> 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.
Legislation. If a country requires age verification, identity verification, moderation, etc, it's easy enough to either block that traffic or enforce the local laws. However users can easily circumvent this with a VPN. For some countries, this traffic is still in scope, and so the only real way to prevent it is to block or impose the restrictions on all VPN users.
Could also be spam/abuse prevention. Credential stuffing often goes through VPNs, signup over VPN is a strong signal for future abuse or issues in various ways.
I'm guessing you're on the younger side and don't remember: there was an enormous moral panic about music in the 90s. There were ostensibly serious, sober Congressional hearings about it. Multiple people (e.g. Tipper Gore) made it their specific political hobbyhorse. It was the thing corrupting the youth, before the pivot to video games after Columbine. It's why we still have those black-and-white stickers on CDs (to the extent anyone buys CDs anymore).
I'd like to like that won't come back, but voting rights for women are back on the table, apparently, and SoundCloud is apparently worth age-gating, so I guess not.
well, what if an artist put something controversial in the lyrics, like, something that radicalizes a minor into developing something maligned like, agency, or self awareness
There is also age-requirement legislation for platforms that contain social media components or collect private information, which SoundCloud also does.
Yes mostly about this. I can't use SoundCloud (or Spotify) in Serato DJ Pro to connect and play songs, not available in my country. But Apple Music connected, so moving my archive there.
AI scrappers made it so much worse. Now most things completely block VPN users who aren't logged in. Reddit and Youtube will refuse to load anything until you log in if you are on a VPN.
It doesn’t really matter if they’re using commercial VPNs or the same upstream providers as commercial VPNs. Blocking an ASN is a million times more effective than blocking single IPs (at the risk of blocking genuine customers). I’ve had customers reach out to me asking to be unbanned after I blocked a few ASNs that had hostile scrapers coming out of them. It’s a tough balance.
VPNs often use providers with excellent peering and networking - the same providers that scrapers would want to use.
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.
> 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.
Mullvad in their Terms of Service say they'll abide by Swedish and EU laws. This, among other things, means a VPN is in no way going to save your bacon from "authorities".
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.
It was at least a good source for psychological studies. In relation to the article discussed, one of the effects this had was reducing marriage rates.
The theorized reason is these children all grew together and therefore had sexual aversion similar to siblings
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.
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.
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.
Can that library be rebuilt in a reproducible manner? If so, what's the difference between the library hosted by Cisco and a locally built one that is identical bit-for-bit? Is there any mechanism to ensure that the library was genuinely downloaded from Cisco rather than procured through alternative channels? If the Cisco server is turned off tomorrow, how can one tell if a copy of the library wasn't downloaded from the Cisco server while it was available?
I'm most likely missing a lot of crucial context, but it appears to me that this peculiar licensing scheme was a compromise made between lawyers that makes little practical sense on a technical level. That, or I'm far too chaotic for such nonsense.
The difference is legal, not technical. You don't have the right to redistribute copyrighted material with permission, except according to exceptions to copyright law (which are narrow enough to not apply here). Cisco gives permission for users to use the software only if downloaded directly from Cisco, and doesn't grant anybody permission to mirror and redistribute it.
Can you tell if a copy was downloaded from Cisco directly? No. Does it make a technical difference? No. But those are the rules Cisco chose, and so there it is.
One potential reason I can think of for this happening is Cisco being required to count the number of downloads of the software (or something like that). But, in the end, there's no requirement that there be logical sense to a rule like this.
Can you tell if a copy was downloaded from Cisco directly? No. Does it make a technical difference? No. But those are the rules Cisco chose, and so there it is.
Is it enforceable if there is no observable difference?
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.
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.
I don't see how any choice the Linux developers make forces phone manufacturers to do anything.
It's their choice to use Linux. They can abide by the license or not ship Linux.
Not to mention that there are many more or less stable APIs within the kernel (which even has versioned API support in places) such as Video4Linux which manufacturers seem dead set against using.
They do abide by the license, but it's also their choice whether to maintain cheap firmware for n years old devices, that they may not even have the license to distribute in source form.
Nonetheless, android mostly solved the issue of the kernel's lack of stable interface via their HAL.
That's a really backwards way of thinking about software distribution. It's like Debian's idea that every piece of software in existence should be packaged for Debian (and Suse, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.).
I don't package any of the software I write for Debian because I don't want to have to jump through their hoops. I don't blame device manufacturers for wanting to avoid jumping through Linux's hoops. Especially with having to deal with Linus.
Nobody likes Apple's app review process do they? I don't think device driver writers should have to go through that.
(I also wish they would open the code but not having a stable driver ABI clearly doesn't make that happen.)
I think a valid reason for not having a stable driver ABI is that it's a mountain of work and makes everything else more difficult. But I've never heard anyone give that as the reason.
There's a big difference between Apple's review process which I would qualify as unnecessary and unfair and Linux's review process which is necessary to produce high quality software.
But it's true that they could at least start by publishing the source code, even if they don't contribute directly.
As for the ABI, I also agree, this would just make the situation worse.
> Linux's review process which is necessary to produce high quality software.
Why? I don't see how that follows. It might be likely to produce better software simply by having experienced kernel devs review the code, but it's definitely not necessary.
I think the interfaces we are talking about are not part of upstream Linux. They will bolt on half baked stuff regardless of the interfaces Linux provides.
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.
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