Matt Edwards

From the decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive (opinion pdf, h/t TechDirt) published the other week: To be sure, expanding access to knowledge would, in a general sense, benefit the public. “But [a]ny copyright infringer may claim to benefit the public by increasing public access to the copyrighted work.” Harper & Row, 471 U.S. at 569. That does not alone render the infringement lawful. Indeed, the Copyright Act and its empowering constitutional authority reflect a considered judgment that “the Progress of Science and useful Arts” is best promoted by laws that protect authors’ original works and permit authors to set the terms of engagement, at least for a limited time. See Sony, 464 U.S. at 429. Doing so benefits the public “by providing rewards for authorship.” Google Books, 804 F.3d at 212. This monopolistic power is a feature, not a bug, of the Copyright Act. ...

John Gruber at Daring Fireball: But I’m also sure their exist other users who don’t quite know what a web browser is, don’t know that the browser they’re currently using — and perhaps have been using for over a decade — is named “Safari”, and won’t know how to undo a mistake they might make on this browser choice screen. Emphasis mine. Larger points being made by this article aside1, the idea that there exist “users who don’t quite know what a web browser is” baffled me. Good user interface design does not hide the concept of a “web browser” from the user. ...

Nolen Royalty built something very cool: On June 26th 2024, I launched a website called One Million Checkboxes (OMCB). It had one million global checkboxes on it - checking (or unchecking) a box changed it for everyone on the site, instantly. What a nifty idea. Flippant and fun, this is the sort of website I miss and think1 I can recall from my college years (late 2000’s into 2010’s). ...

Ian Carroll writing on his blog: The KCM [Known Crew Member] process is fairly simple: the employee uses the dedicated lane and presents their KCM barcode or provides the TSA agent their employee number and airline. Various forms of ID need to be presented while the TSA agent’s laptop verifies the employment status with the airline. If successful, the employee can access the sterile area without any screening at all. ...

Craig Hockenberry writing on his blog Furbo.org: As these generative technologies get better, you will be less likely to trust what appears in your search results. This change will happen at an exponential rate thanks to slop being generated from other slop. […] The human component of the web won’t change. People will need answers that they can trust. Folks on the web are also resourceful; they always have been. ...

Although it was published back in February of this year, I recently listened to this four-part podcast series on the sudden rise and subsequent fall of demand for cycling during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Fascinating listening with excellent sourcing from industry insiders and bicycle shop owners. ...

The other day I was unable to decrypt a few of my Ansible Vault encrypted host_var files in a playbook. As best I can tell, the problem was related to my use of an executable vault-password-file and the 1Password CLI for fetching passwords. Follow along for a frightening story and some interesting technical tidbits. Background on how I stored Vault passwords I rely on Ansible Vault to encrypt sensitive data in my homelab Ansible playbooks. I stored the Vault password in 1Password, and retrieve it using the 1Password command line interface (CLI). ...

Last Friday the endpoint security company CrowdStrike had a little oopsie: On July 19, 2024 at 04:09 UTC, as part of ongoing operations, CrowdStrike released a sensor configuration update to Windows systems. Sensor configuration updates are an ongoing part of the protection mechanisms of the Falcon platform. This configuration update triggered a logic error resulting in a system crash and blue screen (BSOD) on impacted systems. The sensor configuration update that caused the system crash was remediated on Friday, July 19, 2024 05:27 UTC. ...

Need to spin up some virtual machine’s using Proxmox / QEMU? Below is my approach for using a cloud-init Debian image to make the creation of those VM’s nice and simple. Create the template VM image Start with a cloud-specific image. Each distribution has it’s own set of these. For Debian, you can find them at https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/. Read the instructions on that page for which image to download. I’m using the generic Debian 12 Bookworm image for an Intel (AMD64) processor in the qcow2 format. ...

Excellent reporting here by Ben Sandofsky about the fall of coding school / boot-camp Lamda School. In the past, I had believed in the idea of Income Share Agreements (ISAs) which allowed a student to effectively sell “equity” in themselves in exchange for an education. Once the education was complete and the student landed a job, they would pay back X% of their income for Y years up to a maximum cap of $Z. This was in contrast to taking out a loan which would be a fixed dollar amount and have to be re-paid regardless of what that student ended up earning post-graduation. ...