441–450 of 538 posts
The Github repo (which was working for me until 5 mins ago) just 404'ed. https://github.com/PixelMelt/amazon_book_downloader Kind of expected, but I was surprised at how quick that was.
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So it can refer to people and what is in their minds too? Anyway I'm not surprised. This kind of pedantry is what lawyers do for a living.
Yes kind of. The "born secret" doctrine says all knowledge related to the creation of nuclear weapons, ranging from nuclear fusion to the production of fissile material, as “born classified". The doctrine has never been tested in court as no case involving it has gone to trail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret
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I was on the team that wrote this code. We knew it was reverse-engineerable, we just didn't care. Upper management seemed happy enough that it was pretty obfuscated, and we were happy that they didn't force us to do more about it.
But you still did it. With awful consequences discussed in this thread. Couldn't you have done less about it ? Do you tell yourself "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" ? Did they force you to do it, then ? Was it worth it ?
I definitely have regrets about my time working at Amazon. Specifically, I wish that I had pushed back more about doing certain things.
Honestly, DRM wasn't even the worst. All the unnecessary user tracking was way worse, in my opinion.
Its impossible to know for sure, because I didn't push back as much as I should have, but I really think that "well if I hadn't, the next person would've" was absolutely true in this case (knowing what I know about all the other engineers that were in the department at the same time as me). I'm not saying the other engineers were bad people, a lot of them were lovely but they definitely had different convictions than I have.
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Remember when it was illegal to export strong cryptography from the US? There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up. It basically went like this: Problem: we can't make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal -> what actually IS illegal to export? -> munitions! -> let's just declare that cryptography is "munitions" -> problem solved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_fr…
> There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up. That's a rather facetious interpretation. You're complaining that there was no law preventing software being distributed, and as there was a need to prevent that then lawmakers fixed that problem. That's hardly surprising, isn't it? You also seem surprised that including cryptography software in existing lists designed to prevent export of military…
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Remember when it was illegal to export strong cryptography from the US? There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up. It basically went like this: Problem: we can't make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal -> what actually IS illegal to export? -> munitions! -> let's just declare that cryptography is "munitions" -> problem solved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_fr…
Do you also remember the researcher Philip Zimmerman’s hack to get around the cryptography-is-munitions edict? The source code to PGP was published by MIT Press as a book that just happened to be in a format suitable for OCR. That framing made it into a First Amendment issue, one the researchers were confident they’d win in court. https://archive.org/details/pgpsourcecodeint0000zimm
DRM should be illegal. This shit sucks so much.
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Do you also remember the researcher Philip Zimmerman’s hack to get around the cryptography-is-munitions edict? The source code to PGP was published by MIT Press as a book that just happened to be in a format suitable for OCR. That framing made it into a First Amendment issue, one the researchers were confident they’d win in court. https://archive.org/details/pgpsourcecodeint0000zimm
My university had that book, I think it can be used as a weapon actually, given its weight.
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My university had that book, I think it can be used as a weapon actually, given its weight.
I wonder what kind of gun uses books as munition.
I have 3 rules: 1. If possible, buy from the author directly (I mostly read tech books, so that's often an option). 2. Otherwise buy from elsewhere, without DRM. 3. If all other options fail, buy from Amazon but immediately download a DRM-free copy from libgen and use that. This is both ethical and practical.
How is paying for a DRMed book ethical? I agree that buying a DRM free book is clearly right, but if someone is only providing a book in a way that infringes on your rights, why would you give them money for that? If someone sells a book that you want to read and you have the money to pay for it, by all means, buy it. But if you are unable to buy the book because the author decided to publish it in a way so that you…