Reading the "endgame" section, and I feel that some serious thought ahould be given to what the replicator colony will do after it has finished dismantling Mercury.
This reads like it was written by the Cleverest Person in the Room. I have to use Azure Devops at work, and some of the critique of Azure rings true for me, but the author-centric presentation was quite off-putting.
> Fernandez, who more than two decades ago published a four-CD audio compendium of hundreds of recordings from around the world called the Conet Project. It's considered the Bible for numbers-station enthusiasts.
The Conet Project is an interesting listen -- very analogue, Cold War-ish, and a bit sinister. Seems to be available on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/The-Conet-Project
Fans of the band Wilco will recognize one of the Conet Project's recordings as the source of the woman repeating "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" in the song "Poor Places" from the eponymous album. Wilco failed to license the sample and the resulting lawsuit gave the Conet Project a portion of Wilco's royalties on that track.
Why would they need to license the sample? You don't own the copyright for something just because you recorded it off the radio, that's silly. I looked it up and the station in question was operated by the Israeli government, so presumably they would be due the royalties. https://priyom.org/number-stations/english/e10
This reminds me of Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel, which established that copying someone's photograph of a public domain painting is not a copyright violation, as the photograph is not copyrightable under US law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....
Sure, but there's an element of creativity there (what parts to focus on, how much you zoom in, how closely you follow the motion) vs. simply turning a radio on and pressing record, with the intention of producing a 1:1 recording of what's being broadcast. All the creative parts of the Conet Project recording (the message to broadcast, the way it's formatted, the voice samples used, etc) were done by the Israeli government, not the Conet Project.
TLDR: you're basically applying the US standard to something that has been released worldwide, and US intellectual property law is known to be one of the most lax when dealing on derivatives (Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co.). Without saying that the original broadcaster/s do not held any copyright (because, of course, there is a reasonable claim for their copyright), there are two good candidates for the Conet Project's case, both hinging on European IP laws.
The first one is the "sweat of the brow" concept, where effort (not originality, or at least not significant originality) is the determiner. Because this was released in 2001, most European jurisdictions (like Britain's "skill and labour" and Germany's Leistungsschutzrecht) still had this concept. Because the collaborators of the Conet Project did exert significant effort here (they didn't just tune, but significantly denoised and made it reasonably intelligible), it could be argued that they held a new copyright on these works. New laws now significantly tilt towards the creativity/originality concept, but this is usually not a retroactive claim.
The second claim (and the reason that I said IP laws, not specifically copyright laws) is that Europe (incl. UK and Russia) has database rights which does not exist under US law (again, Feist v. RTS). Even if the Conet Project release is ineligible for copyright in most European jurisdictions (and I doubt it due to the non-retroactivity of these laws), they can still point out that the curation of the work provided for enforcement of database rights.
There is actually a third claim (although weak), based on the first publication of a recording of a performance (phonogram rights). This also exists under US laws, although I will be sure that the first "publication" is the broadcast, especially if it was also aimed in the US. (This is the reason why "sampling" some music is considered an IP infringement.)
P.S. If you think that US IP laws are bonkers, try to navigate European IP laws (it's not even harmonized inside EU). There's even a "Copyright in Typographical Arrangement" (UK) where even assuming that the text itself is not copyright, scanning the page might put you into a lawsuit (https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/copyright-typo...)
If its being broadcast by the US military or the CIA, why Persian?
Because they're issueing activation orders to their network of ani-regime operatives inside Iran? Who, mysteriously for spies, only know that language?
Or because they want the Iranian government to think that? And a numbers station broadcasting in - unusually - Persian, is an easy way to get the attention of the Iranians?
The CIA recruits a lot of Iranians to spy for them. Since the Internet is a thing, they typically communicate with them that way. For example, in the 2010s the CIA ran hundreds of fake news, sports, travel, religious, etc. websites, where typing a password into a search box or other text field would open a hidden message area where operatives could read messages from the CIA and send back information. This network was eventually destroyed and hundreds of sources were arrested because the CIA made the error of using the same few messaging scripts and hosting the sites from a few contiguous IP blocks, but it's a good idea of how they generally operate. See here for more info: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-spie...https://cirosantilli.com/cia-2010-covert-communication-websi...
However, since the US-Israeli bombing of Iran on Feb 28, the Iranian government has shut down the whole country's Internet access. This means that the CIA needs another way to send information out, hence the numbers station.
Most birds roost in trees to minimise exposure to predators. Is it possible that birds that are used to living with humans might similarly see a cage as a place of safety? For rest or just taking a break from watchfulness?
(I'm personally uncomfortable with birds being caged for long periods or in confined spaces, and I'm not offering the above as a justification. I don't own or live with any animals.)
I used it 18 months ago when I was looking for a job, and I found a paid subscription genuinely useful. Before and since: almost never. If I change jobs again then I'll use it again.
At this point I assume that all the "thought leaders" posting garbage are either bots or people too oblivious to understand how dismal the platform is.
One thing I've never been able to understand about this new sideload "flow" is whether it will be applied to older devices, or just from some (future or recent) version of Android. Does anyone know?
reply