🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

Guess the code!

"My boss said, we need a lock with a code."

-- a great example for checkbox compliance driven pseudo-security 😂

@kev thanks for the article on https://kevq.uk/how-does-mastodon-work/ it was the catalyst for me to create an account and your profile was my resource for finding cool people to follow!

#FascismLessons

Legal doesn't mean it's always right

Nathan W Pyle made this meme

@DissidentKitty I have an internet connected computer so I'm entitled to an opinion.

Let's begin with a definition of theft, I will then consider another one.

Theft is when you private someone from a resource that they obtained through voluntary exchange or through working on (possibly raw, natural) resources.

From this definition piracy is not theft. You are simply copying, not denying the artist from the original one. The artist still has the drawing on a paper they did.

You may argue that the artist will not gain what they would have gained if they had monopoly over the copying rights. That's very possibly true, but it will only be theft if they obtained said monopoly from a voluntary exchange with everyone else.

Of course this argument doesn't consider governments, under which the definition of theft can be broadened to include other things that not only voluntary exchange and working on resources.

So lets do that.

Theft is when you private someone from a resource that they obtained through voluntary exchange, through working on (possibly raw, natural) resources or through rights given to them by a government.

Under this definition, if there is a law that gives the artist copying monopoly, and you break said monopoly, you are committing theft.
(Here I'm not making judgements of whether something is good or bad, just pointing what follows from the definition of theft.)

Fortunately most of us here (I hope) still live in a democracy and not in the Kingdom of Zuckerberg, so we are entitled to discussing whether we think the government should institute such copying monopolies.

Originally, copy rights were created in England, after the invention of the Gutenberg press because the government thought that if everyone could say whatever they wanted, their days of governing would be over. They were very much correct, see the French revolution that brought the raise of individualistic and democratic ideals.

Modern copy right laws exist for a different reason. The argument behind it is that if people have the monopoly of copy of their creation for say, 10 years, then they are much more likely to create, which benefits society.

The crucial part is "which benefits society", meaning that we get to decide if there is such benefit and whether we want it. Note that the vote of artists counts very little here because they are a small part of the population, monopoly of copy of art is usually not considered a basic right and they would obviously vote for "unlimited monopoly forever". Therefore, in the end, most of the weight goes to whether the laws benefit society as a whole.

To decide if we do want copy right laws we need to consider two things:
1 - What we get;
2 - What we pay.

If we only get Vox Media articles and BuzzFeed quizez then it's obviously not worth it.
If we have to pay with the souls of kittens then it's also not worth it.

This brings us to the final and most productive part of this very high IQ post, considerations on what we get and how much we pay.

What we get:

What everyone will point out right away is that in modern times we are getting A LOT of Vox Media articles and A LOT of BuzzFeed Quizes. In absolute numbers we are getting much more sensationalist journalism than ever before.

But I would also like to point out that in modern times we are getting a lot of quality niche content that would be virtually impossible before and a lack of copy monopoly could render some of that content impossible. This niche quality content DOES NOT include most netflix series btw.

What we pay:

It's very easy to make copies of anything. You only need a computer with internet, not a massive rolling press. Therefore, in practice, the copy monopoly will be enforced through either DRM(proprietary malaware) or surveillance and lawsuits/DMCA notices.

Both of those have massive downsides. DRM is the least bad, it is more or less voluntary, a person can just not buy DRM stuff. But not without downsides, proprietary software can be used as spyware and if the copy monopoly is allowed a lot of people will end up using DRM, increasing the chances of people that don't actually use DRM to also be spied on.

I don't think I have to explain why mass surveillance is bad. But some considerations can still me made. At the moment the main piracy software is torrent, which is usually not used over anonymizing networks. There is no real hard reason for that. It could easily be used through i2p or tor(preferably with speed improvements) in which case the enforcement of the law would require state-actor level surveillance, not just tracker watching.

I do have a opinion on the matter but I'm not picking sides here. Instead I would like to provide framework for a more productive discussion, from which I hope to learn something.

Thanks for reading my blog post. I'm very smart, I know.

#productivity
I think I've figured it out! You just have to have multiple side-projects so you can procrastinate by working on another side-project.

Did you know that qoto.org is already listed on https://keybase.io and you can verify your identity with keybase with just a few simple steps?

Just go to your keybase profile and click the link to prove a new identity. Qoto.org will already show up in the list of servers, you dont need to do anything special.

Once you identify your keybase profile will show that your mastodon account is verified and your local mastodon profile will even show a nice little check mark to prove your identity like in the attached screen shot!

#keybase #QOTO #encryption

An explanation of rhe Total Perspective Vortex, by Douglas Adams:

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.

Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.

For instance, in one corner of the Eastern Galactic Arm lies the large forest planet Oglaroon, the entire "intelligent" population of which lives permanently in one fairly small and crowded nut tree. In which tree they are born, live, fall in love, carve tiny speculative articles in the bark on the meaning of life, the futility of death and the importance of birth control, fight a few extremely minor wars, and eventually die strapped to the underside of some of the less accessible outer branches.

In fact the only Oglaroonians who ever leave their tree are those who are hurled out of it for the heinous crime of wondering whether any of the other trees might be capable of supporting life at all, or indeed whether the other trees are anything other than illusions brought on by eating too many Oglanuts.

Exotic though this behaviour may seem, there is no life form in the Galaxy which is not in some way guilty of the same thing, which is why the Total Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it is.

For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here."

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.

To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife.

Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.

And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.

"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her.

And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.