General_Effort
@General_Effort@lemmy.world
- Comment on Instagram Is Full Of Openly Available AI-Generated Child Abuse Content. 3 hours ago:
Look again. The explanation is that these images simply don’t look like any kind of CSAM. The whole story looks like some sort of scam to me.
- Comment on Instagram Is Full Of Openly Available AI-Generated Child Abuse Content. 16 hours ago:
When I saw this, 2 questions came to mind: How come that this isn’t immediately reported? Why would anyone upload illegal material to a platform that tracks as thoroughly as Meta’s do?
The answer is:
All of those accounts followed the same visual pattern: blonde characters with voluptuous bodies and ample breasts, blue eyes, and childlike faces.
The 1 question that came to mind upon reading this is: What?
- Comment on SoA day of action following allegations of Meta’s mass theft of authors’ work 2 days ago:
Yeah, that’s another one of the deliberately deceptive talking points being spread.
First of all, average people did this. The dataset Books3 was created by a jobless individual named Shawn Presser using one of Aaron’s scripts. Later he shared it with Meta. What makes the difference for Shawn is that the legal department of Meta stands between him and the copyright industry. As far as I can tell, Shawn is way more average than Aaron in that he doesn’t rub shoulders with the likes of Sam Altman.
It’s interesting how this talking point works. Someone shills for the copyright industry against the interests of the average person. And the justification is that the copyright industry persecuted Aaron Swartz. That doesn’t make sense, does it?
- Comment on SoA day of action following allegations of Meta’s mass theft of authors’ work 2 days ago:
I don’t see how this fair use case is different from those in the past. There’s a tech company defending. Organizations like the EFF or the Internet Archive issue supporting statements.
I don’t see the hypocrisy. The content industry is suing tech companies now just like they have in the past, and just like they sue individuals now and in the past.
If I had to guess at the cause of the difference, I’d say that there is a lot of money being spent on social media PR. But perhaps it also is a result of the right-ward shift of society. I wonder how much that has to do with propaganda by the content industry.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
Trademarks have valid uses but they, too, are perverted. Think about luxury goods. The purpose of the brand name is simply to signal that the owner is able to afford the brand. These brands have nothing to do with consumer protection.
I consider them parasitic. Whatever utility someone gets from signalling with an exclusive brand is provided by society, not the company.
- Comment on 3 days ago:
The public domain is not just useful but unavoidable and necessary.
You could imagine a world where all available physical matter is owned property. But intellectual property is an arbitrary legal creation. It is not finite.
EG Trademark law. Only the owner of a mark may use it to trade. The mark proclaims who is responsible for a product. If there were no unowned trademarks, you could not start a business without first paying off some owner. This would clearly be economically disastrous. So having unused, potential trademarks is necessary.
EG Patent law. Only the patent owner may use a certain invention; some trick of doing something. The patent is published so that others may learn from it and perhaps come up with other ways of achieving the same end. After (usually) 20 years, everyone may use the invention. Scientific theories, mathematical theorems, and other such things are always public domain.
If patents were broader and/or lasted for longer, you’d eventually not be able to do much business without having to pay off some owner. The owners could basically demand a tax on any kind of economic activity and deny consent for anything that might threaten their status. Progress would grind to a halt. It would be a new kind of feudalism.
So, a public domain is not just useful but absolutely necessary to our civilization.
Anything could be made into intellectual property. For example tax farming in ancient Rome and elsewhere. Monarchs granted special privileges, such as granting the East India Company a monopoly on trade. Or they might grant some person the monopoly on opening coffee houses in the country or a certain city. A title of nobility could be seen as a kind of intellectual property. Such titles were traded in a limited way. Anything that can be allowed or forbidden by the government could be turned into intellectual property.
- Comment on SoA day of action following allegations of Meta’s mass theft of authors’ work 3 days ago:
A dbzer0 user agitating against Fair Use? You a narc or something?
- Comment on 3 days ago:
That’s not correct. There are other forms of IP besides copyright, such as trademarks, patents, or even trade secrets.
What you are saying is somewhat true for US copyrights (and patents) per the copyright clause in the US Constitution. But mind that typically copyrights are owned by the employer of the creator, who may be a writer, even a programmer, photographer, or any other such professional who may not be considered an “artist”.
You would probably not consider yourself an artist for writing comments here, but you get copyright nevertheless.
European copyright has a very different philosophy behind it, which does not consider the public at all. It’s quite harmful to the public, actually.
- Comment on Implementing a spellchecker on 64 kB of RAM back in the 1970s led to a compression algorithm that's technically unbeaten and part of it is still in use today 3 days ago:
nes game programmers
Were these guys even Real Programmers?
Here’s a great talk about a guy who worked on a 1982 game for the Atari 2600, a game console first released in 1977. It’s a fascinating insight into the early evolution of computing. They didn’t work around limitations. They used a machine to do whatever it could. If anyone has ever wondered by what standard C is a high-level language, this is for you. Or if you want to know how we ever could have developed something to connect the abstract logic of some algorithm with some glowing pixels on a screen.
Pitfall Classic Postmortem With David Crane Panel at GDC 2011 (Atari 2600)
There’s an ancient myth that a god created the first pair of tongs. Tongs need to be forged in a smithy. Obviously, you need tongs for that.
- Comment on Are color palettes subject to copyright protection? 4 days ago:
Generally no, but I wouldn’t rule out that it might be possible in a limited way in very specific circumstances. You wouldn’t be able to stop others from using certain colors.
A specific color scheme might also be used as a trademark.
- Comment on To Curb Online Sexual Abuse of Children, Experts Look to AI: Researchers in Norway and the U.S. are training artificial intelligence to address cybergrooming. Will it work? 4 days ago:
I guess most people don’t get how terrifyingly dystopian this is.
In the EU, there is a serious push to make this mandatory.
- Comment on OCDSB seeking court order in bid to unmask anonymous 'redditor'. 1 week ago:
How dare you accuse me of being of the same caliber as Qanon. You don’t know me.
I know that you recklessly spread disinformation and react to proposed facts with hostility rather than curiosity. I don’t know more about the qanon people either.
- Comment on OCDSB seeking court order in bid to unmask anonymous 'redditor'. 1 week ago:
Yes, but that’s not the only reason. It’s also done to track users; specifically to detect ban evasion and such things. Detecting DDoS attacks or scrapers might also be a purpose. Your instance only gives the first as a purpose, though. EU sites are legally required, per GDPR, to disclose such things.
I don’t know how I should reply to this level of aggressive ignorance and willful disinformation in a way that does not appear arrogant.
- Comment on OCDSB seeking court order in bid to unmask anonymous 'redditor'. 1 week ago:
Yes, which is why I think a company like Reddit plausibly holds less information than an Australian Lemmy instance.
- Comment on OCDSB seeking court order in bid to unmask anonymous 'redditor'. 1 week ago:
If identifying-information-storage was so vital, logless VPNs wouldn’t exist.
I see no technical reason why a VPN would need to store outgoing connections. I would be surprised if they didn’t store incoming connections, but I don’t actually know.
Anyway, just don’t make stuff up. You’re not making the world a better place. You ever heard of these Qanon guys? They made up a lot of shit and they didn’t make the world a better place.
- Comment on How DeepSeek has changed artificial intelligence and what it means for Europe. 1 week ago:
The paper contains errors about AI technology and should not be taken at face value. Notably, its understanding of distillation is wrong.
Unfortunately, it also lacks an analysis of EU law, which makes the paper rather useless. The EU almost always goes for monopoly rents in these matters, which does not stimulate anything. The EU has no content industry able to compete with the US’s, no major tech industry, and it is clearly not developing AI companies either.
- Comment on OCDSB seeking court order in bid to unmask anonymous 'redditor'. 1 week ago:
Destroying documentation while a court case is pending tends to be highly illegal.
Any Lemmy instance stores identifying information for technical reasons. I couldn’t say if reddit stores more information for longer. Quite plausibly, your instance has more on you. Reddit is internationally exposed to various regulations and must make a professional effort to comply.
- Comment on Humming along in an old church, the Internet Archive is more relevant than ever. 1 week ago:
In practice, copyright would be the big problem. There is no Fair Use in Europe. There is no difference between what they do and Anna’s Archive or LibGen. As far as copyright people are concerned, this is just “theft” on a gigantic scale.
Then there’s the GDPR. As far as the EU is concerned, this is one huge human rights violation. The GDPR does allow for archives, but figuring out how the IA should operate would take some litigation. I doubt they would be allowed to provide the Wayback Machine.
- Comment on Humming along in an old church, the Internet Archive is more relevant than ever. 1 week ago:
The ArchiveTeam Warrior is a virtual archiving appliance. You can run it to help with the ArchiveTeam archiving efforts. It will download sites and upload them to our archive — and it’s really easy to do!
The warrior is a virtual machine, so there is no risk to your computer. The warrior will only use your bandwidth and some of your disk space.
The warrior runs on Windows, OS X and Linux. You’ll need VirtualBox (recommended), VMware or a similar program to run the virtual machine.
- Comment on Humming along in an old church, the Internet Archive is more relevant than ever. 1 week ago:
Well, not to Europe. They’ve always been illegal here. I don’t know where they could even go.
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 1 week ago:
So, licenses for everything?
Anyway, we hold the person accountable who does (or rarely does not) do something, not the owner of a thing. Which is why a libel accusation makes 0 sense here.
- Comment on Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids 1 week ago:
If creating text is like shooting bullets, we should require a license for text editors.
- Comment on Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law 2 weeks ago:
PSA:
DNS censorship is standard procedure in European copyright enforcement. Since Quad9 made the unfortunate decision to establish itself in Europe, it is forced to obey.
For example: quad9.net/…/quad9-faces-new-dns-censorship-legal-…
- Comment on The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem 2 weeks ago:
YSK that scientists, engineers, and mathematicians are not paid for the knowledge they create. The knowledge is public domain.
When they publish articles, they typically transfer the copyright to the publisher, which is why they will happily assist you in pirating articles.
Patents are public with the express purpose that others may learn from them. Only the actual use of an invention requires permission. Even that lasts only 20 years rather than 100+ years as is the case with copyrights.
So, this quote is not an explanation of any problems. It is (probably deliberately) misleading. Researchers will not receive any license fees. Rather, these fees will subtract from research budgets.
- Comment on The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem 2 weeks ago:
That’s an evergreen. Tried and trusty.
- Comment on Explicit or educational: Is Big Tech censoring women's health? 2 weeks ago:
By “society”? That’s what NSFW labels are all about. Even the expression is a nonsense euphemism. (You’d think that any not work related websites would be “nsfw”.) Anything to do with the mechanics of human reproduction is taboo. In practice, that’s 90% depictions of feminine bodies.
Of course, there is more to it than that. For example, in Germany, until last year, it was illegal to “advertise” abortions. In practice, that meant that doctors were prosecuted for providing information on the web.
- Comment on Meta will roll out its AI chatbot with text-only features in the EU this week on WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger, nearly a year after pausing. 2 weeks ago:
Interesting in light of the recent lawsuit filed in France. Meta’s lawyers apparently don’t believe it has merit. They are probably right on that.
Still, there is an unavoidable risk from unclear regulations. They obviously feel that reaching European users is worth it. I wonder why.
- Comment on People Are Using AI to Create Influencers With Down Syndrome Who Sell Nudes 2 weeks ago:
Can’t read the whole article, but it sounds like copyright violations. Exchanging the face is really not enough
As to depicting people with Down-Syndrome: Nothing illegal about that. We can only hope that Trump outlaws forced diversity soon. Seriously, someone who’s outraged that marginalized groups are depicted in the same way as other groups, probably isn’t particularly supportive of that group.
For what it’s worth, while most people with Down-Syndrome can’t function in society without assistance, some have even graduated from college. There’d probably be more college graduates if it wasn’t for the stereotypes.
- Comment on Judge disses Star Trek icon Data’s poetry while ruling AI can’t author works 2 weeks ago:
If AI ever reached Data levels of intelligence, Millett suggested that copyright laws could shift to grant copyrights to AI-authored works.
The implication is that legal rights depend on intelligence. I find that troubling.
- Comment on Is 33 cents a small amount of money? 2 weeks ago:
