Fun fact: I hit CTRL-C at least 7 times when copying each of these pictures.
You know. Just to be sure.
You're welcome.
The GNOME team has censored -- and deleted the account -- of the maintainer of Manjaro Linux GNOME Edition. Why? Because he linked to a Lunduke article.
GNOME bans Manjaro Core Team Member for uttering "Lunduke":
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5908516/gnome-bans-manjaro-core-team-member-for-uttering-lunduke
More from The Lunduke Journal:
https://lunduke.com/
Archive.org loses appeal in book copyright case with the Sony / Universal Music lawsuit still looming on the horizon.
The Internet Archive Loses Appeal. As Expected.
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/6079435/the-internet-archive-loses-appeal-as-expected
More from The Lunduke Journal:
https://lunduke.com/
System76’s Principal Engineer doesn’t “even try to contribute to the Linux kernel anymore.”
The article:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/6052448/pop-os-lead-linux-developers-are-patronizing-pedantic-megalomaniacs
More from The Lunduke Journal:
https://lunduke.com/
"The White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire."
Warning: This show is extremely political. It has to be. There simply is no way to discuss the topic without being political. Just the same, the core of the topic is regarding the usability of digital, online publishing and messaging platforms -- a topic near and dear to the heart of those of us who have lived through the ages of the BBS, Usenet, Geocities, and the like.
More from The Lunduke Journal:
https://lunduke.com/
Ads are filling the entirety of the Web -- websites, podcasts, YouTube videos, etc. -- at an increasing rate. Prices for those ad placements are plummeting. Consumers are desperate to use ad-blockers to make the web palatable. Google (and others) are desperate to break and block ad-blockers. All of which results in... more ads and lower pay for creators.
It's a fascinatingly annoying cycle. And there's only one viable way out of it.
Looking for the Podcast RSS feed or other links? Check here:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4619051/lunduke-journal-link-central-tm
Give the gift of The Lunduke Journal:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4898317/give-the-gift-of-the-lunduke-journal
Those in power with openSUSE make it clear they will not allow me anywhere near anything related to the openSUSE project. Ever. For any reason.
Well, that settles that, then! Guess I won't be contributing to openSUSE! 🤣
Looking for the Podcast RSS feed or other links?
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4619051/lunduke-journal-link-central-tm
Give the gift of The Lunduke Journal:
https://lunduke.locals.com/post/4898317/give-the-gift-of-the-lunduke-journal
I know I'm jumping the gun a bit for #SundaySounds but I'm really digging this groove for coding today. y'all might, too. it has a bit of Khruangbin going on in there. not much to look at - which I think is the point.
Finding My People
Pretty sure I’m not the only nerd here - someone who didn’t fit in with the norm. ChatGPT and I were having a wide ranging discussion from the hundreds of online forum posts I trained it on.
We got into my childhood and how I ended up being the person who debated others online.
I realized that I hadn’t changed all that much. I was always social - I just hadn’t found my people.
And then I asked ChatGPT to write a poem to my wife and daughters encapsulating that journey.
If you want to hold onto the notion that AI is just plagiarism at worst, or mindless mediocrity text generation at best - don’t read the poem that I’m putting in the comments.
I'm a sucker for software which makes aging operating systems more useful. As such, I am absolutely enamored with a new DOS utiltity called "mTCP NetDrive".
What is NetDrive?
"NetDrive is a DOS device driver that allows you to access a remote disk image hosted by another machine as though it was a local device with an assigned drive letter. The remote disk image can be a floppy disk image or a hard drive image."
Yeah. Mount -- read and write -- a drive image remotely (anywhere in the world). From DOS.
mTCP -- a suite of networking tools for DOS (like Ping, a DHCP client, an FTP client, etc.) -- has been around for a long time. The developer, Michael Brutman, has truly done a phenomenal job building and mainting all of those tools.
But NetDrive really turns things up to 11.
Oh! The server is a lightweight application that runs (with no need for root access) on Linux or Windows. Want to host your DOS images on a Raspberry Pi? Yes. You do.
What's more, the local DOS system simply recognizes the mounted drive as a standard hard drive (mounted as a configurable drive letter). Which means that just about any software should work on it without difficulty.
Even disk management and optimization tools, like Norton Utilities, work fantastically.
As you can imagine, using NetDrive over the Internet can get a bit pokey. Especially on a less-than-speedy connection. But over a local network? The darn thing runs at a very usable speed.
And -- even with potential speed issues when running on a remote server -- I absolutely love the idea of having a set of DOS drive images which I can mount from anywhere. Heck. I could even share some of those images with friends -- to use as a sort of DOS repository.
The developer has even added features like "undo" and "checkpoints" to make it easy to roll back "woopsies". On a DOS drive image. Mounted on a remote server.
Come on.
That's just nifty.
The United States Court of Appeals (Second Circuit) just issued a ruling against the Internet Archive (Archive.org) -- rejecting their appeal, and upholding a previous ruling against them in the Hachette vs Internet Archive legal battle.
Make no mistake: This is very bad news for both the Internet Archive, Archive.org users, as well as other archival projects.
To make sure everyone is up to speed, here is the short, short version of this legal battle.
For many years, the Internet Archive has been creating digital copies of physical books (by scanning them) -- then allowing people to "borrow" those digital versions from Archive.org (in theory limiting the total digital books being "lent out" to the count of the physical books in the Archive's possession).
They never obtained permissions from the authors or publishers to do any of this.
In 2020, during the Covid lockdowns, the Internet Archive launched the "National Emergency Library" -- where they removed that "1 physical book : 1 digital book lent out" restriction. Meaning anybody on the Internet could obtain digital scans of physical books... and the Archive could "Lend Out" an unlimited number of digital copies based on a single physical copy.
Again. No permission was obtained from the writers or publishers.
Thus -- to the surprise of absolutely nobody -- the "Hachette v. Internet Archive" legal battle began.
And... The Internet Archive lost. The judge ruled in favor of the publishers (including Hachette, Wiley, Penguin Random House, & HarperCollins).
Naturally, Internet Archive appealed that ruling. But, boy-howdy, was their appeal a strange one which was destined to fail.
On April 19th of 2024, the Internet Archive filed their final brief in their attempt to appeal this ruling against them.
In that ruling, one of the Internet Archive's core arguments was that it cost the Internet Archive a lot of money to make so many digital copies of books without permission... so, therefore, the Internet Archive should be allowed to do it.
That is neither a joke nor an exaggeration. It sounds weird, because it is weird.
The Internet Archive truly attempted to make the case that spending a lot of money committing a crime... should make that crime legal. (Could you imagine the mafia making that case? Wild.)
You can read the full analysis, by The Lunduke Journal, of the appeal (including the appeal itself) for yourself for more details.
The reality is... there was never any chance that the Internet Archive's attempted appeal was going to be successful. Their defensive arguments were highly illogical (bordering on flights of fancy), and brought nothing new or noteworthy to the case. This was all painfully obvious.
On Wednesday, September 4th, 2024, the opinion was handed down from the United States Court of Appeals.
While the full ruling is roughly 64 pages long, this single paragraph -- from the second page -- summarizes things quite well:
"This appeal presents the following question: Is it “fair use” for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no. We therefore AFFIRM."
To call out the truly important parts:
"Question: Is it 'fair use' ... to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free ... all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? ... we conclude the answer is no."
You can read the entire 64 page ruling for yourself. Heck. You can even read it on Archive.org. But that line, right there, sums it all up.
Naturally, the Internet Archive has issued a statement. Albeit... a short one.
"We are disappointed in today’s opinion about the Internet Archive’s digital lending of books that are available electronically elsewhere. We are reviewing the court’s opinion and will continue to defend the rights of libraries to own, lend, and preserve books."
The Internet Archive gets sued by some of the biggest book publishers... and loses.
The Internet Archive appeals... and loses.
What happens next? Well. Unfortunately -- for both the Internet Archive, and its users -- the future looks rather bleak.
First and foremost: Has the Internet Archive made, and distributed, digital copies of work you own? This ruling will certainly not hurt your case should you decide to take legal action against Archive.org.
And -- holy smokes -- the amount of copyrighted material on Archive.org is absolutely massive.
The Archive.org software repository alone contains millions of items. With a very large number of them being copyrighted material, posted there without permission of the copyright owner.
Simply going by the numbers, here's how much material is available on Archive.org (roughly):
How many of those items do you think are there without permission (or possibly even knowledge) of the owners or creators?
Every single one now has an increasingly strong case when looking at potential legal action.
And it's about to get even worse for the Internet Archive.
That's right, the book publishers weren't the only ones taking legal action against Archive.org.
Universal Music Group and Sony have an ongoing lawsuit against the Internet Archive -- regarding the distribution of 2,749 audio recordings (with potential damages upwards of $412 Million USD).
Seriously.
"Plaintiffs bring this suit to address Defendants’ massive ongoing violation of Plaintiffs’ rights in protected pre-1972 sound recordings. As part of what Defendants have dubbed the “Great 78 Project,” Internet Archive, Blood, and GBLP have willfully reproduced thousands of Plaintiffs’ protected sound recordings without authorization by copying physical records into digital files. Internet Archive then willfully uploaded, distributed, and digitally transmitted those illegally copied sound recordings millions of times from Internet Archive’s website."
Sound familiar? Digital copies. No permission from the artists or publishers. Free downloads for everyone.
Naturally, the Internet Archive attempted to have this suit dismissed... but their attempt was denied in May of 2024. (Because if there's one constant in life... it's that the Internet Archive always loses in court.) That case is going forward.
What happens if the Internet Archive loses this UMG / Sony case? What happens if they are ordered to pay $412 Million in damages?
To put it simply: Archive.org doesn't have that kind of money. They bring in roughly $20 Million (give or take) per year. That type of legal liability would absolutely destroy the Internet Archive.
And, here's the thing, the Internet Archive is almost assuredly going to lose that lawsuit as well.
Regardless of what you, I, or anyone else thinks of the Internet Archive -- and, make no mistake, I use that service several times a week (and love it) -- the law here is incredibly clear and well tested.
The Internet Archive runs one of the largest (if not the largest) website of pirated and stolen digital material on the planet. Sure, it may also provide extremely valuable (and often, very legal) services as well.. but that doesn't make those crimes go away.
With each legal defeat, the Internet Archive grows increasingly vulnerable to additional attacks.
Simply being logical about it... it seems highly likely that we'll see additional suits brought against the Internet Archive in the months ahead. Books, music, TV shows, software... Archive.org contains a massive mountain of copyrighted material in all areas. These are suits which the Internet Archive would be almost certain to lose.
With this reality looming, how long until Archive.org will be forced to shut down entirely? That day is likely not far off... and a sad day it will be.
The truly sad part? The leadership of the Internet Archive had to know exactly what they were doing.
Every step of the way, it was obvious that they were going to lock horns with publishers (and lose).
Heck, I told them. Repeatedly.
But, even if The Lunduke Journal hadn't pointed this out... it was a brutally obvious certainty to anyone even mildly familiar with copyright law and the workings of Archive.org.
Which means: The Internet Archive knowingly put their entire service at risk (including the Wayback Machine, the massive archive or pre-copyright audio recordings, etc.) because they wanted to publish copyrighted material against the wishes of the authors or publishers.
Despite this, they continue to push a public perception campaign where they pretend that publishers and authors are burning their own books. When the reality is... the books are still available a wide variety of ways. Archive.org simply got in trouble for copying and distributing them without permission.
Something I find truly fascinating about all of this, is that The Lunduke Journal will -- as usual -- get yelled at (rather extensively) for this article. For simply pointing out the current reality of copyright law and how the Internet Archive has, knowingly, violated it.
People love Archive.org. Heck, I love Archive.org.
And people are allowing their love for that website to convince them that anyone being critical of it... must, necessarily, be bad and evil. An enemy.
But it is not The Lunduke Journal who is putting The Internet Archive in danger of being shut down.
Neither is it Sony, Hachette, Random House, or HarperCollins who are putting The Internet Archive in danger.
No, sir.
The only one putting The Internet Archive in danger... is The Internet Archive.