The term was useful back when we used coal gas. It stopped being useful 100 years ago.

Indeed, I log in pretty rarely.

Their admin interface is slow and awkward, but otherwise happy. Their deals are always changing and I currently have good specs for the money. EU company and my machine is in Montreal, so I was happy with non-American hosting and green electricity.

Not going to disagree, but “web usage” is basically everything. You can literally run an entire desktop operating system from 2007 on a virtual machine emulated in JavaScript in your browser now.

There are constant scanners on any site and scrapers on websites, but it is far less of a problem than you would imagine unless you have a big wiki or software forge with hundreds of nested commit history pages for them to spider into.

I also run private servers on hidden subdomains (with wildcard certs and DNS entries), so the low effort scanners never bother them.

DDOS attacks take money, so they aren’t typically going to go after some random homelabber. If it did happen, I would either just shut it off for a while or change the VPs IP. Ovh also has some of its own ddos protection.

Keep in mind that you wouldn’t route local traffic through it, so everything watched at home would be direct and not count.

I have a $5/mo VPS with OVH and they allow unlimited bandwidth within reason. Unless you have multiple households streaming from your server all the time, likely totally fine. If you do end up with one relative streaming 24x7, then I would look at installing the tailscale app on their TV and configuring things to connect that one user direct to your home server.

A VPS takes some learning, but IMHO, it is the “correct” answer and worthile learning.

If it weren’t for the overwhelming harm and the insane ramblings of those pushers, we could actually rationally discuss all of the useful things that can be done with it. There are plenty - its a pretty good tool in any engineers toolbox - but there’s no point in itemizing them because the much greater issue is the ai psychosis taking over our entire financial, economic, and governmental systems.

But with good legal backing, all you need is a shared database and maybe basic cryptographic signatures to prove ownership in case of malicious actors. So basically, traditional banking.

Absolutely. Every AI company has Anna’s Archive in their training data already. They want to differentiate their models by having more training data than their competitors. There are way more books out there that have never been scanned than those that have.

That is the justification and not the reason. Its faster and cheaper to cut the bindings, and they would have to store the books while they are using the digital copies to comply with copyright.

If they were archiving digital versions so they could be read by thousands in the future, this would be a totally different conversation.

They don’t even need to be as selfless as the internet archive - just follow Googles lead and allow people to search and view selections the archive, with automatic opening of the archive when you are confident copyright is expired. Even a closed archive owned by a third party with a dead mans switch to open it in the future when the business model is done would be something.

When destroying books, we don’t actually know what will be important in the future. That’s why archivists spend so much time archiving mineutia without trying to curate. Those are different jobs and you can’t curate for the future.

Yes… If they were archiving their scans. Which isn’t happening.

Keep in mind that books often become culturally important decades after their print run, sometimes when the copyright is ambiguous.

And also keep in mind there are technically, an insane number of “rare” books out there, but important rare books might only be important to people without the money to pay for another printing.

I could almost forgive this prrocess if they were /also/ archiving these books (leven if limited ike Google books does), but they won’t, because they are so focussed on staying ahead of compeditors based on the “knowledge” in their training data.

That is not required by law. It is just easier to cut the bindings off. The other way is slow: https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107

The Internet Archive absolutely does not destroy books. They scan them the hard way with the binding still intact.

Easier to scan if you cut the binding off, and it costs money to re-bind a book you purchased for 10 cents as part of a lot.

They are buying up used books at rates that push up the cost of used books. That is enough to piss off people legitimately.

We also are fully aware they are not careful. Yes, they will occasionally shred the last few examples of a book that might have otherwise become useful in the future, and there’s no indication that they are archivists. They will eventually destroy or loose this training data and the book contents will be gone to future generations.

You have failed to understand the difference between idealism and practice. There are more companies that use Linux without ever contributing back than those that do. Those that do do so because it makes practical business sense to improve the upstream project they rely on. Any company that has decided they don’t want to share some code just builds it in a binary module, firmware, or application to sit on top.

Maybe the Canadian police, but the Canadian court did not. They convicted him with zero corroborating evidence and without carefully comparing the chat logs with his actual account.