As I understand it, Cisco licenses the relevant patents and sublicenses them gratis to every user who uses Cisco’s binaries obtained from Cisco directly and not redistributed (thus also the difficulties in the article with working with Cisco’s unmaintained web server). The sublicense doesn’t apply to binaries built independently from source. I suppose this was imposed by the patent holders.
Can that library be rebuilt in a reproducible manner? If so, what's the difference between the library hosted by Cisco and a locally built one that is identical bit-for-bit? Is there any mechanism to ensure that the library was genuinely downloaded from Cisco rather than procured through alternative channels? If the Cisco server is turned off tomorrow, how can one tell if a copy of the library wasn't downloaded from the Cisco server while it was available?
I'm most likely missing a lot of crucial context, but it appears to me that this peculiar licensing scheme was a compromise made between lawyers that makes little practical sense on a technical level. That, or I'm far too chaotic for such nonsense.
The difference is legal, not technical. You don't have the right to redistribute copyrighted material with permission, except according to exceptions to copyright law (which are narrow enough to not apply here). Cisco gives permission for users to use the software only if downloaded directly from Cisco, and doesn't grant anybody permission to mirror and redistribute it.
Can you tell if a copy was downloaded from Cisco directly? No. Does it make a technical difference? No. But those are the rules Cisco chose, and so there it is.
One potential reason I can think of for this happening is Cisco being required to count the number of downloads of the software (or something like that). But, in the end, there's no requirement that there be logical sense to a rule like this.
Can you tell if a copy was downloaded from Cisco directly? No. Does it make a technical difference? No. But those are the rules Cisco chose, and so there it is.
Is it enforceable if there is no observable difference?
This article isn’t about that. It’s about the externalized costs that LLM companies are pushing onto webmasters because of their aggressive scraping. It’s one thing to believe that LLMs are a good thing, it’s another thing to believe that individuals and cooperative groups that run small internet services ought to be the ones to pay for that good.
I recall now the shutdown of Nekochan.net, which had been the main hub and message board at the time for SGI retrocomputing for several decades, due to concerns about the GDPR. While that might have been an overwrought reaction, and that laws like the GDPR and the Online Safety Act _can_ be followed by a dutiful webmaster, I can't fault any webmasters who choose to throw in the towel when they look at the potential penalties for failing to do so quite right. FAANG and the like can of course make the investments in compliance.
I don't see how any choice the Linux developers make forces phone manufacturers to do anything.
It's their choice to use Linux. They can abide by the license or not ship Linux.
Not to mention that there are many more or less stable APIs within the kernel (which even has versioned API support in places) such as Video4Linux which manufacturers seem dead set against using.
They do abide by the license, but it's also their choice whether to maintain cheap firmware for n years old devices, that they may not even have the license to distribute in source form.
Nonetheless, android mostly solved the issue of the kernel's lack of stable interface via their HAL.
That's a really backwards way of thinking about software distribution. It's like Debian's idea that every piece of software in existence should be packaged for Debian (and Suse, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.).
I don't package any of the software I write for Debian because I don't want to have to jump through their hoops. I don't blame device manufacturers for wanting to avoid jumping through Linux's hoops. Especially with having to deal with Linus.
Nobody likes Apple's app review process do they? I don't think device driver writers should have to go through that.
(I also wish they would open the code but not having a stable driver ABI clearly doesn't make that happen.)
I think a valid reason for not having a stable driver ABI is that it's a mountain of work and makes everything else more difficult. But I've never heard anyone give that as the reason.
There's a big difference between Apple's review process which I would qualify as unnecessary and unfair and Linux's review process which is necessary to produce high quality software.
But it's true that they could at least start by publishing the source code, even if they don't contribute directly.
As for the ABI, I also agree, this would just make the situation worse.
> Linux's review process which is necessary to produce high quality software.
Why? I don't see how that follows. It might be likely to produce better software simply by having experienced kernel devs review the code, but it's definitely not necessary.
I think the interfaces we are talking about are not part of upstream Linux. They will bolt on half baked stuff regardless of the interfaces Linux provides.
The oldest Sanskrit text, the Rigveda, is usually dated to 1500 BC as an oral tradition. It wasn't written down until much later. The oldest surviving unambiguously Sanskrit writing is from 100 BC, using the Brahmi script. It actually isn't the surviving oldest Indic written language either, the Edicts of Ashoka date to 300 BC and are texts written using various scripts and vernacular languages.
In the case of this lawsuit they're suing unknown individuals. The case is Cengage Learning, Inc. v. Does 1-50. Apparently it's a US legal convention to just spitball the number of members of a group of unknown alleged coconspirators to 50.
Would you object if the FBI deputy director encouraged FBI agents to lawfully use their service firearms in the field to demonstrate their use to the FBI? There are real harms involved with increasing surveillance of the public and reducing judicial oversight. Placing the use of warrantless wiretapping as an end in itself rather than a possible means whose use needs to be carefully weighed necessarily means that the weighing will be less careful.
Ultimately Congress should have written the law more carefully. It's their job to balance the various concerns of the government; effectiveness of their law enforcement vs. civil liberties. The FBI's job is only to investigate to the maximum extent of the law, and the email was just reminding people of that.
Every branch of the government has a duty to uphold the constitution including its protections. Further the constitution is the law suggesting it’s only their responsibility to uphold some laws is the root of a great number of issues.
> Ultimately Congress should have written the law more carefully.
That's not how the clandestine agencies like Congress to write laws though. They love to live in the spaces and gray areas created by vaguely written laws.
Whenever these laws are debated and people point out various ways in which they could be abused, Congress says that those are obviously far-fetched and the powers that are being given will be used in reasonable ways.
This email just goes to show what this actually means in practice.
Interestingly, Wikipedia editors are aware that Wikipedia articles are used to find the current URL of sites that are forced to change URLs frequently due to legal or moral issues, and they face the same dilemma registrars and service providers face.[0] So although it seems somewhat more resilient than search engine companies to demands from copyright holders, it's not uncensored, something to keep in mind if you're infrastructurizing it for that purpose.
The issue with most search engines is that on top of not showing the proper link, they push the malicious ones on top of the search page. Wikipedia can simply not link.
Yeah for example 8chan and kiwifarms are usually censored. I'm not that mad about it, some censorship is always necessary (you don't want links to child porn), but it's weird that Wikipedia pretends there is no censorship. And it's kind of arbitrary.
Why is stormfront - an openly nazi forum (a really old one at that) - allowed, but kiwifarms - an anti-trans doxxing forum - isn't? It's both bad
Do they pretend there's no censorship? I don't see that. They block spam and I'm certain no one objects to that, so the bare fact that they exclude some information clearly does not constitute the status "censored"
I'd imagine the reason kiwifarms gets different treatment is because the site is a lot worse than the descriptor "anti-trans doxxing forum" might make you believe — it's a website designed specifically to facilitate long term stalking and harassment campaigns. Trans people are their flavour of the month right now but a few years ago it was anyone disabled.
Yes, they do. Censorship of official links is against explicit Wikipedia policy[1], but it doesn't matter because every policy can be overridden by consensus. In practice this means that a handful of professional activists can (and do) censor it as they see fit, since they can determine for themselves whether such a "consensus" exists.
The Mediawiki environment became increasingly hostile to "the external world" though.
I am making a research project on grammatical gender in French, that I host on Wikiversity (there is a dedicated research space there). Lately I get an increasingly large number of rejection of saving my contributions, because some sites are considered "unreliable sources". But in my project, I am looking to document what people use in practice in their written exchanges. That they express lies or try to spread disinformation is irrelevant from the linguistic perspective I’m conducting this project. But due to this software enforced policy, I get prevented from documenting my sources from time to time.
> If they're spreading disinformation, obviously they also aren't accurately representing their own speech patterns.
But GP is not documenting the 'true' speech patterns of the people spreading the disinformation, but rather the speech patterns they use when they are spreading disinformation (which, as you pointed out, might be different from their normal speech pattern). So the sources are still good enough for that.
> If you had actually read the thread you'd know that it's Wikipedia policy not to include links to sites containg content illegal in the US because that can actually get visitors in trouble.
Not really though.
They have WP:ELNO which includes this, but that excludes WP:ELOFFICIAL. Official links are exception to that list.
> "These links are normally exempt from the links normally to be avoided, but they are not exempt from the restrictions on linking"
The only things that are restricted for official pages is what is in WP:ELNEVER
> 1. Policy: material that violates the copyrights of others per contributors' rights and obligations should not be linked, whether in an external-links section or in a citation.[a] External links to websites that display copyrighted works are acceptable as long as the website is manifestly run, maintained or owned by the copyright owner; the owner has licensed the content in a way that allows the website to use it; or the website uses the work in a way compliant with fair use. Knowingly directing others to material that violates copyright might be considered contributory copyright infringement.[c] If there is reason to believe that a website has a copy of a work in violation of its copyright, do not link to it. Linking to a page that illegally distributes someone else's work casts a bad light on Wikipedia and its editors. This is particularly relevant when linking to sites such as Scribd, WikiLeaks, or YouTube, where due care should be taken to avoid linking to material that violates copyright.
> 2. Technical: sites that match the Wikipedia-specific or multi-site blacklist without being whitelisted. Edits containing such links are automatically blocked from being saved.
According to wikipedia's own official policies, links to 8chan and kiwifarms should be allowed as official links, as Stormfront and The Daily Stormer is, as they don't break copyright and are not on spam blacklists.
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again my problem is not censorship (I am for that), it's just that wikipedia acts like it isn't happening and cannot make an official ruleset that they follow.
There's not a strong differentiation between "official" policies and guidelines and "unofficial" specific consensus on Wikipedia. Individual arguments are generally built out of policy and policy is just longer-standing consensus and can be changed. It's not like there's a different group of editors setting policy from those who argue on talk pages.
Wikipedia acting like it's not censorship is the standard method in which censorship happens in the west today. The people in charge here gloat and applaud the idea of democracy and freedom of speech, while they use dishonest tactics to censorship.
Here's the old joke:
> A Russian and an American get on a plane in Moscow and get to talking.
> The Russian says he works for the Kremlin and he's on his way to go learn American propaganda techniques.
> "What American propaganda techniques?" asks the American.
If there is some official policy which links are allowed and which are not, I'll shut up.
Why are some links allowed and some not, what is the policy, if there is some.
I see
> Wikimedia projects are not censored. Some kinds of content, particularly that of a sexual, violent or religious nature, may be offensive to some viewers; and some viewers may feel such content is disrespectful or inappropriate for themselves, their families or their students, while others may find it acceptable.
I'm a bit annoyed by it. Censoring "lawful but awful" speech is the thin edge of the wedge. An existing precedent of censoring legal websites reduces my confidence that Wikipedia will be able to stand up to censorship pressure (including from its own editors) in the future.
So called "lawful and fine" speech don't need free speech protections, nor any protections for that matter. It's precisely the so called "lawful but awful" speech that do.
I think the argument in this case is that it may cross the line into unlawful behavior. Kiwifarms has been linked to suicides, and encouraging suicide is a crime. 8chan has similarly been linked to violent crimes.
There are cases where speech is illegal, even in the USA, which probably has the strictest standards for protecting speech in the world.
If you think a website is doing something illegal, you can report it to the police or the FBI, depending on what type of crime it is. Kiwifarms has a US corporate entity controlled by a US citizen, it isn't like this is some tor darknet market hosted in Moldova or something.
Generally though sites aren't responsible for their users' speech, so if someone does cross the line, that would be on the user, not the site. As long as the site responds to any lawful subpoenas, they would stay in the clear.
So if a person advocates (for example) murder on an American site, this is fine until the police say it isn't? That is not a standard that 99% of the internet follows, and for good reasons.
The US legal system is 100% wholly incapable of keeping up with the pace of internet content for this sort of thing, so embracing the spirit of the laws on speech and applying them within user-content-based-sites is an appropriate minimum.
Even Musk who wanted to turn Twitter into a site dedicated to free speech specifically said he wanted to focus primarily on moderating content based on US laws (something that he has apparently walked back since then since Twitter still aggressively moderates legal content).
That's the whole point of Section 230. Service providers generally have immunity with respect to third-party content posted by their users. If a user posts something, it's their speech, and the user is therefore held responsible for it, not the website. Section 230 is what makes an internet of user-generated content possible.
> Sure, the Klan has some bad hombres, but we also run Checkers Tuesdays, maths tutoring for underprivileged youths Friday mornings, and Bible study Sundays.
That is, at some point, the bad overwhelms any good.
And sometimes the good is used to spread the bad, or the whole. Cults sometimes recruit like this, abusive people can be nice at first, narcissistic traited particularly, violent fringe groups offer camaraderie, yakuza doing charity and relief supplies. So I agree 100% that it really matters where the good is coming from.
I agree, Kiwifarms is much more shitty than that. To quote from Wikipedia "It now hosts threads targeting many individuals, including minorities, women, LGBT people, neurodivergent people, people considered by Kiwi Farms users to be mentally ill or sexually deviant, feminists, journalists, Internet celebrities, and video game or comics hobbyists."
Do you see the irony in quoting Wikipedia's view of a site to show that Wikipedia's stance on not linking that site is OK, in a discussion about how Wikipedia is censored? Have you actually looked for yourself instead of just trusting the propaganda?
I find it very disturbing that the Wikipedia thread posted in the post above discusses the topic like it's about CP. It's clearly not. It's completely about the political implications of 8ch, especially in the aftermath of the connection between the Christchurch shooting by Brenton Tarrant.
I have browsed 8ch extensively in the past, and continue to browse 4chan. You'll be exposed to disgusting imagery from time to time, no doubt, but the idea that 8ch is censored because of illegal and disgusting imagery is so incredibly disingenuous, this is clearly about political censorship of right wing extremism.
If I had a bit less faith in humanity I would even go as far as to suggest that the Wikipedia thread is crafted to be about CP and not politics for the sake of justifying censorship and rewriting history. 8ch was not controversial because of CP, it was controversial because of extremist politics, and attempting to rewrite history like this is just so typical of Wikipedians these days.
>Google appears to have taken an unprecedented step in filtering its search results by banning an entire domain—and adding a warning about __"suspected child abuse content"__ to a search for the domain itself.
the guy who made it said that he found it reprehensible but wouldn't remove it, so yes promoted pedohilia by turning a blind eye in the name of "free speech"
And the reason why they're even having the discussion is not because the site might contain CP. The reason they're having the discussion is because the board was host to a political discussion board which hosted right wing extremists, and various kind of censors in the west don't think these people should be able to act freely on the internet.
This seems like confused causality. The ban bill was put forward and passed because TikTok asked their users to contact their representatives and share their opinion about the ban bill?
Somewhat connected question, what is WPE? It’s something that got abstracted out of WebkitGTK, right? Is it a standalone port itself, or is it more like the framework to build a highly specialized one? I’ve seen at least in past versions that libwpe is an optional dependency of WebkitGTK, so they didn’t like abstract and then rebase it on the new component. Or is libwpe separate from WPE?
It's been a few years since I was looking into it, so this might be out of date. But WPE is targeted at kiosks and places you might want to display web content but not have a full web browser. Igalia can sell consulting services to these companies, as opposed to webkitgtk which has a small number of non-paying users. So WPE serves as a place for more active development of webkit-on-linux while not breaking webkitgtk which powers the web browser "Web" on gnome. Things from WPE tend to slowly make it into the webkitgtk build eventually. It's all maintained by the same people.
Looking at https://webkit.org/wpe/, the first design goal is the one that justifies WPE vs other webkit ports: "To provide a no-frills, straight to the point, web runtime for embedded devices."
The other goals, like standards compliant and hardware acceleration, are there to differentiate WPE from non-webkit and ancient-webkit browser engines that people might use on embedded devices.
You could describe WPE as WebKitGTK but you bring your own GTK.
GTK is sometimes inappropriate for embedded devices that have a unique display stack. Using WPE brings in minimal dependencies and can render to anything you desire.
libwpe is just used for some basic code sharing between the two, GTK is not based on WPE.
