Today in Youtube's joke of a fair-use appeal process

8 months ago
Hey, remember nine years ago, when I was working on a screen saver and I reviewed all nine Hellraiser movies and made a supercut of every on-screen appearance of the Lament Configuration?

And remember how, as soon as I posted it, it was immediately blocked with seven content-ID matches?

And remember how I filed a DMCA dispute, because this video -- made of dozens of 5 second clips from these films for the purpose of analyzing the special-effects techniques that went into them -- is clearly fair use?

And remember how that claim was summarily rejected, and I filed a counter-claim?

And remember how, four and a half months later, YouTube finally said, "Oh, gosh, you were right all along" and restored the video?

Well now it's nine years later, and what comes next might surprise you:

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

25 Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,
Current Music: Bow Wow Wow -- C30, C60, C90, Go ♬

Mike Johnson Admits He and His Son Monitor Each Other's Porn Intake

8 months ago
This is pretty kinky, man. It's like giving your partner the key to the "purity ring" locked around your genitals. Where by "partner" I mean "17 year old son".

"I'm proud to tell ya, my son has got a clean slate," Speaker of the House says of his "accountability partner".

The Louisiana representative talked about how he installed "accountability software" called Covenant Eyes on his devices in order to abstain from internet porn and other unsavory websites.

"It scans all the activity on your phone, or your devices, your laptop, what have you; we do all of it," Johnson told the panel about the app.

"It sends a report to your accountability partner. My accountability partner right now is Jack, my son. He's 17. So he and I get a report about all the things that are on our phones, all of our devices, once a week. If anything objectionable comes up, your accountability partner gets an immediate notice. I'm proud to tell ya, my son has got a clean slate."

Outside of the creepy Big Brother-ness of it all, Receipt Maven also aired concerns about whether Covenant Eyes -- which is still a working subscription-based service -- might "compromise" Johnson's devices, if he's still actively seeking accountability.

It's a rootkit. You can just say rootkit.

Update: From Violet's security roundup:

The app “takes screenshots (at least one per minute, in the case of Covenant Eyes) and eavesdrop[s] on web traffic,” and captures every single piece of web content, including hashtag searches (per, WIRED, this includes words like “gay” and LGBTQIA+ content).

We don’t know exactly how long Johnson has used Covenant Eyes (potentially since the early 2000’s). But it’s really neat to think about the fact that an election-denying insurrectionist has had spyware installed on his phone and/or desktop that is so thorough it screenshots every minute and then sends that data to the Covenant Eyes servers, and emails out the highlights. It also poses a national security problem, but that’s crystal-clear.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

26 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Current Music: Purity Ring -- Ungirthed ♬

All my apes are blind

8 months ago
Web3 is Going Just Great: "All this time I thought the lasers were going in the other direction."

Bored Ape collectors attending an ApeFest party in Hong Kong have now been subjected to the kind of eye pain the rest of us have felt for years having to look at their hideous, pricey JPEGs.

The going theory is that event organizers skimped on lighting costs by using UV lights intended for sanitization, not for entertainment, causing burns to the eyes and skin. The eye condition, photokeratitis, is better known as "snow blindness" or "welder's flash", as it more typically affects people who haven't worn proper eye protection while welding or while exposed to sunlight reflected from ice and snow.

Several attendees reported having to seek emergency medical treatment after experiencing excruciating eye pain and vision problems, and tweet threads began circulating giving various other ApeFest attendees advice on recovering from the painful condition.

Bored Ape creator Yuga Labs belatedly issued a tweet two days after the incident, claiming only a small fraction of attendees had experienced "eye-related issues", but encouraging anyone with symptoms to "seek medical attention just in case".

Update: Funranium on the Scorched Ape Eye Club:

Having now had a chance to take a look at the likely culprit, assuming a repetition of the previous incident, all I can say is You Completely Irresponsible Fucks. I am having flashbacks to yelling at Naomi Wu for irresponsible deployment of germicidal UV designs in 2020. [...]

This particular lamp is meant to be mounted in a sterilization unit. The kind of thing where you wheel it into a specially designed surgical suite full of equipment SPECIFICALLY CHOSEN such that bleach and UV-C don’t cause them to quickly degrade, shoo the humans out of the room, lock the door, and run it for an hour. [...]

We have to do serious planning for germicidal things to make sure it works. Putting this lamp in the club certainly would have made things fluoresce and look awesome, no question there. But it was also slowly roasting everyone’s corneas, much like being unprotected on the surface of Mars or the Moon. [...]

Trying to sterilize surfaces with UV-C pretty much anywhere outside of a surgical suite is dumb. If we want to reduce airborne transmission, we need to do air sterilization. To effectively do that we need lamps powerful enough to work on air flowing through ducts at speed. We do not want to share space with a UV-C air sterilizer because we like to see with our eyeballs. The UV-C equivalent of the little fly killing lamps aren’t quite gonna cut it, you’re gonna need big fuckers. So, just do it in the HVAC system.

Maybe we’ll stop having Legionella outbreaks too.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

27 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,
Current Music: Screensaver -- Future Trash ♬

ffmpeg weirdness

8 months ago
Dear Lazyweb,

I have a weird MKV file that has 3 chapters in it, but I can only get ffmpeg to extract video from one of them: it can't access the intro or credits.

When playing it in VLC, it by default plays with "Playback / Title / Segment 1 [20:18]" selected, which is the middle part, skipping intro. The "Playback / Chapters" menu is grayed out. If I select "Playback / Title / Segment 0 [23:54]" then "Playback / Chapters" lists all 3 and they are playable.

ffmpeg -i shows: 

  Duration: 00:20:18.72, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 5334 kb/s
  Chapters:
    Chapter #0:0: start 0.000000, end 118.660000
      Metadata:
        title           : Opening
    Chapter #0:1: start 0.000000, end 1218.676000
      Metadata:
        title           : Episode
    Chapter #0:2: start 0.000000, end 96.927000
      Metadata:
        title           : Ending

Note that the overall duration line is 20:18, not 23:54. Extracting any video beginning at 0 starts after the intro and ends before the credits. -map_chapters -1 -map_metadata -1 does not help.

Handbrake shows it as having one "Title" of 3 "Chapters", but shows chapters 1 and 2, "Opening" and "Episode", as starting and ending at 0, and chapter 3, "Ending", going from 0 to 20:18. It cannot extract the intro or credits either. Neither can MakeMKV.

All of the searches for "how to split by chapter using ffmpeg" seem to suggest that these chapter start/end numbers should be non-overlapping and only the first should start at 0.

What's going on and how do I fix it?

Previously, previously.

18 Comments
Tags: , , ,
Current Music: Houses of Heaven -- All Possible Obstacles Are Present ♬

Daylight "Savings", your biannual chaos monkey

8 months ago
In this, The Year Y2K Plus Twenty-Three, MySQL still can't represent times properly. I rediscover this just about every November.

Last night at 1:54 AM (the first one, by which I mean 1699174476) I updated a DATETIME column with "col = NOW()". So did it store 1699174476 in there? It fucking well did not:

    SELECT col ... → 2023-11-05 01:54:36
    SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP(col) ... → 1699178076

That's not 2023-11-05 01:54:36 PDT. that's 2023-11-05 01:54:36 PST, which is one hour later:

    1699167600 = 2023-11-05 00:00:00 PDT
    1699171200 = 2023-11-05 01:00:00 PDT
    1699174476 = 2023-11-05 01:54:36 PDT ←     the first one
    1699174740 = 2023-11-05 01:59:00 PDT
    1699174800 = 2023-11-05 01:00:00 PST
    1699178076 = 2023-11-05 01:54:36 PST ←     the second one
    1699178400 = 2023-11-05 02:00:00 PST

Even the non-storage null transform is ambiguous:

    SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP (FROM_UNIXTIME (1699174476)) → 1699178076

Also, your periodic reminder that we are closer to the Y2038 bug than the Y2K bug:

    SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2038-01-18 19:14:07") → 2147483647;
    SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2038-01-18 19:14:08") → NULL;
    SELECT VERSION() → 10.5.18-MariaDB-log


Update:

Ok, because this post is likely to be a top hit for "DATETIME vs. TIMESTAMP" for years to come, and because there is some absolutely terrible advice and explanation out there, particularly on Sack Overflow, let me lay out what I have learned.

tl;dr -- never use DATETIME, always use TIMESTAMP.

  • TIMESTAMP is a time_t -- it represents an absolute, fixed point in time. Use it for things like "here is when this account was created" or "here is when this message was sent". When presenting that fixed point in time to users as text, you might want to format it in their local time zone.

  • DATETIME is basically a string of the wall clock in whatever time zone you happen to be in at the moment, without saving that time zone. It is ambiguous, e.g. it cannot represent "1:30 AM" on the day that daylight savings time ends because there are two of those on that day. This is never what you want.

  • DATE is a floating year-month-day. Use this for things like birthdays, which, by convention, do not change when you move halfway around the world.

  • TIME is a floating hour-minute-second. Use this for things like, "my alarm clock goes off at 9 AM regardless of what time zone I'm in, or if daylight savings time has flipped."

Downside to TIMESTAMP is that it (currently) can't represent dates after 2038 or before 1970. DATETIME can, but DATETIME is (I cannot emphasize this enough) garbage, so do not use it. For outlier dates, your options are:

  1. Hope and pray that within the next few years, MySQL and MariaDB expand TIMESTAMP to 64 bits;
  2. Use BIGINT instead and store a 64 bit time_t manually.

Extra stupidity! The TIMESTAMP type has some asinine defaults that differ from what anyone would expect. It defaults to:

    NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP() ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP()
and to avoid that, particularly to avoid getting fucked by that auto-update, you need to specify the column as either "timestamp NULL DEFAULT NULL" or as "NOT NULL DEFAULT 0".

It's a wonder anything works at all.


Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

33 Comments
Tags: , , ,
Current Music: Gazelle Twin -- Fear Keeps Us Alive ♬

The Folksy Fanaticism of Mike Johnson

8 months ago
If Johnson is a mystery man to the world at large, to the power brokers of the religious right his new role is no surprise. They've been grooming Johnson for this position for many years.

Johnson's path to power was facilitated by the Council for National Policy (CNP), an outfit founded in 1981 "by a group of right-wing fundamentalists and oil barons" that works "largely behind the scenes, to reshape America into a country that protects gun rights, counters federal regulation, favors plutocrats, and rolls back the social progress wrought by the New Deal and the Great Society." [...]

To see Trump as naturally alien to the religious right is to misunderstand the evangelical wing of the Republican Party. This faction is profoundly theocratic, seeking to remake the government to conform to their understanding of the Bible. The project of Christian nationalism is at its core a political one. [...] The goal is not to win souls but to rule Washington. [...]

In a 2003 article, Johnson wrote an editorial declaring, "States have many legitimate grounds to proscribe [forbid] same-sex deviate sexual intercourse.... Proscriptions against sodomy have deep roots in religion, politics, and law." He has described abortion as "a Holocaust."

These hard-right positions go hand in hand with loyalty to Trump, which includes supporting the attempted coup of 2021 after Trump lost the election. Nelson reports, "Johnson has taken the lead in election denial as well, as the only named representative" out of the 126 Republicans who signed the amicus brief to the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the 2020 election. [...]

The danger is that Johnson will use his power as speaker to subvert the next presidential election. As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann notes:"One reason that the January 6 coup effort didn't go further was then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi's insistence on continuing the joint session of Congress convened to approve election results amid the chaos of the Capitol riot; it's a colossal understatement to say that a Speaker Johnson would be unlikely to follow that precedent."

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

9 Comments
Tags: , ,

Once again, "AI" is revealed to be an army of mechanical turks in a call center.

8 months ago
Cruse "autonomous"vehicles require 1.5 drivers, and manual intervention every two and a half miles:

Half of Cruise's 400 cars were in San Francisco when the driverless operations were stopped. Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company's vehicles every 2.5 to five miles, according to two people familiar with is operations. In other words, they frequently had to do something to remotely control a car after receiving a cellular signal that it was having problems. [...]

When Mr. Vogt spoke to the company about its suspended operations on Monday, he said that he did not know when they could start again and that layoffs could be coming, according to two employees who attended the companywide meeting. [...]

Cruise employees worry that there is no easy way to fix the company's problems, said five former and current employees and business partners, while its rivals fear Cruise's issues could lead to tougher driverless car rules for all of them.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

32 Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,
Current Music: Craig Wedren & Anna Waronker -- How Could It Not Have Been? ♬

Drone delivery: going just as great as self-driving cars.

8 months ago
Amazon's much-hyped drone project is dropping small objects on driveways. Customers are not sure what it delivers beyond minestrone.

"I know this looks like science fiction. It's not," said Mr. Bezos [in 2013]. Yet the venture as it currently exists is so underwhelming that Amazon can keep the drones in the air only by giving stuff away. Years of toil by top scientists and aviation specialists have yielded a program that flies Listerine Cool Mint Breath Strips or a can of Campbell's Chunky Minestrone With Italian Sausage -- but not both at once -- to customers as gifts. If this is science fiction, it's being played for laughs. [...]

Only one item can be delivered at a time. It can't weigh over five pounds. It can't be too big. It can't be something breakable, since the drone drops it from 12 feet. The drones can't fly when it is too hot or too windy or too rainy.

You need to be home to put out the landing target and to make sure that a porch pirate doesn't make off with your item or that it doesn't roll into the street (which happened once to Mr. Lord and Ms. Silverman). But your car can't be in the driveway. Letting the drone land in the backyard would avoid some of these problems, but not if there are trees.

On the bright side, it must be nice for drone operators to be able to find work that doesn't involve dropping bombs on weddings.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

18 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

DNA Lounge: Wherein we have survived another Halloween

8 months ago
As foretold by prophecy, DNA Lounge's 23rd annual All Hallow's Eve party was a rousing success, which means that the great wolf has not eaten the Sun and we get to stick around for another year.

There were many great costumes this season, but the funniest one I saw was the guy dressed as a boom mic operator who just photobombed everybody all night.

Personally I've been kind of phoning it in, costume-wise, since I've found it difficult to come up with a costume that is compatible with, and not spoiled by, an N95 respirator. (My favorite is the Flo Mask.) This stupid interminable pandemic has thrown me off my costume game. (Yes, yes, I see you in the back with your hand up, about to suggest Bane or Mad Max, please sit down).

Did you get your blood bag drink special? Possibly our least-practical drink special yet! Jared spent so much time filling those by hand, and they looked great. Plus we got to use up our leftover stickers from when we were doing delivery cocktails in mason jars. (Remember that? It feels like a hundred years ago now.)

Business-wise, it was a weird weekend, particularly Saturday: we had so few presales that we battened down the hatches for a very slow night, but then we ended up having a huge turnout. Nobody bought in advance and everyone showed up late. It's not unusual for people to hedge their bets on Halloween and commit late, but compared to every previous year, this was extreme. It has definitely been a trend, post-lockdown, that people are buying their tickets later and later. Which isn't great for us, both because it makes it harder for us to predict the staffing we will need, and because we make money on service fees.

We have so many photos just from the week leading up to Halloween: we're not even caught up to Monday or Tuesday, Halloween proper.

Speaking of, what do you think about our recently-new social media photo posting regime? I used to have it make a post every time a new photo gallery went live, with a link to that gallery with 4 sample photos (or, on Instagram, 4 posts). But we briefly had a social media manager working here, and their opinion was "That's too many photos, the feed is flooded with them and nobody cares". So I changed it to do one post a week with a single montage of all of this week's galleries. Which is better?

Comment at DNA Lounge
Tags:
Location: 37° 46' 15.63" N, 122° 24' 45.70" W

Mastoversary

8 months ago
I created my Mastodon account around 4 years ago but it lay fallow and I only started using it in earnest approximately one year ago today, and I have never looked back. It is now the only social media site that I read regularly, and you can too.

To recap your options in this crowded social media landscape:

  • Twitter: owned by Musk, a fascist
  • Blue Sky: funded by Dorsey, a fascist
  • Facebook: owned by Zuckerberg, a fascist
  • Instagram: owned by Zuckerberg, a fascist
  • Threads: owned by Zuckerberg, a fascist
  • Post News: funded by Andreessen, a fascist
  • TikTok: owned by the Chinese Government I guess?
  • Mastodon: owned by nobody and/or everybody! Seize the memes of production!

If you are worried about picking the "right" Mastodon instance, don't. Just spin the wheel. How about sfba.social or mastodon.social, those are both fine choices.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

18 Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,

  • Previously