Notices by Tom Morris (tommorris@mastodon.social)

I'm not saying you should pirate movies and TV shows to preserve your right to pursue litigation. Absolutely not.

But if you have decided to pirate their content rather than pay for it, pat yourself on the back because it turns out only having illegal relations with the Disney Corporation has unexpected extra benefits.

Kinda like downloading those Sony albums off Napster back in the day meant you didn't get a rootkit installed on your PC, unlike the people who paid for them on CD.

"You signed up to a free trial of Disney+, and the T&Cs you never read when doing so contains an binding arbitration clause which totally applies to the dispute regarding your spouse's unfortunate death at a Disney resort restaurant" is certainly an argument.

https://lawandcrime.com/lawsuit/borders-on-the-absurd-dead-womans-estate-rejects-disneys-claim-that-widowers-disney-membership-means-wrongful-death-lawsuit-must-be-arbitrated/

@xerz @aral I've started writing a post also. I've noodled around with it a bit on Mac and have tried NixOS in a VM.

The ecosystem is quite overwhelming (and a lot of the docs are old or not great).

I'm starting by dipping a toe in and using it as a partial alternative to Homebrew, and using it for development environments and scripts... but the Nix language and Flakes etc. are somewhat mysterious. The learning curve is pretty steep.

Also 24 lines of Python with httpx and bs4 that took about 20 minutes just saved me multiple hours of time-consuming work.

Nix-shell shebangs are really handy.

Today, I needed to write a quick and dirty Python script to do some web page parsing and regexery, so just popped in python311 and python311Packages..

No pyproject.toml, no containers, no Docker, no venv. Run it, use result, then Nix's garbage collector will throwaway the dependencies when we're done.

https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nix-shell_shebang

Just re-read this.

Regulators of implanted medical technology should be demanding that all source code, design docs and other technical material be lodged in escrow.

If the company ceases to make support available, make it all public.

It's one thing for movies or TV shows or video games to disappear "into the vault", but prioritising protection of completely unused IP rights over the the health and wellbeing of patients is criminal.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

If you do not tell us how well the lady who sold you the iPhone did or the guy in Tesco who sold you a sandwich did on a scale of 1-10, and whether you'd breathlessly tell all of your friends and family about it, we will notice.

We will text you.

We will email you.

We will chase you to the ends of the earth.

We will never stop.

If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine turning every interaction with another human into an integer and storing it in a database, forever.

Here is a fun question for today: could a public inquiry like the COVID inquiry issue a s49 RIPA notice for disclosure of encryption keys? And if the keys were not provided, could a s53 prosecution take place?

https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/boris-forgotten-old-iphone-password/

@aral I'm more of a web-adjacent developer. This might finally be the year I try and figure out a sensible in-case-of-emergency escape route over to Linux-land.

The Apple hardware has improved a lot, but I would rather like—on quite pragmatic grounds—to not have for-profit companies having as much control over the tools I rely on. (This is why I prefer Emacs and other community-directed free tools over MS's VSC, even though the latter is a great product.)

@danbri @aral Hadn’t seen that. Not great.