Saturday, October 30, 2021

Gosh, I wonder how this could have happened

Washington Examiner: "Trust of US media in ‘free fall,’ lowest in world." - "According to a recent survey conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford, among 92,000 news consumers in 46 countries, the United States ranked last in terms of media trust at 29%."

Cue the "Am I out of touch?" Principal Skinner meme.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Today: Ha ha, nobody believes the media anymore

Tomorrow: The media's power must be stopped

Anonymous said...

Did someone say untrustworthy media?


Truth Social Violated Mastodon’s License; Trump’s Entire Platform Might Now Be DOA

https://www.thebulwark.com/truth-social-violated-mastodons-tos-trumps-entire-platform-might-now-be-doa/


This is Trump’s second bite at the apple. His first “social media” venture debuted last June and was essentially a blog. It lasted a total of 29 days. In a fit of acute embarrassment, Trump finally demanded it be switched off, because it was getting fewer hits than Petfinder.

But Truth Social is supposed to be the real deal. Meant to rival not just Facebook and Twitter, but eventually Amazon and even Stripe. Seriously. Here’s a slide from Trump’s pitch deck. [image in linked article]

. . . .

A lot of open-source software is made available under what is known as a “copyleft” license. The terms are simple: You are free to use the software for any purpose. However, you cannot claim ownership in the software. And if you fork it, you must put the new version of the software — including the parts you developed — in the public domain and make the source code freely available. Mastodon, the software Trump is using to create Truth Social, uses just such a license.

So TMTS can’t claim any ownership in Truth Social. And yet, that’s exactly what Truth Social does in its terms and conditions. To make matters worse, Truth Social — despite multiple requests — is refusing to publish its source code.

Both of these actions are direct violations of the Mastodon license. And the terms of the license specify that if TMTS fails to correct these problems within 30 days, it will automatically and permanently lose all rights to use the software.



Trump can do his usual "ignore the contract, F you, F everyone, see you in court" routine. That will be a recipe for automatic defeat. The license is a clear standard and well accepted, and there's a slew of legal precedent relating to it.

And if Trump digs in his heels, then it becomes an existential issue for the free software movement. That would mean the Electronic Frontier Foundation would get involved, meaning a lot of lawyerly talent and experience become available.

Any remotely competent developer knows this, so either the business people completely ignored the developers, and/or the developers aren't remotely competent, and/or the whole thing is built to fail. Wahhh, Trump's being censored again by the Deep Browser! Victimhood 2024!