Joe @j@mathstodon.xyz

DRM doesn't work in the sense that a lot of people think it is supposed to.
Just because I can't save a video that plays on Netflix, doesn't mean that DRM "works". The idea is that copying is prohibited, however any obfuscation mechanism that DRM technology employs is reversible.
It just needs one person to know how to do the reversing, to liberate whatever it is protecting. After that we're back at just copying.

Due to the DMCA, circumventing DRM is considered a crime and a lot of countries have similar legislation.
You rarely see this used against consumers however, but instead against companies.
When you want to bring a DVD player to the market, you probably want to support it playing DRM protected DVDs too. Now you have to acquire a license for said technology, which will require you to sign a contract with for example the DVD Copy Control Association. And suddenly you have to comply with whatever they are demanding.

DRM is a means of control - not protection.

All of which is to say: yes, fuck whiteness. That's not at all the same as saying "Fuck Caucasians" or "Fuck {typically pasty-skinned culture}.
But doubly-fuck Whiteness for enabling the genocide of the Irish via the famine, and for polluting our modern and rapidly improving culture of welcome and camaraderie with a toxic minority of virulent racists.
Whiteness is antithetical to Irishness.

It also bothers me for more contemporary reasons, for example the assumption that as a caucasian I internalised the post-historical rationalisations for slavery, racism, and apartheid. There's certainly racism in Ireland, but that specific "cos we're white" context didn't exist until it was imported. There's no historical awareness here of race-powered slavery existing in Ireland: that context is also foreign. So I didn't grow up feeling "white".

The concept of "Whiteness" as a coincident and convenient invention during the US/UK slave-trading era is well trodden. The concept of "whiteness", as distinct from the Caucasian pseudoethnicity or a genuine cultural identity, is bankrupt.
But as a pasty Irish person, to be considered "white" stings me in another way, because the Irish were not considered "white", even human, and perhaps that helped the UK engineer the famine-genocide of the Irish.

Amazing work by beck@ & robert@, further refining #OpenBSD unveil(2) semantics, working to remove an early hack that was required to proceed early on, especially with gnarly beasts like chrome. 👍

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=155345127110407&w=2

Some passes of the #ISS visible from the UK overnight - I'll tweet/toot warnings closer to the time

#Linux #Programming #Development ⚙️ Creating a #KDE Plasma #Mobile App 1 – Basic Controls
https://nicolasfella.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/creating-a-plasma-mobile-app-1-basic-controls/

We just donated €240 to the #OpenBSD Foundation, totaling €2300 so far.

We added 24 VMs in January. 35 more available on server7.

Thank you all!

#OpenBSD #RUNBSD

Implement SQL database (driver) in 100 lines of Go: https://vyskocilm.github.io/blog/implement-sql-database-driver-in-100-lines-of-go/ #golang

I took off some days from work, starting yesterday, just to finish personal projects.

Here they are, in order of priority, and uh, so far completed in reverse order.

Let's see how much I can get done today.

@j Really the only introductory text available right now is the HoTT book by UFP (https://homotopytypetheory.org/book/) It's quite good, though obviously pretty dense. I'm not an expert by any means, but I'll also be happy to try to answer and questions.

Being comfortable with set theory or formal logic isn't necessarily a prerequisite for learning HoTT. In fact, I'd say if you've ever done any (especially functional) programming, type theory may actually be more intuitive than ZFC.

SIAM's new journal on the mathematics of data science has just released their first issue!

https://epubs.siam.org/toc/sjmdaq/1/1?fbclid=IwAR1jG_x-_HhrniRjHX4KqfWKfGTDXymPZbq86G-4HtYmWVZ_nKL09jtWn2s