I never used Vine, but resurrecting large swaths of our early online culture sounds like a project worthy of some support. (even if Dorsey is involved)

Cynicism and irony aside, how can we not want to support any initiative giving more permanence to cultural ephemera? I'm sure some interesting and very unique content can be snipped from some of these clips, and it can only lead to further remixing and mashing up into platforms that are currently trendy like TikTok.

... is Bill Murray playing an endless game of 'whack-a-mole' with gophers in the movie Caddyshack.

Not saying that it's pointless (yet) to do so, but it sure seems headed that way.

At some future stage, all of this enforcement will not be worthwhile or manageable anymore.
The one thing that comes to mind is Gabe Newell, who proved that piracy is only a problem when the stuff isn't easily available. One could wish that publishers would come to their senses and roughly offer everything in a similar fashion to what Steam has been doing with games.

The user has a library, where all of the stuff they purchased remains permanently available, including offline and it's made frictionless so that it becomes a pleasure to use the platform, instead of constantly being stifled by territorial restrictions, DRM, some titles being unavailable, whatever other arcane legalese which make the experience so frustrating that people pragmatically get frustrated and resort to piracy.

Thanks so very much for sharing this lovely online novel, indeed so relevant to the topic at hand.

It'll be something I treasure and recommend from here on out.

It's kind of scary that those who enact these rules don't realize how much more motivated teenagers will be, because they'll have the added thrill of accessing something that's forbidden.

Anyway, for the rest of us, what some think of as an annoyance will probably just be a unique opportunity for vendors of VPN services to easily gain market share.
The entire thing will just place undue burden and complexity for these sites to satisfy the Nanny State, and help contribute to some epic-sized data leaks.

#whatcouldpossiblygowrong

"So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish" suddenly makes so much more sense now.

Looks like Apple are doing their very best to ensure that users such as myself will never use one of their NKB 'Nanny Knows Best' devices.
Wouldn't be surprised if the next bit was "Oh and by the way, we had some of your videos sent to our contractors //for quality assurance and training// or whatever else"

This whole idea of being tethered to their apps within the ecosystem is bad enough, but this just feels like a bridge too far.

What's so special about Facetime anyway, just Signal FFS. It does video calling, group chats (especially great for Pentagon employees) etc..

I'm not sure that comparing Linux to Windows 10 (or 11) is fair in the sense that most 'normal' users are not willing to jump through all of the hoops required in order to get a usable desktop environment without much effort and tinkering

The beauty of Linux, the fact that it is endlessly customizable and can be altered to fit an advanced power user's needs perhaps also remains its Achille's heel as most people out there who just want to turn the box on and for it to work, with simple, widely-accepted solutions available beyond the OS itself. While the last ten years have obviously seen much progress towards this goal (Arch, Mint, even Ubuntu, as well as LibreOffice), it still remains that widespread adoption is only going to happen when there is a giant effort to standardize things and dumb them down more than a bit. The percentage of users who want to do pull requests from GitHub to patch or update a system, or deeply care about the privacy of their data probably is less than 10% of the general population.

While I'm sure there are great self-hosted systems out there that can rival the ubiquitous convenience of a turnkey solution like 365 which seamlessly (in theory) makes your data available across multiple devices including mobile whatever the OS may be, until a credible open source version of it can be proven to be as reliable and convenient (including in workgroup environments, not to say anything of enterprise level of rollouts) I'm not sure it's something that makes the case for large-scale adoption.

Yes, if a country's police department can find the funding to hire a developer to customize and maintain a distribution to their needs, and possibly spec out specific hardware that makes it possible to get it working reliably, then such a use case makes total sense.

But until this happens for an entire country, I'm finding it difficult to believe that it'll happen on its own otherwise. Normal users want support, hand-holding and pre-built solutions with limited choices and good security that works on the hardware they use. In other words? This happens to exactly be what OS-X brings to the table, even though in this case the OS is a commodity which is only there in order for Apple to make money from selling their hardware.

So maybe the real question is: can something like OS-X a.k.a. "It Just Works" be developed for Linux on specific hardware, and all of it be open-source? I'm sure there must be many reasons that it hasn't happened so far. SteamOS looks to be the one that's the farthest along in following this path, because they've eliminated so many of the available choices in order to provide users with a system that just works. This is only possible because Steam monetizes the games it sells, and the OS (once again) is a necessary loss leader.

Google could easily do it, but have no incentive to do so because they would only be interested if they could use the platform to harvest data and spam ads.

France sort of did something like this 30 years ago with their 'Minitel' which was a small form-factor dumb terminal computer that made using the phone system pretty amazing back then. It made sense because the phone company was using it to sell more phone calls. Maybe once an entire country decides to commit resources to a giant effort like this, it can have the effect of creating the kind of critical mass adoption we're all wishing for? Not impossible, but where does this exist? Among the many other hidden costs, someone still has to pay for all of the developers and for the update, support and maintenance for all these systems.

Imagine taking tens of thousands of these old jazz records that incorporate direct references to well-known melodies and hooks during a solo as a 'tip of the hat' and quickly switch to something else, leading to them being retroactively sued for appropriation by other music publishers whose song they 'infringed' because the one of the players evoked the melody during their solo.

This scheme of splitting up songs into their stems and attempting to claim copyright ownership of specific elements truly feels Orwellian, and could lead to so many frivolous lawsuits as well as false positives that one could question whether it'll really lead to better outcomes for musicians and songwriters.

One thing that's for sure: For a while, if such a monstrosity comes to pass it may temporarily lead to better outcomes for the lawyers and corporate beancounters who control it, which probably is why these tech companies are trying to sell them the service.

But in reality it feels like yet another arguably futile attempt by middlemen and gatekeepers to somehow figure out how to monetize music in ways that increasingly reek of desperation. Because at the rate of new music being produced (over 4 million new tracks per month) the amounts that can be collected are going to mathematically keep getting smaller and smaller, while the cost of administering all of this and dealing with false positives and litigation is only going to increase. Arguably to the point where it won't make economic sense.

Besides which, real-time generative AI is making giant strides to be able to create music that's passable, soon to be available on-demand and on-device and will probably satisfy the type of casual listeners who play hour-long mixes of lo-fi chill music as background during their work, at the health club or during a commute.

Regardless, at the very least the information in this article feels like it's yet more confirmation that copyright in its present form appears to have outlasted its useful life cycle and has fallen victim to another type of enshittification, something which certain pundits might argue was inevitable and a long time coming.

I'm also very conflicted on this, but intuitively tend to lend credence to the idea that it may be better to deal with the cesspool of AI slop and garbage than relegate these functions to a third party sanitizing app or filter we have no recourse or control over.

Ideally, and as these services mature it'll eventually become a reality, we should have personalized algorithmic agents doing all of this work for us, totally under our control and having direct access to a site's API
(wishful thinking, because all too often the entire business model is to get users riled up, euphemically referred to as 'engagement'.)

While there may be some highly technical reasons why it's not considered cutting-edge, I find it more than acceptable for all major sites and general browsing activities. I divide my Internet usage between three browsers (on desktop), and have yet to find a major drawback or showstopper that would entice me to abandon it. Its only disadvantage (for me) is that Chrome has many more nifty extensions.

As for mobile performance, it also seems generally fine as well. I still think that there's some value in supporting a product that gives us an alternative to the Google hegemon.

My thoughts exactly

Realistically, how is that going to stop anyone outside of the US to train their LLMs on the very same content they're clamoring about?

This is just a performative exercise, for an audience that arguably expects it. (even though it really has no purpose whatsoever, and will accomplish exactly nothing)

Copyright did good when it was all about physical goods and distribution. It started showing signs of being dysfunctional at the dawn of the digital age, and its lobby's staunch effort to not adapt to new realities started to create stress points. When AI's disruptive effects started to get noticed, it was already too late. I'm not saying I'm jumping up and down about it, but it's the new reality, and there's ain't a doggone thing any of these megacorps (copyright cartels) and their lawyers wielding IP laws as an adversarial tool are going to be able to do about it.

The going was good while it lasted. Far from being overjoyed about it, thinking about our many friends in the creative professions who depend on this income for their livelihood. But I just don't see it going backwards. The sum total of published human knowledge, encapsulated and distilled, now available at our fingertips.

Time to start leveraging these new tools, however primitive they are today, they will soon get much better. This is the nature of reality: it keeps shifting and evolving, most times out of our control.

Armchair economists on Slashdot (especially the 'murican ones) won't really be the ones to consider the externalities you've mentioned such as the amount of CO2 emissions this will contribute to helping curb in the long term, and the savings thus realized because such gains may not be measured in mere monetary profits.

A sizeable portion of them having just voted a climate denialist president into office for another four years, and their yardstick of success arguably being quarterly stock dividends, I'm unconvinced that they'd appreciate the long-term benefits of such measures since this doesn't align with their short-term worldview. (like the current price of eggs today, even though not being proactive may in the long run raise their prices up way more down the road).

While I'm most certainly not a big fan of Chinese policies in general, this particular initiative doesn't appear to be one I'd spend time moaning and complaining about. When managing the lives of 1 billion+ people, such a rail buildout actually seems like a pretty safe investment into the country's stability and future. And while I'm pretty sure there's waste with unneeded station stops where powerful political interests jockey for favors, that wastefulness remains different from building out the network itself. As for the US, its short-term mindset seems destined to only perpetuate a slow but constant decline due to the unwillingness many elected officials exhibit of bringing themselves to reach consensus on critical planning of infrastructure issues, (or because they're more interested in just gorging themselves with public funds while never delivering anything of substance).