• 2 Posts
  • 203 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • Oh boy, let’s take this piece by piece…

    DISCLAIMER: I AM NOT A LAWYER AND THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE

    First: let’s talk about the difference between copyright, patents, and trademark

    A patent protects a method of doing something - like a novel piece of code, or a newly invented drug formula - from being duplicated and used or sold without your consent.

    Copyright protects creative works - like art, books, and computer software - from being mimiced. It literally deals with the rights to copy something

    Trademark protects brands - like a logo or company name - from being used by other people for profit. It usually deals with marketplace confusion, as when someone creates a competing product with a similar logo to try to benefit from the logo’s recognition and popularity.

    So, with that said, what are YOU dealing with?

    Well, since you’re not selling software or utilizing anything from the WatchDogs game universe, you’re pretty much free and clear on both patent and copyright.

    What about trademark?

    Well, on the one hand, you are not competing with Ubisoft in any way, nor are you attempting to represent yourself as related to WatchDogs. So, by the letter of the law (in the US), they don’t have a valid complaint.

    However, trademark under US law has this funny feature where an entity that holds a trademark is required to vigorously defend it when they become aware of potential infringement. This is to prevent the selective application of trademark. That is, if I know John is using my trademark and I don’t go after him, then Steve uses my trademark too, I can’t suddenly claim to have an interest in defending it when I didn’t care before. Steve can point at the fact that I didn’t go after John and say “you already gave up your trademark by failing to enforce it”.

    So how does this impact you? Well, unfortunately, even if you are technically allowed to use “dedsec” under US law, if Ubisoft has a trademark on the term “dedsec” specifically, AND if someone at Ubisoft became aware of your use of their trademark, they would likely come after you for trademark infringement just to cover their ass. You might even win in court, but it would cost a whole lot of money that you would likely never be able to recover.

    The good news is that the very first step in a trademark dispute is a cease and desist letter. They’ll demand you stop using their trademark. At that point you can either comply, refuse, or offer to settle the matter by selling them the domain.

    What you do with this information is up to you.



  • I’m an effort to get you an answer that isn’t dismissive:

    1. Youth indoctrination, social conformity, and cultural isolation. If your parents, friends, and most of your community tells you something is true, you are unlikely to challenge it for a variety of reasons including trust (most of what they’ve taught you works for your daily life), tribal identity, etc

    2. People naturally fear death, and one coping strategy for the existential fear of death is to convince yourself that the death of your body is not the end of your existence. Science does not provide a pathway to this coping strategy so people will accept or create belief systems that quell that fear, even in the face of contradictory evidence. Relieving the pressure of that fear is a strong motivator.

    3. Release of responsibility. When there is no higher power to dictate moral absolutes, we are left feeling responsible for the complex decisions around what is or isn’t the appropriate course of action. And that shit is complicated and often anxiety inducing. Many people find comfort in offloading that work to a third party.











  • Except we know what the lifecycle of physical storage is, it’s rate of performance decay (virtually none for solid state until failure), and that the computers performing the operations have consistent performance for the same operations over time. And again, while for a car such a small amount can’t be reasonably extrapolated, for a computer processing an extremely simple format like JSON, when it is designed to handle FAR more difficult tasks on the GPU involving billions of floating point operations, it is absolutely, without a doubt enough.

    You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want but I’m very confident in my understanding of JSON’s complexity relative to typical GPU workloads, computational analysis, computer hardware durability lifecycles, and software testing principles and best practices. 🤷


  • Imagine you have a car powered by a nuclear reactor with enough fuel to last 100 years and a stable output of energy. Then you put it on a 5 mile road that is comprised of the same 250 small segments in various configurations, but you know for a fact that starts and ends at the same elevation. You also know that this car gains exactly as much performance going downhill as it loses going uphill.

    You set the car driving and determine that, it takes 15 minutes to travel 5 miles. You reconfigure the road, same rules, and do it again. Same result, 15 minutes. You do this again and again and again and always get 15 minutes.

    Do you need to test the car on a 20 mile road of the same configuration to know that it goes 20mph?

    JSON is a text-based, uncompressed format. It has very strict rules and a limited number of data types and structures. Further, it cannot contain computational logic on it’s own. The contents can interpreted after being read to extract logic, but the JSON itself cannot change it’s own computational complexity. As such, it’s simple to express every possible form and complexity a JSON object can take within just 0.6 MB of data. And once they know they can process that file in however-the-fuck-many microseconds, they can extrapolate to Gbps from there