The DMCA is a bit overly broad to be considered just a copyright law. For example, just breaking encryption on a DVD is technically illegal regardless of whether you then go on to do something otherwise illegal (make and sell bootlegs) or perfectly legal (make a space-shifted backup copy on your hard drive).
IIRC this was an intentional handout to media companies who were angry that ripping CDs is perfectly legal. They had to find a way to make doing the same with DVDs illegal.
They've been twisted to support almost anything, for example repairing your tractor is illegal because of this same law. But I agree this is just plain old hacking under a plain old reading of the CFAA and doesn't need any twists.
> for example repairing your tractor is illegal because of this same law.
No it's not. There has never been a case establishing that, and it's absurd on its face. The protection measures that the law makes illegal to break must control access to a copyrighted work, and you can't copyright functionality.
You see, they made it so you can't repair your tractor without circumventing a technological copy protection measure, which is illegal under DMCA 1201.
Has this been litigated, or is it just something tractor manufacturers have cooked up in the hopes that it'll stand up in court? Because I seem to recall printer manufacturers doing something similar with refilling toner cartridges and losing.
I'm getting really fed up of this. It's it about time we the people rise up and make it clear how appallingly unacceptable it is to hold your lavalier microphone.
But on topic, it's amazing they're getting these things through budget meetings. Are Flock just giving them away in Y1? They're ~$3k including installation and that clip showed several in one area overlapping. Even for legit crime-fighting, that's a lot of taxpayer green on the line for a park.
"We caught the culprits for damaging a $10 swing chain and spent $3000 surveilling them, $200 demanding three settle and $500 prosecuting one in court."
All for doing something that every who's ever been on a swing has done. Everyone involved in taking this to court should personally pay damages and lose their job.
It's bizarre to me that there isn't any KYC in advertising. Seemingly any foreign money can buy adverts for anything and redirect traffic.
For a long time, you could host your own adverts, put your own script on third party sites. I'm not sure if this is still a thing but judging from the screenshots, maybe it is. Madness.
If you want to advertise, you should have to prove you're selling what you're advertising in the market you're advertising it in. You should have to prove who you are. If you're caught doing dodgy crap, you should be held responsible.
And if you've taken billions over two decades in advertising, and you don't regularly test the adverts you host, you should be liable for the damage they create.
More like ABCD/EFGH testing. So many unaccounted variables, from brand through, marketing, deals and even physical dealerships.
Everything else equal, I can believe having CarPlay adds value for some people. Things weren't equal so possibly not as much as the other variables in the room.
National clubs? They can and UEFA considered it but the problem is always buy-in.
FIFA has a billions in revenue and reserves. Many of the supranational areas are developing and need that income support, at least it looks like outreach, even if it's bribery-shaped. Even in developed nations the people who make the decisions have long tenures and like paid lunches and free tickets. Tough one to crack.
It's pretty insane. Our family has a holiday home in a fairly mountainous region in central-southern France. Dwindling population, no major tourist activity, wine production.
We'd long suffered the worst imaginable 56k but in 2018, the local ISP just ran fibre out to everyone. I think the current service is cheaper than the 56k was too, and far cheaper than any of the 4/5G options back then.
What I mean (vis á vis insane) is that they'll have routed about a kilometre of fibre over several dozen poles, up a mountain just for our house. And the same for all the equally rural neighbours miles around. The return on this is deeply social. Our area is never going to generate the return on internet alone, and that's nice.
France does a lot of getting-shit-done-by-subsidy. The roads around Paris need some attention but they nailed internet hard. I wonder how far they blew their original €20bn budget. The Wikipedia page hasn't had a decent financial update since 2017. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_France_Tr%C3%A8s_Haut_D%C...
A lot...and I mean a LOT of money...is wasted on things that benefit only a very, very small percentage of elite people in ways that don't translate to benefits to the larger society or regular people.
What's so wrong if something is done to benefit the regular people once in a while?
One may argue that this also isn't helping "regular people" but I mean the subsidy aspect in particular. I mean, oil companies in the US are subsidized, for God's sake. Most of the most profitable businesses in the US are subsized heavily and that's part of how they became so profitable. Corporate welfare is not shunned but spend money on the common man and you have protests and politicians up in arms for wastage...
Except when these "elite" people are inhabitants of a lost hole in the middle of the Creuse and suddenly all children can access Internet in a civilized way. The same way the true elites in Paris have done for some time already.
I think you misunderstood the comment you are replying to - they are arguing that running fibre to rural communities is a good use of subsidies, and contrasts pleasantly with the usual sort of subsidy that only a few large corporation owners really benefit from.
I suspect the parent commenter agree with you : broadband access DID cost a lot of money - and in a sense, the project was rushed, and an unexpected demonstration that public / private partnerships with the wrong incentive structure can lead to as bad (if not worse) result than what a public monopoly would have done.
But yeah, my mum at the border of la Creuse had a better internet access than me for a few months :D
> What's so wrong if something is done to benefit the regular people once in a while?
Usually, this is money taken from people that aren't well off either... So it's not a clear cut positive.
Wherever your society decides to do such is obviously not for me to judge.
As a single almost 40yo person myself I'm significantly annoyed by all the money the state takes from my paycheck to sponsor people who quiet literally would spit on me and hold me in contempt. And while i ain't poor, my netto wage is lower then some of those people get From the state. But I'm not French, so no opinion on this particularly case.
> Usually, this is money taken from people that aren't well off either... So it's not a clear cut positive.
Well in France I tend to think the taxes are pretty progressive, so the money isn't taken from poor people.
But yes, somehow the ultra-wealthy people always manage to escape what they owe.
> Our area is never going to generate the return on internet alone, and that's nice.
The time scale for optical fibers' profitability is much longer than copper. The media itself is passive, cheap to maintain, and easy to upgrade by lighting more fibers or moving to newer PON standards. That's why operators often overbuild the fiber count per home on purpose, something they would rarely do with copper (the time scale and upgradability being more limited by the intrinsic properties of the medium).
Fibering up a mountain becomes more rational once you view it as a 40+ year asset with very low upgrade cost (for the medium itself, not the equipment connected to it). Not a 10-year ROI project like copper often was. And even more rational when you can get subsidies by governments which are usually eager to develop the economical activity in regions that otherwise would have little to no opportunity to grow significantly.
But also, having dial-up in 2017 is wild for me to think about.
I do wonder if ultimately via having everyone on fiber it pays for itself ultimately, since you don't have to "convert" anyone's internet between different mediums, you can also sunset all sorts of legacy equipment that's no longer in use since fiber is it.
StarLink tops out in the 300mbit range, and has anaemic uplink speeds, whereas most fibre rollouts offer symmetrical gigabit. The latency over StarLink is also 2-5x higher than rural fibre.
StarLink beats the hell out of the copper phone lines / DSL connections a bunch of these rural communities were running on before the fibre rollout, but it's no match for proper fibre. And assuming France has price controls like Spain, the fibre will be cheaper into the bargain
- The obvious political point: that ISP is subject to laws in a country that is testing its legal framework and diplomacy in new (some may say unpredictable) ways.
- The first rule of public funding is that the money goes back to the public. Roughly all (if not all) of the jobs for Starlink go to the US, whereas fiber installation in France employs French people.
- Paying for Starlink is a terrible investment because the entire constellation is disposable. Every satellite will burn up in roughly 5 years and the whole network would go dead without more launches. Fiber, once installed, is at least serviceable.
- Another political point, but the only company that can launch replacements economically is also subject to laws in that same country.
Starlink hands an awesome amount of semi-soft power to whatever country controls it. It doesn't really matter what country that is: it's a huge strategic liability to anyone who doesn't hold the keys. Until there's at least another player in the game I'd expect a lot of countries to be wary.
Ironically, that could mean Starlink/SpaceX really needs a competitor before it can become a universal solution.
We’re on about our third attempt at rural internet in Ireland. The first two involved wasting a lot of money subsidising dubious cellular and satellite stuff which was arguably marginally good enough 20 years ago, but not now. Thankfully on the third go the government decided to stop screwing around and just do 10gbit-capable fibre to all rural premises.
Ultimately if you half-ass this you just end up doing it again later.
This is one reason I’m kind of baffled by spacex’s valuation; its long term market would seem to be countries who are too poor to build out fibre. It’s unclear that there’s a trillion dollar industry in that.
If you need to get internet to rural places quickly then such services are great.
But if you are trying to get something that could last for decades and handle the expected growth in the speed and bandwidth that the average family might expect then fiber is the way to go.
You don't necessarily need to go right to every rural house at first. There are many places where fiber to a terrestrial wireless access point and wireless to the homes would work well.
Fiber can then be expanded out from those access points later.
Satellite services make an end run through a lot of bullshit, that’s true, but the long term costs of fiber are overestimated because cable companies want a very fast profit. Whereas thousands and thousands of satellites will need to be replaced year after year and that rate could increase considerably if Kessler syndrome develops.
(1) communities have already committed to universal service for electricity which uses the same poles and (2) fiber investments are good for at least 50 years and are much cheaper in reality than the usual ROI metrics say they are; the awkward truth is that the LTE networks that carriers were gung ho to invest in were outrageously expensive in comparison but carriers were fine with that because they could charge an arm and two legs for it.
Is it really that expensive? Many poor places are now having optic fiber for even remote areas. Algeria is having its speed boom (https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/algeria#fixed). I have been through some remote poor areas in Asia who had optic fiber with "crazy" speeds (ie: 500mbs).
I wonder if the price of fiber now is just too low that it's very viable to install at scale even for low-density areas.
How is it inefficient? This is the whole point of government: how much economic activity is happening over 56k? Virtually none. You could make the same argument for paving the street and repairing the sidewalk in front of your house. Chances are the property taxes from the average single family home don't cover just the basic street repairs, let alone all the other services your local government provides. Yet we do it, because it turns out that having a happy, well-served population by way of redistributing wealth through services is a generally good thing.
If we assume $20k to run the fiber, you could do starlink for a long time. There are internet options other than fiber. Unless there is no other options in France than fiber.
What if France got a contract with starlink? Brought the cost down of that.
Yeah, I'd absolutely _love_ that my tax money goes to funding a US company. What could go wrong with depending on a hostile country for someone as basic as Internet ?
If I found out my government blew 20k to slobber on Musk's balls instead of using that money to create work for our own people, I'd personally go blow up that antenna.
Why should Starlink get that business? Why shouldn't France run its own fiber that it controls that isn't dependent on a US-based corporation?
And you said it yourself: Starlink already exists. They don't need a subsidy. You bring the cost of Starlink down by forcing them to compete on the merits of their own service, not by throwing money at them.
Why do you assume $20k as the cost to run the fiber?
The cost is the contractor's hours to get up a ladder on each electricity pole from the closest PON splitter to the customer's home, plus the fiber itself which is peanuts at volume.
Everything else (permits, pole rent, etc) is accounting money that can be negotiated. If there's a strategic national program to fiber up the whole country, this could be exempted on a pen's stroke, or depreciated in many decades.
But it's not inefficient if this fixes a chicken-egg problem: overcrowded big city and underpopulated rural area sucks.
Nobody can/wants to go in rural area if they can't make a living there. A fiber speed Internet unlocks lifestyle for many.
It's the same as investing in say a high speed railway between major cities A and B and adding a middle-of-nowhere stop C midway. That C then can flourish to become a medium/major city... So while the initial investment looked like a waste, it's beneficial to provide a better life for people living in both A,B, and C.
You can bring internet to these other places other than by running a 1km fiber cable, which may be more efficient. Think about it, run. A cable super long to one house or use a dish?
Unless there is truly no other options in france
Unless France is going to launch the satellites themselves (which is also very expensive), you become dependent on another party, which is much worse.
I don't know how it works in France, but in many European countries phone/DSL lines and fiber is highly regulated. Even if it is run by a company, they usually have to provide fair access to other providers so that there is competition. For instance, we have a XGS-PON connection to home (used to be AON) and I can probably choose at least from ten ISPs. This is nice, because they try to compete on prices and bandwidth (e.g. the company that owns the network we are on offers 4Gbit symmetric max, but a competitor offers 8Gbit over the same fiber).
Much harder to accomplish that with satellite internet and foreign companies.
You keep saying Starlink may be more efficient without providing any actual evidence that it is.
Also ignoring the political implications of a country spending tax money to buy services from a highly political company from a country whose politics and world influence are in flux right now.
Starlink is good because it is easy to deploy quickly. But the entire constellation and service will be dead within 5 years without constant launches of new satellites.
Forget efficiency. That sounds like a very poor investment of tax dollars to me. The fiber laid will provide lower latency and higher bandwidth connections for the next 40 years.
Good governance is sometimes taking the money/income from dense areas (cities) and investing it in rural areas. Also, similar to how copper lasted many decades, a fiber network is a one time large investment cost and then you reap the benefits for decades.
Not everything has to be a capitalist 'minimize cost, maximize profits' game.
Glad that France built it out now. From now on the fibers price will rise significantly like HBM, NAND chips, power line transformers due to the AI boom.
Any evidence of this happening? I imagine that fiber manufacturing is much easier to scale up than chip manufacturing (of course, the devices that attach to the fiber might be a different story).
Could you qualify the things the anti-porn crowd claimed would happen that didn't?
Just saying they didn't seems shortsighted when there are obvious harms. Kids go into relationships expecting rough play, choking to be okay. Onlyfans normalised online sex work. Porn's omnipresence enabled its addition. And a whole pile of people have a very odd idea about what parts of the body should look like. Internationally it has enabled a slew of sex slavery mechanisms.
Yeah, they transitioned from a social network to a engagement black hole a while ago. There is a "Feeds" page buried in there somewhere but it's far from default.
Twitter might be full of politically dubious [1] and worse-than-Temu/Wish/etc sponsored posts, but at least it can still default to the "You follow" screen.
It really is a shame. Past the obvious privacy issues, having somewhere you could engage with your people online was genuinely nice. I miss early Facebook.
Bluetooth is watch initiated, and only turns on 4 times a day (or when the user explicitly requests it with a button press). The pedometer is probably a special chip.
You should compare this with the F-91W that gets 7 years on the same battery, and hobbyist hardware mods that get years out of the same battery running ARM chips.
Nice thing about BLE is that it can be really cheap and stateless, you don't need to keep polling. If it was sending each and every step count to the watch (or even every minute) that would be one thing, but a semi-daily sync for time and steps could easily fit in one BLE packet.
My little temperature and humidity sensors that show an LCD 2x the surface area of a watch and broadcast a BLE packet every minute lasts about 12 months on a CR2032 (~200mah). A CR2016 is ~90mah little less than half. And receiving a BLE packet takes way less energy than sending.
Then you have the on-demand stuff that costs a packet or two, like the lost phone finder -- which is what I'm most excited about.
I had the same thought--speculating, perhaps it's like you say and we'll see a disclosure somewhere that it's "Up to 2 years, with 1 weekly Bluetooth pairing, 1 second of backlight use per day, no step counter."
Though, the CR2016 is a pretty big battery vs typical watch batteries, and in some other Casio watches are used as 10-year batteries.
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