> GPL: "Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish)".
Yes but if I use copilot in a private codebase how sure am I that it has not copied GPL code.
I think the risk is higher, but it's always been possible one of the developers would copy GPL code. There are tools that check your code to see if any GPL code exists. I haven't used them, but I suppose you could audit with those.
MS and Github are thieves, all their code is closed source, yet they sell copyrighted code they don't own. If they told us years ago that our code will be automatically stolen by an "AI", most coders would not have created an account. The innovation here is that they have access to most of the worlds open source code and automated the stealing.
On the one hand I don't want lawyers, government and politicians to shape cyberspace. But I also like this ruling it seems to set a precedent for users to be able to opt-in to APIs (and probably javascript the obvious next step if this goes on). Client-server interactions should be transparent, this will prevent allot of privacy related issues. It also makes the web more decentralized, getting developers back into a host your own stuff mentality.
On its face, this appears to be death of the third-party CDN. The largest issue is this means companies will no longer be able to use third-party hosting services like Squarespace which rely on shared (technically third-party) CDNs.
A secondary, but similar, issue, is that now all embeds are opt-in: streams, videos, everything must first be clicked on to even load the thumbnail.
A third, and less-important, issue is that advertising providers are basically over: the website, on load, can't query the third-party ad service to figure out what ad to display. Which I'm fine with, abstractly, but it's also a very large revenue issue.
Using a third party is not illegal in itself.
But you need an agreement with the third party as to how they will store/process any user data they collect.
This is fairly fundamental under GDPR. It's the 'data controller'/'data processor' split.
I suspect (but IANAL of course) that most CDNs would fail here, because the blanket agreements they offer are basically worthless.
But it's easy to imagine a CDN that has a different business model (charges a tiny amount pr. resource stored, for example), and is completely fine under the GDPR.
How can a CDN fail to retain an IP address, at least for the purposes of knowing where to send the response? The ruling doesn't say that Google stored the IP, causing the issue, but merely that the user's IP showed up in a packet sent to Google.
CDNs under the auspices of a non-GDPR government cannot offer any legally-binding assurances that they will comply with GDPR. Their government can legally compel them to lie about honoring the GDPR and secretly act otherwise. Since US courts and authorities are no longer bound by law to honor the GDPR, no service owned by, operated by, hosted within, or subsidiary to a United States entity can guarantee compliance with GDPR.
Any CDN that is owned/operated/subsidiary in full within countries that have legal GDPR protections in place, such as member states of the EU, would be fine to use — but that rules out Cloudflare, Akamai, etc.
This ruling has nothing to do with opt-in or consent. It has to do with the concept of data minimization. According to the GDPR you should only process as much data as necessary and this applies no matter what legal basis (eg consent) you have. So basically the point with GDPR is that you as a user should not even have to care, the company that processes your data is responsible to care for you. And it's actually cool that we see this enforced now.
It does not necessarily set a precedent: use of APIs hosted fully within GDPR countries would be unaffected by this Google Fonts judgment, which only concerns a GDPR site using non-GDPR resources without user consent.
You seem to be asserting the anthropic principal, but in doing so you're assuming that quantum mechanics is required for consciousness. But that's not really an answer to this post -- he explicitly calls that out as a possible answer, but why is QM required for consciousness?
Because since we dont understand consciousness, we cannot assume qm to be irrelevant for it, being the basis of the universe, which were just a part of?
But then the question becomes, why exactly is consciousness manifesting in exactly this way as quantum mechanics? There is no escaping addressing this question somehow.
Bitcoin would be a lot less interesting to its proponents if it were to become illegal to interact with the network and every "legitimate business" suddenly can't operate in the US anymore.
Not to mention that it would be extremely easy for the FBI to just, like, find miners and tell them to shut stuff down (at least US miners). A coordinated worldwide effort and bitcoin dissapears overnight.
As soon as one miner goes down another one will come up because it is profitable, yes maybe they can stop it in the US, but at this point the network effect and momentum is too strong, allot of money is invested in it. The FBI would have to trap over so many people and entities around the world to stop it.
I think the only way to stop bitcoin is economically, like say Satoshi appears destabilizing the market.
Depending on "which" miners are shut down there is some potential for problems - if it is/was possible to shutdown a large percentage of the hashing power of the network then the difficulty to could be too high for the remaining miners to continue the chain (without it being so slow that it's unusable until enough blocks are mined to reduce the difficulty).
There's also the issue that, if governments are seizing the mining hardware, if they gather enough of it they could perform 51% attacks against the chain to effectively prevent it from working.
this is quite unlikely though. For comparison, during the Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash wars in late 2017, the main BTC block time went up to an hour - and pretty much nobody noticed, because all the excitement of the crypto bubble was happening on the exchanges, not on chain.
It's not about miners but about the users/investors. If US investors - which make up a huge fraction of money bet on Bitcoin - are excluded, the value goes way down and makes it less attractive also to non-US investors; another major use case is remittances but if people remitting money from USA to their relatives in third world can't legitimately buy Bitcoin from their creditcard or bank account, then that makes it less useful as a money transfer vehicle.
"Satoshi" is missing and that is part of the allure of BTC since it started from nothing. No premine, no vc investment, no corporate backing.
That said, there is an early wallet that is attributed to Satoshi with a giant amount of early mined BTC in it. If it ever moves, people will flip out.
"Nakamoto owns between 750,000 and 1,100,000 bitcoin. As of November 2021, that puts his net worth at up to 73 billion US dollars, which would make him the 15th richest person in the world.[21]"
There are a large number of BTC that have not moved since its early days which are largely believed to be / have been controlled by Satoshi, and if they were to move now, there would most likely be some sort of at least temporary price shock because market participants have been largely assuming that they will never move.
Maybe Big Media can't make bittorent and piratebay go away entirely, but they've put one hell of a dent in the whole ecosystem of piracy. Used to be I could use Covenant[2] on Kodi[0] and stream anything for free, in a multitude of languages and formats, with downloadable subs if desired. It was a golden age, and it is gone now.
Similarly, I've watched several retro-game preservation communities[1] I've been a part of disappear mysteriously overnight. Certain sets are still very difficult to find on public trackers and the private ones are difficult to get into.
In other words, they may not be able to eliminate it but they can make it very inconvenient.
[0] Yes, I know this isn't backed by bittorrent.
[1] Backed by bittorrent but having little to do with Hollywood.
[2] Actually I guess Exodus was first. I always forget which one was the fork.
I don't think Hollywood or "Big Media" killed the torrent scene. I think netflix and hulu and other services that make it cheap and easy to access the content you want. They provide a "good enough" service to give people what they want, so people aren't going to invest the time to learn how to torrent safely.
Yeah, that's my point though: Even if states can't stop BTC from operating entirely, they can make it so inconvenient that it is basically useless for most people.
You can’t get rid of Bitcoin, but if you make it illegal for retailers to accept Bitcoin and for currency exchanges like Coinbase to operate its pretty much taken care of.
The time for that has passed, you have Coinbase listed on the NASDAQ, you dont just make something like that illegal overnight. As I said the ship has sailed, squashing it is harder now that crypto firms can hire their own lobbysists
The minute the fed considers Bitcoin and crypto to be a risk, they'll axe it. Coinbase or not.
I think the CIA likes having Bitcoin as a means for foreign nationals to exfiltrate money. That's harder to do now in certain countries, but still possible.
And the FBI likes being able to watch where the money flows.
Yes, but I thought the whole point of prohibition (unless you're living in that weird period between 18th amendment and 21st amendment) is that it was a terrible idea, never to be repeated again.
> The minute the fed considers Bitcoin and crypto to be a risk, they'll axe it. Coinbase or not.
This doesn't make sense, you presume that Fed has zero understanding of consequences of their actions.
Fed may consider something to be a risk and yet not act on it. Just because they haven't acted on it, doesn't mean they don't consider it to be a risk.
I am fairly sure there would be constitutional issues with banning it. After all its just some characters/a string. We went through a lot of this with the cryptography wars in the 90s
Something something color of your bits. And even if you somehow managed to convince someone that a digital asset was speech you still have to contend that commercial speech isn't as protected.
I remember prohibition, do you? It enriched a number of people willing to break the law, only to be repealed in a short time, when it was found to entirely useless and simple to get around.
Alcohol was only illegal in the US, unless there is a worldwide ban it will be fine. I have survived this long without ever setting foot in the USA, I reckon I can manage a bit longer.
It almost is, actually. The power of an executive order to control the behavior of the executive branch is untestedly unlimited.
Part one would be a note of the laws establishing the Treasury Department's mandate to regulate financial instruments.
Part two would be a finding that cryptocurrencies are harmful to the interests of the USA.
Part three would be an order to the Secretary of the Treasury to determine what businesses are involved in cryptocurrencies, and to take the following sanctions: ...
prohibit any transfers of credit or payments between financial institutions, or by, through, or to any financial institution, to the extent that such transfers or payments are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and involve any interest of the sanctioned business;
prohibit any United States financial institution from making loans or providing credit to the sanctioned business;
(iv) prohibit any transactions in foreign exchange that are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and in which the sanctioned business has any interest;
(v) prohibit any United States person from investing in or purchasing significant amounts of equity or debt instruments of the sanctioned business;
Form and specific sanctions taken from EO 2021-27505, from December 17 2021.
> The power of an executive order to control the behavior of the executive branch is untestedly unlimited.
"Untestedly" being the important part. There is no practical limit on the orders that can be issued but actually enforcing those rules on anyone outside the executive branch is a different matter. Also, you skipped over the parts of EO 2021-27505 where (a) it required declaring a (rather dubious IMHO) state of emergency, (b) the sanctions were previously authorized by Congress in the Fentanyl Sanctions Act, and (c) all the sanctions applied to "foreign persons", not citizens. There is no state of emergency, sanctions were not authorized by Congress, and you want to sanctions citizens of the United States and locally-owned businesses.
This is why purely from a "theory of governance" standpoint I find it crazy that Congress is even allowed to establish agencies in another branch that wields power reserved for them.
Note: not an expert, i just read the article completely. I hope for high quality CBD oil though, but not sure. I need external advice to be more certain.
