> Surely Congress or the courts would have something to say about it?
The entire mode of operation for the current administration is to ignore such things whenever they don't blindly rubber stamp or get out of the way. It has been very successful for them.
Trump has today, explicitly said that the US administration - specifically his administration - will run Venezuela, with boots on the ground, for as long as is necessary.
I was listening to the press conference and almost went back to edit my comment with a note about it. Honestly, coming out of that I have no idea if what is his saying is reality. As things stand and what we know, it doesn't make sense. We don't know about more troops currently on the ground. He said the VP has agreed to assist, but she is publicly saying very different things. I hate we are in a place as a country where we can't believe basic things about important topics our president says.
Also in the Q&A he mentioned this was mostly targeting the protection of the oil extraction/American companies taking over, not the rest of the country.
(tho not sure how much we can really trust what he says)
At one point, paying for Mozilla's mullvad rebadge would give money to the corp. If you were already going to pay for a VPN, then it's effectively a donation.
Though, just because money goes to the corp, doesn't mean it will contribute to Firefox' development either.
I remember installing XBMC with a 360-style "blades" interface and being blown away by how much smoother and nicer it was then the blades interface on the Xbox 360 at the time.
Obviously the OS wasn't doing as much as an Xbox 360 was, but as an end user, it made me perpetually annoyed at what we "could have had" on the 360.
And then Microsoft changed the 360 UI to their windows 8 uwp Tile-style UI with even more ads and I realized that I underestimated how bad things could get.
Apparently the "blades UI" 360s are quite sought after. I wonder if any progress has been made on restoring the stock firmware. I never had one myself unfortunately, mine came preloaded with a later OS.
Those ancient 360s are probably doomed to hardware failure however. They didn't seem to fix the issues with the 360 being essentially disposable until very late in the release cycle.
This is just what you'd expect any government that is either competent or greedy to be doing, given the technologies at play.
Calling it "thought crime" is, of course, a bit glib. But things like "we want to monitor the communications of every pro Palestinian university student so we can take proactive disruptive actions" are very real and not so hidden desires and sentiments of modern Western governments.
One of the things that came out of several Blizzard anticheat/Warden lawsuits back in the day is that, technically, the act of running an executable is copyright infringement, because the data is being copied from disk into memory, into registers and into caches.
Running any software that then does anything with the same memory space (cheating software or, say, antivirus) is another, separate instance of copyright infringement on top of that.
If I own a book I can make as many personal copies of the book I want as long as I keep those copies personal. So it seems like there is more too this ruling than copying from disk to memory or it contradicts typical copyright low or maybe the ruling was about DMCA anti-circumvention?
The entire mode of operation for the current administration is to ignore such things whenever they don't blindly rubber stamp or get out of the way. It has been very successful for them.
reply