Author here — the image quality was comparable, if not better, which is understandable because both use pretty standard commercial scanners. An upside is that instead of cutting the binder as 1DollarScan does, they tore the pages from the seam, so the pages remained whole. They didn’t do any compression either.
> if the consent dialogs were an actual standard. if sites could describe a list of what they needed consent for and the browser supplied the actual dialog
There is a standard for this called P3P, which was implemented by Netscape, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge before eventually dropping support for it. But there was nothing requiring website owners to use it. Various data protection regulations across the world require them to obtain consent for collecting data, but they are not required to recognise consent or non-consent expressed via P3P settings.
These standards will only get used if the website owners are forced to use them, either by regulators or by monopolistic/oligopolistic market forces.
The "tunnel ahead" sign always struck me as particularly pointless. Who needs that sign? Surely if you're driving towards a tunnel, the enormous tunnel itself is the indication you need that you're heading towards a tunnel?
Those are for truck drivers and those carrying dangerous goods
The Blackwall Tunnel in London has those signs starting something like ten miles south (ie on the edge of the city!), to try an ensure such vehicles don’t reach the tunnel unwittingly and force it to be closed.
I mean the one they put directly in front of a tunnel, with the tunnel picture inside a red triangle. I live quite near Blackwall tunnel and haven’t seen it any of those on the approach. The ones you’re talking about are, I believe, red circles containing the actual restrictions which are, of course, fine.
Also strictly speaking, the restrictions, even if those red circles were combined with the tunnel warning, the tunnel warning is still irrelevant - you’d have to follow those restrictions whether or not there was a tunnel.
> as long as the prompt author can send a message to someone who is a member of said private channel
The prompt author merely needs to be able to create or join a public channel on the instance. Slack AI will search in public channels even if the only member of that channel is the malicious prompt author.
There are some browsers that support multiple rendering engines out of the box, like Maxthon (Blink + Trident) and Lunascape (Blink + Gecko + Trident).
Yes, the article lists some two potential owners of WordStar:
> It's not clear to us who owns the intellectual property. We doubt it's one of the surviving offshoots, today's Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, but it could be another offshoot, Software MacKiev.
Whereas this release is made by writer Robert J. Sawyer, who does not appear to be affiliated with any of the potential owners.
Edit: Even though The Register calls this a free re-release, Sawyer himself just calls it an archive: https://sfwriter.com/blog/?p=5806
> assuming it’s copyrighted material [...] They’re just stealing someone else’s content and facilitating its theft.
All content created by someone is copyrighted by default, but that does not mean it is theft to share it. Linux ISOs are copyrighted, but the copyright allows sharing, for example. But even in cases where this is not permitted, it would not be theft, but copyright infringement.
> the altruism of letting other piggyback from their scraping doesn’t negate that they essentially are stealing data.
It does. OpenStreetMap (OSM) data comes with a copyright licence that allows sharing the data. The problem with scraping is that the scrapers are putting unacceptably load on the OSM servers.
> Stealing from grocery store and giving away some of what you steal doesn’t absolve the original theft.
This is only comparable if the company that scrapes the data enters the data centre and steals the servers used by the OpenStreetMap Foundation (containing the material to be scraped), and the thing stolen from the grocery store also contains some intellectual property to be copied (e.g. a book or a CD, rather than an apple or an orange).
In the UK, the credit card company is jointly liable with the retailer for breach of contract for purchases in the £100-£30,000 range. This is called Section 75 protection (from the section number of the Consumer Protection Act) and offers much more protection than the chargeback offered by debit card providers.
> They delivered the PDF in less than two hours after receiving the book.
It would have been good to see how well they did in terms of OCR, image compression, etc., compared to 1DollarScan.