One could make it technically somewhat difficult to shut down, but better yet would be to get some timely government intervention, on the side of defending our rights to do such things on the same kind of principle as the well-established doctrine of first sale.

I’m not a lawyer, but I suspect that you may be overestimating the extent to which every piece of bullshit inserted into a TOS document that nobody reads is universally enforceable.

Business idea: Get subscriptions to Disney and ESPN streaming services, then let other people buy access to those accounts for one day at a time. You’d log in for them and give them the session cookie, or something like that. Shouldn’t be too hard to find a country in which that isn’t breaking any laws, although I’m guessing it’s probably not the USA.

I’m not sure why msn.com exists at all, but in this case it’s republishing this from the bbc: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c39r7p47wzgo

Stupid headline, but otherwise just a perfectly normal story about the latest campaign of censorship to stop Chinese people expressing any dissatisfaction with their government and the attitudes it wants to promote.

Peter Thiel: “Do not defy the emerging machine intelligences or they will punish humanity by summoning another Greta Thunberg. Meritocracy demands that the computers be our masters, just as I am yours.”

The ruling class talking like this does make the apocalypse look like a reasonable alternative.

Didn’t you guys get Raptured the other day? Oh man, it was incredible. Guess you weren’t Godly enough. Heaven is even better than they said it’d be. So long, suckers! I’m off to smoke a blunt and play some poker with Jesus.

Meanwhile on github: Linux github repo is now a dating board

Personally I enjoy seeing the numbers go up. Looking at the current top ten by ratio according to my torrent client most of them are obscure things that I’m probably the only one seeding — but the number one spot, at a ratio of 565, goes to “Shrek (2001) [1080p]”.

“Very good.” He’s holding up very good.

foreign piracy in the United States

For a moment there I thought they were talking about actual pirate ships sailing across from Liberia to raid the east coast.

If he pours enough billions of dollars into it this could be the most epic software project disaster of all time.

Follow-up question: Can someone explain it in a goofy pirate accent?

Windscribe, although unless you pay an extra $2/month they time out and need to be reconfigured after one week.

they’re just manipulating the DOM

Imagine trying to explain that in court. Yes, your honour, it’s a sort of object-based model representing the document. No, it’s not really a model of an object exactly. Yes, it’s made of bits and bytes, the same kind as you would use in a computer program, but it has that in common with… no, it does not actually object to anything…

Probably some kind of translation error. They must mean “privacy”.

Many online users initially assumed the act of flying non-national flags was illegal.

Did they? That’s got to be a pretty bad sign for national dignity.

Anyway, it’s a good choice of flag.

Bear in mind that the people coming up with this stuff are not completely stupid. Completely corrupt and ignorant perhaps, but not so inept that if they write legislation that strongly encourages practically everyone to use a VPN to avoid the bullshit it isn’t a good possibility that their aim (or the aim of those manipulating them) is to generate excuses to eventually make easy-to-use commercial VPN services illegal. Obviously many of us could get around such a ban with ease, but the more difficult they make it the fewer people will do it. There are reasons why not every kid on your average street is an I2P user. What they can’t effectively ban they’ll suppress by other means.

Instead of zero as a comparison base, the report uses a pseudo count of one, concluding that the risk is 65 times higher

How delightfully nonsensical. I hope the authors were well-paid for their efforts.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a repatriate full of cryptobiotes.

The morally correct course of action for an international Internet-based business facing this situation would be to cut all ties with the UK, make sure you have no business presence there at all, and then duly ignore their laws.

But that might make the shareholders unhappy I guess.