One thing is a giant corporation „promising“ something - the other thing is reality where the promises of corporations are exactly worth nothing and you can bet on them breaking it as soon as it’s convenient.

Good software doesn’t need constant updates or maintenance.

Personally I hate the culture of incremental updates, shipping halfbroken beta versions, bolting on security as last measure because who gives a fuck about dataleaks. Everyone trying to build an everything app and sucking up all the data they can get their hands on.

The sad thing is nowadays most software „engineers“ or product „managers“ can’t even imagine an alternative to this.

Write a program that does one thing well and you don’t need to constantly update it.

> Good software doesn’t need constant updates or maintenance

It does though. Unless your software just play a perfect 440hz A. Even a simple homemade tuner (my first and only android app) can't run on new phones without having to be updated (sadly. I use an ad-riddled one now :/)

The word you missed in GPs post is "constant".

I don't think this qualifier is useful here. My very simple app needed 'constant' updates to avoid falling behind and needing a huge rework after 8 years.

Constant here meant regular. Following android Api updates is constant work. It can also mean that the intensity of work needed is the same, but I don't think it's the idea there (if it is, I disagree with the idea too, for different reason).

I think his idea was that good software exists in a nutshell and does not need upgrade. Which is true for embedded, like the arduino that manage the doors of my father's chicken coop (ideally. The photoresistor disagree here when I think about it, but the software is bad so that kinda prove GGP's point). Not as true for software with complex human interfaces though.

GNU grep is 100k lines of code (including header files and tests). That's probably just as complex as any random Android application. Yet I don't expect it to need a huge rework after 8 years. In fact, if it changed interface in any meaningful way, it would immediately be forked by impatient users who have jobs to do. I cannot wait until the mobile ecosystem is anywhere near that useful.

I work on some software in a regulated space. We have to make changes monthly as regulations change.

One mirror down in one country, meh.

We can play this game of whack-a-mole forever.

Copyright needs reform, this madness is wasting countless lifehours and holding back humanity as a whole. Copyright is broken and doesn’t fulfill its intended purpose anymore.

Legal theories work entirely differently than technical strategies. Lawyers can spin this failure into political ammunition the next time SOPA or TPP (remember that one?) comes up: "we tried to use the existing laws to seize DNS records, but dontcha-know, they immediately circumvented it because not all DNS authorities work together. That alone could have prevented $X00 million in losses. Thats why we need a new law to ____, and ____, and stop ____. and we need all countries on board with this binding trade agreement."

I'm not saying the futility of their efforts is the reason to change copyright law (although it should be possible to turn the argument your imagined lawyer comes up with around) - I’m saying what they are doing is futile, hurts more or less all of humanity AND copyright law is broken and does not serve its intended purpose anymore.

It sounds like we both agree the countermeasures were futile. I guess my comment can be refactored to "The Law allows you a play-the-victim card, which you can't do in tech". I would reform your statement to "copyright doesn't serve its original intended purpose", but serves its de facto purpose just fine: keeping corporations raking in profits. they dont need to stop all countermeasures to accessing Anna, or whatever avenue pirates use. They just need to keep netflix and all other big name content providers/broadcasters/record labels paying their royalties (at the expense of artists and support staff) for as many decades as possible. If you look at it that way, copyright is working fine.

what what about the "Copyright" of walt disney who died in 1966. think of the poor descendants

Won't someone think of the (geriatric) children?

What if we extended copyright terms even more to encourage Disney to make more works back then?

Don't give ideas to Disney (and its legal team) please.. next you know (especially with US elections coming soon) they are ruthless enough to go for it!

Don't forget the Birthday Song fiasco by our friends in Warner/Chappell! (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/hap...!)

With people toying around with cloning. With Elon (and others) toying around with 'accessing the brain'. I wouldn't be surprised if in 100-200 years from now the "Altered Carbon" (nice SciFi series) becomes reality.

(and now we know where Disney will be investing) :)

Having a clone seems a lot closer to having a child or sibling than cheating death. If somebody is survived by their identical twin, we don't say the dead one is still alive.

In the Altered Carbon books/TV series, people can transfer their consciousness into new bodies to cheat death. That makes the issue of who is the same person more complicated than simple biological cloning.

You mean m@getzoneapp.com ?

Yep.

Being upfront won’t do you any favours.

That depends. Different companies have different policies. I've seen folks marched out the door, a couple of weeks after being hired, because they pretended otherwise.

As I've said, I've personally seen a lot of felons do fine.

"Being upfront" doesn't mean immediately stating it up front, but it also means not lying or pretending it won't come up. Also, there are time limits on this kind of thing.

I know a chap that graduated from Brown, in finance, and got busted in college, with misdemeanor pot, and that haunted him for decades.

I also know a chap that did four bids Upstate, retrained, and got a job as an IT admin for BNL. He did great, but burgers killed him.

Being upfront means stating it without being asked during the interview.

Of course lying is a very bad strategy. But so is coming out without being asked IMO.

I have no personal experience just from acquaintances.

I don’t know about time limits I guess that depends on the country. For example in Germany this kind of information is usually not public so you will have a much easier time - also with the penal systems goal to rehabilitate not to punish. Of course it’s still very difficult.

there is no universal technique. you should try to be up front. you don't want things to be discovered later that will walk you out. but if being up front makes them pass on you, just what is the option?

Or don’t use their „security“ features. AFAICT everything would have been fine if they used a hardware key as second factor.

How do you know which app is accessing your hardware key in the absence of any OS feature mediating access to it?

Do you think I could offer English->German translation services to indie authors as a reasonable side income?

Do you know a good place to get to know them or start out building some connections?

I have been doing it in the past (mostly for ads and other marketing content) but it paid very little (was working freelance for an agency) but I enjoyed it a lot.

To be honest I'm not sure. It seems like _a ton_ of work to put out a high quality translation. I do not know how much time and money translators spend on each project but can imagine it being a lot. For example, some authors may expect a legit highly-paid translator to work with their own German proofreader etc to ensure quality of the output.

(Tangentially, I think Germany has some special laws that you as the translator would need to be familiar with. For example I think the translator needs to grant rights to the original author to republish the work. Not 100% sure on this, but worth checking!)

Unfortunately there is not much information for this online (atleast from a quick search I didn’t find much) Most seems to be related to working together with publishing houses (I loathe the German publishing houses so that’s definitely no option).

I would prefer working directly with an independent author - when I have a bit more time I’ll check out how to best get in contact with them.

Not sure about the legal side of it, but I have a friend who works in German copyright and who could probably help figure that part out.

One place to get started might be the Alliance of Independent Authors: https://www.allianceindependentauthors.org/

They are author as opposed to translator-focused, but maybe reaching out to them can be a first step in getting the lay of the land? They might have some information about how their authors tend to use translation services. Although I'm sure there must be some translator communities out there that could provide even more focused info.

Great advice, thanks! I’ll try out some stuff let’s see how it goes.

I may be a very grug-brained „junior programmer“ but I literally never had to implement an algorithm from scratch in a 5 year „career“. Neither did any of my colleagues, who are as a rule smarter and working on harder problems than me.

You aren’t really able to implement them in real life anyway - just like any other form of DRM. If the device can show/play it you can capture it.