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Cake day: July 14th, 2023

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  • Paired with allowing people who own the original to upgrade for $10 (and I’m assuming something similar in the UK) when they’re charging $50 for the remaster if you don’t have the original, that makes sense. They’re just closing a loophole.

    I’d much rather they double the existing game’s price than for them to charge $25-$30 for the upgrade or to even just not have one outright.

    It sucks for anyone who’d been planning to play the original and who just hadn’t bought it yet, but used prices for discs should still be low, so only the subset of those people who have disc-less machines are really impacted.



  • Now they demand internet accounts to use the features of the keyboard and mouse that I purchased.

    What are you talking about? Which keyboard, which mouse, which features, and which “internet accounts” are they requiring?

    Also, Logitech still distributes the older software and it still works for the mice that it used to work with. My MX Vertical works with Logitech Options or the new Logi Options+ software, for example.

    Did you try using that software with your new peripherals?

    You can find the list by device at https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024361233--Software assuming this isn’t from their gaming line or something. In that case, go here instead: https://support.logi.com/hc/en-us/categories/360001764393-Gaming

    Not only that, have to use wide-open-to-snooping Chrome to adjust the settings. You cannot adjust/use your mouse and keyboard if you just use Firefox.

    I highly doubt that the mouse and keyboard cannot be used without Chrome.

    Due to security concerns, Firefox did not implement the WebSerial API that’s most likely used to configure your mouse locally. Chrome did. It’s therefore completely reasonable that you would not be able to configure your mouse from Firefox.

    That API is also supported by Edge and probably by most Chromium-based browsers, like Brave, the “Ungoogled Chromium,” etc… If you have one installed and it doesn’t work, you can probably change your user agent to trick it into thinking you’re running Chrome as a workaround. Most likely they only tested with Chrome and therefore only say they support Chrome, but don’t actually use any Chrome-exclusive functionality.

    This only makes sense if they are planning (or are already) tracking my every move online to sell to advertisers or spooks.

    That’s a bit of a leap.

    If you use Firefox for browsing and only use this Chrome to run this tool to configure your keyboard and mouse, then even with cross-site cookies and so on unblocked, none of that will be visible from the other browser. So this makes you more isolated, not less. Having it in a browser app instead of a desktop app gives you more protection, not less.

    If a company can provide a browser app to do everything a desktop app could, then they can speed up development without having to use something like Electron to distribute their app. And there’s even less friction than Electron because their don’t have to check for updates / require users to install the latest version manually, because they can just always serve the most recent one from the site. As a user, you can probably install the tool locally if you want (it’s likely a PWA) but you don’t have to, meaning you get less software installed on (or worse, constantly running in the background) on your machine.


  • The Keychron K2 and K6 both look solid. Starting at $70 for a Bluetooth/wired mechanical keyboard, RGB backlighting, extra keycaps for Macs / OS toggles… there’s even a hot swappable variant for $10 more (or heck, on sale for $70), option for an aluminum frame… shame they don’t run on QMK.

    Oh - turns out they have several keyboards that do run QMK/VIA, like the K6 Pro.

    If I used staggered keyboards for anything other than gaming, or if I didn’t already have a wireless gaming keyboard, I’d be considering one.


  • There’s nothing about our neural architecture that has “3D” built into the information it can process.

    I think we are very much hardwired to innately understand 3d space in an intuitive level.

    Is that just based off of something more concrete than what feels right to you? If a neural network on a computer can interact with four dimensional data, why wouldn’t we be able to?

    It isn’t as automatic in three dimensions as you make it sound. Based off of the amount of learning and experimentation we do as infants, it seems reasonable to theorize that if a human were to be born in a fourth dimensional realm and to be implanted with some sort of sensory organ(s) that function in the fourth dimension, they would be able to gain an intuitive understanding of that world in the same way that they gain intuitive understandings of this one.







  • Eligible libraries, archives, and museums have a few exemptions to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clauses that aren’t available to ordinary citizens, but these aren’t unique to the Internet Archive. For example:

    Literary works, excluding computer programs and compilations that were compiled specifically for text and data mining purposes, distributed electronically where:

    (A) The circumvention is undertaken by a researcher affiliated with a nonprofit institution of higher education, or by a student or information technology staff member of the institution at the direction of such researcher, solely to deploy text and data mining techniques on a corpus of literary works for the purpose of scholarly research and teaching;

    (B) The copy of each literary work is lawfully acquired and owned by the institution, or licensed to the institution without a time limitation on access;

    © The person undertaking the circumvention views the contents of the literary works in the corpus solely for the purpose of verification of the research findings; and

    (D) The institution uses effective security measures to prevent further dissemination or downloading of literary works in the corpus, and to limit access to only the persons identified in paragraph (b)(5)(i)(A) of this section or to researchers or to researchers affiliated with other institutions of higher education solely for purposes of collaboration or replication of the research.

    This exemption doesn’t allow them to publish the content, though, nor would it provide them immunity to takedown requests, if it did.

    These exemptions change every three years and previously granted exemptions have to be renewed. The next cycle begins in October and they started accepting comments on renewals + proposals for expanded or new exemptions in April, so that’s why we’re hearing about companies lobbying against them now.


  • Dunno, I think regardless of the method used by the extension, I think any extension called “Bypass Paywalls” that does what it says on the tin can pretty unambiguously be said to be designed to circumvent “technological protection measures”.

    “Bypass” and “Circumvent” are nearly synonymous in some uses - they both mean “avoid” - but that’s not really the point.

    From a legal perspective, it’s pretty clear no circumvention of technological protection measures is taking place*. Yes, bypassing or circumventing a paywall to get to the content on the site itself would be illegal, were that content effectively protected by a technological measure. But they’re not doing that. Rather, a circumvention of the entire site is occurring, which is completely legal (an obvious exception would be if they were hosting infringing content themselves or something along those lines, but we’re talking about the Internet Archive here).

    * - to be clear, I’m referring to what was detailed in the request, not the part that was redacted. That part may qualify as a circumvention.

    In this case, it circumvents the need to login entirely and obviously it circumvents the paywall.

    Following the same logic, Steam could claim that a browser extension showing where you can get the same game for cheaper or free circumvents their technological protection measure. It doesn’t. It circumvents the entire storefront, which is not illegal.

    That’s the same thing that’s happening here - linking to the same work that’s legally hosted elsewhere.

    Though as you said, these guys should probably be sending DMCAs to the Internet Archive

    Yes - if they don’t want their content available, that’s what they should do. They might not want to do that, because they appreciate the Internet Archive’s mission (I wonder if it’s possible to ask that content be taken down until X date, or for content to be made inaccessible but for it to still be archived?) or they might be taking a multi pronged approach.

    Maybe archive.today is the problem? Maybe they don’t honor DMCA requests.

    Good point. If so, and if their site isn’t legally compliant in the same ways, then the extension becomes a lot less legally defensible if it’s linking there. That’s still not because it’s circumventing a technological protection, though - it’s because of precedent that “One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribution with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses,” (Source), where “device” includes software. Following that precedent, plaintiffs could claim that the extension promoted its use to infringe copyright based off the extension’s name and that it had knowledge of third-party action because it linked directly to sites known to infringe copyright.

    The Digital Media Law Project points out that there are two ways sharing links can violate the DMCA:

    • Trafficking in anti-circumvention tools - which is obviously not what’s going on here
    • Contributory copyright infringement - which is basically doing something described by the precedent I shared above.

    I’m not sure how the extension searches web archives. It if uses Google, for example, then it would make sense to serve Google ae DMCA takedown notice (“stop serving results to the known infringing archive.piracy domain”), but if the extension directly searches the infringing web archive, then the extension developers would need to know that the archive is infringing. Serving them a DMCA takedown (“stop searching the known infringing archive.piracy domain”) would give them notice, and if they ignored it, it would then be appropriate to send the takedown directly to their host (Github, the browser extension stores, etc) citing that they had been informed of the infringement of a site they linked to and were de facto committing contributory infringement themselves.

    Given that they didn’t do that, I can conclude one of the following:

    1. The lawyers are incompetent.
    2. The lawyers are competent and recognize that engaging in bad faith like this produces faster results; if this is contested they’ll follow up with something else, possibly even the very actions I described.
    3. The archives that are searched by the extension aren’t infringing and this was the best option the lawyers could come up with.

  • How is the accused project designed to circumvent your technological protection measures?

    The identified Bypass Paywalls technology circumvents NM/A’s members’ paywalls in one of two ways. [private]

    For hard paywalls, it is our understanding that the identified Bypass Paywalls technology automatically scans web archives for a crawled version of the protected content and displays that content.

    If the web archives have the content, then a user could just search them manually. The extension isn’t logging users in and bypassing your login process; it’s just running a web search for them.


  • I haven’t switched to Windows 11, but I also haven’t been using Windows 10, either. I’ve seen plenty of people say that Windows 11 is fine, but you should probably check with other students at your school who use the same software you do. Make sure your machine can be upgraded to 11, at least, since support for 10 is ending soon and that could result in software or services that you need being unavailable as well.