I’m 95% sure the settlement with the publishers would have included a clause requiring the Internet Archive to delete all “infringing” material in their possession.

I have mixed feelings. I’m glad they survived the lawsuits, and now they can spend their funding on their actual goals rather than it going towards lawyers.

On the other hand, it’s really sad that they had to delete so much of their archive - over half a million books, and a bunch of recordings from their Great 78 Project (which was archiving 300k+ music albums released between ~1900 and 1950). A lot of the things that can’t be archived are eventually going to become lost media.

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This is a great post that I hadn’t seen before. Thanks for the link!

I feel the same about software development. For personal projects, I’ll often use a technology stack I’m very familiar with, like C# and MySQL on a Debian Linux server. Maybe not the fanciest, but they’re proven, reliable technologies that have been around for a long time, and will likely still be around a long time from now.

New frameworks, libraries, and languages pop up all the time, but some of the ecosystems move way too quickly. I have some Node.js sites I built years ago that I can’t even run any more without major changes.

Relevant: https://www.expatsoftware.com/articles/happiness-is-a-boring-stack.html

I wish there was a law stipulating that smart devices must allow for local control. That’d never happen in the USA (since companies couldn’t make as much money selling the data, and we can’t hurt the poor companies’ revenue streams), but maybe it’s happen in Europe one day.

My guess would be that you’ve logged into all of the accounts in the same browser, and thus they all shared a common cookie or something similar (like LocalStorage) at some point. It’s a common tactic sites use to mark multiple accounts as being operated by the same person.

I’ve never used Arch yet still use their wiki quite a lot.

deeply sane

I hope somebody describes me like this one day.

It was a feature built in to the web browser, providing a website, file sharing, a music player, a photo sharing tool, chat, a whiteboard, a guestbook, and some other features.

All you needed to do was open the browser and forward a port, or let UPnP do it (since everyone still had UPnP enabled back then), and you’d get a .operaunite.com subdomain that anyone could access, which would hit the web server built into the browser.

This was back in 2008ish, when Opera was still good (before it was converted to be Chromium-powered). A lot of people still used independent blogs back then, rather than everything being on social media, so maybe it was ahead of its time a bit.

“cloud” still mostly means services like AWS and Google Cloud. People don’t refer to Hetzner dedicated servers as “cloud” for example.

I’m sad that Opera Unite failed. It was the closest thing to self-hosting for regular non-technical people.

They should say at least one thing that’s unique to the cloud, though.

The article is very confusingly written. Maybe AI? It’s conflating “cloud” hosting (AWS, etc) with renting hosting infrastructure (which includes the cloud, but also things we don’t refer to as “cloud”, like dedicated servers, VPS services, and shared hosting).

This paragraph makes it sound like Amazon were the first company to allow renting their servers:

As companies such as Amazon matured in their own ability to offer what’s known as “software as a service” over the web, they started to offer others the ability to rent their virtual servers for a cost as well.

but Linux-based virtual servers have been a thing for 20+ years or so, first with Linux-VServer then with OpenVZ. Shared servers in general date back to the mainframes of the 60s and 70s.

Similarly, this paragraph makes it sound like the only two choices are either to use “the cloud” or to run your own data center:

Cloud computing enables a pay-as-you-go model similar to a utility bill, rather than the huge upfront investment required to purchase, operate and manage your own data centre.

Ah, yes, the WallStreetBets approach.

I like Notepad++. It can handle anything you throw at it.

I switched to Linux (Fedora with KDE) and I like KWrite for similar reasons.

The current UI is very different to the original UI though.

Some Windows apps do handle it properly. For example, if you have an archive open in 7-zip and try to delete it, Windows Explorer should correctly tell you that it’s open in 7-Zip. I’m not sure why it doesn’t work that way for all apps.

Definitely going to fill this out once I get some free time. What will the data be used for?

might be rolling in it in a couple years

Doubtful given 70-90% of startups fail.