These open weights models are also hosted outside of the US and China. That's a very important difference.

This statement is utter nonsense. And if you think about it, it's in exactly the same spirit as calling for a wide ban on science books or education.

Actually, the more emotionally invested you are in it, the less likely it is for you to question the motives behind it.

It doesn't matter if some Microsoft trinkets are open sourced while AD is not and while you still can't connect your open source DNS and DHCP server to a Microsoft domain controller. Or have your open source email client be 100% compatible with the proprietary Exchange protocol.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32007955

Around 2000 I was only able to play sound from different apps because my soundcard exposed two sound devices /dev/dsp0 and /dev/dsp1

I'm getting the same impression.

Anyone who is interested in connecting an identity with every computer on the internet, like a tamper proof license plate for computers. Just ask local law enforcement.

There has been a growing awareness for the possibilities of foreign states to manipulate social media and other platforms with fake personas. So any kind of counter intelligence would be interested as well.

There have been numerous incidents of politicians trying to go after critical posts using defamation laws. Often enough the investigations find a dead end when the account can't be connected with an ID.

Religious advocacy groups have been more and more aggressive in trying to censor the internet, e.g. this Australian one that boasted having pushed Mastercard and Visa to enforce age verification https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/29/mastercard-vis...

So the list of suspects is actually long.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a very broad lobbying campaign that very easily finds local interest groups to help them meet the right law makers.

These kind of laws usually take many years to hone down just right and talk to all parties involved. Unless some lobby group presents a finished piece of work that just has to be waved through, like with the Citigroup scandal.

edited for tone

It's also interesting how Windows 11 with it's hard dependency on TPM hardware just happens to be in place at the right time. And how a certain former Microsoft employee just happened to start working on a similar solution for Linux before this all started https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572

If the book is not written in your native language or you like to read books with unusual vocabulary (e.g. historical books), it's an absolute delight. So far, a concise dictionary like Oxford has worked the best for me, while Wiktionary or similar always came short.

The other is heft and handiness. If you read anything that is larger than a small notebook, an e-book is much more practical. You also don't have to hold it open all the time.

What if they learned that half of the American small and medium sized companies would have started pouring all their business information into such a service?