Melody Fwygon

This is mostly useless to me; I already enforce all tabs into unique containers to isolate browsing and website contexts from one another; while still allowing me to make exceptions to the rule and “unbreak” things if that’s causing an issue, but still keeping things isolated from the rest of the browsing.

As for Tab Management; I use two windows and a plugin; Tab Stash Plus; which collapses tabs I stash into a bookmark.

Every so often when I reach a critical mass of tabs I personally go through them and play “Keep/Toss” with more odds on Toss. Only useful tabs get stashed and are then searchable from the plugin.

In general; since this feature now presents a possibility of an extremely UNWANTED AI integration I will be setting the config to off and leaving it off…using a relevant config policy tool or plugin to enforce this to off if needed. I hate AI features that I didn’t ask for and this one definitely doesn’t seem like it’s going to be helpful nor compatible with my current workflow.

I suspect they probably do far more than their title lets on; but damn that’s an extremely unfortunate title to have. I can’t imagine that particular part of the title sells well on the resume.

That said; I think numbers 2 through 5 could probably see their pay halved or cut by a third and they’d still be fine. I wouldn’t push anyone below 200k though. I didn’t suggest the Chairperson because it appears that Mozilla isn’t actually paying them, some other entity is doing so and it’s being reported here for “tax purposes”.

Note: This isn’t to suggest that they need to cut these folks’ pay right now; it’s just observing where Mozilla might reduce spending if it were to become necessary to keep things going for them. I am actually assuming good faith that each of these folks are well worth their current pay.

If I can’t buy it, and own it, for a reasonable price - Piracy is acceptable. Copyright holders are required to sell/license their product in an accessible and reasonable manner in order to assert their copyright over consumers.

If I can’t legally obtain a copy for a period of time longer than a year - Piracy is acceptable. Withholding copyrighted products to make them artificially scarce or to manipulate sales of other products is the same as the previous scenario; it is a failing to sell your product in an accessible manner.

If the only manner of sale is ‘a streaming license of the content’ - Piracy is acceptable. If I cannot go to any retailer and buy a physical copy legitimately, expect users to ignore unreasonable terms of sale to access their content in a format of their choosing. This physically sold copy may be reasonably more expensive than the digital license edition; but not over significantly in excess of the cost of box/media/cover art. Make a profit; not a mint.

If the only version of physical media is over-encumbered with Rights Management or other digital restrictions - Piracy is acceptable. Sold physical copies must be playable on any compatible device as determined by the media format with minimal exceptions. We shouldn’t need to connect our BluRay players to the internet every month to pull fresh certs down and lose the ability to play new BluRays when the player runs out of cert storage or becomes unsupported.

I’ve always hated Crustyroll.

Crustyroll got it’s start by standing on the backs of good noble fansubbers who provided their subs for free; and now they’ve come full circle. They became an enemy rather quickly when it profited them.

Keybase is better than Signal. You may not like it’s current owners but it still works, still functions, and can be used to chat privately. It’s entirely OSS on the client side; and server-side software isn’t provided; but with an open Client; it’s likely trivial to reverse and re-implement your own. (Keybase itself doesn’t provide their server code; it’s private due to abuse constraints)

Keybase is End to End Encrypted. It may not be as “feature rich” but all features are private.

I’m not sure if it’s indev anymore though; and it does allow you to be as public or as private as you’d like to be about your identity.

It occurs to me that adding a visual watermark might actually serve to obscure a visual watermarking scheme that is otherwise invisible by providing data that scrambles or breaks the watermark decoder itself.

Audio watermarks can be distorted in any number of ways; and it could be that some of the wildly poor audio quality in most cam-rips is probably the only way you can defeat the watermark; by using a LQ microphone and encoding the audio to a very limited bitrate and then re-upsampling; to defeat any subtle alterations a digital watermark might make to the audio waveform.

Watermarks are only an issue in-as-much as it is used to trace down which copy was leaked.

With modern digital projection systems; you don’t get a reel of film; you get a briefcase of [SS/HD]Ds containing the raw, encrypted, footage. The digital projection system will decrypt using provided keys. There’s no output except the standard ones for the theatre projectors and sound systems…so capturing the output is difficult.

If you do intercept the signal; the projection system might detect it; and refuse playback or wipe the decryption keys. Watermarking is also a danger; since your theater can get identified as the leak source and sued.

I’m not accounting for State laws; which may in fact be stricter. I’m talking about Federal Laws which might not explicitly forbid such things; so long as they’re done in an actually safe manner by professionals.

But, as I said before, if the DEA believes it has the power to stop that none-the-less; that’s what they will do, without respect to if the law is actually legally unclear or borderline. Unfortunately many pharmaceutical places don’t care to invite the wrath of the DEA; even if what they’re doing could be considered permissible; so long as they do not synthesize an exact drug that the Feds specifically name as a controlled substance.

Again; IANAL either. But I do think there’s a lot of room for small compounding pharmacies to synthesize various drugs to meet a patient’s needs quickly while waiting for proper shipments to arrive. There’s lots of compounds that are life-sustaining that do not fall under the DEA banner of authority.

Depending on how Vyvanse is Scheduled; it might be legal to privately make. If it’s not scheduled like a standard amphetamine; the DEA is powerless.

I have a sneaking suspicion it’s not illegal to compound this stuff. But IANAL; and it doesn’t matter if the DEA thinks it is and will hassle anyone trying.

I firmly think this would be a boon for many people; owning one of these is likely a lifeline that even small town physicians could utilize to dispense drugs freely or cheaply to patients in need.

This is something that I think small-town pharmacies could use to create compounds in cases of drug shortages. I think tools and programs and small labs like what are discussed in the article are a positive force for good; and that they should be not only allowed, but encouraged, for many drugs that are expensive, unavailable to someone in need and can be readily synthesized safely with a basic college level of chemistry training by someone in a pharmacy.

I think the potential risks and downsides are small right now; and I think more of it should be encouraged gently so that we can find out quickly what the flaws and limitations are so that we can put regulatory guardrails around it so that people do not harm themselves.

I’m certainly concerned that now that this software has been covered in PopSci; that it will certainly suffer a needless onslaught of DMCA and other lawsuit-related shenanigans. >_>

No; Piracy won’t stop.

Analog loopholes still exist; and cannot be eliminated completely from the chain. Enterprising crackers will tinker and find weaknesses in systems. People will find bypasses, workarounds, and straight up just crack whole encryption schemes that were badly implemented.

Encryption was never intended to protect content. It was intended to protect people. In the short term; sure, DRM and encryption can protect profits. In the long term, it provably cannot and does not. Oftentimes it gets cracked or goes offline; and the costs associated with keeping authentication servers up for long enough to keep lawsuits off your back is provably large and difficult to scale. I would even assert that it costs more to run DRM than it saves anyone in ‘missed profits’.

Frequently companies also argue that it saves profits by recapturing “lost sales”; but that’s provably false. A consumer, deprived of any other viable choice, will in fact, just not buy the thing if they cannot buy it for what they deem as a fair price. It has also been proven; that if they can acquire the content freely; they will oftentimes become far more willing to buy whatever they acquired or even buy future titles. When a customer trusts; they may decide to purchase. But why should a customer trust a company that does not trust them?

To be clear; the Nintendo Switch tends to trade fluently in cryptographic certificates.

The MiG Switch has one of these certificates; one it’s creators likely copied from a legitimate Nintendo Switch game title. All games have such certificates and they are uniquely serialized; much like a GUID or UUID would be. These certificates are signed by the Game Dev studio, and then Nintendo in a typical certificate signing chain scheme; Nintendo signs the Game Dev Studio cert, which signs the Title certificate, which signs the unique cart or digital copy cert.

This banning is usually achieved by banning either the lowest certificate in the chain or the one directly above it; or even the Dev Cert if it was compromised.

So the MiG Switch carts are likely hardware banned. Your Nintendo Switch probably advertises to Nintendo which cart(s) were inserted into it recently by sharing the fingerprints of the certificates. Then Nintendo can basically kill the certificate assigned to your Switch system and prevent you from connecting online; as your Switch uses it’s own system cert to identify itself to Nintendo services.

In all cases this is un-evade-able when connecting to the internet; as Nintendo Switch system certs are burned into a PROM chip on the main board at manufacture. This chip is a WORM chip, which can only be written once and read many billions of times.

A critical part of the way they try and curb cheating in online play is checking the integrity of the runtime environment; which includes checking what titles were launched recently; and if that happens to include a certificate they’ve banned for being cloned by the MiG Switch; then you’ll quickly be banned by their anti-cheating hammer.

Most important is those checks typically don’t take place naturally; they only occur when you’re connecting to the EShop, or connecting to NN to play multiplayer online. The devil therein unfortunately lies in the details; and if you’ve ever purchased a Digital Title that means your Switch is regularly connecting to the EShop to renew Digital License Tickets needed. They tend to expire every 72 hours and must be renewed by presenting an expired Ticket, a valid Ticket Granting Ticket (given to your Switch when you buy the title) and contacting “Mommy Nintendo” and asking “Mommy, May I?”. Yeah. DRM sucks.

If all goes well; your Switch gets a shiny new set of tickets. Unfortunately Nintendo was paying attention to requests and will issue out regular waves of bans for systems detected cheating. You won’t know when this will happen, and it won’t prevent Nintendo from letting you play your games; you’ll just suddenly find your Switch banned from online play after such ban waves.

Like a Hydra; You cut one head off; and two grow in it’s place.

No. There’s no issue legally.

You might take a hit to your reputation with that company; but if they already were presenting enough red flags for you to back out of an interview; I wouldn’t consider that to be a problem.

If you cancel an interview it’s not a big deal. No money changed hands. No agreement was ever reached. Their emotional feelings are irrelevant; the whole point was to help both sides decide if you could work with the other.

I use an instance that does not display or parse downvotes or permit them locally.

So I don’t see the phenomenon. I don’t care about downvotes. I only see the upvotes; which are a far better indicator to me as to how useful a post I made is. If someone posts trash or extremist things; I block them. If they try to argue in bad faith or with far too extremist of a viewpoint, I block them.

The bot doesn’t always get the most upvotes but it does have it’s uses. As someone who has used the Ground News app in the past; I have a sense of their rating scale and I do find that it helps classify things; although you should always use your own discretion and not just blindly trust the bot.

But most people who downvote this bot, do so for completely wrong reasons. Usually they’re upset because they disagree with the assessment of the bot, or do not understand it’s scale. Maybe they don’t like their viewpoint’s position being laid bare for all to see.

Maybe that should be explained more; and there’s posts on Ground News’ website that EXPLAINS how their rating system works. Perhaps the bot should link them.

The issue with too many streaming services is largely the same as not enough streaming services

An average person will have a wide variety of favorite shows. Let’s say there’s 25 of them. For this example; Access to each of these 25 shows are non-negotiable to you and you feel you MUST have access to them.

If Service A and Service B are the only options; they both get to set the price. So to get access to a “complete” collection of content that you want you’re paying both of them $50 each. It’s most likely that half will be available only on A and the other half on B.

Now imagine that there are 10 different services. Each service is owned by one of the big ten networks that makes your 25 favorite shows. We will call them by their number from 1 to 10. Now each of your 25 shows have 10 places they could be.

On average; each network is likely to have 2.5 shows you like. Maybe a few have made some sweet deals with others; but no one place will have even 7.5 of your favorite shows…because these deals are costly and nobody wants to make less money per view.

Now each service; because they’re struggling to compete with each other will settle on a price of $10 each. But you still end up being forced to subscribe to all ten of them because no single provider has everything you want and no combination of less than all of them can provide complete access to all that you want to watch.

Even worse; any one of these ten can raise their price arbitrarily because they’re tired of competing and can’t break even. This means your total spend could be up to $500 eventually as they each creep towards demanding more money like a cable provider.

She’s such a narcissist that she couldn’t stay out of the spotlight. lol.

Regardless; I doubt that any game she could develop would be any good; and I shudder to think of what deranged DRM scheme she will cook up to protect her own game. It’ll probably be worse than Denuvo, knowing how unstable she is.

Genuinely, the scene is better without her hate filled screeds polluting the web. Her abilities might be appreciated more if she got some mental help and she could rejoin the scene as a positive force; not someone who lets their ego run rampant and spews hate at the slightest provocation.

Unfortunately the scene is too cowardly to NUKE her output into obscurity until she cleans her spew up.

The problem with PPA wasn’t anything to do with the method it uses. Given enough announcement, discourse and investigation by the community; it’s entirely possible that users in general would have accepted it.

However; Mozilla did something very wrong by deploying this without asking the greater community. Point blank. That’s not good faith; and that did not allow for the community to go over the code and suggest fixes and express their concerns with how it works.

Instead Mozilla took the lead and decided it will exist; quietly. Without consulting the community. Given that this is how most companies turn selfish, that alarms MANY people who are knowledgeable about how Mozilla typically operates, and it undermines public trust in Mozilla.

This is why technologies like DoH and DoT are needed. To prevent this kind of tampering.