"If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- George Orwell

Co-Creator of RSS Being Prosecuted For Something Meta Is Doing With Little Consequence – quailblog #copyrights

It’s nothing short of an indictment of our society at large that Aaron Swartz, one of the co-creators of the RSS protocol (among many other things) was effectively assasinated by our legal system for “illegally” downloading about 70 gigabytes of academic articles from JSTOR - charged so excessively to be made an example of (we're talking 35 years in prison, $1million USD fine, and asset forfeiture) to the point where he felt the need to take his own life rather than deal with the court circus and impending financial ruin - while Facebook (oh I’m sorry Meta) has torrented 80 TERABYTES of books to train their AI models with virtually no consequences other than a court case they will most likely get some sort of financial slap on the wrist for while their AI models continue to print them money.

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How Complex Systems Fail

Being a Short Treatise on the Nature of Failure; How Failure is Evaluated; How Failure is Attributed to Proximate Cause; and the Resulting New Understanding of Patient Safety

ElevenLabs, TwelveLabs, ThirteenLabs, … #internet #fun

You may have heard of the speech synthesis company ElevenLabs. Recently a friend mentioned they knew someone who worked at a company called TwelveLabs that does AI for video (it feels like it must have been intended to play on the fact that ElevenLabs does audio, but I don't know for sure). Jokingly, I googled "thirteenlabs" and was surprised to find an AI for 3D scenery project. I googled "fourteenlabs". Another AI startup…?? How far does this go?

Japan tried to build an operating system for the entire world, then the US government intervened #software #history #longread

There's a version of computing history where the desktop OS that won wasn't Windows. Not because the alternative was Unix-based or because Apple pulled off something different, but because an operating system designed at the University of Tokyo in 1984 was ambitious enough to try to replace the file system with a hypermedia document model, run on a custom Japanese CPU architecture, and encode 1.5 million characters, only to have a US trade report single it out as an unfair trade barrier in 1989.

That project was TRON (The Real-time Operating system Nucleus), a real, government-backed Japanese computing initiative whose desktop variant, BTRON, was named in a US trade barrier report and effectively killed before it could reach schools nationwide. Meanwhile, its embedded counterpart, ITRON, quietly became one of the most deployed operating systems in history.

TRON's history has since attracted some genuinely wild conspiracy theories, including one claiming that Japan Airlines Flight 123 was deliberately crashed in order to target the TRON developers on board, despite there being no evidence that any TRON developers were even on the flight. But the strangest part of the story isn't even a conspiracy theory: BTRON's hypermedia desktop was decades ahead of what the market could support, and SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son may have helped sink it from the inside.

How I browse the Web with uBlock (Hard Mode) #privacy #internet

Consumer Rights Wiki — Anti-Consumer Practices Database #resource

Creating the internet's largest dedicated repository of information on anti-consumer practices, one edit at a time.

How a joke domain purchase turned into geopolitical warfare #internet #security #war

We turn on logging. The requests coming from a single IP. We had some suspicions that a private company was using our backend to generate predictions. We poke their website to see - sure enough they are - an angry email to them. However they weren’t the problem.

Air Theremin · Play With Motion Or Hand Tracking #music #fun

Finger: the 1971 social network that never died | Andros Fenollosa #computers #history #fum

It will surprise more than a few of you to hear that the first social network dates back to 1971.

No accounts, no algorithm, no central server. Your entire profile fits in a single plain text file that you control. John Carmack (co-founder of id Software and programmer of Doom and Quake) used it as a development journal. And chances are you already have a client installed on your operating system without knowing it.

But the most incredible part is that, half a century later, it still works. And do not rule out a comeback.

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Dainius