If X/Twitter was to be banned in the EU, and some of its citizens still wanted to access X/Twitter, let us say for the sake of getting alternative points of view on politics and news, would it be a good or a bad thing if accessing X/Twitter by IP was stopped?
As in, a citizen of an EU country types x.com/CNN, because he or she wants to know the other side of some political issue between the EU and the USA, and he or she feels that the news in the EU might be biased or have misunderstood something. Would it be good or bad if the user was met with a "This website is by law not available within the EU"?
Generally speaking I wouldn't support blocking their IP, but rather I'd block the ability of European companies to pay for ads on X unless they fixed their shit and paid any damages. That might of course lead X to block Europe visitors in turn but that is a different discussion.
Or in other words: I would block the do business-part, not the access part.
Like anything involving hundreds of millions of users, there's going to be good or bad effects. However I have been on the internet long enough to have concluded that the idea that local law has _no effect at all_ on websites is not good. Ultimately if they don't comply they would probably have to be blocked.
CNN is a very silly example though, because .. you can just go to the CNN website separately. The one that is blocked is Russia Today and various other enemy propaganda channels.
there's a push to end with VPNs in the UK and in the EU because it's clear that this is a very plausible endgame
currently VPNs are too easy to use for the leadership of autocracies like the EU or the UK to be comfortable with them, so at the very least they will require for backdoors to see which citizens are watching what, and have them visited by fellows in hi-vis jackets
> there's a push to end with VPNs in the UK and in the EU
No there isn't.
Governments discussing such things doesn't _remotely_ mean there is a political will for them, or that they will be voted into law.
Governments are expected to research and discuss paths of legislation (and in this case, come to the conclusion banning VPNs is both harmful and ridiculous). This is how our democracies work!
Reporting government discussions as approved legislation is, at best ignorant, at worst trolling.
I’m reminded of Lord Haw-Haw, an English-speaking Nazi propagandist during WW2 that garnered quite a bit of attention for his radio broadcasts.
There’s an interesting tidbit that he gained quite a few listeners when he started releasing casualty information that the British government withheld to try to keep wartime-morale high.
Lord Haw-Haw then tried to leverage that audience into a force of Nazi sympathy and a general mood of defeatism.
Anyway, fun anecdote. Enemy propaganda during wartime (or increased tensions) is harmless until it isn’t.
I would have thought that the Great Firewall of China would be a more obvious thing to be reminded of. Especially since there is no world war currently, yet, at least, and communication might help stop one.
Once there’s a fascist regime with ambitions of world domination that documents their horrors more thoroughly (and has their enemies document their horrors more thoroughly) than the Nazis then we can start referencing that regime instead.
Conveniently, at least in the US, WW2 is old enough to be “history” rather than “politics”, compared to Korea and Vietnam. Or, at least that’s the excuse I was given in AP US History when the curriculum suddenly ended at 1950. So WW2 will continue to be the most well-documented topic that we’re all educated enough about to collectively reference.
Trust me, I’d much rather speak plainly about the horrors of the atrocities that the US committed in the 20th century American but we’re not there yet because the people who grew up in the nation while it committed those atrocities still run the government and basically the nation in general.
Edit: also if it wasn’t obvious I was comparing Musk to Haw Haw. I don’t know if there is an equivalent for China
I’ll admit to being misinformed on occasion, and greatly appreciate the opportunities to learn and be corrected.
Dishonest, though? To what end? If anything, the anonymity of the internet allows me to test my more weakly-held fringe beliefs and adjust them as I receive feedback.
I get the impression that you’re not well-informed enough to have a meaningful conversation about these difficult topics, though you may hold an opinion with significant conviction. Sorry.
A change in economic system might be neither sufficient nor necessary, especially if the new economic system turns out to be even worse, or a scam.
One approach is to have expectations to not only the economic system, but also other systems, and the different people involved, no matter if they're on the top, on the bottom, or somewhere in the middle.
It has a more lax license AFAIK. Also, many Rust projects and libraries have been abandoned, or are in so-so shapes.
Edit:
To specify, new projects like sudo-rs may seem promising, but going by observation and experience with similar projects, there is no guarantee that sudo-rs and similar projects will be successful, good and continued to be maintained. The problems with old projects can end up applying to new projects as well. And projects in Rust are no exception, going by experience with existing, older Rust projects.
Aside, a pet peeve I have is that for instance Ruffle has not turned out as successful as I had hoped for, even after several years and many sponsors. The proprietary Flash runtimes written in C still outperform Ruffle greatly in some cases, causing problems for some users that want to use Ruffle instead of other runtimes.
If there are 1000 projects that aren't sudo-rs but are similarly load bearing, and they have all been abandoned/in so-so shape, you're right that it doesn't actually say anything about sudo-rs, but there's a highly probable outcome that will be inferred by most people. Incorrectly or otherwise.
How is this a counter argument for anything? A more permissive license is not inherently a bad thing. Many C and C++ projects are also abandon or in so-so condition, why you uniquely call out Rust makes little sense. Either sudo-rs fills the void or it doesn't, but it is a counter point to this idea that open source projects have no path of evolution. Just because that path doesn't look like how you want it to doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
What if the exploitative aspect is open source itself? Trick some above average but naive developers into giving their talent, effort, insights and time away for free or very little? Maybe open source or something similar could have been organized in a way that wasn't exploitative and wasn't (possibly) unsustainable, but that is not how things ended up with what Richard Stallman and others organized.
The exact moment you charge for something, you need payment processing, a bank, a legal entity to hold said processed funds, you have liability, you need some sort of marketing / sales process (even if it's just copy on a website), and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something.
Release it for free, no barrier to entry, no legal liability, the entire world can use it instantly. This is why free software spreads and catches on - precisely because it's free.
There is no way to form a business around FOSS without becoming a gatekeeping high-barrier entity. You can release for free then charge extra for consulting or special features, which many have done and continue to experiment with.
But the core reason why FOSS spreads and took over is precisely why it is difficult to fund. No one is going to pay for something when the alternative is free. And the moment you start to charge some free alternative comes along and your prior users spurn you as greedy
The code can become "radioactive" as well when a software library goes paid. It starts phoning home with information about its environment to ensure compliance which is just kinda... icky to most devs. I certainly don't want that bloat in my dependencies.
This is an upfront cost and is possibly a one-time cost per-agreement.
Practically nobody downloads and installs sudo directly from the project website; people install it with their distribution of choice. The agreement could be automated and included in the licensing process. ie: the license gives specific distributions access to the software (either via paid or other agreed-upon terms appropriate to the distribution) and perhaps individual licensing terms for non-commercial entities.
Of course, the bigger ask in this decade is in use for training LLMs. OSS shouldn't be laundered through an LLM (IMHO) for license avoidance. Maybe some projects are OK with that (eg: many BSD licensed works.) There are some that likely aren't.
> The exact moment you charge for something, you need payment processing, a bank, a legal entity to hold said processed funds, you have liability, you need some sort of marketing / sales process (even if it's just copy on a website),
That seems like an area that's ripe for innovation. What does it take to get setup on a platform like Patreon? Seems like something similar ought to be setup for open source/independent development, probably an idealistic nonprofit.
> and the barrier for someone to use your product is suddenly extremely high, simply because it costs something.
All the organizations who really ought to pay are already setup to do all that, and do it all the time.
> But the core reason why FOSS spreads and took over is precisely why it is difficult to fund. No one is going to pay for something when the alternative is free. And the moment you start to charge some free alternative comes along and your prior users spurn you as greedy
What we need is innovation. Maybe a license that has a trip-wire? If not enough money is voluntarily deposited into a tip jar over a certain period of time, the license requires a modest payment from all for-profit organizations of a particular size.
That's up-front, is for the most part free, and incentivizes some payment.
I think you have good arguments, but I wonder if there are alternatives that could work in at least some cases. Like, how Unreal engine's license works. Source-available to game developers, but in theory limited to paying customers, or something along those lines.
All of this is true, but ironically Free Software is about ensuring people have control over their computers, and Open Source spun the narrative to make it about getting software cheap or without paying at all.
People having control over their computer (and even having the right to share what they run on their computer!) is completely compatible with people paying for software labor.
No it isn't. People having control over their own computer is in direct contradiction with people paying for software labor. In an honest world, sure, but in reality, people don't want to pay for shit and are going to steal from you. The Pirate Bay is still running and isn't going away. So is Anna's archive.
There can be "cynical greedy bastards" in many places. If you optimize against them in one regard and place, will you also handle them elsewhere well? And calling for change can be abused by some of them to open new opportunities for exploitation, this time benefitting some different group of them.
You need to have an alternative, and it needs to be a credible and reliable one, to ensure that it does not end up being the case that one scam is replaced with another scam.
I really think that criminal theory needs to progress. We differentiate between say consensual intimacy and rape and we don't let the existence of sexual abusive people set the terms for our romantic encounters.
We have carved out a class of engagements, labeled it deeply asocial, criminalized it and now we pursue people who engage in it through legal means.
Business really doesn't have this. Personal example - last week I was at a place where the business owner tried to overcharge me by an order of magnitude and then verbally attacked me when I caught him and backed out of the transaction.
His google and yelp reviews are full of people claiming false charges and all kinds of fraud, refusal to correct and repeated abuse until they closed their cards. It's wildly obvious what's going on here and I was on the ball enough to catch it.
I contacted the police and they said "well you should call the BBB or something". It's dozens of reviews of clear credit card fraud and for some reason because he's a merchant, doesn't seem to hit the radar.
These are purely criminal matters - people acting habitually in bad faith with ill intent in a brazenly dishonest manner.
Whether it's plundering the commons, polluting the public discourse, or breaking other types of social compacts, these should be treated the same as any other crime.
Does your country allow suing him for a large monetary amount? Have you talked to the media? A lawyer? Maybe together with others? Made it as easy as possible for the police to get him, paper trail, receipts and all?
You do have points, though, but there might at least be some actions that you and others can take in this case. Maybe a medium change like changing the law on this specific point might make sense.
I'm not law enforcement. This shouldn't be my job. If I see someone robbing a store with a mask on and a gun I should be able to call the police, report it, and hand it off.
If there's an accumulation of complaints against this merchant then that should warrant an investigation.
The police have like half the local city budget, can't they do their job?
Traits with Copy can do that, I'm just saying they're not really implicit copies because it's a core, visible part of the language that the developer can control on all of their own types.
But do bitwise copies when moving not also possibly incur that, even without Copy? If the optimizer doesn't optimize it away? Since movement can happen by copying bits and releasing the old bits, as long as there is no UnsafeCell in the type, or something along those lines?
Avoiding bitwise moves requires either costly indirection or else some sort of express place semantics where some program values are meant to be accessed in a fixed pattern such as stack-like access (most common) or perhaps other kinds, such as deque, sequence, tree etc. Substructural types can help model this but doing so correctly is not always easy.
As in, a citizen of an EU country types x.com/CNN, because he or she wants to know the other side of some political issue between the EU and the USA, and he or she feels that the news in the EU might be biased or have misunderstood something. Would it be good or bad if the user was met with a "This website is by law not available within the EU"?