• 10 Posts
  • 413 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 4th, 2023

help-circle




  • The backup provision applies to “computer programs” only. Not TV shows, movies, music, stage plays, player piano rolls, etc. (The relevant law is in 17 U.S.C. § 117 a.)

    Maybe courts would find that fair use would allow the copying I described above. After all, in the “Betamax Case”, the Supreme Court found that at least in many circumstances, timeshifting can be considered fair use. The Supreme Court’s decision can be seen in this document. The first sentence of the last non-footnote paragraph of page 13 (part of the same opinion written by Justice Stevens) reads “When these factors are all weighed in the ‘equitable rule of reason’ balance, we must conclude that this record amply supports the District Court’s conclusion that home time-shifting is fair use.”

    But they would have to read pretty thoroughly between the lines of federal law to do so. (And, again, that sometimes happens like in the Betamax case. But…)

    So, it’s far from certain what the courts would think about that sort of use.

    (Again, NAL. I kindof geek out on this stuff. Lol. But I don’t even have a shadow of a fraction of enough expertise to give any legal advice on this.)



  • I’ve got all of TOS, Voyager, and DS9 (as well as all the movies – well, official movies, at least) on DVD.

    I went to the trouble of copying all of Voyager to a big ol’ hard drive because I re-watch it every now and then and that would make it easier. I kindof intended to do so with DS9 as well.

    Just for personal use. Not with the intention of sharing it or selling the original DVDs or anything. Not that that 100% for sure makes the act of copying “legal”. I’m unaware of any caselaw indicating it is, though maybe the “Betamax Case”'s declaration that timeshifting is legal might push the likelihood slightly in the direction that maybe courts would find it legal if they haven’t made any decision directly about copying just for personal use and not publishing. (IANAL, not legal advice, go hire a lawyer.)

    But one disk was encoded differently than the rest and somehow I wasn’t able to get all the content onto the drive in a form that I could reasonably watch it from the hard drive. Even though it works just fine in my Bluray player.

    Maybe one day I’ll figure out how to do put all the content on a drive, but it’s probably just as fine to swap disks as I’m watching.



  • Oh! That’s good to hear. Honestly, that issue has kindof pissed me off enough at Rossmann specifically that I kindof quit watching his YouTube videos and stuff. So I very much haven’t been following him or FUTO.

    I wonder if the FUTO website still claims that they require all projects to be or have a plan to become specifically “Open Source”.

    Edit: Yup. They still say “All FUTO-funded projects are expected to be open-source or develop a plan to eventually become so” on this page. Maybe that means that they intend for Grayjay to “develop a plan to eventually become” properly Open Source and not just “source first”.


  • Just in case this matters to OP or anyone else in this thread, Grayjay isn’t Open Source, despite Rossman’s and FUTO’s claims to the contrary. Its license disallows any commercial use of Grayjay, and also disallows removing any features related to paying FUTO. Which disqualify Grayjay as “Open Source” by the OSI’s definition.

    And consequently, F-Droid won’t distribute Grayjay unless they change their license.


  • Damn. Um… Neither, please?

    I’d love to have steak sitting across from Linus. Bradley Kuhn from the SFC is an awesome guy.

    But if I had to pick between Gates and Stallman… I guess Stallman so I can grill him about why he’s been sabotaging the the Free Software movement so badly.



  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlNo script help.
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    10
    ·
    edit-2
    8 days ago

    A lot of user fingerprinting techniques rely on JS. Plus, by shutting off JS, you reduce the attack surface of your browser. If, let’s say, there was a zero-day vulnerability in Firefox that required JS to exploit, you’d be shutting off that whole means of attack if you blocked all/most JS out there on the internet. Mining cryptocurrencies on your computer via your browser can only be accomplished with the help of Javascript. A lot of forever cookie techniques require Javascript.

    uBlock origin is for kindof a different use case. It’s for if you’re on one website that you don’t necessarily suspect of evil dealings that might include buttons (like social media sharing buttons, for instance) or other scripts (like ad displaying scripts or analytics scripts) from third parties that might include evil tracking stuff. If I started a blog on https://theawesomeestblog.com/ and included script from Facebook that puts a share button on my page, and if you then visited my blog, Facebook would know because your browser would make requests from your IP with cookies they’d placed on your brower previously and JS included with the button could very well be used to do additional fingerprinting.

    NoScript is for (among other things) when you don’t even necessarily trust the website you’re purposefully visiting. Like, I don’t know if cnn.com mines Bitcoin via JS on users’ browsers (and, honestly, it seems a little unlikely to me, I think), but if I disallow JS on cnn.com, then when I click a link in Lemmy to a cnn.com article (and maybe I don’t even really know I’m going to cnn.com when I click the link – it might use a link shortener or something – or maybe it’s not cnn.com, but some reasonably-trustworthy-sounding news-y-sounding domain that I haven’t heard of before), I know it’s not mining Bitcoin on my machine.

    Oh, and as others have said, NoScript is Open Source. Says so right near the top of the home page.




  • Seems like the sort of thing that Nintendo will want to shut down. There are legal loopholes that can be taken to avoid copyright infringement in such cases (such as releasing a game engine without any reasources/assets a la the Super Mario 64 decompilation project), but it doesn’t look like this SM64-on-GBA project is doing anything like that. (Which is unfortunate. Other projects like the Link’s Awakening PC port that got shut down not too terribly long ago also didn’t take precautions.

    Don’t get me wrong. I hope this project sees the light of day. I just don’t think Nintendo will let it. And I wish the creators of these sorts of projects would take the necessary precautions to avoid being shut down on copyright grounds.


  • TootSweet@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonemicrulesoft
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    9 days ago

    I was asking more specifically about the word “quality” itself than the whole sentence. Are you referring to stability? Security? User-friendliness? Integration with whatever? Hardware support? 'Cuz the word “quality” is way too broad a term to just use and not expect to piss off a lot of people. Lol.

    That said, I can’t disagree with you about, for instance, Plasma. (I haven’t used Gnome enough to comment, but my last experience with Plasma back like 10 years ago wasn’t great.)

    I strongly prefer relatively minimal solutions. Rather than Plasma or Gnome, I use Sway, for instance. And it’s solid as a rock. More so than either Plasma or Windows’ graphical system in my experience.

    Plasma, in my book, is way over-engineered. Windows too. And that’s why they suck. And, admittedly, Plasma perhaps more so than Windows.

    If I can find any common ground with you here, this is it: Microsoft has leverage on its employees to “fix” bugs in its over-engineered crap while KDE’s over-engineered crap doesn’t get fixed until volunteers can get to it.

    But neither the Microsoft approach nor the KDE approach (nor, I’d guess, the Gnome approach) is a solution. You can’t fix fundamental design flaws by heaping fixes on top. Sometimes you have to step back and decide it’s best to finally rebuild the foundation. And Windows has a problem with almost never doing that. The Linux ecosystem is much better at that, I’d say. (And the argument could probably be made that that’s the result of engineers just wanting to build something new and shiny rather than keep working on the boring old stuff. The result is working, though. Certainly in my estimation.) Look at Wayland, for instance. The only “innovations” I’ve seen from Windows is how they redesign their start menu and piss everyone off every couple of Windows versions.

    And in the Linux ecosystem, I can throw away what I don’t want and replace it with something I do want. I can’t really replace any pieces of Windows.

    I can’t measure any of the above in dollars that went into Linux ecosystem vs dollars that went into Windows.