Yeah, I was trying to sell some fake patents to Harcourt Fenton Mudd's mother, and she reminded me that unless I presented a fraudulent offer, I might not make a sale to her at all.

Like books, once you own a DVD it's yours. No one can take it away, alter it, or prevent you from watching when you want. It's always yours.

While that is technically correct ("the best kind...") it's legally incorrect.

DVDs use DRM. So, at any time, the copyright holder can revoke your authorization to watch them, even if there's no technical means to prevent you. (That's assuming they ever granted authorization to watch them in the first place, which is actually pretty unclear. Nowhere on a DVD or its case or paperwork have I seen any text suggesting that the copyright holder has granted permission to watch the DVD. I guess it's just sort of implied.)

DMCA makes it illegal to decrypt DRMed content without authorization from the copyright holder. Authorization is not something you buy (check your receipt; do you see it there?), so it's one of those things which can be given and taken away, at will. And (see above) that can be done without any communication or the consumer's knowledge. What you did legally a week ago might be illegal today, without any communication given to you.

Since you own and physically possess the DVD, you can still do it, but it might be illegal.

DMCA needs to be repealed before there will be any coherent policies that consumers will be able to make unambiguous sense of. So I think even for situations where the content isn't licensed, it's probably best to avoid the word "buy" if there's any DRM.

I just wanted to remind everyone: you agree to my terms.

I'm told that a few of you supposedly didn't realize that you agree to my terms, so I'm just reminding you.

It's easy to forget how utterly fucked up things have become, compared to how a few decades ago, we(? well, at least I) thought things would evolve, and one of those has to do with dedicated services for secure communications.

The thing that defies my predictions, is that dedicated services for secure communications, exist at all.

When you wanted to secure email, you didn't use a "secure email" service; you (the user!) just added security onto your insecure email service. Send a PGP/MIME message and the email provider doesn't give a damn that it's encrypted, it just cares about SMTP.

But these days (could I call it the "Age of Lack of Standards"?), everyone is trying to manipulate you into depending on their software and services (inextricably linked; you can't use their software without their service, or their service without their software), so you can't just replace the service or easily "tunnel" security through their presumably-insecure (perhaps even mandated insecure) service. Whatever security they offer, is all you can reasonably get (pretty much the opposite of the classic email situation).

Why do I bring this up? Because the regulations are all about services! Not protocols. Not software. Services. (emphasis mine in all below quotes)

Here's the beginning of The UK Online Safety Act (1)(1)(a):

imposes duties which, in broad terms, require providers of services regulated by this Act to identify, mitigate and manage the risks of harm

Here's good 'ol CALEA (US Code title 47 Section 1002 (a):

Except as provided in subsections (b), (c), and (d) of this section and sections 1007(a) and 1008(b) and (d) of this title, a telecommunications carrier shall ensure that ...

CALEA even mentions encryption:

A telecommunications carrier shall not be responsible for decrypting, or ensuring the government’s ability to decrypt, any communication encrypted by a subscriber or customer, unless the encryption was provided by the carrier and the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication.

I haven't dived into the details of EU's DSA, but I see a hopeful sign right there at the very beginning of Article 1:

The aim of this Regulation is to contribute to the proper functioning of the internal market for intermediary services by setting out harmonised rules...

Look at all those references to services! Not the code you run; the services you use.

What does it mean? I think it might mean that even in the UK(!) you might be perfectly fine and legal using secure software. You just can't have it rely on some coercible corporation's secure services. Send your encrypted blobs over generic protocols and un-dedicated services, and the law won't apply to your situation. I'm not necessarily saying "Make PGP/MIME Great Again" but I do think following in its spirit is a really great idea.

If you run a service, what you want to be able to tell the government (whether it's US or UK or France/Germany) is "we don't provide any encryption, though some of our customers supply their own."

Stop asking for secure services. Worse is better. Ask for secure software (which assumes that all services are completely hostile) decoupled from any particular service.

Lack of competence can be addressed through injection of capital to hire competent people to correct whatever problems incompetence caused.

You must follow the laws of the land to operate in the land. This is an issue of sovereignty, and US cannot dictate otherwise.

Problems here will arise when communications are international, and laws are mutually exclusive. Which jurisdiction is the one invoked.

We may actually end up in a world where users in totalitarian nations like UK will become unable to communicate with users outside it using most popular messaging apps. Or will only be able to communicate using a special unencrypted, fully wiretapped mode recorded and sent to authorities of relevant nation, with massive warnings about this being put all over that specific communication about this.

That was weirdly specific. More projection?

Did you remember to say "hail Obama" ten times while facing toward UN building in NYC before formulating this hilarious self-own?

These people never learn. Your model is a guess. Data science is not a form of science. It never has been, because it explicitly rejects scientific method. Including in this case, where it rejects observations that contravene the modelling, and doubles down on "but my best guess in formula I made up and ran through a computer that has never been able to guess correctly before".

And since data "scientists" predicted about fifty million of last zero catastrophic sea level rises, their last refuge is to... double down on data science. But we do it from satellite data this time (again, for n+1st time where n is a very large number) so it's different this time.

Remind me, what's Einstein's definition of insanity?

This really needs to stop, but since most of the funding for climate science is in fact funding data science which is behind all the amazing catastrophic predictions that range from desertification collapsing food production (observation: stable rising of food production by about 3% every year and planet is globally greening on average as seen from space), to storms becoming apocalyptic across the planet (observation: storms are weakening globally on average), certain species like Polar Bears dying out (observation: numbers far higher today than ever counter before, and there are now culling programs for that species as it's the last species on the planet that actively sees humans as prey), Great Barrier Reef dying out (observation: currently highest coral cover on record)... they can't stop. Turning climate science back into mostly science would destroy the funding, as there would no longer be catchy catastrophic modelling to scare people into giving money.

The problem is that data science unlike science doesn't need to care about reality. It can live in a world of mathematical abstractions of "best guess" models, which is all that data science is about. Which is why it's so good for making catastrophic predictions that never come about. And when time of observation eventually arrives, data scientist does what he did here. Shrug, say "I made my guess better, it's so good it will be correct this time, now pay me". And people do. If you were a data scientist, wouldn't you continue to just farm people who give you free money for this sort of activity?

There was a sliver of hope for those of us who think it would be better if climate cult level activity would turn back to science in the wake of reckoning of 2020 (where a lot of 2000s predictions where aimed at, and all of which proved to run hilariously hot compared to reality), but sadly that scandal went with almost no mainstream attention, and so the grift of data science pretending to be science appears to have just continued. World will totally end this time, we promise!

You're still using that same device made with rare earth metals, extraction of which caused immense suffering by your own accusations, to pretend really hard that someone beside you is a racist in this thread.

It's doubly ironic in light of the fact that California-left-progressive axis adherents prefer Chinese as their slave class. It's the primary difference from mainline East Coast left-progressive axis, who's adherents prefer blacks as their main slave class.

It's been that way for well over a century, and it hasn't changed.

You remind me of the guy here on slashdot who was posting links to them being sold a few years ago.

But you have strong faith, and that is all you need. You believe.

And has been "coming soon" for at least a decade.

This pretentious, utterly fake internet moral grandstanding is truly the bane of modernity.

You are typing this message on a device that required rare earths to be manufactured. Which are separated... in other nations. Because we refuse to do it domestically across the West.

There are people who are experiencing extreme downsides right now. They had to extract and refine rare earths so that your utterly fake moral grandstanding on how awful it would be if we moved this problem back home and dealt with it domestically could happen here on slashdot.

There are few people as awful as those like you.

It's much worse. There's an army of interpreters doing live interpretation of meetings, sessions and so on. And it's utterly insane endeavor, as proficiency for them is not "in language x" but in "interpreting from language x to language y".

This is why there's a fucking army of them, all sucking on the massive tit of the EU money. And it's still not enough for every meeting that needs to take place. This is why de facto lingua franca of EU is English. Even though the only one small nation where it's a national language in EU. Absolutely retarded endeavor.

This AI library is also about spoken language, not just written, which is why it's such a great first step.

This may actually help unfuck the EU as a structure in one of the fundamental ways it's fucked. Comprehension across languages.

Just the bureaucratic translation apparatus between all languages in Brussels is a money black hole on its own, and this has a good chance of removing it. Beyond that, ability to actually communicate in main European languages across the board would be a very welcome thing, as a lot of written and spoken assets are just not available in most European languages at all due to fairly small pool of speakers.

It's not solution in itself, but it's a very good first step in the direction of solving the Tower of Babel problem within EU.