I don't think e.g. NordVPN has any offices in France, but in theory the French authorities could tell French ISPs to block access to nordvpn.com (and all other Nord domains), though I'm not sure if the law applies to "secondary services" (instead of ordering ISPs to block domains that offer pirated sports streams, they'd be told to block domains that offer a service to circumvent the block).
I believe Russia is doing it like this, trying to connect to a VPN provider's website will fail - interestingly NordVPN's app uses SSO to login, so blocking their main site would block the app's ability to log in.
Every VPS provider is "a service to circumvent the block" because you can configure one as a VPN in around 30 seconds, and these are all just legitimate foreign companies many of which use Cloudflare or other shared IP services for their own websites. Are you going to block AWS and Azure and everything on them because US-region instances don't implement French website blocks? You've gone from blocking a couple of pirate sites to blocking >95% of the internet.
> Are you going to block AWS and Azure and everything on them because US-region instances don't implement French website blocks
*French shrug*
I guess their idea is to just make it obnoxious enough for casual users. At the moment a French resident wanting to watch these games without paying can just install VPN, connect to it, and watch the pirate streams. If the VPN providers are forced to comply, having a VPS is still a viable option, but for a casual user it's complicated enough that it might be enough to significantly reduce the number of pirate-stream watchers.
Then again, because of Internet censorship in e.g. China, Iran and Russia, there are several services designed for a 1-click install of a personal VPN on a VPS...
> I guess their idea is to just make it obnoxious enough for casual users.
This is always the excuse, but how does that ever work? People want to be able to do it, technical people know how to do it, non-technical people ask them to do it for them. If the number of non-technical people is large, a single one the technical people will make a one-click installer to automate it so they don't have to keep doing it manually for people, and then the inconvenience is gone for everyone.
The companies peddling this stuff are desperate to rationalize that it can do any good. A million games will have DRM and their customers will hate it and they'll collectively lose billions of dollars by inconveniencing legitimate customers or have people pirating their stuff out of spite when they would have actually bought it. Then some game doesn't get cracked for a while because it's a statistical anomaly or it's just not very popular and nobody bothers and they get to congratulating themselves without ever considering how many of the people who didn't pirate that game actually bought it instead of just pirating a different one, or if the number of people who bought it is smaller than the number of sales they lost through destruction of goodwill -- for not only that game but also all the games that were cracked right away.
And then they double down with this kind of website blocking overreach where they're unapologetically causing collateral damage to innocent people as if to demonstrate just how little they care about anything but the dubious pretense that it was worth it.
I think it's more likely they put pressure on Visa, Mastercard and French banks. If their choice is severing the relationship with Nord VPN versus the entirety of France, they'll choose the former. Losing Visa access would be very bad for Nord's business, so I think they'd rather comply.
The VPN provider could obviously just accept cryptocurrency from users in France, so is the theory that France is going to threaten Visa with not accepting Visa anywhere in France if Visa doesn't block foreign VPN providers in foreign countries from accepting Visa from foreign users? How would even that be effective, since you would only need one VPN service to choose "stop accepting Visa"?
It's interesting how the debate is transferable to other topics. In theory maths should be able to be broken down to its basic components and be proven to be all true, or if something is false, then the whole thing collapses. But in practice things like this become so complex that it becomes a matter of conviction, influenced by things like ego.
Now imagine taking something like biology and vaccines. What happens if you rely on your experts and other rely on theirs, and they disagree?
>>In theory maths should be able to be broken down to its basic components and be proven to be all true, or if something is false, then the whole thing collapses.
>>But in practice things like this become so complex that it becomes a matter of conviction, influenced by things like ego.
Isn't this like doing a bunch of AND , OR operations?
How does ego become a factor here? Either an expression evaluates to true or false. There are only two outcomes, why is there a confusion here.
That's true, but in practice mathematicians rarely check a proof to that level of detail. In fact, they rarely write a proof at that level of detail. There just isn't enough time to do that for every result/review, so people take shortcuts. Most of the time it's fine because trained mathematicians take good shortcuts, but sometimes things slip through.
Yeah, it's true, there is politics in mathematical truth, for better or worse. That is slowly changing with the adoption of proof assistants, I think. A lot of well-known names (like Tao and Conrad for instance) are starting to formalise large swathes of modern maths in Lean, for instance. Perhaps it will never get to a point where it is so easy that formal proof is required to publish a result, but who knows? It seems like a start.
I feel like the Dems need to be doing a lot of PR, the public needs to hear them attack the Low-IQ autocrat every day. Maybe they're doing this but the media aren't reporting it, in which case they need to engage with the media better...
Without this engagement, even if it's just futile noisemaking, the voters will surely think in the next election cycle "why should we vote for you, when you haven't done anything the last 2 years?"
Where are Dems supposed to make this noise? They don't have 120 million subscribers like Joe Rogan does.
Where is the bullhorn the democrats are supposed to be using that isn't literally owned by a rich guy who benefits from lower taxes when the democrats are not in power?
The right did not grow their propagandists and build their bullhorn overnight. They have been planning and moving their chess pieces for decades. Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, Laura Ingraham... This network and its audience was carefully and strategically built and cultivated over at least 40 years. It's going to take actual planning, hard work, and long hours for the other side to catch up.
What do you see as "the media"? The media landscape is so fractured, everyone has their own "feed".
I have seen Dems constantly attacking Trump, if you haven't consider the news you consume may simply be different. There is not one mainstream to push anymore.
My main media is Reddit, Youtube, and a few other sites so I do in fact see some fight coming out of the D's. There should be much more given the severity of these various issues, but I see some hope. It is sad that legacy media has almost completely given up on reporting most of this stuff, though.
as for the "mainstream social media", I'm not sure how effective the instagrams, tiktoks, etc. are at delivering these messages. I know some congressmen on are on there. Perhaps not enough, though. Or perhaps they don't get how to reach their people.
> In a .js file, each character is UTF-16 (2 bytes).
What? I'd like to challenge this. The in-memory representation of a character may be UTF-16, but the file on disk can be UTF-8. Also UTF-16 doesn't mean "2 bytes per character": https://stackoverflow.com/a/27794229
At the weekend, I was at a small town which had a half a mile long main road blocked off for a market day. They put up bollards to do so.
Chances are, there were 0 persons planning a car attack on it. So there was an element of "We don't think anything's going to happen, but if it were to happen, we're prepared.". A bit like having a fire extinguisher when there's never been a fire.
But would seeing the bollards also have the effect of discouraging the insane people of the idea of driving the car through the crowds the next time a market day is held?
Oppositely, if they didn't put up any barriers, a psychopath seeing this and the realization that cars can be weapons might give them the idea of "I know what I can do for my act of terrorism..."
So the interesting question is to what extent the Iranian derived Hezbollah "garage rockets" (very poor guidance, CEP is basically "somewhere in Israel", but extremely cheap and require only smugglable parts) can be combined by some power with Ukrainian style precision guidance.
Well, this week proves that range and velocity limitation can be overcome if you ship them near to their destination in small boxes ahead of time. This wasn't really an option with cruise missiles.
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