Stallman Was Right

publicado de forma cruzada desde: https://lemmy.zip/post/61045078

Chocolate Factory describes concession as an attempt to balance openess with safety

publicado de forma cruzada desde: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/988709

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Like many US soft-power initiatives, the programme was imperfect, morally complex and at times at odds with the policies of other governments. Yet it is one foundation of what the internet is: a global commons. Today’s online world is dominated by large tech platforms and awash with illegal content and misinformation. But it is still a structure in which facts, ideas and information accessible from London are largely accessible from Delhi, Johannesburg and São Paulo as well.

That could change rapidly. On the one hand is the matter of US funding, now cut or apparently redirected towards a Trumpian, politicised effort to undermine global attempts to regulate US big-tech platforms.

On the other is the mounting export of censorship technologies, which are constantly improving and increasingly marketed overseas. These include devices sold by companies in China that give their customers – governments in Pakistan, Myanmar and Ethiopia among others – extremely fine-tuned control over what comes in and out of a country. It is believed that similar technologies are the foundation of Iran’s current shutdown.

This article unfortunately fails to mention the US has provided a significant portion of the apparatus to China.

Even while warning about national security and human rights abuse, the U.S. government across five Republican and Democratic administrations has repeatedly allowed and even actively helped American firms to sell technology to Chinese police, government agencies and surveillance companies, an Associated Press investigation has found.

And time after time, despite bipartisan attempts, Congress has turned a blind eye to loopholes that allow China to work around its own rules, such as cloud services, third-party resellers, and holes in sanctions passed after the Tiananmen massacre.

https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/us-government-allowed-and-even-helped-us-firms-sell-tech-used-for-surveillance-in-china-ap-finds/

You wouldn't just out of the blue completely drop support for something existentially necessary for someone to live their life and get to their job day to day would you?

Wait, you would? What the fuck? Weren't you the one lecturing me about the ethics of downloading a car?!??

Before Fisker’s 2024 bankruptcy, just 419 Fisker Oceans made it into British driveways. One unfortunate buyer, a marketing manager from Southampton, experienced the worst of the brand’s teething troubles. After taking delivery, her Ocean was plagued by persistent software glitches. Following a call to Fisker, engineers were dispatched to collect the vehicle for repairs, but when the car was due to be collected, it refused to start. Mere days later, Fisker declared insolvency, leaving the Ocean stranded as a 5,500 lb (2,500 kg) driveway ornament for the next ten months with no solution in sight.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/43269077

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/41329789

You wouldn't just out of the blue completely drop support for something existentially necessary for someone to live their life and get to their job day to day would you?

Wait, you would? What the fuck? Weren't you the one lecturing me about the ethics of downloading a car?!??

Before Fisker’s 2024 bankruptcy, just 419 Fisker Oceans made it into British driveways. One unfortunate buyer, a marketing manager from Southampton, experienced the worst of the brand’s teething troubles. After taking delivery, her Ocean was plagued by persistent software glitches. Following a call to Fisker, engineers were dispatched to collect the vehicle for repairs, but when the car was due to be collected, it refused to start. Mere days later, Fisker declared insolvency, leaving the Ocean stranded as a 5,500 lb (2,500 kg) driveway ornament for the next ten months with no solution in sight.

Navdanya International has released the report Seeds of Resistance, which documents the global spread of both old and new GMOs and the dismantling of biosafety regulations across continents. The publication comes as the European Union moves toward deregulating next‑generation GMOs, paving the way for gene‑edited organisms to enter fields and dinner plates without labeling, traceability, or proper risk assessment.

It's wild just how much they're trying to shove AI down our throats.

geteilt von: https://beehaw.org/post/23392765

Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects. With hard work and expertise, basically any old vehicle could be restored and operated: On YouTube, you can watch a man drive a 1931 Alvis to McDonald’s. But the car itself was stuck in time. If the automaker added a feature to the following year’s model, you just didn’t get it. Things have changed. My Model 3 has few dials or buttons; nearly every feature is routed through the giant central touch screen. It’s not just Tesla: Many new cars—and especially electric cars—are now stuffed with software, receiving over-the-air updates to fix bugs, tweak performance, or add new functionality.

In other words, your car is a lot like an iPhone (so much so that in the auto industry, describing EVs as “smartphones on wheels” has become a go-to cliché.) This has plenty of advantages—the improved navigation, the fart noises—but it also means that your car may become worse because the software is outdated, not because the parts break. Even top-of-the-line phones are destined to become obsolete—still able to perform the basic functions like phone calls and texts, but stuck with an old operating system and failing apps. The same struggle is now coming for cars.

Software-dependent cars are still new enough that it’s unclear how they will age. “It’s becoming the ethos of the industry that everyone’s promising a continually evolving car, and we don’t yet know how they’re going to pull that off,” Sean Tucker, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. “Cars last longer than technology does.” The problem with cars as smartphones on wheels is that these two machines live and die on very different timescales. Many Americans trade in their phone every year and less than 30 percent keep an iPhone for longer than three years, but the average car on the road is nearly 13 years old. (Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment about how its cars age.)

At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes. After installation, the program includes 'AI' (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: 'new' and 'old'. For comparison, the size of SumatraPDF-3.5.2 installer is 8,246,744 bytes.