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To fight a thing, you must think about it.

The best way to avoid an -ism is to forget about it.

The fighters cannot forget, so they fall into a trap of their own making.


That is still a very good template for how a simple website should be written.

> A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored influence.

Which tools, specifically? I know none.


I mean that we are in dire need of such tools!

I also am not aware of any existing tools.


Wise.

I've seen many a fine volonteer project become enshittified because they started optimizing for financial income rather than for having fun.


It's also a smart legal strategy.

Nintendo's lawsuits they won against emulator projects in the past had donation systems as one of, if not the sole main point they drove to win the case.


From a practical perspective, they "won" in their recent attacks on emulation by shutting big projects down, but we can't know what would have happened at trial because they never got that far.

NoA sued the Yuzu devs and settled out of court, with the devs paying $2.4 million and shutting down the Yuzu and Citra projects. The $2.4 million was noted as being a reasonable estimate of what Nintendo's lawyers would have billed if the case went to trial, not a reflection of Yuzu's collection of donations.

NoA used some combination of carrot-and-stick to get the Ryujinx developers to shut that project down as well, but we won't know what that combination was because they never filed a lawsuit, so there are no public records, and there was likely an NDA.


FWIW, while Dolphin doesn't accept donations, the non-profit foundation behind it has been collecting money for almost 15 years via ads and referrals. All of the financials are transparent: https://opencollective.com/dolphin-emu


Yep like yuzu did monetize their emulator, it didn't help that they were also shipping cracked on their discord server


I suspect you would quickly attract a lot of the wrong kind of “developers” the moment a financial reward appeared. Especially now that it’s so easy to use AI to make something that looks slightly plausible.

Although I suspect the other sibling comment is the real reason.


I agree.


If a copyright holder does not give you permission, you can't legally relicense. Even if they're dead.

If they're dead and their estate doesn't care, you might pirate it without getting sued, but any recipient of the new work would be just as liable as you are, and they'd know that, so I probably wouldn't risk it.


"How do we protect ourselves against a competitor doing this?"

That's the neat thing: you don't!


"low-latency links", says the article. I wonder if they consider 500 ms ping to be low, or if they want to replace Geostationary with Low Earth Orbit.


> "low-latency links", says the article. I wonder if they consider 500 ms ping to be low, or if they want to replace Geostationary with Low Earth Orbit.

Directional laser beams are orders of magnitude to jam compared to radio wave. That alone makes it of big interest for military applications, even with 500 ms latency.

There is several known cases where jamming caused the loss of costly military drones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

Laser comms could prevent that entirely.


> Directional laser beams are orders of magnitude to jam compared to radio wave. That alone makes it of big interest for military applications, even with 500 ms latency.

I am reminded of RFC 1217 - Memo from the Consortium for Slow Commotion Research (CSCR) https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1217

    2. Jam-Resistant Land Mobile Communications

       This system uses a highly redundant optical communication technique
       to achieve ultra-low, ultra-robust transmission.  The basic unit is
       the M1A1 tank.  Each tank is labelled with the number 0 or 1 painted
       four feet high on the tank turret in yellow, day-glo luminescent
       paint.  Several detection methods are under consideration:


I love that this was ostensibly written by Vint Cerf.


It's listed in his computer science bibliography https://dblp.org/pid/c/VintonGCerf.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vint_Cerf#Author

Though the edit for that authorship to the RFC came much later. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc1217/history/


Could these not be jammed by blasting the same wavelength laser at said geostationary satellite?


Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I guess if you aim well enough, there could be a very long, narrow, non-reflective cylinder in front of the receiver that would block all light that is not coming exactly from the direction of the target satellite.


"If you aim well enough" is doing a ton of work there. Precise real-time optical tracking of a satellite from a moving platform is an extremely difficult problem. Even if the satellite itself is geostationary, it would also have to rotate to keep the "cylinder" pointed in the right direction to maintain signal.

I suppose you could make a "cylinder" or "cone" broad enough that, if the threat was static, could blot-out attempted jamming from only certain regions while staying open facing toward friendly zones.


It's a geostationary sat. It doesn't move.


No, but the airplane it would be talking to does. Hard enough when your transceiver is wide open, if you narrow your FOV to a thin cone in order to block jamming signals, the GEO now has to physically track the airplane somehow.

Either the whole satellite rotates or the transciever is on a mount that can rotate


Unless you plan on having 1 satellite per airplane, something tells me it's harder to constrain the FOV than you might suggest. There's also the small problem of the energy, complexity, & weight of having motorized parts on the satellite (or fine-grained attitude control for the satellite itself to track the craft).


Agreed, my point is it's a lot harder than tiagod made it sound.

It also doesn't account for some kind of mobile jammer making it inside the cone, particularly if it's staring at an adversarial nation where secure comms would be needed the most, but the adversary would have freedom of movement.


You will probably need to increase the gain (better lens, photomultipliers) on the receiver photodiode too.


your assuming the target satellite doesn't reflect?


Getting it to work with one end stationary first sounds like a reasonable development plan. LEO adds a lot of complexity, but with huge benefits.

OTOH the number of engineers that focus on throughput over latency is quite staggering.


I guess if your goal is just to stream aircraft telemetry and black box like recordings then latency may not be high on the agenda.


Black box data doesn't need that crazy throughput either though. Traditional RF is much easier to get right, and works even when the aircraft starts losing track of where it is and stops being able to track the satellite with its laser


I think it's the opposite? For small telemetry you want it now, but for the big data products there's no hope of "now" and so you settle for soon.


Leo seems easier to me. Geostationary is really far away. Leo is much, much closer. It's easier to hit a buck thats running right past you than to hit a stationary target across the Atlantic.

Especially if you yourself are on a moving platform


I’ll take 500ms ping for those speeds while temporarily on a plane.


No doubt! I’ve measured literal 5 minute ping times on airplanes. 300,000ms. Where are the buffering the packets!?


My guess is that you're getting retransmissions because of dropped frames, not because there's some huge buffer in the sky.


Indicated airspeed 280kts, ground speed 470kts, FL410, the packets are trying to catch up…


I like "huge buffer in the sky".

That's where I imagine all my deleted data goes.


we're all just riding the ring buffer of samsara, maaan


There’s one huge buffer in the sky!

The huge buffers are at the two endpoints (:->


Geostationary is easier to hit than a LEO constellation like Starlink. With an LEO target you need to switch at least every 2-4 minutes, Starlink ground stations can switch multiple times per minute but that's for obstacle avoidance in the air you'd only have to switch when the current target moves out of LOS entirely.


That's a lie.


Poorly written site. Javascript-only, no references, no sources.


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