Riskable @ riskable @programming.dev

Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software De

---

Read more

Posts

17

Comments

1,150

Joined

2 yr. ago

Historically, there were probably tens of thousands of people named, "Jesus" around that time. There were also loads and LOADS of people crucified by the Romans. If you were to make up a story and try to make it believable wouldn't you pick a likely starting point?

At least they're open about it: The entire point (according to them) is attrition. The actual plan is to make work for these people much more hostile so they quit.

Santa is a stand-in for Jesus... for children. They're both magical beings that can perform miracles and have similar methods: Both Santa and Jesus have naughty lists and forms of punishment that come later; much later (both are equivalent lengths of time to a child though 🤣). Both bring "gifts". Both have traditional appearances. Both have followers that wear silly hats and strange clothes. But most importantly...

Both are imaginary.

If you believe in Santa as an adult you're ridiculed. If you believe in Jesus as an adult you're just labeled, "Christian". Yet the fact that nearly every child eventually finds out Santa isn't real is quite disturbing to a lot of Christians. After all, if they could stop believing in Santa--who is so similar to Jesus in every way--then they could stop believing in Jesus.

The largest contributors to Open Source make their money from patents and other IP.

The data in that video is (probably) accurate but your statement is completely wrong: In that list only Intel makes anything but trivial amounts of money from patents. In fact, Microsoft, Google, and Docker have famously lost shittons of money thanks to patents. They basically siphoned money out of those companies into the pockets of lawyers and provided absolutely no benefit to society.

For fuck's sake: Features were removed from Android because of software patents!

Not only that but Google makes almost all of its money from advertising, not "IP". Same for Meta which is oddly missing from the graph (even though they contribute to and maintain a ton of FOSS stuff).

Then let's talk about #1: Redhat. They absolutely would be 1000% behind banning software patents. It's nothing but trouble for them.

I'd also like to note that Microsoft has been very much in favor of software patents since they were invented by the courts (remember: no legislation added software as a category of patentable subject matter: They exist as a result of court rulings!) because they thought they would put an end to open source software (see: Halloween documents). However, software patents have actually cost Microsoft more than they ever helped the company! In short: They're idiots. They opened a can of worms that's kept them constantly under attack but because those worms also hurt their perceived enemies they've doubled down on their decision.

Software existed for decades without (software) patents and has innovated and evolved vastly more quickly than any other science. Then we created software patents and things actually started to slow down (because lawsuits take time and threaten to end great software before it even exists).

Software is already covered by copyright which is all that was necessary for some of the richest companies in the world to come into existence (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle). Software patents shouldn't exist!

Why? Software patents are already covered by copyright. Anyone can write software and they automatically get assigned the copyright for it. The barrier to entry is basically zero since everyone has a computer and nearly anyone can learn to program by simply taking the time to do so.

I mean, I also don't think patents should exist in general but there's a pretty clear difference between software and things in the physical world. Software is "just math". And I mean that literally: 100% of all software that exists can be reduced to math that you could--in theory--perform with a pencil and paper.

There's a lot of reasons why software patents shouldn't exist far beyond the scope of patents in general.

Imagine if any company could just copy an indie game and scale it up/polish a bit and get all the sales.

You're describing the entire mobile games industry. You think all those top apps in the app stores are 100% original? No. They copied other games.

Also, patents have nothing to do with that. Software is covered by copyright.

Furthermore, "back in the day" manufacturing was expensive and required huge factories to build stuff (in quantity). The barrier to entry was enormous! People were mostly uneducated and there was not much in the way of "shared engineering knowledge". Ten thousand people could look at a car engine and have no friggin clue how it worked. That's why patents were necessary: Disclosure

These days disclosure has become irrelevant. Any engineer can look at an invention or product and figure out both how it works and how it was made. At the very least, they can figure out a way to make it. Just look at all the Youtube channels where every day people are making complicated machines, parts, and electronics! The mysteries are gone. Disclosure is unnecessary.

Since the entire point of patents was disclosure why do we still need them?

Here's how it's going to go:

• Pentagon will put up enormous resistance because of cost and impractically.
• Pentagon officials will be fired left and right because, "they can't get stuff done."
• Eventually enough competent people will be replaced with loyalists then they'll actually start kidnapping immigrants and placing them in facilities that were never meant for large amounts of people.
• American citizens that look like the conservative enemy of the day will be kidnapped along with legal and illegal immigrants.
• The US government will get sued over and over again for fucking up basic shit like "accidentally" kidnapping Black/Asian/Latino Americans and even simpler things like keeping people fed (because the Trump administration doesn't care about competency; only loyalty; or these people, for that matter).
• Countries will refuse to accept the sheer number of people (same exact problem Hitler had!) leading the Trump administration trying to come up with "solutions".
• They'll force the kidnapped people to do traditional prison work. Except there's not enough demand for that many license plates so they'll switch to literally selling their labor, allowing Trump's personal circle of rich friends to profit at their expense.
• Due to unbelievable levels of sheer incompetentcy that won't work out so near the end of Trump's term--when he's panicking about having to face justice again--he'll attempt to implement a more, "final solution."

Baldy looks like it might be General John Kelly... Even though most pictures of him have some hair.

Software patents shouldn't exist!

Trying the back button to get out of an ad infestation? You get a new ad! Trying again? Believe or not, straight to another ad!

There's vastly more malicious code now than there was back then. Every company that has an online presence is constantly under attack. Constantly. There isn't an IPv4 address that exists that isn't scanned and have an attempt at hacking performed within seconds of being connected.

Not only that but today's malicious code is much better at what it does with hundreds of amazing features and methods of branching out using different attack methods. Today's malware is so good it updates itself very carefully/as secretly as possible so that some old compromised machine that no one thinks about anymore can become the next vector of attack inside your network.

All it takes is one active vulnerability

Keep all your shit up to date, people! When was the last time you checked your router to see if it had updates? Hmm‽

People are accepting of ads because ads are literally everywhere. A world without ads would be very strange indeed!

Every logo that exists and every product that has its own name/brand printed on it is an ad. Every product name in a catalog or simple list is an ad.

A world without ads would be like hundreds of years ago when you could buy soap that just looked like soap with no labels and no packaging at all. When the only food you purchased was bare produce/meat (or the whole animal). But even then any assembled/manufactured product would have some sort of "maker's mark".

I mean, how long have humans been branding cattle? That's the original use of that term!

The article sucks. The FTC isn't going after Microsoft's cloud services because they're good/bad. They're going after Microsoft because of forced bundling. Same abuse of monopoly power they were found guilty of when they started forcing everyone to use Internet Explorer.

Microsoft is forcing customers to use their cloud services under all sorts of scenarios. Many of which have no logical reason other than to force customers into Azure.

For example, if you have a lot of Windows servers in Azure they will stop supporting you once you reach a certain threshold unless you also sign up to use their enterprise cloud AD service.

They already do this with regular Windows--you have to use AD if you're a business customer and you go past a certain threshold of systems--but in that case you can just get some Domain Controllers and call it a day. You can put them wherever you want (locally, in AWS, in Azure, wherever).

With Azure Windows servers though you're forced to use Azure AD (or you lose support and possibly access to other bundled services). You can't host Domain Controllers anywhere else. I mean, they'll let you have as many off-Azure DCs as you want but they must still be joined/synchronizing to Azure AD.

There's probably many other anticompetitive tactics in place within the world of Azure but that's the one big one I know off the top of my head.

Sounds sooooo second class to me. I only deal with first class languages so I can enjoy my curry with a satisfying closure 🎩 👌

It was a tired story until OH DEER it wasn't anymore.

After replacing writers and artists it is now replacing the entire category of, "old people". AI has reached the, "final solution" faster than I thought possible!

Exactly! I love how AI image generation can come up with funny surprises like that 🤣

I hope the hilarity never ends!

I use it for the hilarity!

I made a whole series of images representing the usual hair colors just for fun:

I have so much fun with images like this in Discord/Matrix and the occasional Lemmy post 🤣

That's a lot of dough