In the US, the cover (as long as it doesn’t mess up the song too much) is automatically allowed, as long as you pay what is called a compulsory royalty (a certain amount per record sold, or per audience member in case of a live performance). ASCAP and/or the Harry Fox Agency (iirc) act among other things as clearinghouses for these payments. You have to notify them ahead of time of the cover you’re releasing, and maybe pay something up front.

Normally if you seek permission from the publisher of the song you want to cover, it’s because you want to negotiate a lower royalty than the compulsory one. You can often do that if you can convince them that your record is going to sell a lot of copies. It’s just a discussion about money and business people are used to that.

If your performance copies from the original but is not a straightforward cover, then you do need permission ahead of time as the compulsory license doesn’t apply, with some limited free-speech exceptions for parodies.

IANAL bla bla bla.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#United_States

Scrounge at flea market or thrift shop, $20 or so. Maybe no swivel, but if you want it vertical just rotate it or get two of them.

Plus ça change.

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

Spoiler: Adam Back, one of the usual suspects. Wake me up when someone acknowledges being Satoshi and proves they can access the original Satoshi wallets. Otherwise this is more guesswork.

Don’t pilots already do that?

I don’t think so. I’ve read the opposite and IME you learn not to sweat the small stuff. That helps a lot.

This has a LED, is that ok?

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3423

“Breanna Olson, a mother of three, found out two and a half years ago she had ALS, the most common form of motor neurone disease (MND) and which, with no known cure, weakens muscles and over time affects speech, swallowing and breathing.”

Yikes. MND is what Stephen Hawking had.

Well start with a few not-that-private letters to check for evidence of their being opened. What happens with ordinary email by the way?

I think it’s hard, and even if there is something that works, its use can probably be detected somehow, and that could get your family in trouble.

Tbh I’d probably use snail mail letters for anything private on the theory that the RU govt doesn’t have the resources to open all the envelopes, and you can use special phrases for particularly private meanings. All that stuff like media attachments is asking for trouble. You could also send microSD cards by snail mail though that might attract attention.

Remember that Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan had no internet connectivity at all. If he wanted to send an email, he’d write it to a USB drive and have a guy on a motorcycle take it to a café 70 km away or something like that. Replies would be brought to him the same way. They still managed to find him and kill him in his bedroom.

Today with AI analysis of massive amounts of traffic logs, I’m sure signal ID is far easier than it was in 2011.

You’re trying to bypass an anti spam filter. If there was a consistent way to do that, spammers would exploit it til the vulnerability was mitigated.

I’ve been using fastmail and it works, but it’s on the expensive side, enough to be unattractive to spammers. So that’s one approach.

You want exactly what the scrape bots want, so it’s difficult.

Oh boy they were really good deals. I use one and have thought of getting another. I might get a carrier locked one super cheap since I only want it for local apps anyway.

I’ve self hosted with icecast and it was ok but definitely DIY. Maybe there are more packaged approaches by now.

Lichess is great. TTT is more of a venue for following pro games, kind of an ESPN for chess. It’s also supposed to be good, but its purpose is different. Using Lichess as a gameplay backend lets them host online games without the effort of the somewhat evil chess dot com, or the unsuccessful Chess24. Seems like a win for TTT. I’m not so keen on Lichess doing something that commercial but we’ll see.

You can use Lichess online at lichess.org. It’s completely free, no ads, and no mobile app is needed. It’s the best fancy web UI I’ve ever seen by far.

I wouldn’t call them super cheap though they depreciate a lot from the new prices. Lots of quality ICE cars of similar age at lower prices, i.e. they are still expensive cars.

You can get fantastically good deals on used Fiskers. The company is bankrupt but there’s a lively community of owners and getting stuff like repair parts isn’t hard. I’m slightly tempted but only slightly. What I really want is an EV conversion for an old cargo van, so it would have very few computers inside.

What has it got in its pocketses? The One Ring.

Overall I think we’re going to see a much higher quality of software, ironically around the same level than before 2000 when the net became usable by everyone to download fixes. When the software had to be pressed to CDs or written to millions of floppies, it had to survive an amazing quantity of tests that are mostly neglected nowadays since updates are easy to distribute.

Finally someone else said that.

Ironic that the info is on youtube. Maybe put it ccc.de or something?

Climate change, flaky software, crappy maintenance, etc. It’s been going on longer than the AI thing.