Do you know any service cheaper than Backblaze?

I’ve just watched the video. I find it pretty outrageous. The word about it should spread.

Wyden has been spectacular on actually understanding tech issues for a very long time at this point. The gerontocracy needs to stop acting like they have any clue how the internet works.

It's not a dump truck; it's a series of tubes.

this is a very lengthy piece but quite interesting. from the introduction:

Something happened when we shifted to digital formats that created a loss of rights for readers. Pulling back the curtain on the evolution of ebooks offers some clarity to how the shift to digital left ownership behind in the analog world.

While most publishers still sell physical books, when it comes to ebooks, the vast majority appear to have made a collective decision to shift to offering only limited licenses. Some of the reasons for this shift are economic, some legal, some technological, and others psychological – a belief that limiting or eliminating digital ownership of books will raise publisher revenues, forstall free copies leaking onto unauthorized websites, and allow publishers and platforms unprecedented control and tracking of the behaviors of readers, as well as universities and libraries that provide ebooks. Whether these beliefs map to reality, however, is hotly contested.

and the broad conclusions here:

Our study leads us to several key conclusions:

• By turning to platforms as the primary technical means for conveying ebooks, publishers have introduced a third major player into the ebook supply chain: ebook platform companies. Together with publishers, platforms have restricted the ebook market to one composed primarily of licensing instead of sales.
• The platform companies have motives and goals that are independent of those of publishers or purchasers (including institutional buyers such as libraries and schools). Rather than looking to profit from individual sales, like a bookstore does, platforms compete to collect and control the most aggregate content and consumer data. This enables what are now widely known as “surveillance capitalism” revenue models, from data brokering to personalized ad targeting to the use of content lock-in subscription models.3 These platforms’ goals are sometimes at odds with the interests of libraries and readers.
• The introduction of platforms, and especially publisher-platform partnerships, has created new forms of legal and technological lock-in on the publisher side, with dependencies on platform infrastructure posing serious barriers to publishers independently selling ebooks directly to consumers. Platforms have few incentives to support direct sales models that do not require licensing, as those models do not easily support tracking user behavior.
• The structure of the ebook marketplace has introduced new stressors into both the publishing and library professions. Publishers and libraries feel they are facing existential crises/collapse, and their fears are pushing them into diametrically opposed viewpoints. Publishers feel pressured to protect and paywall their content, while libraries feel pressure to maintain relevant collections that are easily accessible via digital networks. Both libraries and publishers feel dependent on the ebook platform companies to provide the ebooks that readers demand, allowing the platform economy (which is already dominated by only a few large companies) to have even more power over the ebook marketplace.
• Because of the predominance of the publisher-platform licensing model for the ebook marketplace, important questions exist as to the impact, if any, that digital library lending of books has on that market. For example, while some evidence exists that the availability of second-hand physical books via libraries and used bookstores might compete with direct publisher book sales, it is less clear that the digital loan of a single title by a library competes with platform ebook subscriptions and locked-in book purchases. Moreover, given that publisher-platform partnerships profit from surveillance of book buyers, consumers who choose more privacy-friendly library loans may represent an entirely distinct market that places significant value on data protection.
• While access to user data generated by platform surveillance of readers is a potential benefit to publishers, in practice publishers do not fully exploit (and may not have full access to) that information.

As a general rule, when trillion-dollar companies don't like regulation, it simply means they're admitting the rules are good for their customers.

Not much to add here, given the opening dependent clause.

As far as I can tell this basically means that all apps must be approved by Apple to follow their "platform policies for security and privacy" even if publishing on a third party app store. They will also disable updating apps from third party app stores if you stay outside the EU for too long (even if you are a citizen of an EU country, with an Apple account set to the EU region).

The idea that preventing app updates is in line with their claims of protecting security is utterly absurd. "Never attibute to malice what can be explained with stupidity," but Apple isn't stupid.

cross-posted from !android@lemdro.id

Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for Android™️ (WSA). As a result, the Amazon Appstore on Windows and all applications and games dependent on WSA will no longer be supported beginning March 5, 2025. Until then, technical support will remain available to customers.

Customers that have installed the Amazon Appstore or Android apps prior to March 5, 2024, will continue to have access to those apps through the deprecation date of March 5, 2025. Please reach out to our support team for further questions at support.microsoft.com. We are grateful for the support of our developer community and remain committed to listening to feedback as we evolve experiences.

Well, apparently, after just a few years the ability to control GPU operation in Linux will slide down considerably.

I was making a braille learning app when I came up with this game idea. You count the braille dots to guess the word. https://www.themisgames.com/brailliance/menu

Do you think it's too hard? I want to experiment with ways to make it easier. I'm also actively working to add more iOS-specific VoiceOver support with a native app. Perhaps make the perkins input easier.

They settled for $2.4M and shut everything down.

We write today to inform you that yuzu and yuzu’s support of Citra are being discontinued, effective immediately.

First focusing on AI and now this, already cancelled my donations, do we have a good fork to move to?

So I was thinking about what if we could make a network that the only thing you needed to connect to it is to directly connect ( through wires or directed wireless antennas ) to at least 1 computer that takes part in it, with no centralized node of any kind. For that we would need a whole new protocol and address system. THIS IS JUST A THING IN MY MIND TO TALK ABOUT. I AM NOT ADVANCED IN THIS DOMAIN.

At first I thought at making groups of 256 nodes so that every node inside of that group knows every other node. A node will know nodes's group address that until now are just 2 hexadecimal digits like "D8" and the location address. A location address means what path to take to connect to any node, a location address for 98 would be "connect to 63, ask 63 to redirect message to A9, ask A9 to redirect message to CF, ask CF to redirect message to 98". Messages between a groups nodes would be all encrypted and all steps of the location address would be encrypted for each node in part.

Now every node in a group can send encrypted messages to anyone else in that group.

Now lets say that another node wants to connect to that network, but the group is already 256 nodes: That node will create another group. The first node of a group picks a random 2 digit hexadecimal address for that group. A node knows at least 1 computer's location address from every group. Untill now addresses are like "D8.01" D8 is a computer's address in a group and 01 is that group's address. 256 groups will create a kilogroup, each node knows at least 1 computer's location address from every kilogroup. Untill now addresses are like "D8.01.8F" , 8F being the kilogroup's address.

This thing can scale ever more, creating megagroups, gigagroups etc...

If I wanna connect to D8.01.8F then I first connect to a node that I know is in the 8F kilogroup, that node will connect to a node it knows in the 01 group, and that node knows D8 directly so it will connect to him and give him message, this kinda works like a DHT, wich me sending the message to the closer node I know to the destination node

Now this is very very far from perfect or usable, what happens if 2 networks grow independent and when they connect they have the same addresses? What if someone wants to sabotage this with a fake node? The location is also not very private.

Can this get better or even usable? Do you have any ideas or just want to discuss this?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/16368424

At the upcoming SXSW Conference... Honda will give attendees a chance to try out a new mobility device... specifically designed for mixed reality entertainment experiences.

Users can steer... without the use of their hands — they simply have to lean into one direction to move forwards, backwards, sideways or diagonally.