Hacker News: prosody

New comment by prosody in "Spain’s LaLiga has blocked access to freedom.gov"

prosody — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 21:32:36 +0000

There's positives and negatives to each. For government domain seizure, there's due process involved but working around it is harder (the service provider either has to acquire a new proper domain or onion domain, then disseminate it to the audience somehow). For ISP level blocking there's limited due process (at least in the cited case of LaLiga seemingly just issuing a complaint to the ISP), but the audience can easily work around with it with a VPN or sometimes just an alternate DNS server.

New comment by prosody in "Canada slashes 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6%"

prosody — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 20:25:05 +0000

> in an attempt to hurt relations with freer, traditionally more conservative nations

I don’t think those are the salient characteristics of the US from Canada’s perspective in this development, and because of that I don’t think of your analysis of this as motivated by short term political considerations is correct. Instead, the current US government’s unexpected decisions to turn the thumbscrews on Canada exposed Canada’s economic dependence as a vulnerability, and the Canadian government is at least trying to signal a capability to become less dependent in the future in the hopes that reduces their vulnerability as perceived by the US government. That vulnerability existed before and will outlast the current US government.

New comment by prosody in "SoundCloud has banned VPN access"

prosody — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 03:50:36 +0000

What's the motivation for blocking VPN read access for this and other services? Are AI scrapers using commercial VPNs to get around rate limiting?

New comment by prosody in "VPN location claims don't match real traffic exits"

prosody — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 02:34:16 +0000

Advertising a VPN endpoint in country A which in reality is in country B is a security concern for users trying to reduce their visibility to country B’s authorities. You’re right about the more fit to purpose tools, of course, but they’re more of an impediment to normal internet usage.

New comment by prosody in "South Korea – A cautionary tale for the rest of humanity"

prosody — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 13:51:40 +0000

Kibbutzim in Israel from the 40s-80s tried a fairly radical project of communal child-rearing. It failed when the generation raised there rejected the choice to continue the project.

Viz: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/19/kibbutz...

New comment by prosody in "The Cancer Imaging Archive (TCIA)"

prosody — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 04:33:23 +0000

The specific structure and presentation of it could be, and the items individually could be. There are some jurisdictions where a dataset as such rather than just the structure and presentation have legal protections, but those are slightly distinct from copyright AIUI, and as such I imagine you'd want a tailored license for that rather than GPL. They're called database rights.

New comment by prosody in "Hate Radio (2011)"

prosody — Sat, 07 Jun 2025 19:06:35 +0000

When I read about the leak of the new Meta internal guidance for content moderation[1], my first thought was that the only things they banned were likely things that they understood to be pre-genocidal speech (eg comparisons of a group to vermin). Rules that seem kind of arbitrary to a modern western audience but which click in place if you look at propaganda that was issued during historical genocides.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2025/01/09/facebook-instagram-meta-...

New comment by prosody in "Closing the Chapter on OpenH264"

prosody — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 14:31:13 +0000

As I understand it, Cisco licenses the relevant patents and sublicenses them gratis to every user who uses Cisco’s binaries obtained from Cisco directly and not redistributed (thus also the difficulties in the article with working with Cisco’s unmaintained web server). The sublicense doesn’t apply to binaries built independently from source. I suppose this was imposed by the patent holders.

New comment by prosody in "I fear for the unauthenticated web"

prosody — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 16:05:25 +0000

This article isn’t about that. It’s about the externalized costs that LLM companies are pushing onto webmasters because of their aggressive scraping. It’s one thing to believe that LLMs are a good thing, it’s another thing to believe that individuals and cooperative groups that run small internet services ought to be the ones to pay for that good.

New comment by prosody in "Urbandead MMORPG (zombies and humans, made by 1 person) dead to moderarion laws"

prosody — Sun, 16 Mar 2025 23:07:55 +0000

I recall now the shutdown of Nekochan.net, which had been the main hub and message board at the time for SGI retrocomputing for several decades, due to concerns about the GDPR. While that might have been an overwrought reaction, and that laws like the GDPR and the Online Safety Act _can_ be followed by a dutiful webmaster, I can't fault any webmasters who choose to throw in the towel when they look at the potential penalties for failing to do so quite right. FAANG and the like can of course make the investments in compliance.

New comment by prosody in "LineageOS 22"

prosody — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 06:52:05 +0000

Isn’t that significantly on the Linux kernel not having stable driver ABIs?

New comment by prosody in "Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system"

prosody — Wed, 27 Nov 2024 22:19:13 +0000

The oldest Sanskrit text, the Rigveda, is usually dated to 1500 BC as an oral tradition. It wasn't written down until much later. The oldest surviving unambiguously Sanskrit writing is from 100 BC, using the Brahmi script. It actually isn't the surviving oldest Indic written language either, the Edicts of Ashoka date to 300 BC and are texts written using various scripts and vernacular languages.

New comment by prosody in "Pirate library must pay publishers $30M, but no one knows who runs it"

prosody — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 18:12:28 +0000

In the case of this lawsuit they're suing unknown individuals. The case is Cengage Learning, Inc. v. Does 1-50. Apparently it's a US legal convention to just spitball the number of members of a group of unknown alleged coconspirators to 50.

New comment by prosody in "Leaked FBI Email Reportedly Shows Desperation to Justify Warrantless Wiretaps"

prosody — Thu, 09 May 2024 17:31:59 +0000

Would you object if the FBI deputy director encouraged FBI agents to lawfully use their service firearms in the field to demonstrate their use to the FBI? There are real harms involved with increasing surveillance of the public and reducing judicial oversight. Placing the use of warrantless wiretapping as an end in itself rather than a possible means whose use needs to be carefully weighed necessarily means that the weighing will be less careful.

New comment by prosody in "DNS over Wikipedia"

prosody — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 04:15:14 +0000

Interestingly, Wikipedia editors are aware that Wikipedia articles are used to find the current URL of sites that are forced to change URLs frequently due to legal or moral issues, and they face the same dilemma registrars and service providers face.[0] So although it seems somewhat more resilient than search engine companies to demands from copyright holders, it's not uncensored, something to keep in mind if you're infrastructurizing it for that purpose.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:8chan/Archive_2#Inclusion...

New comment by prosody in "Tell Congress: Stop the TikTok Ban. Instead, Protect Our Data No Matter Who"

prosody — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 18:30:11 +0000

This seems like confused causality. The ban bill was put forward and passed because TikTok asked their users to contact their representatives and share their opinion about the ban bill?

New comment by prosody in "WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering"

prosody — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 16:15:38 +0000

Somewhat connected question, what is WPE? It’s something that got abstracted out of WebkitGTK, right? Is it a standalone port itself, or is it more like the framework to build a highly specialized one? I’ve seen at least in past versions that libwpe is an optional dependency of WebkitGTK, so they didn’t like abstract and then rebase it on the new component. Or is libwpe separate from WPE?

New comment by prosody in "WebKit switching to Skia for 2d graphics rendering"

prosody — Tue, 20 Feb 2024 16:11:00 +0000

Adding to this wishlist, if it were available on Windows then it would be an option for a cross-platform webview widget, but it hasn’t supported it for a while now.

New comment by prosody in "Memory safety is necessary, not sufficient"

prosody — Sun, 24 Dec 2023 01:22:52 +0000

It's deprecated for removal.[0]

[0] https://openjdk.org/jeps/411

New comment by prosody in "What will enter the public domain in 2024?"

prosody — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 01:44:45 +0000

To be precise, the US does have life+70 for works published after 1978. The rest of the world went that route and the US begrudgingly followed, but the works published before the switchover date are grandfathered into the old system. The US copyright regime is a real rats' nest of complexity, see https://guides.library.cornell.edu/copyright/publicdomain