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Comment by subarctic | Hacker News Reader

> Meanwhile, Canada is in the final stages of considering legislation that would fix the Canadian version of the DMCA, a bill called C-244 that is in its third reading in the Senate and expected to move before the end of the month. If Canada legalized circumventing technological protection measures for the purposes of repair, we might just have to head north to find the tools we need to do repairs.

That's good news, I didn't know about that bill. It looks like it was voted for unanimously in parliament. It's nice when you hear about our government doing something good for once.

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What the hacker community should be lobbying for, everywhere is the complete repeal of these anticircumvention laws. DRM does not meaningfully protect against piracy, and most of the things it does protect against are otherwise-legal

Anticircumvention laws are the backbone of big tech's business models. They're all about creating little digital fiefdoms with us as their serfs. They own the platforms, they have all the keys to the machines and they aren't interested in hackers taking away their control.

Same tech companies that used to reverse engineer and adversarially interoperate whether their competitors liked it or not. They're the ones lobbying now. They don't want others doing the same thing to them.

> It's nice when you hear about our government doing something good for once.

Critically, what the government is doing here is reducing its own authority with regard to information, the internet, and ultimately at some level, thought. Sharing methods for basic home and business improvements, including repairs of machinery, is one of the most fundamental functions of society.

It's rare (but of course not unheard of by any stretch) that the governments of the largest nation states do anything _proactive_ that is helpful to society, but in many cases when they choose to reduce their own capabilities (even for the wrong reasons), it seems more forward-looking.

just as an aside, in political science/international relations, a "state" is what you are calling a nation state. A "nation" is like canadian first nations or the cherokee nation or the german nation before there was a german state (not very long ago), i.e. it's an ethnicity/language.

A nation state is when a nation and a state are combined, like Italy (a country, a polity, where the italian people live) and Japan. The USA is not a nation-state, it is just a state, nor is Canada.

>The USA is not a nation-state, it is just a state, nor is Canada.

That throws up the question in my mind: What makes a people into a nation? How uniform do they have to be?

Quebec has entered the chat.

They do love to do that :)

I swear I’m not trying to pull an RTFM, but the Wikipedia page is genuinely an interesting one and goes into the history and the fact that nation-states, in particular, are a relatively modern phenomenon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation

With today's (good) sensitivity to not letting ethnicity guide us to whether someone is a friend or an enemy, the rise of the nation state can seem like a bad idea. However, it should also be kept in mind that prior to nation states emerging, ethnicities were combined in states through the force of Royal or Imperial power; Bourbons, Hohenzollerns, Angevins, Carolingians DnGAF what nations they were ruling over, just as many as possible; and often times there still were ethnicities with greater power at the center who simply wanted to take your mind off of that.

then of course, prior to the age of empires, nations formed where there were geographical boudaries between them and their neighbors, and they did exist as nation-states. The modern rise of nation-states took place in the context of the downfall of nobility/aristocracy. Democracy and free speech do, by their nature, unlock the expression of vulgar passions.

I have no problem with the concept of nation-states. People will always seek to find their tribe.

That is what makes America exceptionally unique on the world stage; it is seemingly becoming more tribal anyway, but the mix is unusual.

You know it's funny; I actually went back and forth several times on that part. I really just wanted to distinguish between city-states (and for that matter, cities), which, it seems obvious, have an easier time staying in their lane with regard to this conflict with IP.

But you're absolutely right; the point was better made with simply the phrase "large states".

(FWIW - and I think it's not worth much - I have a degree in political science).

not your fault, the computer security community and crypto defi community just say "nation-state nation-state nation-state" as often as they can these days. I think it's because "the United States" which is made up of little states that-are-not-states internationally, has ruined the word "state" for the thing they want to talk about, the financial equivalent of state-sponsored-terrorism for example.

The government of Canada is really missing out by not selling this bill as a reason to keep them in power

The odds are like 95%-5% against them, nothing will save them at this point.

I saw some tweets claiming people would vote He Who Cannot Be Named if McDonalds ice cream machines get fixed.

For some reason it another the broken ice cream problem doesn't seem to be nearly as prevalent in Canada. I don't have ice cream at McDonald's often, but at least a handful of times a year and don't think I have ever encountered a broken machine. This is mostly around Toronto.

It's not a government bill.

> It's not a government bill.

It's a private member's bill (from a member of the governing party, supported unanimously by votes from every party)

Less than 1% of the population would understand this bill. What concerns people on the day to day is quite different and that’s what the government is talking about (housing, immigration, policing, health care, dental care, pharmacies etc).

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