572 karma · joined June 8, 2019
A bunch of people I know who play video games are on Telegram. I'm pointing out that I can talk to them without sharing my phone number which I can't do on WhatsApp/Signal.
Not being stalked by weirdos is a higher priority for a lot of people than anything involving spooky Edward Snowden stuff involving the NSA, FSB, GCHQ, Mossad and Five Eyes etc.
On Telegram, I can be in rando messaging groups of people and have a username rather than a hard-to-change, legacy voice traffic routing number that's widely used for tracking.
The only improvement is if they could get rid of the requirement that you use a phone number to sign up for these services, which is a regression from AIM, MSN, ICQ, IRC and Jabber/XMPP.
See https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/part/1/chapter/...
Most jurisdictions have something broadly similar (albeit often not quite up-to-date around software and digital products). Everywhere in the EU will have laws that implement the EU's Consumer Rights Directive.
Which is great and would apply if you'd paid money for it. NightOwl is free (as in beer). The expectations the law sets out regulating the sale of goods and services do not apply when no money has changed hands.
Which I'd argue is pretty much right: while it sucks that companies get taken over and have spyware crap put into products, the idea that, say, a teenager who is hacking around and building stuff to learn how to code, puts up a project they've made as open source or a freeware download, does something silly like the left-pad debacle, then gets sued—potentially by a big corporate behemoth with very deep pockets and very scary lawyers—for a series of acts which involved them writing some software for no money. Regulation of technology should rest far heavier on the shoulders of Google, Microsoft, Apple and so on than it does on a hobbyist or small indie dev creating freebie menubar utilities or Chrome extensions or whatever.
The difficulty of ensuring those little freebie and open source apps don't become a vector for supply chain attacks remains difficult. Much better sandboxing and OS app-level permissioning, good network monitoring and anomaly detection on a per-app level, and building trust into packaging/distribution processes - these are all slow, grinding, incomplete ways to improve this. Lawsuits probably aren't.
The legislative text (it's an amending regulation—think a diff—but the underlying statute hasn't been updated on Legislation.gov.uk yet) is here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/en/uksi/2013/3198/regulation/...
The Electoral Commission's guidance - https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/running-electoral-reg...
I can't find any reports of people actually receiving the penalty. It'd certainly be useful if the Electoral Commission collected these statistics, but they don't. It seems fairly rare, and it's likely to be one of those things that's there to encourage people to register to vote rather than something to be actively enforced.
I'd also note that given there is a requirement for an in-person home visit to encourage registration before service a formal notice, it's pretty likely that COVID restrictions and guidance meant quite a lot of the home visits didn't happen over the last few years.
Not a lot of formality is required for most contract signing, and so long as the other side of a contract is sure that you signed it, a PDF signed in a standard PDF editor like Preview is almost certainly fine.
But if you are making a deed, there are attestation requirements under s1 of the Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 1989 - see https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1989/34/section/1
If a company is executing a document, it has to follow the rules in sections 43 to 47 of the Companies Act 2006. See https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/46/part/4/crosshea...
For property transactions, there's still an issue in use of e-signatures. There's a statutory scheme for "e-conveyancing" set out in Part 8 of the Land Registration Act 2002 which gives the Land Registry the ability to set up provision for using e-signatures for formalities that previously required wet ink signatures. They never got round to actually implementing this up until COVID restrictions made it somewhat impractical to get wet ink signatures so made a temporary change to allow it. When the COVID restrictions were lifted, they've gone back to the old practice but have promised that they're totally going to sort out a permanent solution. Whether they will is another matter.
See https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electronic-signat...
I've personally used an iPad with an Apple Pencil to sign and have attested a (non-company) deed that had to comply with the LP(MP)A requirements and nobody seemed to have any trouble with it.
I suspect the target audience of a lot of e-signature SaaS products are companies where there are teams managing a lot of documents being signed across multiple jurisdictions, and juggling between sales, in-house legal and so on. Most of the problems those products are solving are likely business process issues rather than strictly legal requirements.
Mentioned therein: Apple won't allow their products to be used by bad guys. Hence the number of movies and TV shows where you can always tell the bad guy because they're the only person not using an Apple product.
Now, Nokia could have been paying her to use their phone during the music video - product placement is a thing, and you can see the brand logo in the shot. But I suspect if they were, Nokia's brand reps probably wouldn't have wanted a shot of a popular R&B singer trying to text from a spreadsheet and would have made sure the shot looked better to protect their brand.
If it's not Nokia she's "endorsing", then presumably it's Excel. That fails on the basis that she probably wouldn't have been using Excel on the phone. As noted in jgc's blog post, it's likely the built-in spreadsheet software in Symbian. Either way, it isn't distinctly Excel - it's a generic spreadsheet app with no particular visual distinctiveness that would pick it out as Excel. People only say it's Excel because that's the spreadsheet they're most familiar with.
(Incidentally, I'm all for ensuring celebrities who do paid endorsements are doing so responsibly. There ought to be some consequences for the public figures who used their fame to push cryptoscams including Tom Brady, Matt Damon, Jimmy Fallon, Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian etc. if only so it prompts their agents to think twice and do some due diligence in the future.)
PDF - http://lawyersforcivilrights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/...
Their legal argument starts on p17 of the PDF and across pages 17 and 18 it cites Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and points to 34 CFR §100.3(b)(2) which states universities in receipt of federal student funds:
> may not, directly or through contractual or other arrangements, utilize criteria or methods of administration which have the effect of subjecting individuals to discrimination because of their race, color, or national origin, or have the effect of defeating or substantially impairing accomplishment of the objectives of the program as respect individuals of a particular race, color, or national origin [1]
The general rule across most jursidictions is you can have a test for employment, admissions etc. that leads to a disparate impact - e.g. a tough physical fitness test that it is harder for women to pass than men - but if that can't be justified as relevant to the job or serving a valid role for the organisation, that's a problem.
To use the fitness test example, it's highly likely that the Marines applying such a test to decide who gets to train for special forces could justify such a test, but rather less likely if you're a company deciding on who to hire to write software or adminster databases or whatever.
The argument made in the complaint is that the justifications for legacy admissions policies don't work, and without a satisfactory justification, it's a breach of Title VI.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-34/subtitle-B/chapter-I/p...
If you look at s1(6) of the Retained EU Law Act [1]:
> The revocation of an instrument by subsection (1) does not affect an amendment made by the instrument to any other enactment.
If you read the Explanatory Notes to the Commons Bill, it states this at paragraph 71 on page 11 [3]:
> Subsection (3) clarifies that any amendments made by EU-derived subordinate legislation and RDEUL are not within scope of subsection (1). For example, where an instrument made under section 2(2) ECA 19721 is revoked by the sunset, if that instrument amended primary legislation, the amendment in the primary legislation will be unaffected.
(Subsection 1(3) is now subsection 1(6) due to amendments, but the text of the subsection is unchanged.)
The Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 amends the CDPA - and the particular clause you refer to has been inserted in to the CDPA as s28A. Were the regulation to cease to apply due to s1 of the Retained EU Law Act, it wouldn't matter because all it does is amend CDPA so falls within the amending exception.
As the Bill passed through Parliament, it was amended to require the Government to fully explicate all the legislation that would be affected and include it in a Schedule to the Bill. If you check the schedules, the CRR isn't on there.
The government have published a commented list of this schedule as an OpenDocument spreadsheet which gives a little more explanation of why they're repealing each particular one. [3] If you download it and CTRL-F for copyright, the only entry is the Artist's Resale Right (Amendment) Regulations 2009 which it lists as superseded by the 2011 regulations but not formally repealed.
The Retained EU Law Act is likely to have some important effects, and there are some important legal provisions like the Working TIme Directive and various bits of environmental law that will be going through the process in s1, but on copyright, it does nothing. Certainly not repealing s28A of CDPA.
[1] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/28/pdfs/ukpga_2023... (it's not been HTML-ified yet...)
[2] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/58-03/0156...
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/schedule-of-retai...
Universities in the UK treat a degree from the US with a 3.7 or 3.8 or higher GPA as equivalent to a first according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_c...
We're not talking about some rando hacker cranking out a cool Emacs module, these are projects backed by companies like Google and Microsoft and are being integrated into some of the most widely used tech products in the world like Google Search, Android, iOS, Facebook etc.
> “Literary works” are works, other than audiovisual works, expressed in words, numbers, or other verbal or numerical symbols or indicia, regardless of the nature of the material objects, such as books, periodicals, manuscripts, phonorecords, film, tapes, disks, or cards, in which they are embodied.
The reason to have this category is mostly to distinguish it from audiovisual works where there's a developed system of compulsory licensing around stuff like paying royalties for playing music on the radio or in public venues.
This point has been litigated too, e.g. in Apple v. Franklin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Frankl....
Yahoo Finance has much more detailed financials for a whole bunch of asset classes. For ETFs it has detailed performance data. For equities, you can get (and download) data on stuff like dividend history, stock splits.
Just see for yourself. Pick a few assets and compare. It's night and day how much more detailed YF data is. The only real thing that GF has going for it is in Google Sheets you can put =GOOGLEFINANCE("symbol") and get the current price of that asset (you can also give it a second argument for other attributes, but the data on offer is pretty limited compared to YF).
Alternatively, imagine what the world would be like if we spent less time thinking about what C-suite executives think.
Pointing out that we used to put all the phone numbers in a book published by the phone company and now we don't is historically true but practically unimportant, just as "hey, sorry to hear your house got broken into, but you know, people in IDYLLIC_RURAL_HAMLET don't even lock their front doors like you BIG_CITY folks do" isn't useful unless giving up living and working in BIG_CITY and moving to IDYLLIC_RURAL_HAMLET is actually a practical option, which most likely it isn't (and if that were to happen en masse, IDYLLIC_RURAL_HAMLET would suddenly find they'd also need to lock their front doors if their population increased by a factor or two).
Who could have predicted that technological change might lead to shifts in social attitudes? Or, indeed, that the rules, principles and institutions we collectively create to make society bearable have to adapt to said changes?
In as much as any vague buzzword can have meaning, Web3's chief innovation seems to be creating a model of software that actively repulses a whole lot of people, e.g. play-to-earn video games where the financial incentive turned a fun and enjoyable leisure activity enjoyed by millions (i.e. video games) into a combination of a joyless job that pays less-than-minimum wage, digital feudalism, and a pyramid scheme.
These kinds of financial incentives have a habit of driving out non-financial incentives, and the latter tend to be what makes online communities any good, so it shouldn't surprise you to learn there's lots of animosity to web3 stuff in a lot of mastodon/fediverse-type communities.
I think most people listen to podcasts for fun and entertainment so it's unlikely they'll want to clip, get transcripts etc. But the small number of podcasts doing deep dives on scholarly, technical or professional matters? It's potentially quite useful to be able to get transcripts/excerpts with highlights and audio clips to add to personal notes for future reference.
The right to legally enforcable exclusivity in intellectual property regimes like copyright or patents stems from a balancing exercise between incentivising the work being done (i.e. authors writing books, filmmakers producing films, drug companies researching cool life-saving medical innovations etc.) and ensuring that at some point it reaches the public domain (plus a bit of practicality).
See https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dom.html#global-attri...
> authors are encouraged to use values that describe the nature of the content, rather than values that describe the desired presentation of the content.
You should be able to do this with Karabiner Elements.
OpenBazaar - Closed Jan 4, 2021. https://twitter.com/openbazaar/status/1346104369566121986
SafeMarket - the getting started link says it's alpha, tells you to go to the subreddit, which is closed. The GitHub repo last had a commit in 2016.
Livepeer - a video streaming service that has no actual evidence on the website of anyone actually using it to stream any content. All the videos they have up on the Livepeer website about Livepeer... are hosted on YouTube. All the discussion I see of it on Twitter and their subreddit is about which exchanges the coin is listed on and the likelihood of it going to the moon etc. The actual utility in transcoding seems secondary to the speculative value of the token.
CryptoPunks - I hope the person who paid $23 million is happy with their purchase.
Thousand Ether Homepage - old school web nostalgia. Okay that's nice I guess.
"An open source sample iOS dApp that demonstrates a practical use-case in biomedical research: sharing location data by interacting with a smart contract deployed on the Oasis Devnet." Trusting a smart contract with your location data sure sounds like one of those ideas that'll end perfectly. Again, not an actual app, just some demoware.
Everything else on the awesome-dapps list are educational resources—books, tutorials, blog posts—not actual examples of functioning dapps.
If these are the awesome dapps, one dare not ask what the bad ones are like.
What's to stop the buyer unbundling the property which is worth something (the copyright) from the pointless NFT?