abraxas @ abraxas @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

I wouldn't say their opposition is always bad faith neo-nazis, but the anti-vegan/anti-PETA movement definitely has a few bad seeds they should be burning out. There is no reason to combine ethical meat-eating with neoconservativism. It's bloody stupid.

FOSS has always been about “free as in speech”,

If you're being pedantic, then yes, because Stallman coined "Free Software" as a term and that rolled into the acronym "FOSS". If you're talking about what we actually thought, then no.

FOSS vs. proprietary is tangential to the discussion over filesharing, anyway, because it addresses different issues. FOSS isn’t good because it’s zero-cost, it’s good because it respects user freedoms.

From a totally different angle, it's good because it does more to empower innovation and creative expression than IP ever did, yet innovation and creative expression were always the stated goals of IP. Because of that, it's a lot less tengential a discussion than things like filesharing, which also empowers creative expression. Cost-free, unlimited access to art is the best way to get art in the hands of everyone. And that is "free as in Beer".

It’s funny, I’ve never met anybody who’d have that kind of experience and use the word “hacker” in this meaning simultaneously.

I'm slightly too young to use "hacker" the traditional old-MIT way. Maybe only by 2-3 years. I was a stupid kid playing with linux in the mid-90's and I hacked into a stupid municipal dialup BBS and got root, then neither did nor changed anything because it was "cool" to prove I could figure it out. Then "Hackers" came out and I ran that movie on repeat for a few weeks and then moved on to actually learning to code.

I remember exactly the opposite, people being much more acutely aware of the difference, and Stallman being much more popular than now.

There's those of us who were avoiding Redhat for shittier distros (like Slackware back then imo) because we didn't want to buy anyone else's beer for us to contribute for free. Maybe we were fewer than it seemed. I was that ugy giving out Ubuntu Warty CD's having this weird pipe-dream of the tech world all going free-as-in-beer (yeah, I know they're a for-profit. A lot of people didn't get that back then and just saw a better Debian). Maybe again it relates to the exact date?

Clarification? Movies about Steve Jobs excluded.

Mr. Gates started back when "hacker" didn't mean "hacker" (as you point out). He would pick up freely-given tech early on, and was then one of the first to start crying IP complaints and asserting his ownership of his product. Wherever you stand on the opinion, Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists started his really terrible reputation, since many hobbyests accurately alleged he built his business on tech they were using/granting for free. I never knew the facts of the 1977 BASIC case where he was sued over ownership of BASIC and won, but then in the 80's he notoriously started his attitude of embrace, extend, extinguish. Everything from his behavior related to DOS, his ripping off Lotus Notes, etc. One could simply say "he was a good businessman" and they're allowed to feel that way. If you say "hey, you can have as much of my water as you want for free" and I drain your lake so you have to buy water back from me, technically what I'm doing is legal. That's basically what many people felt Gates did.

EDIT: And I don't have good references, but I remember some quotes from him as his reputation got bad, that the hobbyists shouldn't have been giving software out for free anyway. That the real problem was that they should have been demanding money for their work and/or keeping their ownership. One could argue his behavior was some of what spearheaded the carefully-crafted OSS licensing in the 80's.

Not that I've seen, at least not cleanly. It's the dream I'm looking for.

An alt-right neonazi forum/organization/etc. Putting it to reddit context is for two reasons. First, because we're all pissed at reddit's recent behavior. But second because Spez has been accused (with evidence) of being sorta Elon-like in his courting of the alt-right, and possibly having extreme right leanings himself.

In fairness, I think it's because the tech barrier of entry went down, WAYYY down. "Free Data" is an easy sell to people who were dialing into usenet in the 90's, and us stupid ameteur hackers who would break into systems like they were puzzles because we thought it was cool and the maximum penalty was a fine and community service (the good old days, we all did it at least once and thought we were Zero Cool... unless we thought Zero Cool was lame, whatever). A lot of the people who think IP jives well with the internet were the ones who looked at me weird when I said I had online friends circa 2000, and who couldn't understand how I couldn't make some party because I "had to spend Saturday hanging out on IRC for my D&D campaign"

Even more technical folks now, they just never lived what made the internet beautiful when it was smaller. Back when "FOSS" was "Free as in Beer" and fuck that Richard Stallman with his "free as in speech" bullshit. They don't remember how this dark storm of people's hobbies turning into other people's IP, people like Bill Gates stealing the foundations of technology to build his empire (for all the good he does now, he was truly evil to his core).

Ok, old-fart rant over.

I feel there’s still a difference between hosting it directly vs the federated nature of the platform meaning that the content is copied so it can be served to an end user

Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that's not the case. If you "federate" a server with CP for example, you are hosting CP. If it's not brought to your attention, maybe you have a safe harbor exception (and maybe not), but if it IS brought to your attention, you are required to act on it to not be liable. And I airquote "federate" because as I learned Lemmy's architecture, I'm not sure "federated" is the best word to describe it. When I think of federated, I think of something like an orchistrator. A tool where you are directed to the authoritative cluster for content, but not required to join in on it. In such a world, there would be three states - (1) I have a copy of this data, (2) I don't have a copy of this data but link/index it, (3) I refuse to index this data

Lacking #2, I believe, really creates a lot of liability.

And that's an issue, and suggests some flaws with Lemmy's architecture. Lemmy UI's should be indexers, no more. This is probably why we keep seeing the push-and-pull of "we must create a giant web" vs" fuck that, small is better". Each lemmy instance is a full-fledged forum solution, storing a copy of the entire network of all other forum solutions we're interested in. Of course it'll never succeed at either.

And now that Lemmy's reached a more critical mass, I'm not sure it could pivot to a better design. Which is a shame. Because it's still better than reddit, but it'll never be what many people loved about what reddit (and digg) used to be.

EDIT: It's not all doom and gloom. I think there's a space for self-hosted apps or clients to make up for that gap, and we already have search indexers to find communities cross-web. I think when we have better multi-user integration, we'll have a lot of opportunity. Like if I had a lemmy.world user primary, and it had a authorizing key, I could maybe have a user on dbzer0.com that has the public key for my lemmy.world and still effectively sign that account in a defederated instance. Enough people have been demanding something like that, I'm sure it'll drop eventually.

What he's trying to say is that if there were 198 fraudulent copies sold on G2A, but G2A also was responsible for 500 non-fraudulent sales, then Wube might have still netted a profit off G2A from people who would not have bought Factorio full price. Since nobody has ever shown that anywhere near a majority of keys are fraudulent, it is entirely possible for most games that they still make more money even after chargebacks than if G2A didn't exist. There are, however, definitely going to be games where that's not the case.

The better argument, honestly, is that G2A being unwilling to police fraudulent sales is helping the scam industry, and is responsible for us getting more Microsoft Support, Amazon Refund, etc scams in our inboxes. I do not hold the negative view most do on key resellers because most of the reason big media hates on them has nothing to do with the fraud... but honestly companies like G2A should be doing more (something) to own and police their shit. I personally think a majority of G2A's keys are legit because there are a lot of ways to legally gets keys much cheaper than MSRP. I frankly support that behavior because I'll never be a fan of the IP price controls and treating game purchases as "licenses" instead of purchases.

Does cdkeys.com really count as grey-market? AFAIR, they directly purchase all their keys from legal sources. Unlike G2A and the like who shove fingers in ears and say "we're just a key marketplace".

They let people resell keys "no questions asked" (it reduces their liability to not ask questions). Some percent of the resellers they host use stolen credit cards to sell at a loss, and nobody knows what percent. It's probably depressingly high, but (likely) still <50%.

Some percent of the resellers just buys games on sale, or in a cheap country to resell to expensive countries. It's not uncommon when a game has a plummet sale (a $70 black friday sale for $20) that thousands of copies of the game show up for $30-40 on G2A as soon as the sale ends. Those are (generally) not in any way related to stolen credit cards.

I mean, cdkeys.com doesn't allow third-party sellers and (supposedly) sources all their keys from verifiably legal sources, usually just region arbitrage. Considering they come into ownership of all the keys they sell, I'd think they lack all the "safe harbor" protections of the others.

Thing is, cdkeys.com is about the same price as the others. Which suggests to me that the "stolen keys" rate from those others is lower than some companies would have you believe. Remember, legal or not, the big label stance on all this is an extension of their stance on buying used, which is that they would rather you pirate something than support even a legitimate third-party or cross-regional market.

Exactly. When I supported this, there was that wince of "this won't get the people it really needs to hit"... but it does enough.

And tbh, I know some wealthy fucking people who legitimately don't cross the line. $1M/yr is a lot of bloody money. That means if I found a way to "only" make $900,000/yr, I'm immune to this tax.

Also, anyone hiring for $900,000/yr?

That's what the campaign to quash the bill did. That, and tried to convince people that they might have a single multi-million-dollar transaction in their life (like selling a large successful business) and have to pay an extra 4% on it.

Always a push to get the "temporarily embarassed millionaire" to support the reach. "Yeah, yanno. My little lawmowing operation that makes me $20,000 coild sell for over a million and then I'm fucked"

That's a symptom of too much caffeine...

I know, I have it.

And caffeine.

It's hard to know because both sides are arguing that it's 100% their side. Game companies are claiming it's basically all pirated keys. G2A (in court) used to argue that it was basically no pirated keys. The truth is somewhere in the middle but nobody is talking.

In some cases, the fraudulent purchase route is less profitable than just buy-selling across countries and abusing sales. I can't imagine in those cases that we're looking at fraudulent purchases.

It's a grey area (again, as I removeded elsewhere, because game companies are also against used sales and cross-region sales).

It can be stolen credit cards.

It can also be:

1. Games purchased during an unprecedented sale, then resold at a profit still well below current MSRP. Big game companies hate this.
2. Games purchased in one country to be resold in another, non-region-locked country. (note, my removed includes region locking)
3. Games purchased in bulk directly from the company or from an authorized reseller. Can relate to #2 as well.

But because everyone involved is in a grey area, there's not as much transparency from anyone exactly how many this is. G2A argued for years it was virtually zero, then admitted it's a bit higher than that. Is it 10%, 50%, somewhere in between? We actually don't know.

I sorta blame big media companies for this. They have been trying to kill used movie/game sales for decades, moving to these (should be illegal) licensing models, etc. In doing that, they have failed to allow an infrastructure to form that would keep used or third-party purchases "legit" so you end up with sites that have no choice but to live in the grey area, even cdkeys.com that (allegedly) sources their keys 100% first-party legitimately.

Ultimately, credit card fraud will always be a risk. Someone installed a barcode copier on a local gas station machine a while back, and they bought 5 PS4s on it before the Bank got wise. It's a little easier in other countries because there's no physical shipping to deal with, but it's not really creating the market. As a defrauded individual, you just can't chargeback a playstation that was sold anonymously on ebay and already shipped.