I really don't believe the headline. Google has thousands of teams of engineers that are writing code for hundreds of different products... There's no way all of them are generating anywhere near 25% of their new code via AI.

Unless they're doing something like generating massive test fixtures or training data sets using AI and classifying them as "code" 🤔

Australia: Consumer protection laws are better than most other countries, even European countries. For example:

• Products must last as long as a "reasonable consumer" would expect them to last, regardless of the warranty period. For example, at least 5-10 years for large appliances.
• If there's a "major failure" any time during that period (a big problem with the product, if it stops working, if it differs from the description, is missing advertised features, or you wouldn't have bought it if you knew about the problem beforehand), the customer has a choice of whether they want to have the item repaired, replaced, or return it and get a refund. Customers can also ask for a partial refund based on loss of value.
• The store you bought the item from must accept returns and warranty claims. They can't tell you to go to the manufacturer.
• For repairs, returns and replacements of large items (like appliances), the company must pick it up and drop it off for free.
• It's illegal for a store to not offer refunds (unless the items are second-hand).
• Products must match descriptions in advertising, including what a sales person tells you. If a sales person tells you the product does something but it actually doesn't, you can get a refund.
• Businesses get fined for breaking these rules. A chain of computer stores had to pay a $200,000 fine for showing an illegal "no refunds" sign and forcing people to go to the manufacturer for warranty claims, and were later fined $750,000 for doing it again: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/msy-technology-ordered-to-pay-penalties-of-750000-for-consumer-guarantee-misrepresentations

This applies for digital goods, too. As far as I know, Australia is the only country where you can get a refund from Steam for a major bug in a game regardless of how long you've owned the game for or how many hours you've played. Valve tried to avoid doing this and was fined $3 million: https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/valve-to-pay-3-million-fine-for-misleading-australian-gamers/

Rule #1 about going to court against a large company with good lawyers: don't represent yourself, since there's no way you'll win, and the judgment will likely require you to cover at least some of Nintendo's legal fees.

It's something we can thank Apple for. CUPS is the standard printing system on practically all non-Windows OSes, and Apple hired its developer and did a lot of work on improving it in the 2000s and 2010s.

I don’t see anything on the parody ClownStrike site that infringes the DMCA. At best, Crowdstrike might have a valid trademark infringement claim, but DMCA is only for copyright infringement claims, not trademark claims.

Are there really a billion systems in the world that run Crowdstrike? That seems implausible. Is it just hyperbole?

Shout out to xdg-ninja - it'll find files that are in your home and suggest how to configure the app to use XDG instead. https://github.com/b3nj5m1n/xdg-ninja

It's a DRM system called Widevine, that's currently maintained by Google. It ships in Chromium/Chrome and Firefox as a closed-source binary blob. Firefox asks you before running it, since you may not want to run proprietary code.

You can tell Firefox not to run it, or disable it in the plugins. Instructions are here: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-drm#w_disable-the-google-widevine-cdm-without-uninstalling. Regular videos will still play properly, but videos with DRM will fail to play. Note that practically every paid streaming service uses Widevine DRM, so if you disable it, none of them will work any more.

Plex are likely using it for their free streaming content. I'd guess that they've licensed it only for streaming, and need to enforce that users can't download or record it.

Your own Plex content does not use DRM, so if you're only using Plex for your own content, it's fine to deny Widevine from running.

I don't understand why this is a bad thing? Open source code is designed to be shared/distributed, and an open-source license can't place any limits on who can use or share the code. Git was designed as a distributed, decentralized model partly for this reason (even though people ended up centralizing it on Github anyways)

They might end up using the code in a way that violates its license, but simply cloning it isn't a problem.

This is the best post I've read about it so far: https://boehs.org/node/everything-i-know-about-the-xz-backdoor

It's funny but a obvious fake. There's no such thing as "permanently" closing a Github issue.

Keep in mind that software doesn't have an expiry date. If a piece of software is unmaintained and doesn't have an active fork but it still fulfills your use case and doesn't have any major issues, there's no need to replace it. Some of the software I use hasn't seen any updates in five years but I still use it because it still works.

Edit: As an example, a lot of people still use WinDirStat even though the latest release 1.1.2 is now 17 years old.