GeekNights Monday - Tech News Roundup - March 2019

Tonight on GeekNights, we have a tech news roundup! Youtube comments demonetize videos, police piracy in late capitalism, it's bots all the way down lobbying the FCC, people don't know what VPN to trust, missing the point of what "trust" means (though you can just look here (maybe)), anti-cheating software is wreaking havoc with Windows 10 previews, streaming is king in the mass-market music world, Linux 5.0 exists, W3C approves WebAuthn, and Apple closes two stores in Texas to avoid patent trolls.

Don't forget the GeekNights Book Club exists!

Things of the Day

Episode Links

https://www.patreon.com/posts/25144970

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In actuality, the concept of an infinite fractal is not applicable to a coastline; as progressively more accurate measurement devices are used (with the measurement result growing every time), other, practical problems with measurement emerge.

  • The sea is in constant motion, meaning there is no fixed “coastline”.
  • Even if the sea’s movement could be halted while measurement took place, there would be no way (beyond arbitrary decisions) to define where the coastline lies in terms of river outflow. A measurement including the entire banks of every river that extends into a landmass would conflict with many interpretations of a coastline, yet no established technique exists for selecting an arbitrary line where river becomes sea.
  • Even if the issue of rivers were overcome, it would still be impossible to decide which the boundary between land and water is, as land may be wet but not submerged.
  • Even if such a definition could be agreed upon, as increasingly accurate measurement is performed, the problem of measuring the boundary of an atom—which ultimately does not have a defined boundary—arises. Even in the classical model of an atom, which assumes atoms are composed of individual solid particles, most of an atom is made up of the space between these particles. This problem is further exacerbated when other, more modern models of the atom are considered.
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On the VPN issue I did a ton of research on it and eventually went with liquid VPN. The main reason is that a tech channel I like approved it (level 1 techs) and does not advertise it in the videos. The tipping point is that when they were auidited to report their logs to police enforcement they were able to preserve the privacy.

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Was the orchestral Final Fantasy song at the end off of the 20020220 Concert Recording? If so, that is a great and underrated concert recording. One of my favorites.

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If tech news roundup ever tries to get massive views it would look like this.

https://youtu.be/chL2fBZUh8c?t=109

Isn’t botting the FCC comment form illegal? In case you were thinking about out-spamming the spammers.

Have the people who did it faced any consequences?

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You’re right, but are you going to take your selective prosecution chances?

I definitely won’t be doing it unless I can trust the technological methods used such that it could never be traced back to me.