Online vape seller has ‘no intention of stopping’ shipments to Australia, despite nationwide ban — ‘We have no intention of stopping just because of one twat in Canberra.’
abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world Posts 0Comments 1,096Joined 2 yr. ago
abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world
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Yes - there’s a problem. Why is Meta the company that should fix it? They are not, and never have been, a news platform.
Meta is all about letting people communicate with each other. Obviously sharing news is one use case for that, but it’s not even close to the primary one.
Also as an Australian… virtually all of the local reporting is behind a paywall. So it literally can’t be shared on social networks (not legally anyway - any distribution there would be copyright infringement).
Why should Meta pay for content that their users can’t even access? It’s ridiculous.
Gitlab is open source. You can download it and host it yourself. A decentralized developer community is resilient against this sort of attack for the very reason GitHub is so vulnerable: size.
Um, what? Sorry but if someone is going to send, say, ten million malicious contributions (or heck, even just one), I don't particularly want to deal with that on my self hosted server. I'd rather someone else deal with it.
Git was always designed with decentralized development and collaboration in mind. Its creator, Linus Torvalds, prefers not to bother with servers like GitHub at all. Git can even be used entirely over email (Linus’s preference)!
The Linux project created Git to solve problems they had. Pretty much no other project in the world has the same set of problems - it's a highly unusual open source project with tens of millions in market value. Other projects have very different needs.
I'm not an office user but that font looks good to me.
Arial is an old fashioned (designed for paper) font and not even a good one, while Calibri is just a good implementation of the same style of font. Aptos is properly modern with nice wide characters and sensible letter spacing, definitely glad they've made the switch.
I've edited my comment - it has been tested extensively and they're not very bad at all.
Not really. Hindenburg had hydrogen at air pressure.
Pressurised hydrogen tends to fail in a much safer way (or just not fail). A regular fossil fuel car fire is much worse.
The thing is you're not just burning hydrogen (or gas). You're also burning oxygen in the atmosphere and how bad the fire is depends how the gas mixes with the oxygen. The mix has to be just right or it won't burn at all (Hindenburg was just right).
Gasoline tends to burn quite slowly which is particularly catastrophic as it generates heat over a long time which causes everything else in the car to also catch fire, while still burning fast enough that you might not be able to escape the car before it the fire gets dangerous.
Ultimately, businesses get all of their money from customers, and those customers are people who deserve privacy. Some businesses have other businesses as customers but those other businesses also get all their money from customers.
If you make all this stuff public, then you are basically allowing customers to be tracked.
And most of the money businesses spend also, ultimately, go to people - their employees or indirectly to employees of their suppliers (or to investors, who are also people).
There's really no way around it except to provide privacy across the board and the best way to avoid tax evasion is by having clear taxation policies that can't be avoided. Sales tax, for example, is an unavoidable tax on business. Property taxes are also unavoidable. Import/Export taxes are very difficult to avoid.
Where our governments go wrong is trying to tax "profits" which are nearly impossible to enforce. Did the company really spend a hundred million dollars buying a patent? Or was the money actually for something else and the patent was just a cover? Is that old painting in the meeting room really worth ten million or is it a fake? If it's fake, is the buyer a victim or was it money laundering? You can't possibly regulate that stuff and transparency into transactions will only catch out idiots. Most people running big businesses are not idiots.
It shouldn’t cost anything to spend and transfer money - just as it doesn’t with cash.
Yeah there's no such thing as free lunch. Cash is not free and neither is this new EU currency. The costs are hidden from you but they are there.
When you buy a pizza in cash for example, you're not just paying for the pizza. You're also paying for the business to send someone to the bank regularly to deposit earnings and and withdraw coins to give customers as change. And the bank is doing the same thing - all those armoured cars delivering cash to ATMs around the city? Those are not cheap and you are paying for them.
Worst of all, cash tends to go missing - Maybe an employee gave a customer two twenty dollar bills in change when it should have been one... or maybe the employee pocketed the 20 bucks. The business has no way of knowing which and both happen regularly. Either way the customer ultimately pays - the business sets prices high enough to cover those costs.
Ask anyone who keeps track of this stuff for a large business, they will tell you credit cards are cheaper for them.
I can’t get my head around how much money VISA and MasterCard is pulling out of society today.
It's mostly insurance. Because while cash goes "missing" more often, credit cards still has issues (stolen card numbers and occasionally software bugs) and unlike cash, where the business pays, with credit cards often VISA/MasterCard often have to pay. The fees are partly to cover that. And the fees also cover the money they spent trying to prevent money from going missing (they spend a lot of money on that).
How banks take fees for you to do a simple money transfer.
Mine doesn't. They make monthly deposits into my account based on how much money I have there and how much they were able to profit off using it for investments.
it's a Credit Union, so technically I'm a shareholder and the entire business model of the bank is to make money for their shareholders (me). You too can be a bank shareholder. The only "fees" they charge are to pay for employees and customer service, and those are far less than what I earn in interest on my savings.
I can’t get my head around how much money VISA and MasterCard is pulling out of society today.
As someone who paid for the best of those third party apps before... Apple has done a much better job. It's not even close.
For example my iPhone can be turned off, locked, and in my pocket, but the camera is still discoverable and able to be enabled on all my Macs and even my TV. Simply select the camera like you would any other and put it some kind of mount.
The third party apps require quite a bit of mucking around to get it to work.
My experience is not much flies under the radar anymore - this stuff is heavily automated and even legitimate content is often accused of infringing (I've stopped buying stock photos for example... because using them is likely to result in being accused of copyright infringement and proving you purchased a license is far more effort than they are worth).
https://github.com/github/transparency/blob/main/data/dmca/dmca_takedowns_by_month.csv
That's their DMCA takedown report (there is also a "transparency center" with pretty charts)... hundreds of takedowns every month, with some of them fought and re-instated. I'd bet smaller sites don't have any reinstatements. It was last updated 4 months ago, hopefully another update is coming soon.
Definitely a good idea to have eggs in other baskets but there's a pretty good chance all of them will be taken down at once and GitHub seems like it'd be more likely to come back if you have a defensible case.
Forgejo looks good, but I don't see any support for Gantt charts?
Kanban works well for active work but sometimes you need to step back and look at the longer term plan as well.
Do you really think a smaller service will do a better job defending against Nintendo?
I wish there were more options too but I don't see GitHub as being at fault here. The law is pretty clear on takedown notices and defending Fair Use claims is horrifically expensive.
Also not a lawyer but maybe more familiar with IP law than you are?
When an AI scrapes the post you just wrote... how exactly were you, the author of the post, harmed by that action? You weren't harmed which is a powerful fair use defence. It's not enough on it's own, but it's a huge step in that direction and other factors such as transforming the original add to that making a compelling case.
Consider the most recent fair use case, which was Google had negotiations to pay license fees for Java, then refused to pay — instead Google created a copy of Java. It dragged on in court a long time and bounced back and forth on apeal, but in the end the ruling came down to "java is protected by copyright, but Sun was not sufficiently harmed, therefore it was fair use". Or at least that's where it was headed when Oracle (who bought Sun years after the infringement happened) decided to stop burning mountains of cash fighting a lawsuit that wasn't likely to end well for them.
I was somewhat surprised by that case - I felt the fact that Google had talks about paying, then decided not to pay, was pretty clear harm. But the judge didn't see that as real harm - Java's source code is not 'free as in freedom' but it is 'free as in dollars' to download and therefore not really properly protected by copyright. The fact the license added restrictions to what you can do with the copy you were given for free didn't hold up in court (which has pretty widespread ramifications for GPL... I wonder who will be brave enough to test that in court... the FSF isn't going to back down from a lawsuit like Oracle did).
Anyway, if Java is borderline, I think the fediverse is clear cut. Almost any copy of the fediverse would be fair use. Yes, it's technically copyrighted content, but there's a loophole so big it surrounds the entire universe.
"We value privacy; also think of the children!"
I wouldn't say "force". Meta is all in on being open these days and they're going in that direction even when they're not required to:
my view is that the more that there’s interoperability between different services and the more content can flow, the better all the services can be
[...]
it was fine to have these systems that people felt a little more locked into, but I think for the mature state of the ecosystem, I don’t think that that’s going to be where it goes
WhatsApp wasn't the first to open up but that makes sense given it has a few billion active users and an open E2EE encryption protocol is really difficult to implement.
"Retarded" was once a medical and technical term. It's not any more and has officially been redefined in dictionaries as abusive slur against people who have a serious medical condition... and you used it in the modern context.
The word is socially unacceptable now. Stop using it.
you could say it does compete with The NY Times
Only indirectly - as in airplanes competing with cars. And the law generally encourages that type of competition as it leads to substantial innovation and economic growth.
What does that have to do with copyright infringement though? And how would it be illegal?
I could totally start a website, maybe call it "New York Stories", read every news article about New York (I'd get a lot of them from NYT) and then working off my own memory, not copy/pasting the text write/publish the same story. That would not be copyright infringement. In fact the NYT themselves do it all the time, publishing things that were originally reported elsewhere. You're allowed to do that as long as you don't produce exact copies.
LLMs generally don't do exact copies of anything - they're just not exact at all. If you ask the AI exactly the same question a thousand times, you won't get precisely the same exact response twice.
For example asking "What should I eat in New York?" gave me:
New York City offers a vast array of culinary experiences, reflecting its diverse culture. Here's a mix of iconic eats and modern must-tries:
- Pizza: New York-style pizza is famous worldwide. Visit classic spots like Di Fara, Lombardi's, or newer favorites like Lucali for a slice of this iconic dish.
- Bagels and Lox: New York bagels are [... several more paragraphs ...]
Then the same question again:
New York City is a melting pot of cultures, making it one of the best places in the world to explore a wide variety of cuisines. Here are some iconic foods and places to consider when deciding what to eat in New York:
- Pizza: New York-style pizza is famous worldwide. Look for places with a long history and great reviews, such as Lombardi's (America's first pizzeria), Di Fara Pizza, or Joe's Pizza for a classic slice.
- Bagels: Another iconic New York [...]
It's approximately the same response but not exactly the same and even recommends different restaurants.
Being exact matters when it comes to copyright infringement. Like OpenAI I'm genuinely curious how they got it to output a verbatim copy of anything. That's highly unusual behaviour and if they had reported it to the company I'm sure it would have been fixed. Just like if someone posted an exact copy of an NYT article in this community it would be removed and nobody would be taken to court.
Raises hand — my phone is primarily for communicating with other people. When I want a computer, I have my desktop for that, or if it's too big to take with me then I'll have my laptop.
The only other thing it's commonly used for is music/podcasts. And once a week or so I'll take a photo.
Sure, I don't make as many voice calls as I used to, but text communication counts if you ask me - cell phones have had that feature since 1992.
It's not just about saving battery. Phone chips are fast but they lack appropriate cooling and overheat real fast if you try to take advantage of that performance for more tham a moment.
Those rules might apply to the sender… but the customer who places the order doesn’t get off so lightly. They can go to jail for five years for importing a drugs without a license.
That’s not even really a vape thing. Nicotine is a drug. Importing cigarettes is also illegal with the exception of travellers in person can bring a few packets with them.
It wouldn’t be hard to catch people - international shipping requires labels declaring the contents. And if the vape seller is lying on those declarations then they’re breaking NZ laws.