VonGuard

Hacker News users now profit from extensive invasion of privacy, from Facebook to LinkedIn, to every ad network, VPN, ISP, etc... They all trade in our private info daily. 20 years ago, the battle cry was around privacy and government monitoring of all traffic and how bad that was. Now people climb over one another to give away their data for free in exchange for mind-altering social media platforms and AI driven nonsense.

I am convinced Libertarians do not exist. The current state of the US should drive them to utter insanity, and yet, they tend to be mostly silent on all of these corporate over reach issues. People who say they are Libertarian just don't want to pay parking tickets. If the real techno Libertarians existed, they'd be burning our current Valley to the ground. Anyone who cared about the 2nd amendment should be losing their minds over military deployments on US soil. Constitution huggers should be screaming bloody murder, daily. Instead, those types are super happy with their new dictator. Funny how all the performative anger goes away when it's their side that is performing the authoritarian actions. The NRA seems to LOVE this willing take over of the well armed militias by the federal government... But I digress.

Instead, the reigning philosophy here is now greed. Privacy, sovereignty, ownership, open source, all those things are forgotten in the backseat of the crypto and VC cash car.

It surprises me how little the newer generations care about ethics, morality, principles. Call them whatever you want, but it really feels like everyone screams about how righteous they are, how wrong everyone else is, and then they take the cash and stand up for nothing when the chips are down.

Remember when the big thing we were worried about was the NSA recording our phone calls? Now large corporations harvest our call info, chat texts, social media posts, and even the raw microphone input on our phones to strip every last piece of information about us and mine it for data to influence our lives, purchases, and even out thoughts. And what did we do in the last election? We put in the party that will remove even more roadblocks from this type of thing, and has deregulated crypto. Victory!

How did we get here? Where are the Cypherpunks? Where are the high ideals we used to have?

All burned alive at the altar of money.

The United States of Ferenginar

Assyrian in origin, Nimrud was a very talented hunter, but perhaps he got mixed up with a city along the way, and the Bible's thoughts on Assyrians, Persians, and Babylonians is always interesting to trace back to the truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod_(disambiguation)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrud_(disambiguation)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrud

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borsippa

Either way, Bugs Bunny used it sarcastically to describe Elmer Fudd, and here we are.

I believe this comes from soda jerks: the guys who jerk the soda taps and make you an egg cream or a chocolate coke. I should probably say "made," as it's a job that was eliminated by soda machines. A lot of restaurants even have customers "Jerk" their own soda, though now you just press a cup against a thingie.

This is actually a known pattern in tech, going back to Engelbart and SRI. While not 1-to-1, you could say that the folks who left SRI for Xerox PARC did so because Engelbart and his crew became obsessed with EST: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhard_Seminars_Training

EST-type training still exists today. You don't eat until the end of the whole weekend, or maybe you get rice and little else. Everyone is told to insult you day one until you cry. Then day two, still having not eaten, they build you up and tell you how great you are and have a group hug. Then they ask you how great you feel. Isn't this a good feeling? Don't you want your loved ones to have this feeling? Still having not eaten, you're then encouraged to pay for your family and friends to do the training, without their knowledge or consent.

A friend of mine did this training after his brother paid for his mom to do it, and she paid for him to do it. Let's just say that, though they felt it changed their lives at the time, their lives in no way shape or form changed. Two are in quite a bad place, in fact...

Anyway, point is, the people who invented everything we are using right now were also susceptible to cult-like groups with silly ideas and shady intentions.

My favorite PE story is about a certain company created by the government that first went public, the PE.

After the PE acquisition, an exec stands up in front of the entire company and says, and I am not kidding:

"This was a telecom company. Telecom companies grow at 10 to 15% a year. This is now a data services company. Data services companies grow at 20 to 25% a year. Get to work."

PE changed nothing else at that time. They simply decided the company was in another category, and thus, this would yield more money. I have always marveled how some business people can simply move things around on a spreadsheet and think that reality will follow.

On DMT, you meet elves. On 5-MeO-DMT you hear every voice in the universe at once. Quite a step up, but both last like 15 minutes, max.

Happens ALL the time. Players even figure out how to emulate MMO servers by sniffing network traffic. When people want to play the game, they will find a way.

You are talking about the attempted exception in 2024. The 2015 exemption expires every 2 years and has to be renewed and to my knowledge it was renewed during this last effort, as it had been every 2 years since it was granted. The article you linked has nothing to do with the 2015 exemption. It only has to do with a proposed exemption that was not given in 2024.

This is one of the few places where the USA has a sensible solution. In 2015, my org (Themade.org) worked with Archive.org, MIT, the EFF, and Harvard Law to obtain a DMCA 1201 exemption for legal DRM circumvention for the case of single player games where online validation servers have ceased operations.

Thanks to the hard work of these organizations, the US market, at least, allows for those who purchased these games to continue to play them with a third party patch to their client. See below:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/11/new-dmca-ss1201-exempt...

Been using this for a while. It's evolving rapidly and the team behind it is very responsive and passionate. Very excited to see this evolve over time! The only thing that it really needs going forward is more Retroarch cores ported to JavaScript, but that's an upstream problem.

Some of what I am about to say is highlighted in this article but I think it should be restated:

The Adam came with a dot matrix printer. All in one giant box. I know because I found one at the flea for $30 once, and I had to carry it for a mile to the car. Very heavy and awkward.

To turn on the Adam, first, you plug the printer into the wall, then you plug the computer into the printer. Then you make absolutely sure there is nothing in the tape drive. Then you turn it on.

If you had a tape in the tape drive when you turned it on, so much juice went through the thing that it demagnetized anything in the drive. Back then, using audio tapes to hold data was revolutionary, in terms of storage space and price. The payoff, however, was that it was slower than anything you've ever used in the modern day. It could take 30 minutes to load something into the system through a tape.

So imagine waiting all that time, and then finding out it just doesn't work (no error message, just a hung machine) because you left the tape in the drive when you turned it on. You'd basically have to leave the thing on and loading for hours before finally giving up because of lost data.

This thing came with a Buck Rogers game, and that's what everyone wanted to play. The Coleco (formerly a Leather company) folks were overflowed with complaints and angry phone calls as everyone and their mother put that tape in and fired it up, first thing. An absolute travesty of a computer, all the way around the block.

Mullvad swinging for the fences suddenly. They have a billboard in South San Francisco, too. Did they get a cash infusion? Why all of the sudden are they expanding? Honestly, I'd have changed the name by now...

So, I happen to know a bit about this because his cult compound is a state park in Florida, in Bonita Springs. Highly recommend visiting! Say hi to the loose big turtles!

The park is presented as a lovely old commune with vintage bungalows, a rare place where women actually ran things in the late 1800's and had a lot of freedom within the community to create art, plays, and raise their kids. A lot of the women were widows and this was basically the only option for them aside from marrying their dead husband's brother, or some other arcane ritual of the day. They paid for the upkeep and food for the "commune" by staging plays, and the men dealt with the outside world and negotiated for such transactions (to keep up external appearances of a patriarchy, something that was totally expected back then.)

My wife and I were touring the place, having a good old time, and when we entered the community gathering hall/church, my wife started slapping my arm repeatedly to get my attention. She's gasping for air in an almost shocked laughter. She pointed to the giant model of the split-open Earth as interior, like the one shown at the top this article. The whole commune were hollow Earthers!!

Of course, the bloom was then very much off the rose. A few things to know about Teed, in addition to the hollow Earth stuff, which we subsequently learned by reading more deeply into the interpretive museum text, therein:

1: Teed believed he was Jesus Christ, or at least, that he would come back with Christ. When he died, the cult left him on the porch for a few weeks, waiting for him to get back up. The Sheriff had to come and demand they bury him, because the stink was so bad from the rotting corpse in the hot Florida sun. A testament to the power of belief, or delusion, you decide.

2: The last Koreshanty-ist (As they were called) born and living on the Florida property admitted she was wrong about the Earth when she watched the moon landing on TV in 1969 in her bungalow.

3: Teed believed his theory was true because he said if you walked in a flat, straight line in any direction, you would eventually hit an incline. This was absolutely true! BECAUSE THEY LIVED IN A SWAMP.

4: Of course, 100% as expected, despite the ladies running the cult via committee and being very free in the cult society... All men except Teed were to remain celibate, but--OMG!-- there were plenty of babies! Teed 100% did the cult leader thing and had relations with every woman on the property. That's the real reason he built the cult.

The 1980's when Reagan turned this country upside down and showed the GOP that cutting taxes wins them elections, even if it makes the debt go out of control and you can no longer pay for anything the government buys.

Hotline was the greatest single platform for the Macintosh in the 1990s. First Class was great, but Hotline was SO simple, you just pop in a tracker address, fire up the server, point it at 1 folder on your HDD and yer out there, as a pirate BBS server host on the internet hosting those brand new things, MP3's and those wildly hard to gather NES roms, or that illicit copy of Adobe Photoshop 4.5.

Hotline took the AOL script kiddies from #Zelifcam and put them on the real big boy Internet without any restrictions or repercussions. It was glorious time. I still have a Big Red H necklace given to me by the I-forgot-his-name author of the platform.

I'm wondering if these sightings are occurring in Grovers Mill, NJ.

The dumber the people, the more they love Trump. It's a legit strategy, but I never thought people who'd benefited from American' education would buy into this shit and pull up the ladder!

Being incredibly stupid.

Example: I heard the leader of the West Coast Vintage Computer Club remark, recently "Well, the problem is the Department of Education! We need to get rid of that!"

This is entirely within the realm of the judge to do. They do it fairly frequently as punishment to people who bring bad law suits and lose.

No, I am not ignoring them. I know Archive very well. They do not preserve copyrighted content deliberately, it just gets uploaded, and when no one comes and complains it stays up. They remove things ALL the time. All of the Atari 2600 games from Atari itself, for example. Atari's current owners showed up and asked Jason to take those down, and he did. And he thanked them for the privilege and said they were very nice.

I ADORE Archive. But guess what, they're being sued into the ground over doing EXACTLY what we all want them to do: preserving things. If anything, this absolutely 100% proves my point: we have 1 example of a modern Library of Alexandria, and it is in danger because someone is upset they didn't get paid. This is even more than choosing as a society not to save information and our culture. This is being outright HOSTILE towards the idea.

OK, but again, people are telling me to take code I do not own the rights to, and to release it under an open source license. That's 100% illegal. This is the equivalent of me taking a Stephen King novel and pasting it into a webpage and attaching a Creative Commons license. That does NOT make the Stephen King novel open source. It just gets me in trouble and sued.

And the license matters. We're talking about something owned by a company somewhere, legally. Humanity's concerns don't matter in business and legal affairs. As I stated above, I agree that we should be able to save everything. But this has nothing at all to do with what's good for humanity. This is about money and copyright law.

Also, OK, your personal code is not licensed. Great, now I can take it and license it myself, copyright it myself, and then sue you for hosting it in your github account. Hey, I'd be in the wrong, but if I lawyer up I can just win by spending money and waiting you out. This is the world we live in. It's not good, but it's reality.

Hey I agree 100%. We live in a time and place where we could put about 10-Refridgerators-worth of computer and storage into the basement of every library in the world, and fill those drives with every book, painting, movie, song, etc... EVRYTHING all in one place, replicated around the world a million times over..

We could do this. The technology exists. But we, as humans, as a society and as a race of beings, have collectively decided that we will not do this: It doesn't make anyone any money.

For the first time in history, we could store all of human knowledge in a safe replicable way, world wide, for everyone. But we specifically choose not to do this.

This. I cannot believe people are telling me to just open everything. It's nuts. Imagine if someone found your personal code and just decided to open it without your permission or knowledge!

OK, so my non-profit with a budget of about $200,000 a year is now expected to lawyer up and take on this risk, where some random company can just sidle up to us, sue us for X, and automatically win because we cannot possibly afford a lawyer to even respond to their litigation?

I love how utterly diconnected from reality HN comments are. Y'all seem to think that just because you can rationalize something on paper that we should all just go out and do the thing because the laws are "Stupid." If the world ran like HN thought it did, we'd have no copyright laws, no patents, and infinite free legal advice and services. Yeah, yer right, maybe we could get a sympathetic judge or get the case tossed. After we spend $100,000 on lawyers to get there. Oh, the prosecution would have to pay our legal fees you say? Great, now I'm out $100,000 waiting on the appeal, and it could take years for them to pay up. That's like giving them a $100,000 loan with 0 interest and no defined closing date.

And what's even the upside? I ruined my non-profit so I could spuriously open source some random crap I don't even want to preserve. I have the binaries already, I don't need to recompile. But hey, no one is using this stuff right? Fuck the law!

The world does not work this way. If a lawyer shows up and wants to kill a small non-profit, they can do it in a day, very easily. They don't even need the courts, they just have to sue you and then bomb you with 50,000 pages of evidence. This is a REAL tactic. How do you counter that without paying a lawyer to look at all 50,000 pages? The key is to not give them a reason to do so. You know, by not breaking the fucking law.

Email me at alex@themade.org and we can chat about options and methods. I've done this a bunch and we can usually figure out a way to meet the needs and keep risk at bay, but we will need to talk to the original rights holders, even if the thing was sold off 5 times to new companies. Usually, when I cold call the head of legal about this type of thing, they have absolutely no idea what IP I am talking about, even when their company owns it 100%, and this usually helps a lot to get them to open up. "We own what? Oh, and a museum wants to work with us? Cool!"

Great idea except it won't make anyone money. Therefore it will never happen. Copyright law in America is not based on good ideas, reasonability, or even preservation. They are based on profit. Your idea is great, but we do not live in a world where good ideas matter at all. Only money matters here, and this idea will not make anyone money.

Courts do not do that. The people suing would offer up a big old list of damages into the millions and then negotiate down from there to something like 6 figures AND the loser covering the court costs. The American legal system is completely broken, and amounts to two people piling up money, then the one with the bigger stack wins both stacks of money. This is completely untenable for a non-profit to even think about, let alone to incur the risk.

Completely incorrect. This work is being done under a non-profit, and whether or not the original owners care is irrelevant. Doing this would immediately open the non-profit to litigation and endanger the entire project. Just because we don't think anyone cares doesn't mean we won't get sued.

This project is preserving the source code around a distributed chat system from the year 2000, the E programming language, and the first real usage of JSON. Outside of those aspects, it's not about preserving fonts and proprietary code.

You are literally suggesting that we take proprietary, copyrighted code and release it under an open source license with no standing, rights, or ownership. It's insane to even suggest this. If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes.

When we want to open source proprietary code, we work with the rights holders. This code was all given to us under such an agreement, and the agreement ONLY covers the code owned by the people who built this thing. The deal was contingent on us not opening any of the code the original owners didn't own, as that would ALSO incur risk for them.

This is a cautionary tale for preservationists. My current preservation project is still not open because we are very slowly reviewing the code to make sure we don't accidentally include any IP when we open the source code. The real things that get you are similar to what happened here: codecs, graphics libraries, and a really big one to look out for is fonts. It'd be great if there was a scanner that could detect this stuff, but unfortunately, the scanning tools out there tend to go the other way like Black Duck: they detect open source code, not closed source.