klamann

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.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/our-small-team-vs-million...

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://download.geoservice.dlr.de/TDM30_EDEM/ DLR does provide 1x1 degree tiles for similar data sets like TanDEM-X, but for those they do not provide anonymous access.

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!

1: https://github.com/Klamann/maps4cim