wrong with making money so long as the software meets the OSD. I know at least the GNU Project actively encourages people to sell free software.

The GNU kernel was not originally supposed to be called the Hurd. Its original name was Alix—named after the woman who was my sweetheart at the time. She, a Unix system administrator, had pointed out how her name would fit a common naming pattern for Unix system versions; as a joke, she told her friends, “Someone should name a kernel after me.” I said nothing, but decided to surprise her with a kernel named Alix.

Source: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.en.html

I’m assuming uralsolo is talking about free software as in, software which gives users the four freedoms.

I don’t think all software needs to be free, but in some ways, it’s no longer the issue of the day. In this day and age, a lot of what we’re using is no longer really software. We’re using services with client-side Javascript which is nominally free software (but not really). Most of the actual software is sitting behind a server. I see this as good and bad. It means users of less popular operating systems get access to the same services as users of popular operating systems so long as they have browsers, and the negatives are, well…I’m sure you don’t need my help to think of some.

It’s hard to make money with free software because everyone has the right to commercially exploit it. For this reason alone, I don’t think it’s necessary for all software to be free, but I’ll be there to celebrate the programs that are free.

I learn something new every week about subjects I was decided on for a long time, forcing me to re-evaluate. It seems like there are more knowledgeable people here than on Reddit. I do wish our visualnovels community was more active, but alas, it’s a more niche subject that’s bound to grow slowly.

Japanese visual novels, because there are more of them.

However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.

Gigablast went down 2 months ago. The crawler is available as free software, though.

Mojeek’s Search Engine Map gives you a good picture of the search engines out there. You can also see Seirdy’s very informative post on all the different search engines out there, which is fairly regularly updated: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/