It was never legal for massive corporations to record other people's work on CDs and sell them; that's the opposite of copyright. The comparison is absurd.

These were previously peasants still under feudal lords. Before somebody came to teach them under the communists, nobody cared if they were educated, or whether they lived or died.

This neo-John Bircherism masquerading as argument will always ignore the millions victims of tyrannical royals, or capitalist oligarchs in order to assign every death under communism as a death caused by communism. It's not even intellectually dishonest, it's not intellectual at all.

If Stalin didn't kill enough people for you that you still feel the need to inflate the numbers, it's an indication of how many murders you're willing to excuse for your preferred system: "We only killed 50 million!"

For a salient example, see the "60,000" protestors killed in Iran. What's a few exploded schoolgirls in comparison to that?

This does not matter without antitrust, which is why customer service became bad in the first place. 30 years ago, the low quality of customer service we complain about now simply didn't exist, at any size or professional level of business, and never had.

If a company back then had the customer service of the average company now, or even the average government agency now, people would have suspected that it was a covert front for criminals or spies.

If a company doesn't have to compete, it can cut everything until it only has the ghost of a product and a billing department. You don't boycott monopolies, monopolies boycott you. If three companies put you on a list to not have internet, phone service, a bank account or a credit card, etc., you just can't have them. You've become a European human rights judge.

AI finding vulnerabilities and cleaning them up is going to be a budget problem for closed-source software, who have gotten used to ignoring vulnerabilities until somebody screams at them.

Closed source software isn't kept in a magical safe in a cavern deep beneath the earth, guarded by dragons. Half the people in your company touch it every day, and probably plenty of contractors.

This is also a self-inflicted wound. There's no reason that Europe should be in the situation that it is in other than it is run by elites that are, like everyone else, invested in the success of US companies, and have no particular loyalty to Europe. When they retire, they move to the US and get board seats, advisory positions, lobbyist jobs, and cushy university spots.

Europeans need to start engaging in rational thinking and to stop letting their politics revolve around zombie US institutions (like NATO) and electing functionaries from tiny little countries who have made an industry of covertly advocating for US interests in Europe. They also need to seriously rethink their relationships with Russia and China, and realize that when it comes to Russia, they were the bad guys so destroying their economies and futures over manufactured grudges and fantasies of invasion is an indulgence that their children can't afford.

Independence from the US means getting rid of their elites that work for the US, and getting rid of victimhood narratives about Russia (who at least occupied part of Europe) and China (who have never done a thing to them.) They should make BRICS EBRICS. If Europe doesn't wise up, they're just going to start killing each other. Thank God that France has nukes and can't be invaded again.

But the ones playing the music are all very old people now, and many of them have likely sold their publishing to the our blob overlords for a pittance. If massive multinational media corporations can make it difficult to figure out what they might have a claim to, it will end up easier to take the whole thing down. They attacked IA last time based on wax cylinders.

The reason orgs like the RIAA exist is to take PR hits for the industry; they will eventually demand they be taken down and probably make claims based on the length of time they were hosted. Get what you want while you can, although if you're a Millennial/Gen Z hipster you won't know any of it because it wasn't marketed to you (or anyone, it was just music, we enjoyed it.)

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edit: Looking through the list, I remembered how awful Chicago shows at the big clubs were, how Metro banned punk rock, and how I only ever went to those places to see touring bands that managed to get an opening spot for some A&R industry plant. Most of these are not good, and tons of them have all of their publishing owned by multinationals. It's the kind of selection you'd expect from somebody who thought that Bleach-era Nirvana was just alright and stalked Pavement.

Was happy to see a bunch of Fireside Bowl shows, but it looks like he dodged the good ones. This is almost pure "indy." I bet anybody could still find 100 that they'd like though so I don't want to seem too negative. This is mostly Gen X mainstream suburban hipster music.

If bitcoin miners are smart enough to have anticipated this, and decided not to hold onto bitcoin and just let it drop; and also to have repurposed their equipment, sold it to bigger fools, or have just run it into the ground, none of these ideas make any sense.

Why would they, though? The real answer is that governments and monopolists are propping up bitcoin through simply handing tax money to bitcoin holders, and in the case of the latter (also government tit-suckers) leveraging themselves to pump up bitcoin markets when they are down. I'm sick of humoring this because it was once mildly interesting technically. It's a criminal scheme and everyone involved needs to go to prison. When I hear a politician say the word bitcoin, I'm going to do everything in my power to damage that politician.

That wasn't the cause, that was the effect. They got flooded with cash for participating in particular ideological battles, so they continued, the smarter older people got disgusted (and just old) and left, the stupider newer people who came in were only interested in working on those ideological battles, and at some point the ACLU ceased to stand for anything in particular and became Yet Another Democratic Nonprofit.

Hopefully this isn't happening with the EFF. If they just become Democratic Tech CEO Pressure Group, it'll be another once great institution zombified.

> Leftists

Such an abused word. These are just Democratic Party partisans. They have no firm political opinions other than their own moral superiority, just like their opponents. They're building careers; it's a politics of personal accumulation.

This was a bipartisan agreement. Democrats just say "nothingburger" a lot when you talk about it.

The EFF is, and has always been, a libertarian org with a narrow focus.

Why do you think it matters? Little Snitch is used by enough people that it would be completely worthwhile as just an asset. With an infinite budget you don't look for the exploits once you have the target; you accumulate the exploits, and use them as you get targets.

I don't know how you think these apps are useful for small-time criminals to exploit, but governments somehow wouldn't be able to figure out a use for them. It reeks of "I have nothing to hide."

Maybe they use Little Snitch just to figure out what you're running, use another exploit to get into that, get blackmail material on one of your family members through connections made from files on your computer, and offer not to release it and to donate $500K to your project (that they'll set up for you, and will come from some obscure European foundation's fund), or "invest" (with no expectation or even mechanism for getting a return) into your LLC if you insert code into your software. Or even simply accept a pull request, which will be totally deniable if the code gets caught, and the pull request eventually traced to a Chinese/Russian/Iranian/North Korean IP.

I have no idea what evidence you expect people to leave. The goal is not to leave evidence. Why would someone announce that they were interested in you or targeting you?

(Taking this reply as an excuse to write a concurring rant...)

Also, once you've compromised somebody's integrity and got them on the payroll, why not use them for other things? They can join other projects, they can sit on foundation boards, they can become tech media personalities, etc., etc....

There's nothing tinfoil about this. It's cheap and easy. You could subvert every open source project in the world for less than the cost of one fancy plane, or a few fancy missiles. The CIA went in on a crypto company, got it to weaken everyone's crypto, and likely killed the son who inherited it from the previous owner. "Nation-state buying Little Snitch" is not some crazy fantasy, it's a mundane scenario (I'm sounding like LLM today, I think.) Even though OpenSnitch could be compromised even more cheaply, they show all their code.

Also, aggressors don't just use carrots, they use sticks. The Altman sister stuff for example (true or not, works even better if it's true) certainly seems like a stick. Top of the world, then suddenly a jury (easily subverted by a state) puts you in prison or takes away control of your company, and now you're killed (or "kill yourself") in prison or otherwise. Now your widower and your sister own the company, and they say yes to everything. If my multi-billionaire brother molested me, you'd never hear about it because he would have trivially given me enough money to forget about it and him. I wouldn't be filing any lawsuit. Makes me suspect that he's being resistant to something.

Even when they don't forget who corrected who, often their taking in the correction also just involves feeding the exact words of my correction back to me rather than continuing to solve the problem using the correction. Honestly, the context is poisoned by then and it's forgotten the problem anyway.

Of course it's forgotten the problem; how stupid would you have to be to think that I wanted an extensive recap of the correction I just gave it rather than my problem solved (even without the confusion)? Best case scenario:

Me: Hand me the book.

Machine: [reaches for the top shelf]

Me: [sees you reach for the top shelf] No, it's on the bottom shelf.

Machine: When you asked for the book, I reached for the top shelf, then you said that it was on the bottom shelf, and it's more than fair that you hold me to that standard, the book is on the bottom shelf.

(Or, half the time: "You asked me to get the book from the top shelf, but no, it's on the bottom shelf.")

Machine: [sits down]

Me: Booooooooooook. GET THE BOOK. GET THE BOOK.

These things are so dumb. I'm begging for somebody to show me the sequence that makes me feel the sort of threat that they seem to feel. They're mediocre at writing basic code (which is still mind-blowing and super-helpful), and they have all the manuals and docs in their virtual heads (and all the old versions cause them to constantly screw up and hallucinate.) But other than that...

When southern people say y'all to one person, they're really addressing you and your family (even though you might be the only one there.) If I ask "how y'all doing?" I want to know how you and yours are doing.