kevincox
@kevincox@lemmy.ml
https://kevincox.ca
- Comment on How does harddrive failure work when there's multiple partitions? 3 days ago:
Yup. I would try to stop using it if at all possible. As soon as you can dump a full disk image to some other storage. Tools like ddrescue can be useful as they will try to re-read failed sectors to get a more complete image.
Once you have the data (or at least as much is available) to a reliable medium then you can start sorting through it and discarding or saving individual bits.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 days ago:
Are you a lawyer?
I am not. Are you?
Including a link to a Creative Commons license in a comment footer will not do that.
It is when you give it a different name which doesn’t reflect the actual behaviour of the license.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 days ago:
Ok. So you should probably frame your license like that. Instead of saying “Anti Commercial-AI license” say “Pro Non-commercial-AI license”.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 6 days ago:
No, it is more. You aren’t restricting anything, it is just a superset of uses. If you want to explicitly license your comments for wider use that is fine, but don’t misrepresent it as “Anti Commercial-AI”. Just frame it as licensed for non-commercial use.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 1 week ago:
Pasting a copypasta is probably actually copyright infringement. Same with memes.
The thing about copyright is that it really only matters if you choose to enforce your protection. Presumably the owners of the copypasta don’t care enough and the owners of the memes think it brings more popularity to the move than any licensing costs they could possibly gain from selling the stills.
(Some memes may be considered transformative enough to be fair use, but some of them almost certainly are not.)
Video game streaming is a clear example of this. Almost certainly live-streaming or doing full gameplay videos are infringing the game owner’s copyright. The work is often commercial, is often a replacement for the original (at least for some people) and very rarely transformative. But most game publishers think that it is worth it for the advertising. So they don’t enforce their copyright. Many publishers will explicitly grant licenses for streaming their games. A few publishers will enforce their copyright and take down videos, they are likely well within their rights.
Tom Scott has a fairly good overview of basic copyright knowledge: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU
I don’t know if I would say the internet is opposed to copyright. I think there is a lot of misunderstanding and a lot of not caring. If the average internet commenter posts a meme it is of such minuscule cost to the owner of that work that it doesn’t make sense to go after them. So it sort of just happens. This makes people think that it is allowed, even if it probably isn’t. Most people would probably also agree that this is morally ok. But I don’t think that means that they are against copyright in general. I think if you asked most people. “Should I be allowed to download a CGP Grey video and reupload it for my own profit” they would say no. Probably similar for “Should I be allowed to sell cracked copies of Celeste for half price”.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 1 week ago:
I should add that there is one approach that could be taken here. Take this with a huge grain of salt because I am not a lawyer.
When you are posting on Lemmy you are likely granting an implicit license to Lemmy server operators to distribute your work. Basically because you understand that posting a public comment on Lemmy will make it available on your and other Lemmy servers it is assumed that it is ok to do that.
In other words you can’t write a story, post it on Lemmy, then sue every Lemmy instance that federated the comment and made it publicly available. That would be ridiculous.
There is a possible legal argument that twists this implicit grant to include AI training. Maybe you could have a disclaimer that this wasn’t the case. I don’t know how you would need to word this and if it would actually change anything. But I would talk to a lawyer.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 1 week ago:
It doesn’t work.
By default you have complete ownership of all works you create. What that license link is doing is granting an additional license to the comment. (In this case likely the only available license.)
This means that people can choose to use the terms in this license rather than the default one. It can’t take away any of their default privileges.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 1 week ago:
Because you are effectively spreading misinformation.
Your behaviour leads people to believe that in order for their comments not to be used for commercial AI training they need to have a signature. But that isn’t true, at most the signature is allowing more uses of your comment, not restricting anything.
People already struggle to understand copyright. Adding more confusion is doing everyone reading your license a disservice.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 1 week ago:
I don’t understand what you are trying to say.
Congress is getting lobbied for new laws on who owns the content that AI models are being trained from
Training AI from something definitely can’t change who owns that thing. This is ridiculous and I’m pretty sure isn’t being considered.
If I let AI watch Frozen does that change who owns it? No Disney still does.
who has to pay who for the privledge of using that data
IIUC most of the laws talk about if AI training is “fair use”. If it is fair use copyright protections don’t apply. But granting a license to your work won’t change that.
The only thing I could see potentially being done would be changing the default copyright protections to allowed a revocable default grant for AI training. But it isn’t even clear if granting a new license would implicitly revoke that default grant. It also seems unlikely that this is the way the law would work.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 1 week ago:
Yes. However whether or not it has protections under copyright is not always clear. Likely your comment is too short and simple to be protected. But if it can’t be protected claiming to grant a license to that work doesn’t change it.
Basically by adding this note they are effectively granting a license to the work. There is no situation in which granting a license can restrict how a work (which is effectively maximum protection).
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 1 week ago:
You don’t need to license each of your comments. By default you retain all ownership. So you applying a license is strictly allowing more use. Basically if AI training was not allowed due to copyright than they can’t use any comment by default. If AI training is fair-use (which seems to be most companies’ claim) then it is irrelevant how you have licensed the comment.
In no situation does granting an additional license to a work restrict the ways in which works can be used under other licenses.
- Comment on What is the Anti Commercial-Al license and why do people keep adding it to their comments? 1 week ago:
Because people don’t understand how copyright works.
In most countries any copyrightable work that you produce is automatically covered by copyright. You don’t need to do anything additional to gain that protection.
Most Lemmy instances don’t have any sort of licensing grant in their terms of service. So that means that the original author maintains all ownership of their work.
So technically what these people are doing is granting a license to their comment that allows it to be used for more than would otherwise be allowed by the default copyright protections.
What they are probably trying to accomplish is to revoke the ability for commercial enterprises to use their comments. However that is already the default state so it is pretty irrelevant. Basically any company that cares about copyright and thinks that what they are doing isn’t allowed as fair use already wouldn’t be able to use their comments without the license note. So by adding the license note all they are doing is allowing non-commercial AI to scrape it (which is probably not what was intended). Of course most AI scraping companies don’t care about copyright or think that their use is not protected under copyright. So it is again irrelevant.
- Comment on Nintendo DMCA Notice Wipes Out 8,535 Yuzu Repos, Mig Switch Also Targeted. 1 week ago:
Also archive.org/…/yuzu-windows-msvc-20240304-53729609… AKA magnet:?xt=urn:btih:13001f9414da4cf238d0370fea54f5668406107a&dn=yuzu-windows-msvc-20240304-537296095_20240305_1340&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt1.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=http%3A%2F%2Fbt2.archive.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&ws=ia600207.us.archive.org/22/items/…/download/
- Comment on After 16 years, Ecobee is shutting down support for the original smart thermostat 1 week ago:
A link to the official notice: …ecobee.com/…/Connectivity-and-Support-for-Legacy…
(It was the first link in the article, good job The Verge)
- Comment on After 16 years, Ecobee is shutting down support for the original smart thermostat 1 week ago:
It is also nice that these just degrade to regular thermostats. It isn’t like they are completely stopping working. It would be nice if you could swap out the API, or they keep the API running longer (how much work can maintaining it be?). But this sounds like a pretty graceful degradation.
It would be nice to have these speak some common Zigbee protocol or similar. But this isn’t the worst behaviour I have seen from companies.
- Comment on Is ansible worth learning to automate setting up servers? 1 week ago:
If you haven’t used any configuration management before it would definitely be valuable to learn.
However I would also recommend trying Nix and NixOS. The provide much better reproducibility. For example using Ansible-like tools I would always have issues where I create a file, then remove the code to create the file but the file still exists or the server is still running. I wrote a post going into more detail about the difference a while ago kevincox.ca/2015/12/13/nixos-managed-system/. However this is more involved. If you already have a running server it will be a big shift, instead of just slowly starting to manage things via Ansible.
But I would definitely consider using something. Having configuration managed and versioned with history is super valuable.
- Comment on Google Feed alternative 1 week ago:
If they can shove ads into the GMail UI I’m sure they could have found a place to put them in Google Reader.
- Comment on Recommendations for Hardware for Physical Media/Jellyfin Server 1 week ago:
Video serving is a very sequential workload so hard drives will be more than sufficient and you can typically get storage at a lower price.
SSD may give you slightly faster start and seeking but it is unlikely to be noticeable.
- Comment on Recommendations for Hardware for Physical Media/Jellyfin Server 1 week ago:
If you want to serve multiple resolutions and bitrates you will probably want hardware that can do transcoding. However basically any graphics card (even integrated) will be able to transcode a video stream in real-time at a decent quality.
(If you wanted you can try to pre-transcode offline, but Jellyfin doesn’t support this well)
- Comment on Recommendations for Hardware for Physical Media/Jellyfin Server 1 week ago:
Although getting something that supports AV1 hardware decoding could be forward thinking. For now you are probably fine without it and if you are ripping DVDs you may consider just keeping the original encoding. But most likely you will start to see more AV1 files coming in the future, and having a server that can transcode AV1 to older formats easily will keep everything on your network working properly.
- Comment on Bitwarden has launched a new authenticator app 1 week ago:
TOTP code is like 5 lines. The hardest part is writing the seed to disk.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
Most trials and discoveries are already incredibly invasive. I don’t really see why the mind should be treated much differently. I would rather define what is acceptable evasiveness generally than different for mind vs written down in my diary.
Also why would you do this after they are convicted beyond reasonable doubt? This should only be done when required to reach the conclusion. Just like avoiding physical searches you can just plead guilty if you don’t want to be investigated.
If used properly this could actually be less invasive. Imagine a quick check of some facts that you believe with an automated machine that only returns the basic required information and you could be removed from the suspect list before other searches need to be done (like lawyers searching through your emails or personal notes).
I agree that this is a very dangerous thing to consider, and it needs to be applied very carefully. But I don’t think it is in the abstract any more morally wrong than the current methods of evidence gathering that we currently do. In many ways it could potentially be less harmful to the person being investigated. However it will be impossible to know for sure until we know how exactly this technology (when it is developed) works.
- Comment on Post your Servernames! 1 week ago:
Currently
s1
andt6
. I’m not a fun person. - Comment on I just heard about Brazilian Butt Lifts which is a procedure where they take fat deposits from somewhere on your body and place it in your butt? 1 week ago:
TL;DR is yes, but typically slowly. So the BBL won’t last forever but for most people it can last quite a while.
I have seen claims from 5-10 years. But it will depend on your lifestyle. I have seen some sites saying that if your weight is fluctuating it will dissipate faster than if you keep a fairly stable amount of body fat.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
That is important to remember but it is sort of orthogonal to the point being made. Assuming that mind-reading worked perfectly you can find the truth about what the person believes. In most cases if they think they murdered the person and the gun is hidden behind the oak in their backyard it is beyond a reasonable doubt. I think it is still useful to have the truth about what that person believes, even if we have to remember that their beliefs are fallible.
- Comment on ByteDance won't sell TikTok, would rather pull it from the US 1 week ago:
Even if they do plan to sell they wouldn’t say it. If buyers think that a sale is inevitable they can offer less because they “don’t have a choice” but to sell. If they act as if their plan is to pull out the buyers need to not just make them an offer that is higher than the others, but also high enough to make them reconsider their whole position.
- Comment on Stop Using Your Face or Thumb to Unlock Your Phone 1 week ago:
Probably. Wouldn’t it be good to have the truth during investigations?
However I think that we really need refine when warrantless searches can occur. Right now many searches seem to be done with very little evidence to justify them. I think this protection should apply to your mind and phone just like it applies to your house. This probably also needs to be considered at border crossings. Right now they have basically unlimited rights for searching what you have on you with little to no evidence.
We should probably also rethink about how the information is shared when there is a warrant. Right now during a trial a huge amount of personal information can be made available. Maybe if it was easier to get precise information less would be needed.
- Comment on Why are SMS messages so expensive? 1 week ago:
Most plans other than the absolute bottom contain effectively unlimited SMS.
- Freedom Mobile’s smallest phone plan is $19/month with unlimited calls and SMS: shop.freedommobile.ca/en-CA/plans
- Public Mobile’s cheapest plan is $15/month with unlimited calls and SMS: subscribe.publicmobile.ca/…/unlimitedtalk&text
- Comment on Why are SMS messages so expensive? 1 week ago:
This isn’t really true anymore. Originally it was and because SMS was rarely used it was effectively free. But then it grew more popular to the point where most messages didn’t have “unused bandwidth” to piggyback on and had to be sent separately. Now days all traffic is basically data traffic and SMS isn’t hiding in some unused space.
That being said it is still so close to free that it doesn’t really matter. Sending 140 bytes of low-priority data is a rounding error.
- Comment on How should I link to music so that anyone can open it? 1 week ago:
If the song is able to be freely distributed share a magnet link for an mp3, opus of flac file.