I wish people would stop comparing those uses of copyright to nonprofits like Internet Archive

While I understand AI training exemptions to copyright are controversial, and think most people here would side with IA on ebook lending.

It depends on the attack vector. Typically you’re right, but malicious .lnk files are often paired with other malicious methods to infect machines. Sometimes they’re configured as a worm that copies and spreads when a flash drive is connected, sometimes they’re configured to download a remote payload when another script or program is started. The problem is that it’s a type of file that’s often overlooked because it seems innocent.

It isn’t necessarily the case that the Trojan needs to be interacted with by the user in order to execute the malicious code. Just having the file on your machine opens the door for all kinds of attacks (especially if you’re using a headless setup: you wouldn’t necessarily know you have the .lnk file in the system unless you’re manually unpacking your downloads yourself). All it needs is for another piece of infected code to run and look for that file, and it can open the door for more traditional malicious code.

Edit: just as a for-instance - If I was a black hat and wanted to spread some malicious code, I could include this .lnk file in a torrent (innocuous enough to slip by unnoticed by most people/unscrupulous pirates), and then maybe place a line of code in a jellyfin plugin or script that looks for that file and executes it if it’s found. Because the attack isn’t buried in the plugin or script itself (most people wouldn’t think much of a line of code that’s simply pointing to temp file already on your system), it could theoretically go unnoticed for long enough to catch a few hundred or thousand machines.

I believe the torrent included both an .mkv and a malicious .lnk file.

.lnk files are dangerous because they can evade detection and automatically open other files or executable on a computer; AFAIK you would not have had to open the .lnk file yourself.

If you put up any guards at all against data tracking, they get pretty bad pretty quick. They get skewed toward the one or two datapoints that you didn’t shore up, so they think “huh, this user must really like phone games because they played doodlejump in 2016 and still has it installed on their phone”. Or at least I think. My wife gets ads that are far more on-the-nose than I do, but she doesn’t lock down her tracking data at all.

But I don’t even like them trying to match me to ads, I don’t want to incentivize their data collection practices.

I mean this genuinely: I would rather YouTube die than be subject to their overlong and hyper targeted ads.

If the ads were untargeted I’d feel less adamant, but as it is now I would sooner give up YouTube entirely.

Lots of good suggestions here

I’m a bit surprised by your budget. For something just running plex and next cloud, you shouldn’t need a 6 or even 3k system. I run my server on found parts, adding up to just $600-$700 dollars including (used) SAS drives. It runs probably a dozen docker containers, a dns server, and homeassistant. I don’t even remember what cpu I have because it was such a small consideration when I was finding parts.

I’d recommend keeping g your synology as a simple Nas (maybe next cloud too, depending on how you’re using it) and then get a second box with whatever you need for plex. Unless you’re transcoding multiple 4k videos at once, your cpu/GPU really don’t need much power. I don’t even have a dedicated GPU in mine, but I’m basically unable to do live 4k transcodes (this is fine for me)

It wouldn’t be surprising to me if they’ve had this implemented for awhile.

There’s still some question about why their 3.5 model had an apparent sudden drop-off in quality about a year ago, and among the plausible explanations for it could be that they were fucking with their weights in order to watermark the outputs in exactly the way you’re mentioning. They were also fighting against prompt-injection methods and censor disapproved uses at the time, so who the fuck knows.

You could feed it through a different, smaller model that could even be self-hosted. It isn’t difficult to make a model that rephrases an input in another style.

Not to mention that it would be extremely difficult to implement an effective watermark on text below a certain size

There are hundreds of thousands of pixels in an image where you can hide a watermark, but in a text output of a paragraph or less there are only a couple hundred characters.

How precise is the watermark? Is it a specific sequence of characters? Is it a sequence of words? A number of characters in a row? Non-print characters?

How precise the watermark is will determine how easy it is to get around. I imagine some of the most important uses to detect would be twitter/social media influence bots where the output length is only 140 characters or less. I find it hard to imagine a watermark on output of that size being effective or reliable.

They were good for about a paragraph, maybe less.

As soon as they reached the attention limit they started talking gibberish.

Why are they trying to re-invent social media monetization schemes instead of incorporating already existing ones that are value-adds?

I could easily see a ‘reddit marketplace’ work well for them (i’d never fucking use it but i’m betting a bunch of people would), and it would drive more traffic to the site and lure more advertisers. Better than facebook marketplace, which requires real personal information to use, or craigslist, which feels a little too seedy and un-moderated for the faint-of-heart. Reddit could leverage their reputation for being a place for passionate hobbyists and even provide users a way to make their own income from their reddit activity.

Milking your users for paid-content seems over-the-top obnoxious when they absolutely had more options before needing to resort to that. What a trash company.

I guess my point is that retaining copyright isn’t necessarily dependent on abolishing hierarchies altogether. People imagine it would take a complete re-imagining of our economy to abolish copyright (and it isn’t a small thing, to be sure), but it’s honestly less intensive than most people think.

Especially since most of the economic value of copyright is held by large corporations, not private individuals.

Humans need no incentive to create new works, but the way we distribute resources requires us to make these rules so that those creators fit within our ‘work for food’ production model.

You don’t have to abolish hierarchy, you just have to de-tangle work from sustenance-level resource distribution. A UBI sufficient for living would be enough. Even providing universal housing and reducing the workweek would help.

Copyright simply makes creative work profitable, but profit isn’t necessarily a prerequisite for creative work.

No, i’m talking about all intellectual works (copyrights and patents being some of the categories commonly used)

Humans need no incentive to create new works, but the way we distribute resources requires us to make these rules so that those creators fit within our ‘work for food’ production model.

Even a modest UBI would support most creative endeavors, but instead of that we have a “monetize your work or starve” arrangement.

Because it manufactures scarcity and causes us to repeatedly expend energy reproducing things that could be otherwise copied and enjoyed at near-zero cost.

We keep inventing silly rules in order to put off dealing with the existential threat our mode of production represents. “Copyright” is the first and silliest of those rules.

deleted by creator

Abolish copyright.

in case it was unclear: accusing someone of narcissism as a personality trait isn’t the same as accusing them of a PD.

I used to think the same thing, but I did an effort post about this about a year ago (here’s the link)

The article you linked to says something similar to my own understanding: basically, DRM circumvention for personal use is officially not allowed under DMCA and could absolutely be used against you in court, though the likelihood is low. The exceptions the author mentions are pretty nebulous, and the Library of Congress actually addresses the most common cases in their discussions and publication and affirms that they are not allowed.

I don’t personally agree with their interpretation, but I think more people ought to know that it’s officially not legal to circumvent DRM for personal use.