That law doesn't apply to many HN readers

There always have been attempts to exploit others for personal gain and people following that.

The new thing is the speed in which this happens globally. But there had been other accelerators bringing equal jumps. Introduction of cross ocean telegraph cables, flight, book printing, ...

True, modern technology makes results globally available with very little marginal costs.

However on the spread of ideas the last item mentioned on the list above is extremely interesting to study: Book printing brought translations of the Bible into more places and took reproduction and interpretation of those texts out of the hands of the few (mostly the church) to broader masses (for as long as people could read) which lead to lots of political conflicts and redistribution of power in Europe with impact to colonies worldwide. By people following one interpretation of a text and derived rules more than another. To a large degree since books with ideas could now be replicated within days instead of years. As now ideas are replicated within minutes rather than days.

TIL, I never questioned encoding >

Neither did CVS. That was one of the big sellers of Subversion (maybe even the seller)

CVS in essence was just remote access to RCS files, where each file was handled independently, which caused lots of trouble to recover a specific state of work, especially when including deleted (or even worse: replaced) files.

But it was in the timeframe where the "browser wars" gained momentum, where Microsoft Network tried to "Microsoftify" the Internet etc.

Even if it was a research project by research focussed people it fit in the bigger strategy and gave a friendly face.

This thinking can be seen in the allocation of network blocks. Mercedes Benz getting 53.0.0.0/8 is just a "we have more addresses than we ever need."

If somebody had imagined "yeah, let's give an address to each of our vehicles" they would have realized the space running out.

Indeed. I can't count how often I told people that segmentation faults are among the best kind of errors. One has the complete state and not a log message missing 90% of relevant info.

Of course you don't want processes to crash all the time and spend time on writing gigabytes of data onto disk. But for the rare failure it's a good thing to have.

I assume Firefox users over proportionally use privacy extensions.Thus they overproportionally won't appear on Google Analytics and similar places, which for some statistics reduces the numbers even more than reality.

The problems, as I observe, are more in network infrastructure, routing, etc.

But yes, they could serve well as ad space.

This may be good and we'd still not have the data (but "they" can collect on their own privately/secretly)

Niantic has the benefit that they can steer "volunteers" to specific points, though.

The story here however I'm not too sure about: Isn't the game mostly played in dense urban areas? - by the time you need military drones there the area will have changed a lot (destruction, fortification, ... and overall be outdated) where I think the civilian drones (delivery, cars, ....) benefit more. While the technology certainly is dual use.

This doesn't mean they want to throw it out of the window in a way which reduces their overall margin.

This increases stakes to protest quite a lot, compared to European worker protection and social security.