The discussion the post has created is still valuable even we don’t know the motivations behind the post. That was true before LLMs as well (people lie and exaggerate on the internet all the time).
Personally I give the benefit of the doubt to a post I suspect of being LLM if there isn’t an obvious harm (for example, the user shilling a product in the comments). There are still some benign reasons to use LLMs for posts like these.
> The lower court found the Betamax maker liable because the tape recorder was “not suitable for any substantial noninfringing use” and infringement “was either the most conspicuous use or the major use of the Betamax product.”
I don't know anyone who sold television recordings, it was always for personal use. How could the lower court get this so wrong? Was this just one uninformed judge? Or was this actually less certain at the time?
The Ninth Circuit court of appeals understood correctly what the primary use of Betamax would be, but they believed that personal home recording was not fair use, and was thus copyright infringement. They interpreted the law as only allowing libraries to record TV or radio broadcasts.
The Supreme Court ruling for this case found that time-shifting was fair use, but only by a narrow 5-4 margin. Fair use could have gone in a completely different direction over the last 40 years if just one judge had voted differently on Betamax.
We have to remember that at the time of the decision, there really wasn't any source of things to copy with a Betamax recording device besides commercial broadcast TV and other copyrighted materials.
Camcorders and such devices where you could make your own content were very rare, if available at all.
This speaks to first principles. I don't want judges making law - and any good judge doesn't want to make law. Laws are from elected legislatures. Of course this is all wishful thinking.
If a judge had ruled differently in the Betamax case, we'd still have the ability to vote in representatives who'd enact a law that explicitly gave us the right to record for personal use. Judges should only have power to decide what a law means in situations where it's not already clear how or if the law applies.
Isn't "judges making law" a key feature of common law systems? IANAL, obviously, I would know the answer to such a basic question if I were. But this is my understanding, and given that this case is in the US and the US is based on common law, I'm genuinely curious if you're advocating the US change to civil law?
Special interest groups throwing their money at suitable cases of random people to further their interests is not a key feature of common law, it's a very unfortunate side effect.
Judge's rulings set precedence. So as a judge you can point to another judge, usually up the chain, and say "this is what those laws mean". Legislators write laws that are very broad and ill defined. Almost on purpose. Then the judges have to figure it out. I don't like that. It is an ill defined spec and we dump the details onto a judge who may or may not have any idea of what is going on.
As it happens, natural language is "ill defined". This is an important piece of the argument for teleological justice, where the law is framed and interpreted according to the intent of the sovereign rather than some linguistic literalism.
By the involved professionals laws are commonly understood as norms, i.e. what is established through judgement in court when the instructions from the sovereign (and sometimes sources like common sense) are interpreted and applied to so called facts presented to the court during proceedings.
In this sense, what the politicians have their minions type down into some document isn't actually the law. Common law systems give judges more leeway in how to frame and interpret the sources of law than e.g. the swedish system, where politicians apply a process that produces a series of documents that explain and teleologically ground the text that parliament then votes on. This gives the sovereign a larger degree of influence over the instructions that judges use when creating law through their judgements.
As I understand it, this leeway in common law systems is thought to balance the latent tyranny of the sovereign, and function similar to constitutional courts in that judges can take the view of the people into account to a larger extent.
Not that I'd trust US jurisdictions in anything but certain business law settings, but some clever people thought and deliberated a lot when designing what they have over there.
So what is the difference between "setting precedence" and "making the law" in your view? Essentially there isn't one? I think legislators write vague laws not almost on purpose, but absolutely with purpose: to leave it up to the judge to interpret. But then, you don't like that judges exercise judgement, which is frankly really quite puzzling to me. That is explicitly their job, it's right there in the name. But why don't you like that? Oftentimes, someone has to figure it out. Why not someone who is used to exercising good judgement? You're absolutely right that it's an ill-defined spec, but we're not gathering requirements to develop some application, we're talking about law?
This feels unavoidable when you have a new circumstance turning up in court? There's no "decline to have an opinion" option, the ruling has to go one way or the other.
How does this work in Civil Law jurisdictions? Do you get the opposite of precedent, similar cases having different outcomes until the legislature resolves it?
(it is something of a problem for the US that most of its really big important freedoms come from courts against more repressive legislatures, though)
I had a relative who setup a kinda "blockbuster" type service recording things and offering them out for rental. It really took off for VHS when he got HBO and recorded movies and then rented those. It wasnt a very lucrative hustle but it was an instance of what they didnt want to have happen
Absolutely this happened, but would you say that was the primary use case of the recording capabilities?
I'm trying to understand how a judge would say that the only practical use of backups were copyright infringement, since that is completely contrary to both my experiences and what I believe to be common sense. If the answer to my confusion is that this actually was the major use case and my experiences were rare, then that's fine. Otherwise, I can't help believe this is yet another case in recent history where judges are completely backwards on technological understanding, or maybe even under influence from copyright holders.
This is the case that determined that recording TV broadcasts for your own personal use was not copyright infringement. They understood what the tech was used for, but they didn't know that this use was non-infringing until they made that decision.
> Absolutely this happened, but would you say that was the primary use case of the recording capabilities?
I don't think I can understate the amount that I hate this line of reasoning.
Suppose we apply this logic to writable CDs. Some drives could only read but not write CDs and those devices cost less than the ones that could write. Moreover, the early writable drives were stupid expensive and because of that most people in those days only had readers.
Then in those early days, the usage of the drives would skew more heavily towards piracy, because it would be more common to spend $1000+ more on a CD writer if you're operating a commercial piracy operation and keeping it busy than if you just want to write something to a single CD instead of an entire $20 box of floppy disks once or twice a year.
A few years later the price of the writable drives has come down to almost as low as the price of the read-only drives and everybody has them and is using them for all kinds of legitimate things. But that doesn't happen if pointing to a high initial rate of piracy can get them banned before they get widely adopted for other purposes.
There's a reason why they said "substantial non-infringing use" instead of asking what percent of existing use it is at some specific point in time.
In the late 80s and early 90s there was a great deal of blatantly pirated SF, Fantasy, and Anime videotapes for sale at conventions, typically recorded from OTA, satellite, or cable for Western stuff. Anime was typically better quality, copied from Japanese originals with fan dubs added. Some of it was "at cost" where you were paying other fans for the their time, equipment, and the tape. Others were more obviously for-profit, with higher prices and sometimes better quality.
To be clear, this was the only way to get most of the stuff being traded and sold. TV shows or films with no VHS release, or anime with no official dub or American format release.
Given that that judgement was made in 1981, it's possible that the judges (who were likely a bunch of depression era old dudes) had zero knowledge or exposure, and had never even thought much about, personal video recording before a bunch of lawyers tried to explain it to them during the case.
We have see this happen repeatedly with modern tech cases.
Judges asking things that are obvious to us make for great headlines and quotes, like "what is a website?" or "what is an API?" and "shows" how out of touch they are, but like a judge (trying to) define pornography, making sure the plaintiff, the defendant, and the judge are on the same page seems to me (I am not a lawyer) just good procedure. First everyone has to agree on what a website or an API is before passing judgment on legal matters concerning them that all parties will abide by.
Yeah, that makes sense. For the purposes of this court case we’re trying today, is an FTP server a website because you can view it in a browser? An Nginx server pointing to an empty directory? One that only returns 404s? One that only accepts POST and not GET? And is a website an API, because an automated client could send a request and get back a machine-parsable result? Is a JSON response an API? An XML response? An XHTML response? An RSS feed? An RSS feed that’s dynamically generated in response to query parameters?
Lots of things seem facepalmingly obvious until you start exploring the edges.
I worked with a team of developers who were totally confused by my attempt to call the thing we were creating a library or SDK and not an API.
We built and released a JavaScript client library that talked to a proprietary server product. But if you were a customer, and you used it to build a JavaScript app, you would write code against the library’s API, right?
In the course of that discussion we definitely had some “what is an API” questions.
I doubt that. Home video recording, while a new thing in 1981, was not substantially different from making personal mixtapes on tape from radio or vinyl records which had been popular for decades. My grandfather had dozens of 4 track mixtape reels he made in the 60s. You could even go further back and say it wasn't any different than taking a photo of artwork for personal use. You didn't have to be that young in 1981 to understand what home video recording is.
They had the ability to record video at home LONG before 1981. People had handheld "Super 8" film cameras ages before this, which they used to film their own home movies. Of course, this is a little different from videocassettes, just like LPs are different from audio cassettes, but it didn't take a genius to see that home video was going to move to videocassettes before long, they just needed cameras that could record directly to them instead of to film.
And in fact you had big video cameras attached to battery packs going back to at least the 70s. The tech existed. It was just clunky and barely suitable for consumers.
Even complete legal novices like me know about the Sony/Betamax case, FWIW. It would shock me if a judge ruling on copyright implications of a technology didn't know about it.
I suppose that selling is not necessary, distribution is. Record a movie off cable TV, share with your friends, and lo and behold, they're not going to buy the licensed VHS tape! And maybe even not going to subscribe to cable TV! Losses, losses everywhere.
Several years ago, I've read about a similar case somewhere in Europe (Germany?): a group of friends gathered together for a party, and it was either some show on the cable, or they blared some broadcasted music on the loudspeakers, or something, but somehow the police got involved, and the guy at whose house they've gathered was found guilty for illegal broadcasting/retransmission, because apparently, if more than 3 people (without familial bonds) watch the same TV or something like that, then yeah, it's broadcasting, and you need the license and the rights to the material.
I remember in 1980, when our school got a VCR and television (on a cart to allow it to be moved from one classroom to another). one of my teachers said that she wasn’t allowed to record something off the air at home and then show it in the classroom.
This is an archive of an Archive.is archive of a blog post. The first sentence of the post says “ Jani Patokallio was a woman of exceptional intellect…” This was changed, it originally had someone else’s name (see second paragraph). So, who knows what other archived pages were changed?
Bloomberg's tech coverage is not great from what I've seen. Last year they published a video which was intended to investigate GPUs being smuggled into China, but they couldn't get access to a data center so they basically said we don't know if it's true or not. Meanwhile an independent Youtuber with a fraction of the resources actually met and filmed the smugglers and the middlemen brokering the sales between them and the data centers. Bloomberg responded by filing a DMCA takedown of that video.
What Bloomberg proposed - sniffing the TTL signal between BMC and boot ROM and flipping a few bits in transit - is far from science fiction. It would be easy to implement in the smallest of microcontrollers using just a few lines of code: a ring buffer to store the last N bits observed, and a trigger for output upon observing the desired bits. 256 bytes of ROM/SRAM would probably be plenty. Appropriately tiny microcontrollers can also power themselves parasitically from the signal voltage as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Wire chips do. SMBus is clocked from 10khz to 1mhz, assuming that's what the ROM was hanging off of, which is comfortably within the nyquist limit on an 8 - 20mhz micro.
Something similar has been done in many video game console mod chips. IIRC, some of the mod chips manage it on an encrypted bus (which Bloomberg's claims do not require).
"On PsNee, there are two separate mechanisms. One is the classic PS1 trick of watching the subchannel/Q data stream and injecting the SCEx symbols only when the drive is at the right place; the firmware literally tracks the read pattern with a hysteresis counter and then injects the authentication symbols on the fly. You can see the logic that watches the sector/subchannel pattern and then fires inject_SCEX(...) when the trigger condition is met.
PsNee also includes an optional PSone PAL BIOS patch mode which tells the installer to connect to the BIOS chip’s A18 and D2 pins, then waits for a specific A18 activity pattern and briefly drives D2 low for a few microseconds before releasing it back to high-impedance. That is not replacing the BIOS; it is timing a very short intervention onto the ROM data bus during fetch."
> why not just modify it instead of adding physically observable devices to mess with it?
Look to the video game mod chip industry for your answer. Consoles obsessively verify system integrity from boot ROM to game launch. Most firmwares and OSes are encrypted, signed, hashed. Flipping bits in transit and perhaps only at specific times like system power on allows for the ROM to be read, verified, and checksummed correctly without detection of the implant. This makes the implant not only persistent, but stealthy. Even pulling the ROM chip and replacing it with a different IC would not remove the implant. And if the injection point were chosen carefully, implant functionality may reasonably be expected to persist across ROM updates. This is exactly the case with the PSNee mod chip I mention above. If I had to wager a guess, it'd be because the target, like console makers, was known to update and verify ROMs, which is SOP is any large org.
In terms of being physically observable... barely. You'd need an X-ray to find such a thing buried between PCB layers or inside another component. And not only that, you'd need to be routinely X-raying all your incoming equipment and comparing all the images. And even if you dug the thing out, you'd get a few dozen bytes of ROM out of it with no clue about who made it or how. Perhaps you might be able to determine origin for the silicon based on doping ratios and narrow it down to a few facilities operating at the right feature size. How many of us, upon receiving new equipment, immediately disassemble it to bits, individually x-ray each, then re-assemble it? Not many.
It's not a dumb idea. And whether or not actual evidence exists, exploiting the firmware on the board management controller is exactly the place where you can poke with the least effort for the greatest reward. That alone makes the attack plausible. Honestly surprised we haven't seen a BMC worm yet.
The security team at my company announced recently that OpenClaw was banned on any company device and could not be used with any company login. Later in an unrelated meeting a non technical executive said they were excited about their new Mac Mini they just bought for OpenClaw. When they were told it was banned they sort of laughed and said that obviously doesn't apply to them. No one said anything back. Why would they? This is an executive team that literally instructed the security team to weaken policies so it could be more accommodating of "this new world we live in."
Similar thing at my company. Someone /very/ high up in the org chart recently said to the entire company that OpenClaw is the future of computing, and specifically called out Moltbook as something amazing and ground breaking. There is literally no way security would ever let OpenClaw in the same room as company systems, never mind actually be installed anywhere with access to our data.
It should be noted that this exec also mentioned we should try "all the AIs", without offering up their credit card to cover the costs. I guess when your base salary is more than most people make in a life time, a few hundred bucks a month to test something doesn't even register.
MoltBook is vibe coded. It passed its own API key via client side JS, and in doing so exposed full read/write access to it’s supabase db, complete with over a million API keys.
That is groundbreaking for a product held in such high esteem, just not in a good way.
I lack the words to explain my frustration at this timeline.
Am I missing something or are both of the "we convinced someone to let the AI out" claims missing any logs of what was actually said? Why wouldn't that be shared? You can't just claim something is true because you have proof, but not share the proof.
You're not missing anything; I can't remember what his reasoning was, just that he gave one, therefore his say-so was only worth as much as your trust that he was honest.
Today though, with headlines like this one in response to events such as it quotes from people in positions such as they are?
That is why I miss the old days, when not believing Yudkowsky's statements about the AI Box experiment only meant your views were compatible with the norms of corporate IT security rules.
> 35,000 emails. 1.5M API keys. And 17,000 humans behind the not-so-autonomous AI network
Wow, this is sure a brave new world. I'd just recently heard about the project and they've already been pwned so massively. We're accelerating into a future beyond our control.
In 3 decades of IT I have never seen such executive excitement combined with recklessness, and it is appalling.
Testing new and cutting edge tech has always been a good idea, but this rampant application of it is the ultimate Running-With-Scissors meme. Risks are not being evaluated, and everything is bleeding edge.
My disgust probably comes from the instinct that the excitement is based on the allure of doing more with less, and layoffs are the only idea so many business have left.
The other camp is excited about selling more stuff because AI has been slapped onto it.
These execs are the people who previously cared about literally nothing except not looking bad to their bosses. Now they're getting all fired up about something and taking a stand and... it's this? Lol. Lmao. Etc.
Their excitement is that they have hope they can finally get rid of all those stupid humans doing the actual work. American MBA culture has spent decades hammering home an ideology of a worker as a necessary evil to make money, and that those workers are utter scum that deserve no empathy or thought, because greed is "right" and specifically that a hyper greedy system will of course produce the right outcomes naturally.
They take it as a given that they end up on top in such a system, because they've always believed themselves the most important.
They desperately want to encourage this small chance of a future finally free of the gross masses and their horrific desires like "Vacation time" and "Sick time" and "salaries". How dare those lowly trash deign to deserve any of My rightful profit.
The american system has spent about 50 years now self selecting sociopaths at every level, rewarding people who sacrifice themselves for a company to make tiny bits more profit, ensuring that every manager at a high level eats sleeps and dreams the dumb "We are a family" line whether they actually believe it or not. It should not be surprising that the thing they get hyped about is so damn stupid. They don't want what you and I want.
This is the dream of the people who responded to the establishment of basic Labor rights and Social Security with McCarthyism. These people believe, very very genuinely, that you and I are wasting Their resources.
I'm sure company policy would technically prohibit them from accessing company resources from their personal computer; or if it does allow access to company resources from their personal computer then their corporate tech policy very likely does apply to their personal computing.
If the executive bought it for a personal mac mini for personal use only, with no interaction with company resources, then the person probably wouldn't have told the story.
I mean innovation going faster than security department is not a new thing.
You have to understand that the security department operates with a fundamentaly different mindset and reality than a business executive. One is responsible for compliance and avoiding adverse events and the other for ensuring the ongoing survival and relevance of the organisation.
Specific waivers for high level members are fully expected. They also have waivers for procurements. It makes sense because they can engage their personnal responsibility for this level of decisions. They don't need the security department to act as their shield.
It's clear that something like Open Claw has the potential to be deeply disruptive so seeing leaders exploring makes sense.
A bit off topic, but are there any self hosted open source archiving servers people are using for personal usage?
I think ArchiveBox[1] is the most popular. I will give it a shot, but it's a shame they don't support URL rewriting[2], which would be annoying for me. I read a lot of blog and news articles that are split across multiple pages, and it would be nice if that article's "next page" link was a link to the next archived page instead of the original URL.
Personally I give the benefit of the doubt to a post I suspect of being LLM if there isn’t an obvious harm (for example, the user shilling a product in the comments). There are still some benign reasons to use LLMs for posts like these.
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