wgjordan

The 'copyright violations' section of the RIAA letter (regarding the unit tests) was clearly a standard §512 notice alleging copyright infringement. Even if §512 wasn't explicitly mentioned, it's still a legally effective notification of claimed infringement.

> The rules in section 512 do not apply.

Assuming you're referring only to the §1201 'anticircumvention' portion of the claim (the main focus of the GitHub post), whether this portion is also subject to §512 rules is a little more ambiguous. §1201 defines a trafficking violation separate from copyright infringement itself, but some court rulings have established a requirement that §1201 violations establish a 'nexus' to copyright infringement in order to be valid. If this requirement holds, §512 safe harbor protections could indirectly cover §1201 claims as well. However, because there's a circuit split on the issue, unless GitHub is sued on this exact point it's impossible to say for sure what rules would apply in this specific case.

In any case, GitHub handled the 1201 takedown claim in reference to its established, documented process in handling takedown notices and counter notices [1], except for the fact that it didn't wait 10-14 days after receiving a counter notice before re-enabling this content. The deviation from their published policy is still itself noteworthy.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/github/site-...

> Infringement of copyright is defined by the statute and does not include the anti-circumvention 1201 provisions.

Yeah, my mistake, you're correct the 1201 anti-circumvention provisions do define a new violation separate from copyright infringement itself.

However, there is a circuit split as to whether a violation of section 1201 requires a nexus to copyright infringement to be valid. If an 'infringement nexus requirement' is upheld, section 512 may still cover section 1201 violations by shielding service providers from any copyright infringement liability that would establish a nexus with the circumvention tool.

I don't see this particular issue ever being resolved by the courts in any case, so there's still quite a bit of ambiguity in this connection between the two sections of the DMCA.

Rather interesting that GitHub decided to restore access 1 day after receiving the EFF's counter notice, instead of waiting 10 days.

As a brief legal recap, in 1998 the DMCA added §512 [1] to US copyright law, which established a mechanism for shielding 'service providers' from liability for content posted by users (known as 'safe harbor'), but only as long as they follow formal procedures (known as 'DMCA takedown') to respond 'expeditiously' to remove content when they receive a notification claiming infringement, but also to restore access "not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days" after receiving a counter notification claiming the removal was a mistake.

In the post, GitHub implied they removed the youtube-dl repo after receiving the RIAA's formal takedown notice in order to 'comply with laws', and the law also required them to restore access after receiving the EFF's formal counter notice. However, the counter notice was sent yesterday and they restored access 1 day later, not waiting the legal minimum of 10 days. In restoring access so quickly GitHub isn't fully complying with §512, opening themselves up to liability if the RIAA decides to pursue legal action.

Perhaps a symbolic gesture to restore access a couple weeks before they would have been legally required to restore access anyway, but nonetheless interesting to see their willingness to set aside §512 safe harbor protections in the future if their reading of facts suggest a takedown claim doesn't have merit.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

> I was under the impression that DMCA notices were for the removal of infringing content, not alleged anti-circumvention tools. That's what the law seems to specify.

My reading is that the DMCA expanded the definition of 'copyright infringement' to include 'circumventing protection afforded by a technological measure that effectively protects a right of a copyright owner' (§1201), and so a DMCA notice specifying 'material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity' (§512) would work for the removal of anti-circumvention tools as well.

§1201: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201

§512: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

> If GitHub really was "standing up for developers", why couldn't Microsoft's own army of lawyers figure this out?

I think the 'What we're changing' section is the real interesting part of this post regarding this. I read this section as a half-apology for not doing enough to stand up for developers in this case (allowing the repository to be taken down to begin with), and a promise to do more in the future to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. We'll have to wait and see if their future actions match this promise.

It's not treated differently at all - that's exactly what the EFF just argued in its response to the RIAA [1]:

> Because youtube-dl simply uses the "signature" code provided by YouTube in the same manner as any browser, rather than bypassing or avoiding it, it does not circumvent, and any alleged lack of authorization from YouTube or the RIAA is irrelevant.

[1] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-1...

> no, the one close to being IE6 is Safari.

Google Chrome was compared to IE6 as being close to having 'the monopoly position as a browser'.

Indeed, Internet Explorer peaked at ~95% global browser market share in 2003-4 (when IE6 was the dominant version). Safari currently has <10% of the browser market share on desktop, <20% including mobile [1].

Sorry, Safari is nowhere close to being IE6 from this perspective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

The original 2011 report [1] was updated with a note mentioning that an official review conducted in 2017 [2] concluded the official recommendation probably wouldn't have been any different despite the statistical error, so they didn't change them.

[1] https://www.nap.edu/catalog/13050/dietary-reference-intakes-...

[2] https://www.nap.edu/resource/13050/FINAL%20Vitamin%20D%20Pha...

> As Linux enthusiasts and long-time fans of Linux Journal, we were disappointed to hear about Linux Journal closing it's doors last year.

closing its doors, no apostrophe.

I take this to mean the editors weren't hired back? Refer to the closing message for proper grammar [1]:

> On August 7, 2019, Linux Journal shut its doors for good.

[1] https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/linux-journal-ceases-pu...

In order to defend against slow-client (Slowloris) attacks, reasonable timeouts are necessary but not sufficient if your server has a limited pool of request handlers (or if it uses a separate resource-intensive process/thread per connection). You need a HTTP server (or proxy such as nginx) that buffers incoming requests using async IO syscalls (e.g., `epoll` or at least `select`) until a complete request is ready to be handled by the application.

Even with async IO buffering requests it's still possible for a slow-client DoS to exhaust other system resources (such as file descriptors), but with properly-tuned limits the required attack will need to be many orders of magnitude greater to succeed.

Indeed, overly broad denunciations of 'security by obscurity' come up as a point of confusion often on HN, and this post provides a good, coherent summary of a proper response.

A defense mechanism that only partially mitigates an attack vector could be considered 'security through obscurity' if deployed on its own, but that same mechanism could be considered 'defense in depth' if deployed alongside other defense layers as part of a more comprehensive security model.

Scroll down and the answer is right there:

> Q: What does "every pixel is simulated" mean?

> A: Basically every pixel in Noita is made of some material. The different materials are simulated. E.g. Water will behave like a liquid, gasses will rise, sand will pile up, rigid bodies will rigid body... In addition to that we run simplified simulations of various chemical reactions, electricity, thermodynamics and so on.

According to the game intro, they had a team of 3 lead testers and 25 testers. That should give you a sense of how many human resources went into testing back then at least.

"The advantage of this pattern is increased application resiliency", as spelled out in the first paragraph. So yes, these technologies are 'biased towards' systems that require this degree of resiliency rather than 'simple old business systems'.

From the article, data seems to show sellers flooding the market in San Francisco:

> In San Francisco, list prices have fallen 4.9% year over year and inventory has risen 96% with a flood of new listings.

> When comparing the principal city to its surrounding suburbs, the San Francisco metro area does break the mold. Higher levels of inventory, up 96% YoY following a flood of new listings during the pandemic, are sitting on the market in the city proper, a significantly larger jump than the surrounding suburbs.

> In San Francisco [...] the softening is clear as sellers inundate the market and buyers have not changed their pace to match — newly pending sales in the city are up only 1.7% YoY.

Typo in title (not in the actual article headline)- should be 'its', not 'it's'

Looks like it's now updated!

slack.com returning 503 Service Unavailable.

See https://status.slack.com/2020-05/87ad1d12e36fcf0c for incident details:

> [May 12, 4:53 PM PDT] Users have reported general performance issues such message sending failures and timeouts. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible and will provide an update shortly.

On the other hand, over 200 engineers on payroll is way more expensive than a couple handful!

Presumably you're getting significant value out of the additional engineering work in which case the architecture shift probably makes sense (to stay aligned with the expanded organizational structure), but there are also cases where a small and flexible team maintaining a simple monolith would be much more nimble and cost-effective.

Currently in Phase 2 Clinical Development since Dec 2018, with interim data expected mid-2020 [1].

[1] https://valneva.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/2018_12_17_VL...

I would also enjoy being able to punch in '12345' as my password everywhere instead of launching LastPass all the time, but I accept that some conveniences aren't worth security consequences.

> 40% of people in ICU in italy are 19-40, basically, those who make up the majority of the workforce.

Correction: 11.9% of people in ICU in Italy are 19-50; 51.2% are 51-70; and 36.9% are > 70 [1].

[1] https://www.epicentro.iss.it/coronavirus/bollettino/Bolletti...

This is the first bear market (drop of 20% from a recent peak in broad-based index) Bitcoin or the crypto-currency market has ever seen, 'traditional' or not, so it's really uncharted territory.

> If we latch too late, after cycle 40, Full Throttle Racing will glitch. But if we guess a value too soon, say on cycle 0, that might be too early, and it might cause issues in another game.

> We would have to retest the entire SNES library to be sure such a change did not cause any regressions, which just isn't practical with a library of 3,500+ game titles.

Running automated regression-tests against a library of known-accurate titles actually sounds extremely practical. This sounds like standard software-engineering practice to me.

I'm surprised that a test-harness like this doesn't already exist by now given the relatively mature state of SNES emulation. It seems like it would be an extremely helpful tool to benchmark accuracy of new or existing emulators, prevent regressions from advanced optimizations, etc.

Automated testing could transform the 'blind guessing' approach on tweaking PPU timings from a game of 'whack a mole' to a structured, iterative linear algebra solver. Which could end up being quite a bit more feasible than acquiring 100x die scans of the chip and tracing the logic from the hardware directly.

> Idiomatic Python is just much clearer and more straight forward for most. They explicitly spent time to minimize how many language concepts and constructs you need to get basic things done. [...] The syntax/grammar are often more regular, use keywords and fewer symbols, and optional bits.

This is similar to a native-English speaker boldly asserting that Dutch is a 'clearer and more straight forward' and 'more regular' language than Japanese.

It might be absolutely true for your own experience and upbringing, but it's still completely subjective.

The (forementioned) article, I would imagine.

No need to conflate the frontend (the end-user interface that 'most people' use when trying to 'find the book they're looking for') with the mirroring/archiving backend (the distributed/p2p technology used to 'make sure LibGen never goes down').

The frontend would still be a user-friendly HTTP web-application (or collection of several) that pulls (portions of) the archive from the distributed/resilient backend to serve individual files to clients.

The backend can be a relatively obscure, geeky, post-BitTorrent p2p software like IPFS or Dat, as long as those willing to donate bandwidth/storage can run it on their systems. This is a vastly different audience from 'most people'.

The real question is which software's features best fits the backend use-case (efficiently hosting a very large and growing/evolving, IP-infringing dataset). Dat [1] has features to (1) update data and efficiently synchronize changes, and to (2) efficiently provide random-access data from larger datasets. Two quite compelling advancements over BitTorrent for this use-case.

[1] https://docs.datproject.org/docs/faq#how-is-dat-different-th...

> That's the AI effect.

Indeed- as that coined term suggests, "AI" has such a philosophically-tied definition with moving goalposts, that in practice it gets slapped far too liberally on anything 'magical' having to do with computation. (As long as it's still trendy to do so, at least.)

'Machine Learning' is at least a little more specific of a term (if still rather general).

> I have a hard time someone at the Apple Store doesn’t already have access to internet elsewhere to do their research.

Perhaps someone at the Apple Store is there to purchase a device that will give them access to the Internet which they don't currently have elsewhere?

Thanks, I appreciate your followup. I'm genuinely interested in discussion on this topic. I was hoping there was something more focused summarizing the academic consensus in a given field of study that you were alluding to, but it appears not.

One thing I noticed is that the focus of these is on gender-stereotypical portrayals of princesses. Is only the princess-themed content specifically seen as 'damaging', or is Disney content not featuring princesses also suspect?

Another detail is that a good number of the results you dug up seem to be reflections on interactions with the 'Disney Princess' line of toys and media which was launched in 2000, which would suggest that the most 'damaging' of this content is specifically 'post-2000'. Was there something about pre-2000 Disney content you had in mind that's especially damaging, that is not the case with the post-2000 Disney Princess line, or is it all garbage?