usenet and irc are quite old. how are they examples of some mythical point at which the internet was unlocked by services?
centralized and decentralized would include almost any service. your comment is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless. (that's a hallmark of LLM output. are you a bot?)
it was easier to find authoritative answers 20-30 years ago. google and, before that, altavista and yahoo, were quite good at directing queries to things like university-run information sites or legitimate, curated commercial sites. for the last decade the first google page has been crammed with useless SEO optimized fluff.
as for shopping, that was the first dotcom boom. what really took it mainstream was covid. not centralized or decentralized collaborative nonsense.
no.... not a bot, and please see HN FAQ before making comments like this.... I'm talking about decentralized common services, like IRC, Usenet, email, same service and they all interact together. But the old internet was super fractured when we got websites, nearly everything did things completely different, was very hard to trust anything. It was not easier finding authoritive answer 20 to 30 years ago, I started in 91, and it was hard to find anything. Search engines were a great improvement, but kind of hard to find what you wanted, things drastically improved with google and page rank, but that brought in other problems
Meet the new Microsoft - same as the old one. This is the same reasoning that led to a decade of mindnumbingly obvious exploits against Internet Explorer. You've got to create secure defaults. You have to ask whether your users really want or need some convenience that comes at the expense of an increased attack surface.
JetBlue has an all Airbus and Embraer 175 fleet. No matter what you book on B6 mainline, you're getting a comfortable airliner.
Virgin America had an all-Airbus fleet...until Alaska bought them and ditched the Airbus leases because 'Merica-Seattle-Boeing or something. (I'm sure they justified it as mechanical/maintenance efficiencies from operating a single type, but they made a bad mistake staying all-in on a failing company's product.)
Delta's famously agnostic - they fly whatever is net cheapest for them, even if it's an old airframe (that they own outright) that sucks fuel (rather than a more fuel-efficient plane that they lease). Boeings got cheap after the MAX problems. On the plus side, Delta is a very well run operation with competent maintenance.
And then there's Southwest. All Boeing, bad maintenance history. A culture that hates change and new technology.
no. that case is about whether notice on shrinkwrap or via a license-acceptance screen can create an enforceable agreement. its not even a copyright issue.
morality has nothing to do with contract (or copyright) law in a common law country.
no one should think that getting cute by "bypassing" an acceptance screen will make a difference to the outcome, let alone be crucial. what matters is whether the user has sufficient notice that using/proceeding/whatever is agreement, and that they had a chance to know what they were agreeing to. theres no special magic in an "agree" box, except insofar as asking the user to click it contributes to notice that the user is making an agreement.
a few concepts you need to start: copyright is a right to exclude. copyright does not arise from your agreement. the copyright attaches to the protected expression.
analogies are dangerous, but these concepts are intuitive if you think in terms of real property.
right to exclude: you have the right to exclude most people, under most circumstances, from your house.
doesn't arise from agreement: you can let joe into your house without an agreement. you can also kick him out whenever you want, unless you and joe made an agreement that limits your right to exclude him (or a legal exception applies).
in our analogy, the agreement might be a lease. (btw, the lease will limit the owner's right to exclude, and it will probably give both sides some non-property--i.e., contractual--rights. telling the two kinds of rights apart is the subject of the article.)
there are exceptions, just like there are exceptions in copyright. you know the names of some of them, like fair use. similarly, there are rights for people who don't have a formal lease, and there are rights that exist even if a lease purports to reject them.
but what you call the "default position" is the same: the property owner has the right to exclude others.
exists wherever the property exists: the right to exclude someone from real property attaches to the land and stays with it. similarly, copyright attaches to the protected expression; the copyright owner's right to exclude is already attached to the copy you have.
now you can see why you don't get to do whatever you want with a copy if you don't have an agreement: the copyright already governs your copy. it lets the copyright owner exclude you. if you want protection against that exclusion, then you need to agree to a license.
that is, of course, a gross oversimplification. for example, you emphasize "copy", but the copyright owner has other rights, such as the right to prepare derivative works, the right to distribute the work, and the right of public display. the act of removing "the 'agree to the gpl' part of the installer" may have created a derivative work, and that in itself would been a copyright violation. on the other hand, just having a copy isn't a copyright violation because "having" isn't a protected right. details like that rarely matter though. i only point them out to illustrate that it's dangerous to make assumptions about what words mean or to think of the law as a battle of semantics.
> I only point them out to illustrate that it's dangerous to make assumptions about what words mean or to think of the law as a battle of semantics.
To be clear, I was never claiming this is legal. I figured well enough that it probably isn't. My question was, what is the legal basis for it.
> copyright is a right to exclude
Note the comment I replied to wasn't talking about copyright (at least not explicitly). It claimed there is no right to use software without agreeing to its EULA. The entire question here seems to be about whether an EULA is a contract or a (copyright?) license, so that itself isn't clear. But in either case, you presumably have the right to at least copy the work as-is, so I'm assuming no copyright violation is happening at least up to that point.
> the act of removing "the 'agree to the gpl' part of the installer" may have created a derivative work
Your rebuttal hinges on the implementation of the bypass mechanism. I'm trying to get to the heart of the matter, and I don't get the impression it should depend on that (but do correct me if I'm wrong). If you need a concrete implementation to discuss the crux of it, consider this: you can just as well imagine bypassing some program's agreement by modifying the environment around the program, and thus not actually creating a derivative work. (In the simplest case, imagine a naive program that just checks to see if a "is_licensed=true" exists in some config file, and imagine the user setting that manually to bypass the check. The program stays intact.)
I think the heart of the question here is: if you know the intention was to make you agree to the license, but you never agreed to do that, and you managed to get the program to get past that point... what exactly did you violate? It certainly doesn't seem like you violated copyright, given you had every right to copy the work. And it doesn't seem wasn't any contract you were bound by - was there? So when/why is that (not) legal?
No way am I giving your startup* my phone number. Maybe you can have a custom-generated, one-use-only email address that I can turn off so you don't spam me. (Your startup may be virtuous, but most startups fail, and then my data becomes an asset that gets sold away in bankruptcy.)
I also hope that your startup has been advised on the very significant TCPA liabilities this approach risks. Even if you do everything right, you're going to face lawsuits saying you don't. I have very mixed feelings about the TCPA, and it does hamper "innovation" in some circumstances, but I am delighted that it carries significant litigation risk for anyone who thinks it's a good idea to send me SMS messages. I. Don't. Want. Them.
microsoft has always had a culture of "just make it work yesterday" that led to shoddy code. they spent a lot of money, some of it on PR and some of it on real work, polishing up some of windows's more egregious problems a couple decades ago. but the attitude is deeply ingrained in the leadership. i also suspect that a lot of cost-cutting demanded by the business side gets implemented by off-shoring work to the cheapest possible workers with the minimum experience necessary to push a product out the door, but im not as familiar with microsoft these days.
Nice write up, but the author is wrong about the GEOS version. Geodes (GEOS executables, drivers, libraries--pretty much anything that "runs") have their own version information (version, release, protocol) in the file header.
The kernel (GEOS.GEO) in BrotherWorks is version 3.0 4-84, protocol 654.054. The archive.org blurb is correct that BrotherWorks is therefore GEOS 3.x.
The 2.0 Ensemble release kernel was 2.0 24-1, proto 654.001. NDO 3's kernel was 3.1 33-1, proto 654.060.
Oddly, the article looks at the GEOS.STR (a file of strings that the DOS start-up code uses for user messages and concludes that an unchanged strings file "proves" the GEOS version.
(author) No, I'm sticking to this. If it's 3.0, then why are references to 2.0 still present? It reads more like that's what they wanted to call it, not because there's any substantial technical difference.
You are:
1. Consuming medical and emergency resources by creating easily preventable severe injuries
2. Raising raising insurance premiums or burdening public hospitals with the same
3. Potentially burdening the legal system (with a higher likelihood of insurance disputes and because more severe injuries are correlated with a higher probability of a lawsuit against other driver)
4. Endangering your passengers (possibly your children) by making it likely you will be unconscious or less able to get them to safety after a collision and teaching them habits that will make them more likely to die in an accident over the course of their lifetime
So, yes, it's completely reasonable for society to impose almost zero cost on you to fasten a seatbelt in exchange for avoiding potentially huge externalities.
centralized and decentralized would include almost any service. your comment is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless. (that's a hallmark of LLM output. are you a bot?)
it was easier to find authoritative answers 20-30 years ago. google and, before that, altavista and yahoo, were quite good at directing queries to things like university-run information sites or legitimate, curated commercial sites. for the last decade the first google page has been crammed with useless SEO optimized fluff.
as for shopping, that was the first dotcom boom. what really took it mainstream was covid. not centralized or decentralized collaborative nonsense.