Starting next Wednesday, February 26th, Amazon isn’t going to let users download the ebooks they’ve purchased, forcing users to keep everything within the corporation’s proprietary ecosystem.
As covered in The Verge, the mega-corporation is removing a feature that lets ebook readers do what they want with their purchases, including back-up their books, or convert them to different formats, or transfer them to a non-Amazon e-reader. There are a lot of reasons why you may want to download your ebooks, but the basic argument for it is simple: if you buy something, you should be able to do what you want with it.
Amazon’s downloading process has always been a little obscure, requiring a lot of clicks. And if you want to move books to non-Kindle devices, you have to convert the books out of Amazon’s proprietary file type, which can also be tricky. But even this too-onerous process is giving away too much to its customers for Amazon.
This move isn’t terribly surprising coming from Amazon, a bad company that’s getting worse, and being led by a fascist-fascinated billionaire who looks like Mr. Clean’s uncle — the one who is no longer invited to Thanksgiving. This isn’t just an issue of forcing users to cede ownership and keep everything within Amazon systems — Amazon has demonstrated in the past that it’s not a trustworthy librarian. The company has deleted books that it said were offered for sale by mistake or replaced books with new versions without alerting readers. Amazon’s also not interested in selling their ebooks or audiobooks to libraries, keeping a monopolistic hold on some titles. This is most egregiously the case for “Audible Exclusive” audiobooks, which won’t be available to borrow from libraries or to purchase from other services.
Tech companies selling books, music, and movies have long treated digital purchases more like rental agreements, which is nice for saving space on shelves and hard drives, but means that you’re locked in a strange, almost feudal relationship. The solution is to not give them your business — services like Bookshop.org and Libro.fm not only let you download your own, non-DRM-locked copies of what you buy, but also let you support independent bookstores with your purchases.
If you’ve already bought ebooks from Amazon, you’ve got a week to back them up before the feature disappears. The process seems like it involves a lot of clicking, especially if you have a larger library, but writer Craig Mod shared a tool that apparently helps automate things a bit:
In case you were looking to backup your kindle books (since Amazon is removing the option to download them on the 26th), this script works quite well in minimizing the click-pain of downloading them individually: gist.github.com/spf13/1fee1e…
Former NFL punter Chris Kluwe was arrested yesterday after denouncing MAGA as a "Nazi movement" during a Huntington Beach city council meeting, where he protested a MAGA-inspired library plaque.
As reported by The Daily Beast, Kluwe addressed the council from the public comment podium about new display at the city's public library that spelled out "MAGA" using the words "Magical," "Alluring," "Galvanizing," and "Adventurous." — Read the rest
When Boom Supersonic's XB-1 broke the sound barrier last month, it achieved commercial supersonic flight for the first time since the Concorde. It also did it without an audible sonic boom, which could pave the way for the first cross-country supersonic flights. — Read the rest
DOGE has wasted taxpayer dollars firing dozens of nuclear security experts at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the agency charged with "designing, building and overseeing the US nuclear weapons stockpile," as reported by the BBC.
After terminating the professionals on Thursday in a chaotic cost-cutting spree, DOGE walked away, leaving adults scrambling to reverse course, begging fired employees to come back to their critical national security roles. — Read the rest
The overnight attack caused a fire at the facility that houses the remains of the 1986 nuclear disaster, though radiation levels remain stable both inside and outside the complex. — Read the rest
DOGE has zero accounting experience. The ‘didn’t earn it’ folks are the inept shitheads.
There can be no audit. This is erasure. This is petty hackers creating millions of problems.
Social Security has not missed a payment in over 85 years.
Elon is going to ruin our country. Republicans gave him all the access he needed with none of the oversight. That is premeditated. That is gross negligence.
The victim repeatedly told the police that he was not a reliable witness due to sustaining a head injury from the assault. On top of this, police pressured the victim into identifying Gatlin as the suspect, even though he had already identified two other suspects. It took 17 months police to finally hand over the bodycam footage, which they conveniently forgot to say existed in the first place. The case was dismissed soon after.
First reported by Ars Technica, the copyright case against Facebook parent company Meta over its use of authors' work to train large language models has unearthed some embarrassing dirty laundry in discovery. Dozens of emails, allegedly between Meta employees, discuss torrenting massive amounts of pirated material—and seeding those torrents to boot—in order to train the company's AI models.
It was revealed via court documents last month that Meta had obtained AI training data from LibGen, a large file sharing database that includes everything from paywalled news and academic articles, to whole books. The prosecution alleges that Meta downloaded over 80 terabytes from LibGen and another so-called "shadow library" by the name of Z-Library. This is, to be clear, internet piracy on a scale that would make a Nintendo lawyer blush, and the lawsuit alleges the emails put in writing "Meta’s decision to take and use copyrighted works without permission that it knew to be pirated, despite clear ethical concerns."
One of the emails in evidence quotes an alleged Meta employee futilely advising that "using pirated material should be beyond our ethical threshold" before arguing that databases like LibGen "are basically like PirateBay or something like that, they are distributing content that is protected by copyright and they're infringing it."
There are repeated examples of emails ascribed to Meta employees flagging the use of LibGen as a concern, either in failed "lone sane man fashion," or in the context of hiding the activity. One researcher proposed only accessing LibGen through a VPN, and later joked that "torrenting from a corporate laptop doesn't feel right 😂."
Meta would ultimately operate in "stealth mode," to quote one AI researcher at the company, concealing the activity by only downloading and seeding the torrents outside official Facebook servers. As an aside: It was real neighborly of them to seed the torrents too! Wonder how good their ratios were.
The prosecution further argues that these discovery documents suggest that Meta executives up to and including Mark Zuckerberg were aware of the use of pirated material to train AI models at the company. Another detail that stands out to me: The emails filed as evidence indicate that Meta employees believed OpenAI used LibGen for its own models, framing the company's use of the database as a sort of arms race.
If the Internet Archive isn't allowed to loan books as a digital library, I don't think companies like Meta should be allowed to swallow up terabytes of pirated material to train a chatbot that will lie to you about how many planets are in the solar system. In a twist of fate, our international copyright regime looks to be one of the most sturdy bulwarks against an AI future. I'm no fan of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but I say let them fight.
One other thing I just can't escape is how low-rent this all is: Our Silicon Valley thought leaders and mavericks need unprecedented injections of capital in order to… do internet piracy and conquer a new frontier in cheating on your homework? The sheer body of written communication allegedly confirming it all is just the cherry on top of a schadenfreude sundae. "Subject: Forwarded: Re:Re:Re:Re: Crimes." I'm reminded of how Valve was saved from ruin by a similar disregard for opsec on the part of its former publisher Vivendi, or, indeed, that one I Think You Should Leave sketch.
I'm in. I intone the words with a sense of victory as I navigate the file directory using only shell commands—a feat that might have impressed the occasional adolescent maybe two decades ago. But then, the camera pans out to reveal a PDF document… inside a Chrome browser… running on Windows.
Yes, this is Linux running in a PDF, running in a browser, on my Windows PC.
This completely unexpected turn, brought to you by Ading2210, the same high school student who gave you Doom running in a PDF. On YouTube, they go by vk6 (via Hackaday).
In the video description showcasing the LinuxPDF project, they explain: "I got Linux running inside a PDF file via a RISC-V emulator compiled to Javascript."
What a world we're in today: a world of such compute power that means high-level and rather ubiquitous technologies such as Javascript can run entire emulators, apparently inside PDFs. The fact that PDF documents allow Javascript to execute is a double-edged sword, of course, as while it can allow you to run DOOM and now, apparently, Linux, it can also put you at risk of dodgy malware scripts.
LinuxPDF can run in any Chromium-based browser, which includes Chrome (duh), Brave, Edge, and Opera. You can check it out for yourself here.
Of course, you're not getting the Ubuntu experience inside your Chromium-powered PDF, rather you're getting an incredibly barebones command line experience via TinyEMU RISC-V emulation.
And you're not getting a particularly fast version of that, either, thanks to the layers of emulation. You get a command line, plus a virtual keyboard to press—although you can also type your inputs using your own keyboard using the space at the bottom-right. It's a little janky (backspace only seems to register on the virtual keyboard, for instance) but what do you expect?
Ading2210 explains: "It works by using a separate text field for each row of pixels in the screen, whose contents are set to various ASCII characters." Pretty ingenious, if you ask me.
So, first DOOM, and now Linux. What's next? Crysis? How about a PDF reader running from an emulated OS running inside a PDF? We're waiting, Ading.
A new slime-like material developed by University of Guelph scientists generates electricity when squeezed, opening doors for applications from medical devices to clean energy harvesting.
The material, made of 90% water plus natural ingredients found in olive oil and proteins, can transform its microscopic structure when exposed to electric fields. — Read the rest
“We are in the midst of a political coup that, if successful, would forever change the nature of American government. It is not taking place in the streets. There is no martial law. It is taking place cubicle by cubicle in federal agencies and in the mundane automation of bureaucracy. The rationale is based on a productivity myth that the goal of bureaucracy is merely what it produces (services, information, governance) and can be isolated from the process through which democracy achieves those ends: debate, deliberation, and consensus.”
Being a Pokémon fan can sometimes feel like watching a neverending popularity contest. Pikachu is the mascot, so he gets all the attention and merch, but it’s Charizard—the original Fire-type starter from Pokémon Red and Blue on the Game Boy—who always seems to drive the most feverish fandom. And this means poor…
Toxic chemicals, per-, and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, abbreviated as PFAS and also known as "forever chemicals," have been used for decades as water repellants. PFAS break down very slowly and have been found in the blood of humans and animals worldwide. These chemicals are known to cause multiple health issues in humans, from developmental delays to cancer. — Read the rest
The US Navy successfully tested its new laser weapon mounted on a warship. The dramatic photo above depicts the High Energy Laser and Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system zapping an anti-ship cruise missile.
While other manbaby billionaires are having their midlife crises in space, some anonymous oligarch has decided to speedrun the plot of BioShock by dumping a few hundred million into underwater housing.
The project, dubbed Deep (and they're weirdly intense about not calling it "The Deep," which is absolutely what we're going to call it now), is converting a flooded quarry on the Welsh border into a testing pool for pressure-resistant pleasure domes that can descend 200 meters below the waves, complete with six bedrooms and porthole windows for watching sharks swim by while you enjoy your morning coffee. — Read the rest
Support your friendly neighborhood independent comic strip: SIGN UP FOR THE INNER HIVE and you'll get each week's Tom the Dancing Bug comic at least a day before publication. Plus other exclusive content like extra comics, commentary, juicy gossip, puzzles, recipes, and thrilling secrets. — Read the rest
ALT
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/15dtrq9dkche1.jpeg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/g1cfejmhkche1.jpeg){kind=link}