Does the Internet Archive have any options to donate from the EU so I can get a donation receipt from a EU based non-profit? I know there is the "Internet Archive Europe", but that seems to be a Wikimedia like thing, i.e. they don't collect funds for the IA but for whatever it is they are doing here (which is not archiving websites for some reason?).
No, IA is a US non-profit, that status does not apply for EU non-profit donations as tax deductible.
There also isnt really an european branch of the IA to donate to, to support the infra/core mission. The other IA Locations(Canada, EU, Swiss) are mostly idependent(probably to avoid any issues with the others, if one does have governance/legal issues), however they share the same mission in aquiring data to save and working with libraries.
Send EUR via SEPA transfer to GB74RBOS16107510000470. (Yes, the page only mentions wire transfer, but SEPA transfers work too, are faster, and cost everyone less.)
there would still be fees for a wire transfer from a EU bank to this bank in the US, right? And I wouldn't get a donation receipt that would be accepted by the tax man over here anyway.
RBOS is short for Royal Bank of Scotland. When accepting SEPA credit transfer (though they are not legally mandated to offer the instant execution variant), I don't think there is even a mechanism to sneak in extra fees, beyond what the sending institute already billed (typically: 0.00€).
I still don't get it. The GB74R.. account number is listed under Final Bank/Beneficiary Bank, which is Citizens Bank NA in the United States. Where does the Royal Bank of Scotland come in? There's no SEPA account number listed for RBOS. Also, Scotland is not part of the EU anymore, so there can be significant fees when wiring money to post-brexit UK.
Sending money to the intermediary is still essentially free. The likely incorrect assumption here is rather: that it would do any good in this case. Because that only works when the intermediary has agreed to do anything other than facilitate wire transfers (with the beneficiary account number and cost schedule specified!). They would say so in the instructions (e.g. a note on how the SEPA reference field should be filled), if that were the case.
SCT is not contingent on EU or Euro participation - SEPA membership is distinct from those. That is how Iceland, Norway and Switzerland can reap the benefits (the latter not even EEA member, though effective treaties are now somewhat similar). As long as an US bank has a correspondent branch/account/partnership/whatever inside SEPA, they can make it almost free to receive money via SEPA, and then possibly still save on currency conversion and transaction cost as they clear in bulk across the pond.
USA entities sometimes are not even aware that they have a fully functioning euro account able to receive fee-free SEPA bank transfers, simply as a mechanical consequence of having an euro-denominated account. In the past I've tested this: I asked the IBAN of an euro-denominated account from USA non-profits, got warned nobody ever sent money there, proceeded to send a donation anyway, had it work perfectly fine.
HOWEVER it's conceivable that the USA bank might end up charging some BS fees on their side just because they can. That's hard to control for.
That wouldn't be a SEPA transfer since it's a British account right? SEPA is one implementation of the general concept of wire transfer, for eurozone accounts to other eurozone accounts.
RWE is the biggest producer of energy from lignite in Germany, which causes massive emissions even when compared to burning black coal, oil and gas. Lignite used to be really important for Germany because it has almost no reserves of oil and gas that can be accessed with traditional methods, but Germany has huge natural gas reserves that can be accessed with hydraulic fracturing. Of course, fracking is illegal in Germany, so we keep burning lignite instead, which is so much worse. Mind you, I'm not arguing that fracking is the future, we need to decarbonize the entire energy sector, but we could do so much better with the cards that we were dealt.
So the lignite-burning energy dinosaur from Germany accepting a billion dollar bribe to divest resources from clean energy into fossil fuels is totally in character for that company. Shame on them.
I think this Anubis project is a terrible solution to the problem posed by aggressive web scrapers. Using a web browser with reasonable privacy settings has become a big loss in quality of life already, but the first time I encountered Anubis I got completely locked out of most web servers that deployed it. The situation has improved a little, but I hate that maintainers of great web services have rationalized themselves into believing that creating massive barriers to access their sites is a fair trade-off. Unsurprisingly, I have nothing but negative associations with their mascot.
The FSF has the right idea about all this:
> Some web developers have started integrating a program called Anubis to decrease the amount of requests that automated systems send and therefore help the website avoid being DDoSed. The problem is that Anubis makes the website send out a free JavaScript program that acts like malware. A website using Anubis will respond to a request for a webpage with a free JavaScript program and not the page that was requested. If you run the JavaScript program sent through Anubis, it will do some useless computations on random numbers and keep one CPU entirely busy. It could take less than a second or over a minute. When it is done, it sends the computation results back to the website. The website will verify that the useless computation was done by looking at the results and only then give access to the originally requested page.
> At the FSF, we do not support this scheme because it conflicts with the principles of software freedom. The Anubis JavaScript program's calculations are the same kind of calculations done by crypto-currency mining programs. A program which does calculations that a user does not want done is a form of malware. Proprietary software is often malware, and people often run it not because they want to, but because they have been pressured into it. If we made our website use Anubis, we would be pressuring users into running malware. Even though it is free software, it is part of a scheme that is far too similar to proprietary software to be acceptable. We want users to control their own computing and to have autonomy, independence, and freedom.
I think all of these mitigations are unfortunate. They hurt one of the things that makes the web cool: it's a stable, stateless, idempotent way to access data.
This makes it a prime target for aggressive scraping by LLM companies, but it also makes it accessible and fast, and a prime target for benign use (like archive.org or "read later" services).
For my own sites, I'll eat the cost of the crawlers (mitigated by making the sites as efficient as possible) and keep them available to everyone.
As a German, I started wondering if every nation has to experience a fascist catastrophe on its own, before a majority agrees that a fascist takeover is possible at home (surely the peoples who failed to stop all the other fascist regimes were just dumb). Then again, 30% of German voters would vote for the fascist AfD party today, so there's that...
I agree with the premise of the article wholeheartedly. Minor nitpick:
> The German dynasties behind Porsche, Volkswagen and BMW pretty much merged with the Nazi regeime.
Volkswagen was founded by the Nazi regime after they have already taken over. While support by car companies was relevant, there were far more important supporters of the war effort in the chemical and steel industry.
Its sad thing but in every society there appears to be a significant portion of people who support the tenants of fascism. The whole 'that minority group over there is wrecking things for you, we will punish them' vibe seems to really strike a chord time and time again.
There's a peer-reviewed study of this that appeared in the last couple of years that showed the percent support for authoritarian rule tends to hover around 20% worldwide regardless of country, plus or minus some fuzz amount. I can't find it now because I keep finding other papers but this is another report that's is pretty consistent with it:
Once you get that group control is when you have problems.
This is kind of an interesting deeper dive into why people support fascism. Maybe not surprising but highlights the two main reasons: something like "we need a strong leader to take control of the government away from corrupt elite and put it back into the hands of the people" and "the government needs to be in the hands of the real, true, competent people, and not the other, fake, lesser people".
Personally I'm past the point of "what does fascism look like" and want to have a realistic discussion about "how do you reestablish a democracy when you're in a fascist regime?" So far the historical examples at my fingertips are all basically some variant of "people get tired of it, the cult leader passes away and everyone kind of magically agrees that fascism isn't working".
There is research that suggests that our brain composition determines our political ideology. More or less gray matter in different parts of brain determine where we land on spectrum of progressive, liberal, conservative, authoritarian.
don't forget about the historical examples of having your home destroyed by war (usually a war started by your leader) and the regime being forcefully replaced by a foreign power. Japan, Italy and Germany are democracies today.
"yes" heh. more a human problem i'm slowly figuring out, spend enough time on this earth and it's honestly tiring. social media and modern new cycle prob just accelerates it.
The problem with needing to experience fascism to worry about it is that the lesson will fade too quickly to be useful. 5 generations, maybe, before the majority have forgotten.
Back home in Portugal, it is a similar trend, I belong to the first generation to grow in freedom after the revolution, and it is quite sad to see how right wing is taking over, as if people had forgotten all about PIDE/DGS, the kidnaping and killings, crossing to France over the mountains and Spain, Tarrafal prison, the colonial wars.
Germany's current political course is a replay of the Weimar Republic. Including the people wagging their fingers about the dangers of fascism. You'd think the people telling us not to repeat history would read a history book.
But here’s the crucial part. This article didn't start as LLM slop. It didn't happen because the author actually didn't have anything meaningful to say. It happened because the author chose to "spell check [the article] with AI".
I've been using optical connections for audio on my gaming PCs for decades now, exactly for this reason. Though wireless headphones will work just as well these days. Too many game developers mess this up (e.g. by having no frame limiter in the game menu) and many of them never fix these kinds of issues. Thanks for caring and fixing this in your game!
This ist what the four essential freedoms are all about.
The hardware aspect is quite irrelevant to the whole point: the hardware only runs with software that does not respect your freedom and there's no feasible way to make the hardware run software that does respect our freedom. And of course our banks and streaming services and whatever else we need also don't offer us any software that respect our freedoms. So no, it's not about hardware, it's about free software. Always has been.
I think movies are a great example why stopkillinggames matters so much: If you bought a copy of Terminator on VHS or DVD or Blu-ray, you can still watch that movie today, tomorrow, or whenever you want. And of course you can rent a movie theater to watch that movie if you like. Even if everyone who ever worked on the movie is gone and the distribution company goes bankrupt or the director decides that making this film was a mistake and burns all the original film material, you can still watch the copy you bought, because you own that copy.
Now if however you bought a physical copy of "The Crew", which is a racing game with a nice single player mode, you can't play that game anymore today. Just because the publisher decided it's time to pull the plug, and no one who bought a copy of this game gets to enjoy it any longer in any form whatsoever. This piece of art is destroyed now, please move along, and don't forget to "buy" one of our other games that will probably be available for a couple more years until we pull the plug again thank you very much.
Game publishers are destroying works of art, stopkillinggames wants to preserve these works of art, and personally I'm on the side of people who want to preserve art.
> And of course you can rent a movie theater to watch that movie if you like.
In the UK at least, not that exact one on that disc, because you may own the disc but not the rights (a loicence if you will!) for public display of the content.
Whether a movie theater with only you sitting in it counts as "public" sounds like an open question (in the government's own words "What amounts to a public space is a question of fact and only a court can make definitive pronouncements about this"), but I suspect the theatre wouldn't be keen on chancing it.
I love that the OpenStreetMap community provides a mature toolscape that allows projects like this to access geospatial data for anyone, no questions asked. It's hard to overstate how valuable this kind of resource is to the free software community.
Just to give some perspective: More than 10 years ago I built an open source project that generates cities for a different game (maps4cim [1], a map generator for Cities in Motion 2). It relies on OSM data to generate roads and buildings and stuff, and NASA SRTM data for elevations. The OSM part of the application is far more complicated, since it covers so much data that is changing every day, yet you can make the exact same query against the Overpass API and get a response with the latest data in the expected format. NASA however at some point decided to shut down public access to SRTM data, which is in the public domain, and hide it behind a non-RESTful webservice where only registered users have access.
To me this feels like such a loss. I never would have started this open source project a decade ago if there was no free access to all the data the users would need. Yes, it's still public domain data, therefore someone could go through all the hassle of signing up for the service, scrape all the data and then host it free of charge, but right now there is no such service. Don't get me wrong, I don't feel entitled to this kind of free service, but I feel like these barriers to entry really matter and we all lose access to great tools that are built on the shoulders of giants. Very sad to lose NASA as one of the giants that once gave us free and easy access to highly useful data. More power to projects like OSM that live the spirit of open data!
It's also pretty amazing how easy it is to contribute. Between things like street complete with gamified quests and the browser based editor on osm.org basically anyone with an internet connection can update the places around them in minutes.
That being said, the fact that there's always something to fix just about anywhere I go tells you there's not enough people that contribute. Tbh I think the major problem is that there's no single go to app that people use all the time and then notice the issues. Though that's changing a bit with Organic Maps. Tesla self parking also had a bunch of new people mapping places, or so I heard.
But if you need to semple a big are in detail, that could potentially run into API limits or overload the service. But it demonstrates its possible to get the dataset & provide an API on top of it by a third party. :)
I did a quick review of the resources that you linked to:
https://portal.opentopography.org/raster?opentopoID=OTSRTM.0...
allows to submit a request for data from a specific area through a web form (no REST API), then you get redirected to a page where you get a download link after your request has been processed. Does not give access to the original SRTM data.
http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html
exposes SRTM data through a REST API in their own custom format. I immediately ran into rate limiting when I tried to download a small map tile.
https://download.geoservice.dlr.de/SRTM_XSAR/
provides free access to SRTM data in the original format. This is a great resource! Unfortunately, the map tiles cover 10x10 degrees, which results in huge files. NASA used to provide 1x1 degree tiles, which was much better suited for on-demand access.
