/tech/ - Technology

So apparently big publishers want to kill the internet archive again.

They accuse I.A. of having done a copywrong by lending out books. I won't bore you with the legal technicalities because i think it's just a pretext for publishers trying to kill a library because it's a cartel that wants a monopoly.

I think the lessons here are if you pay these people money, they're going to use it to attack nice things like the Internet Archive, and "copy-right" is nothing but a heinous weapon.

People who build archives to preserve the memory of the past are like really rare flowers, it's an incomprehensible act of barbarism to try to burn down their archives.

https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

Fuck imageboards. I want text. And if you do too, then hoo boy do I have the thread for you!
This thread is for sharing textboard links. Hard mode - No Clearnet.

(Yes, I'm begging. But come on, my mouth is open and the spoon is right there…)

So OpenClosedAi has appointed a NSA-guy as director.
So it's probably best to avoid that one.

So Intel processors are crapping out and they're already on the financial downturn. Intel might go under or continue on in a diminished fashion.

Many think that the X86 platform will stagnate without the competition between AMD and Intel.

I don't know, but there's always Risk-V, with it being a very open platform, there is nothing stopping anybody from taking a RISC-V design with small low-power cpu cores and adding a few really powerful chunky desktop type cpu cores to it, to make a hybrid processor. Lowering the barrier to entry for companies to make desktop-type processors.

halp. bitch neighbors

https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=py4Tc-Y8BcY
https://github.com/hacksider/Deep-Live-Cam

This is a piece of software that does deep-fake face-swaps but it's fast enough to do it live.

While everybody lost their minds over how to use this maliciously.

I think this is some really empowering technology for video creators. It enables super low budget movies to be shot by a very small number of actors that play multiple roles, each with a different fake-face, they can also economize on stuff like make-up and hairdressing (especially for scifi alien foreheads) .

For people that wanna be actors but didn't win the genetic lottery on looks this might be the time to shine. (at least briefly until more advanced tech comes along)

it will also level the playing field for e-thots somewhat.

A video game that nintendo had a legal distribution monopoly on was leaked ahead of the official release. They got really mad about that and they are trying to take it out on the video-game emulation communities, by attacking emulation related software projects on github.

So the lesson here is if you give companies like that money they are going to use it to attack your hobbies. I think this legitimizes "pirating" games because you have no legal option to buy these games without also supporting nintendo's legalistic mafia-terror.

If copy"right" wasn't set up like a monopoly, and you could buy these specific games from any distributor not just nintendo, so that you could choose to buy from non-mafia sellers, it would at least be logically possible to make a case against "piracy". But as long as that's not possible "piracy" is basically just self defense. Keep in mind that nintendo doesn't make games, it's just a legal entity, and not the same as the people that make the games like for example programmers and artists.

Obviously there also is the hole deal with DRM which is total hypocrisy, it basically attacks the concept of personal ownership of your possessions. It's property-rights for me but not for thee.

If they were to reform copy"right" and remove the distribution monopoly aspect, so that everybody with the means to distribute copies was free to do so as long as they gave royalties (as a form of revenue sharing) to the people who actually created the stuff that is being copied. Maybe that would work.

But as long as they keep the monopoly part "piracy" is basically just competing distributors that were arbitrarily banned from participating in the market. Some times people make the strange argument that pirates gain from the work of others but that's also true for the capitalists that own nintendo, by that logic all of nintendo's profits are pirated.

I sometimes feel like the copy-monopolists take the most extreme ideological positions, while we don't and that's why this hole shit drifts ever more towards reactionary insanity where Nintendo gets to rape random software devs on github as some kind of bully-frustration release mechanism and it's a crime if you play with toys "the wrong way". Maybe we should redefine piracy as everything that keeps works-of-art outside the creative-commons/public-domain and drm as a product defect. Maybe that will create a counter-weight.

So in Malaysia they tried to ban public DNS servers, because people used those to avoid censorship
It's another case of legislative-pedophilia (attacking civil liberties by claiming it's for pRotecTing tHe cHildRen)
The law got canned because of public outcry.

Louis Rossmann vid for more context:
https://farside.link/invidious/watch?v=itj3Z43QAf8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itj3Z43QAf8
https://odysee.com/@rossmanngroup:a/malaysian-prime-minister-tries-to-ban:f

I don't know much about that country but it seems pretty shit, they still have archaic medieval laws that punish criticizing or satirizing royalties. The guy wears a fucking bath-towel as his official costume, how people avoid snickering at that is beyond me. By the way the artist of the clown-face (thread picture) got arrested because it insulted the queen or something (not quite sure i understand why that face would…no matter)

Anyway whats the cure for those attacks on digital infrastructure like DNS ?
-vpns ?
-recursive DNS server locally hosted on a remote-vps
-entirely new network protocol that has a resilient name-resolver directly built in
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

Fermilab is a big atom-smasher particle-accelerator physics research project, in the US.It's no longuer the biggest project of this type, the currently biggest is the LHC in Switzerland. Threat-title is a Swiss-French speaking physicist quip about that. The biggest smasher under construction is in China

The fermilab had an interesting research project for neutrinos, and sort of was the front-runner in that area. However they had funding problems and might not be able to continue and there was some drama as well. There was a death and some close calls too.

Neutrinos are very light, low energy particles that don't interact much and hence can pass through matter without getting blocked. They occur naturally in the sun's core as a byproduct of nuclear fusion, but they are also generated by technology without nuclear reactions.

These neutrinos have interesting technological applications.
high power applications: is a neutrino-ray-cannon that can disable nukes by making them cook-off with 1-5% of their specified yield. Regardless where the nuke is or how fast it's going. No matter of shielding or how deep they are buried/submerged. It also doesn't do damage to anything else, so there's no political complications.
low power application is neutrino based communications. Those could become very energy efficient and no longer suffer from signal degradation from passing through objects (including the entire earth). So you can send signals to somebody on the other side of the planet by pointing the neutrino transmitter straight down. Jamming neutrino transmission would be impractical. The military obviously wants this for their ships, subs, bunkers and bases, the first generation of such devices (derived from research instruments see picture) would be super bulky , and likely limited to such niche applications. However eventually could be shrunk down to fit very small electronic devices.

I wonder whether this project is being sabotaged because the anti-nuke-ray would finish off the nuclear weapons industry, and neutrino communications would use a different more 3 dimensional network-topology and reshuffle the deck in communications, upstarts could potentially up-root the entrenched 2 dimensional telecoms.

Fermilab isn't the only research project that's doing neutrinos, so if this was industriaPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

Some breakthroughs have led me to finally and definitively abandon microshit's spyware.
I had been staying on wangblows for the audio software but had no idea Linux production had come so far.

My DAW [Renoise] has a fucking excellent native linux version that exceeds WIndows performance in some cases. Grabbing audio to feed into its sampler is easier than ever with youtube-dl and ffmpeg.
yabridge lets you convert Windows VSTs to run through Wine, the ones I've tried have worked seamlessly albeit with a little overhead.
Takes a tiny bit of elbow grease to get it optimized enough for serious use, but it's pretty simple once you get past initial setup and it even supports VST3.

Feels pretty good to be making music on a system I have so much control over, it's actually given me a lot of inspiration to work on new material.
Are you a composer or producer who runs Linux? What's your workflow/software?