Daily Archives: 2024-06-21

Article note: Yeah, unfortunate, but that was pretty much inevitable. The only way it makes sense is if they're trying to make a larger case (socially and/or legally) about the unbalanced state of copyright. Hopefully it doesn't cause problems for the larger IA operation, because it's become essential infrastructure.

Enlarge (credit: Tim Macpherson | Image Source)

As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles.

IA reported in a blog post this month that publishers abruptly forcing these takedowns triggered a "devastating loss" for readers who depend on IA to access books that are otherwise impossible or difficult to access.

To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court's decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA's controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law. An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library's lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA's lending than by preventing it.

Article note: A buffer overflow in the interaction between common implementations of UEFI - an unnecessarily ugly and complicated bootloader firmware - and the TPM - a security enclave add-on that appears to cause more vulerabilities than it prevents - leads to potential widespread pwnage. I could have written that description basically any month in the last decade.

Article note: As I've now been saying for years, my body is ready for AI Winter 3.0. The useless bullshit brought about by FOMO and hype has _wildly_ outstripped the useful advances.