How soon before WINE is included in this?

Sony patent could let players tap a credit card on their PlayStation controller to rent games.

• Ftfy, Dexerto, if something can be taken away from you at any time, you don’t own it, you’re only renting it.

Australia claims it is a global pioneer in killing online speech rights.

• Ftfy, The Guardian.

Welcome back SOPA.

So abandon everything then?

Also, if you think the Fediverse is gonna be safe from this, then I have bad news for you. Also, decentralized networks in general could be targeted by this sorta thing if what happened to A/I is any indication.

What happened to those Mastodon instances and to A/I is proof that even decentralized networks can be targeted by censorship.

What’s stopping the FCC or your country’s equivalent from locking down HAM regulations?

It’s even sadder when you consider that SOPA caused a mass blackout protest which ultimately got it hidden away until its chance to reappear and this time maybe actually become law.

No one’s doing any sort of mass blackout protests this time around.

Not gonna matter when apps and services start blocking Linux, or even worse, should this shit creep up the chain to the ISP level and should ISPs start requiring an Apple, Google, or MS OS just to get online to begin with.

And hypothetically that reCAPTCHA could also serve as an ID of sorts:

• Any Google account verified 18+ gets full web access.
• Any Google account 14-17 gets mildly restricted access.
• Any Google account 9-13 gets heavily restricted access.
• Any Google account 8 and under or anyone without a Google account is locked out entirely.

… That could be a pretty effective way to completely lock down the web. And then moving everyone back to time-sharing on rented terminals will be the final nail in the coffin for personal computing. If Big Tech gets their way, personal computing could be killed off by thin clients or terminal apps connected to a rented cloud server.

I could easily see things like Discord, Meta, Google, Reddit, and Twitter doing this if it came to that, for instance.

As I pointed out, and is already actively underway on mobiles with regards to GrapheneOS and LineageOS, apps and services could always start blocking Linux.

The Linux exemptions in Cali and Colorado bring up something else if that gets followed on a broader scale: Can’t apps and services just start blocking Linux and start specifically demanding Windows or Mac?

Am I crazy for saying that DHH is a far-right plant and Omarchy is a plot to destroy FOSS from the inside?

That would kill the Fediverse and other alternatives too, though, because they wouldn’t be allowed to exist by said regulations. What you’re suggesting is gonna result in vendor lock-in by making it impossible for smaller competition to comply.

I’d say good luck extending this to desktops, but MS might beat them to the punch if this becomes standardized and apps/sites start blocking alt OSes like Linux or BSD and start vendor-locking to Windows for age-gate DRM purposes.

Damn, first legitimately good thing I’ve seen come out of that country in a while as far as legislation is concerned.

Good thing Matrix and XMPP exist as alternatives.

If I start getting straight-up locked out of Discord unless I show my face or ID, I’mma just stop using it full stop.

I mean, shit, Discord’s already getting ridiculous with their Nitro ads. No, Discord, I don’t want Nitro, stop asking me. No needs to start meaning no again.

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No prob! And if you’re maxing out any lossy codec, that’s the point where your only intention is to make a file smaller than you can do with lossless, while still having no audible degradation between that lossy copy and the uncompressed or lossless original file, although you could also settle for transparency in the case of codecs like Opus or even Vorbis where their max bitrate is higher than their transparency rate for even smaller files.

In the case of older codecs like MP3, supposedly its transparency bitrate of 320kbit/s CBR is also its max bitrate, but there’s decades of debate over whether 320kbit/s CBR or V0 VBR is superior for that codec, such as this HA thread from 2008 on the matter. As for MD/ATRAC, its transparency bitrate, and also its max bitrate and the native bitrate for the MD format, is 292kbit/s CBR.

For the curious, the two bitrates for MD/ATRAC that fall below its transparency bitrate are 132kbit/s (MD LP2) and 66kbit/s (MD LP4).