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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: November 28th, 2023

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  • I did look it up afterwards and found out it could also be Arizona, but still wasn’t sure. I figured porn sites would also be capable of mysteriously mistaking an Azerbaijani IP for a Texan IP. I also figured internationally obscure ISO 3166-2 subdivision codes were much less likely to come up than ISO 3166-1 country codes given that people are much less likely to know what they are, plus they are much more likely to overlap with each other and cause ambiguity. But it is very American to assume everyone else knows the US’s subdivision codes and Lemmy probably has far more Arizonans than Azerbaijanis, so I wasn’t completely sure either way.










  • So… why are people upset about this? I’d say it’s about damn time. Having two settings apps is pretty ridiculous and it’s honestly crazy it’s taken them this long to ditch the control panel. I still remember people making fun of Microsoft’s inability to drop control panel in the Windows 10 era. Is there anything special about the control panel or uniquely terrible about the settings app that would warrant this kind of negative reaction? Is it because of the settings that aren’t available in settings? If they’re preparing to drop control panel that probably means they’re going to add whatever settings are still stranded on it to the new settings app, unless there’s evidence that they won’t do that.


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

    Though as you said, these guys should probably be sending DMCAs to the Internet Archive if they actually want to stop their paywalls from being bypassed. I know they do honor takedown requests. Maybe archive.today is the problem? Maybe they don’t honor DMCA requests. I very often see them used on Hacker News whenever someone wants share a paywall-free link to an article.


  • You can do that with permissively licensed software too. Except with those, the party distributing their repackaged version doesn’t have to distribute source code alongside it. A lot of companies avoid copyleft software because they don’t want to or cannot deal with stricter licensing terms. If you’re a company creating commercial software which you intend to sell, you don’t want to use any GPL code, because you want to keep your software closed source to avoid exactly what you described from happening.

    This can be exploited by primarily licensing your open source code using strong copyleft (like the AGPLv3) while selling commercial licenses to businesses that don’t want to comply with the AGPL and are willing to pay up. Qt is able to successfully use this even with weaker copyleft (LGPLv3) because it’s used a lot in embedded systems (like smart cars) which cannot comply with the LGPLv3’s anti-tivoization clause.

    This means copyleft licenses can make it easier to profit if you’re the author of the code, but of course third parties can more easily profit from permissive licenses.