This is the reality of power struggle (all means are in the game), but this new level of reach, spread and deep integration has been within reach and in active development for at least 200 years, and it's just going get worse. It's enabled by bureacracy, "one voter, one vote" democracy in the face of a mature media manipulation ("mind control") industry, capitalism and other trappings of civilization. ML is just going to end up automating the doctrine of FSD.

I think I'm moving out of the city to learn to live off the land, be independent and raise a family. I think it may be very interesting to see how I can use modern technology in that context, while making sure I don't absolutely depend on it.

Anyone else think it's quite possible there will be a lot of new wars in Western countries in 20-40 years, when the tipping point of replacement migration is reached?

That's it in a nutshell. The ultimate black box to bow down to. We already do this with in so many ways, just following orders, just repeating what we hear, and so on.. and people think we're become less spineless and murderous as this wet dream of sociopathy is introduced? Yeah, right. Some list biased training data as a pitfall, from the "correct" perspective that is absolutely a feature, that is the point.

> Anyone else think it's quite possible there will be a lot of new wars in Western countries in 20-40 years

In real life? I can't think of anyone I can have normal, intelligent conversations with who doesn't express worries that get flagged on HN. And I'm not talking leftist young people, I'm talking everybody, from 20 to 85.

Needs a citation I guess.

For most people high fiber foods are better.

Are you posting via proxies?

https://securingtomorrow.mcafee.com/executive-perspectives/a...

This is a statement by the Intel CTO from 2016 on the ME discussions, and briefly reassured us that Intel is conscious of the security of the ME, and that they have teams dedicated to it and can push firmware updates out to cover vulnerabilities.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tec...

Intel made an official announcement in May that they have discovered an escalation of privilege vulnerability and are addressing it accordingly as you would expect. It also notes that consumer hardware and firmware is not affected by the vulnerability, demonstrating that Intel actually does release two different chips, and prioritizes privacy and security more over features on the consumer models.

https://newsroom.intel.com/news/important-security-informati...

Intel releases a software tool for checking if your system is one of the vulnerable units or not, they have a fix already for the firmware and confirm it is not due to physical design flaws, and are working with manufacturers to push the updates ASAP.

Overall, I don’t feel like Intel is at all intentionally sabatoging it’s customers, and genuinely considers the ME a valued feature by consumers, even though it bothers me that one is included on every product, they do differ and consumer models have fewer privileges than business models, which seems to be more of a firmware design than a hardware design, so I tend to believe that they simply don’t design extra chips without the ME and instead lock it down more on a software level. Vulnerabilities also appear to be firmware based, and the extremely vague announcement by black hat doesn’t suggest otherwise either. Intel very obviously takes the security of their devices very seriously and makes themselves available to users who need help identifying whether or not they’re vulnerable and what to do about it.

Nor could they likely pay them enough to make it worth the trouble if there wasn't a market for the ME - Intel is $170 billion company, with a $12 billion R&D budget last year alone [0].

[0]https://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/mannerisms/markets/i...

On another site, having a similar conversation about this very topic, multiple people jumped in to assert that this was done at the behest of the NSA and that the legal mechanism for doing so was a National Security Letter. No amount of linking was able to convince them that that's not even what an NSL does. Nor would they believe that an NSL contains no such mechanism to force a company to do such.

Worse, it was multiple people who believed this. It wasn't just one isolated individual. Even showing them what an NSL really is made no difference to them. I pointed out what it did have the power to do, and they countered by saying that's what they claimed but that it could secretly do more. I asked for a citation and was told it wasn't out there because it was top secret. They linked to some of the most outlandish stuff, as if Cold War spies were actually proof that the NSL could compel Intel to include the ME and to include exploits in the code just for NSA use.

It went on like that, for a good day and a half of back and forth. I finally gave up trying to help them be sane.

I don't get it. I truly don't understand. These are otherwise bright people, or so they seem. I'm well and truly flabbergasted by this behavior.

That's pretty different than asserting it was done at the behest of a three letter agency and then basing a whole argument on that. Extraordinary claims require extaordinary evidence.

I mean, you could have separate bugfix and feature releases for a relatively low cost, but that would only alleviate the problem for the duration of a release cycle.

I also don't see why open source contributors should give away the copyright to their work. All it accomplishes, is that the "original author" (= the copyright holder, usually a company) can re-license the work without agreement from all contributors. It strips contributors from parts of their rights.

It makes sense in the case where I contribute, say, an entire new module. Then I should have the right to do with it as I please. But there needs to be a line drawn somewhere, and I sure as hell couldn't tell you where.

If you fix a piece of software, why would you send the fix to the original creator? To show off? The only reason I can see is for the creator to merge your fix into the project.

But it seems to me that it makes the most sense to clarify that when the creator merges the changes. I don't see why the license should include a CLA any more than it should encourage potential contributors to be nice to each other, or to look both ways before crossing the street.

With git, the contributor has an even harder case to make. A pull request is literally a request to incorporate your contribution into the project. If the pull request doesn't include a proposed change to the license, it would be very hard to claim that the fix couldn't be distributed under the terms of the existing license.

I'm not aware of any court rulings directly on the subject. The best I can think of is the Prenda Law case. They sued people for copyright infringement for downloading some porn videos. A few of the people targeted showed evidence that Prenda Law had uploaded the videos themselves, and Prenda Law immediately tried to withdraw their cases. Some of the judges were very upset about that behavior. I'm pretty confident about how a court would handle a case where somebody claimed the contents of their pull request weren't meant to be distributed.

The traditional concerns have been cases where people try to contribute code that actually belongs to their employer, which remains a concern with this CLA-in-the-license approach, or projects interpreting their own licenses in obtuse ways ( https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2002/11/msg00138.html ).

I imagine this could be an issue if, say, it's a project like Firefox and they start including some binary blobs. Without an explicit CLA, couldn't a FOSS-zealot contributor now sue to have their code excised from the product?

Broadly speaking, the CLAs I've seen either (1) fall into the classic legal "belt and suspenders" approach of being explicit where there is arguably an implicit promise, or (2) require the contributor to transfer copyright to the project and then make promises about what the project will do with the code, including promises about relicensing, and a broad license back to the original contributor.

US copyright law sometimes assumes that there is some kind of agreement between people who collaborate on a copyrightable project, and generally speaking, the CLA looks like it serves that purpose.

However, I believe most open source projects are actually joint works, and the rules for joint copyrights are wildly different from what programmers seem to expect (e.g., http://copyright.universityofcalifornia.edu/ownership/joint-... , but you can find other explanations online, including at http://copyright.gov ). It's clear to me that the law assumes people who collaborate on a joint work will have some kind of agreement between them, like a CLA. I'm not able to find it right now, but I'm aware of one case where somebody contributed to a proprietary program, declared that made him a joint copyright holder, and started selling copies of the software without permission. The court agreed that if he had been a joint owner he would have had authority to sell copies without coordinating with the other owners, but the court decided he only had copyright in his contribution, like a collective work, not because the contribution could stand alone, but because it was relatively small and easily identified.

Based on that ruling, if I maintained an open source project under some kind of restrictive license that I intended to enforce, I wouldn't worry about getting a CLA for small patches (aside from getting some statement that they had authority to offer the contribution), but I would worry about getting one from regular contributors.

There is some point when a contributor crosses a threshold and becomes a joint owner. You want a clear agreement between the joint owners, but I don't believe the license is the right place for that agreement.

Yes, and it makes sense, after all you made that part of the code. The same holds true for licenses like the GPL.

Remember the shitstorm about MIR and the CLA that it required? People do not want to sign their rights away and allow a company to sell away their code.

* if the license is permissive

* if the license is copyleft and the organization is a non profit.

Canonical fit neither of those.

I think the limitations on playback are an unreasonable burden. More fundamentally, I think I should have the right to gain the fullest possible degree of control and knowledge of the workings of my computing equipment without being punished by the legal system. Just like I should have the right to repair, inspect and modify the physical objects I buy, should I be allowed to do that with my computing hardware and their information contents.

In the near future neural networks will recreate full software packages just from being connected to cloud-based applications that stream video and commands back and forth from a browser window (or a VNC-like desktop client/app). The DRM systems will always be cracked, because you fundamentally can't and should not be able to control what people do with the information you give them, and eventually even running the DRM by not sending the executable code at all will not be enough to make software impossible to copy.

However, I don't think this will be a large problem, because you can still fine people for sharing copyrighted material with randoms (I'm not sure I think that's a good idea, haven't thought about it enough), and once you have enough clients that integrate content stores and payment functionality with playback, you can get a user experience that is so much better than that of Spotify.

I think the right to free computation and inspection, repair, integration and modification of computing systems should be enshrined in national constitutions, as it is as fundamental as the right to free expression, and perhaps just the newest incarnation (and necessary extension) of that same principle.

I don't think it's ready for prime time either, but I think it might get to Arch-level usability for a reasonably large set of phones soon. Very promising for middling tinkerers and up IMO.