"They have spent the last few years doing nothing but suing fans so they won’t be prepared to face lawyers that are completely identical to them but are better because as I said before, they have guns.”
If the government puts in the effort to develop systems to track/process/etc a new kind of tax like this, no one should pretend it will only ever be used agains the ultra wealthy. If anyone doubts this, you need only look at the Alternative Minimum Tax:
>...Although the AMT was originally enacted to target 155 high-income households, it grew to affect 5.2 million taxpayers each year by 2017, raising $36.2 billion, or 2.4% of federal income tax revenue. The passage of the TCJA for tax year 2018, reduced the affected number to about 0.1% of all taxpayers. This number is expected to rise again in 2026 with the expiry of the individual provisions of the TCJA.
You're saying we shouldn't tax the rich because eventually it might be used to tax the less wealthy? That's a lot of "might" on something that should otherwise positively impact a lot of problems with wealth distribution in the US.
The more principled stance here, is "What value are shareholders providing to companies whose shares they hold?" Like, why do I care if we tax you based on your holdings in a space that has historically been used to dodge taxes? Especially when I think the good of taxing the ultrawealthy and subsequently anyone making a lot of untaxed gains through dubious avenues (making building ultrawealth harder) far outweigh the negative consequences of taxing more middle-class folks who happen to have stock.
Like, if the concept of a 100-millionaire goes away, then we necessarily strengthen people with less wealth (middle class). And before anyone calls this "class warfare", it's definitely class warfare, just currently the ultra-wealthy are winning.
>You're saying we shouldn't tax the rich because eventually it might be used to tax the less wealthy?
No, what I said was:
>>If the government puts in the effort to develop systems to track/process/etc a new kind of tax like this, no one should pretend it will only ever be used agains the ultra wealthy. If anyone doubts this, you need only look at the Alternative Minimum Tax:
>...far outweigh the negative consequences of taxing more middle-class folks who happen to have stock.
The older I get the more I realize just how envy-driven people can be.
I would be taxed more according to what you're saying, and I'm still advocating for it.
I recognize that the benefit to society of having better distribution of wealth far outweighs any potential cost to myself in the scenario where this gets expanded.
It's hard to foresee what the consequences are for introducing a tax on unrealized gains.
If the problem is that some people can leverage the unrealized gains and buy stuff with that, wouldn't the solution be to apply the taxation when the transaction happens?
If you're just owning unrealized gains as an abstract number you don't get taxed. If you're using them as collateral for an acquisition or a loan then it can be made the case that it's tax evasion and treated within the legal framework of tax evasion.
EDIT: for Musk if would be hard to make the case that he was just "moving investments from Tesla to Twitter" after going public to state his reasons for acquiring Twitter and that he didn't care if it made money or not but he wanted to "fix free speech" or whatnot. That should be a clear case where he's doing extracting value from his unrealized and gains and thus making them realized.
You can also make such law apply only to people with over $100M if you want to avoid having millions of tax evasion cases clogging the system
It implies the money is destroyed by taxation. In reality that money would go towards relieving the governments need to collect other tax revenues. So for example you could increase the standard deduction. Now everyone pays less tax and can either contribute more to their 401k (boosting stock values) or buying more things (boosting stock values). If you want to say the government is incompetent and will waste the money, that doesn't apply here because it applies to every tax, not specifically this one.
There's no world where the government takes money from taxpayers and doesn't just turn around and spend it. Often this spending is several orders of magnitude more wasteful than private individuals spending their own money, because government agencies have extremely weak incentives to spend efficiently. They spend, run out of money, and just stop whatever they were doing because, oops, out of money until the next budgeting cycle.
Value is destroyed by taxation, money is just a proxy. We spend on government because there are things we need that only government can do. Wealth transfer is not one of them.
That's actually hilarious. "The rich won't invest if you tax their unrealized gains", or said differently an argument for trickle-down economics. News for you: they already don't.
Not sure if some of you know how bad things are for the less well-off in the world right now but they are actually fucking hellishly bad. We're on the brink of a recession if we're not already in one.
I'm confused. Then how can they have unrealized gains if they're not investing? Aren't we talking about gains coming from investment?
If the rich are not investing then there are no unrealized gains and so they won't pay any tax under the proposed law and there are no problems in the first place.
Honestly this reads like a paid post for a candidate, quoting a TV show and following it with a candidate endorsement is either astroturf or a good indication that you should think a bit.
Anecdotally it feels like there has been an uptick in these high-profile hacks recently, maybe a result of more security people being laid off as a result of companies thinking they would replace everyone with AI?
Probably not - The reason we continue to see attacks is for a couple of reasons:
1) There are very few consequences. At worst, a hacker will get 5-7 years, and the chance of getting caught is low.
2) Security is very very very hard. The defender must get everything right. The attacker only needs to find one flaw.
3) Security does not just depend on security staff. It depends on every software engineer, operations (or devops) engineer, every software dependency, every piece of hardware, etc. If one of these people or dependencies has a problem, the whole system can be cracked. Examples of problems include writing insecure code, getting hacked, not removing old employees from an ACL or group, installing a tool with a back door, etc.
The point is security is hard and it depends on people doing the right thing. It's very hard to get people to do the right thing.
#3 is big as I'm not a security or IT person, but have had a big burden placed on me with regard to security. The biggest factor is work that was once done by internal employees in trusted areas is now outsourcers and contractors, sometimes from low pay higher corruption areas.
There's a constant fight of giving and removing access from an army of people. Additionally, there are often efforts to push these higher risk people into more confidential areas because the push to cut costs. Make one exception and then a "but this person has access" is sure to follow.
> The reason for this attack is political (in the general sense of the term).
The opening salvo in the article is:
>> A self-proclaimed hacktivist group named NullBulge, aiming to “protect artists’ rights and ensure fair compensation for their work,” claims to have breached Disney and leaked 1.1 TiB (1.2 TB) of the company’s internal Slack infrastructure
More security people laid off but also layouts in general put strain on the remaining workers who are supposed to do more work to make up the difference hence more likely to cut corners to deliver products
You call that a workaround but it’s basically the best possible situation security-wise. If this didn’t work securely then it wouldn’t be possible to implement disk defragmenter or even explorer. It’s so core to Windows NT’s security model that I wouldn’t call it a workaround.
You do similar things even with more modern stacks - assign a permission to an application and grant permissions to the application to the user.
The only real concern is that Windows NT permissions are not as granular as they could be.
> Windows NT permissions are not as granular as they could be.
For objects, Windows NT permissions are ridiculously granular; e.g. GENERIC_WRITE can be mapped to a half-dozen separately settable type-specific flags, depending on the object type (file, named pipe, etc.). It’s too granular for even an administrator to make sense of, arguably, and the documentation is somewhere between bad and nonexistent. (The UI varies from decent, like the ACL editor you can access from e.g. Explorer, to “you can’t make this shit up”, like SDDL[1].)
For subjects, the situation is not good, like on every other conventional OS. You could deal with that by introducing a “user” for each app, as on Android. But I’m not aware of any attempts to do that (that would expose this mechanism in a user-visible way).
(Then there’s the UWP sandbox, which as far as I tell is build with complete disregard of the fundamental concepts above. I don’t think it’s worth taking seriously at this time.)
I have no idea if there’s a granular object permission that could give access to the MBR of a disk. I’ve thankfully never had to dig that deep into Windows internals.
I’ve had to work with SDDL before to setup granular permissions for WMI monitoring on a whole lot of computers and my god, did it make me love the Cloud and Linux. I can’t emphasize enough how unintuitive setting these permissions is creates systemic over privileging.
Been using the portable version of 1.4 for decades after first coming across it in some PC magazine or something like that many years ago. Not terribly pretty, but it does what I need and it still works.
What did it take behind the scenes to get this approved? Can you go into some of the decision-making? This is nice but a far too rare event these days.
I've had the code all this time, and about 15 years ago(!!!) we were working on a fix for some bugs that had been around a while. At the time, there was talk about releasing the code, but we wanted to get a patch out and find a replacement for the MVE decoder first. I sent an email to the owner a few days ago (after a comment on a different post here) asking if we can just go ahead and strip the code we can't release, and he said "go for it".
"acting as a stark reminder of how volatile digital ownership is"
Okay I'm gonna say out loud what people are thinking, just pirate videogames.
These companies are comfortable with taking away ownership of a product we paid for when they feel like, they broke the social contract, just take their shit.
This is wrong, digital ownership isn't volatile at all. I have software I can do whatever I want with, including copy it. The problem is when we're actually renting but it's being marketed as ownership.
We need laws that say "if your software can stop functioning if a company goes under, without a technical reason, you can't say 'buy', you can only say 'rent'".
The medical industry often has contractual obligations to post the source code, dependencies and instructions for building the software to a third party escrow service. In case of bankruptcy this source code is then released to the customers.
Maybe software copyright should expire when a company dies, making all source code they owned public domain.
> Maybe software copyright should expire when a company dies
Why just bankruptcy? I'd say any software copyright should cease when the owner cannot or will not continue supporting the software to work to the level of functionality from purchase or at discontinuation, whichever is higher.
So even if a company still operates but isn't keeping your purchased software working (as-is operation, not security patches or new features) at least at the level from when you bought it or when it was discontinued, then the software should become open under reasonable conditions. Free for personal use, maybe a reasonable licensing cost for companies who want to keep supporting it commercially.
There are probably many corner cases that would need to be addressed to not become a vehicle for abuse but it would be a good start towards not making software unnecessarily obsolete.
The counter-argument would be that game code includes valuable IP including frameworks, models, and so on, some of which might still be in use in other games.
Software is inherently fragile and dependent on surrounding technology. Buy a hammer, get a hammer. Buy (rent) software, you get something that only works on a specific combination of hardware and OS, perhaps only with certain libraries, packages, and other extras installed.
So even with open code the game will still stop being supported on new platforms, probably quite quickly.
How do they ensure the posted build instructions and software actually work? In case of release, if it turns out to not work, you’re still out of luck. I don’t think this is practical unless “can be made to work independently” is already publicly verifiable when the software is first issued. Which of course won’t happen because it would immediately be pirated.
The point is these companies should legally be restricted from using terms like “buy” or “purchase” wherever their game is sold. Instead they should be required to use terms like “lease” or “rent”. The common understanding of terms like “buy” or “purchase” is that you own the item. This is clearly not the case for nearly all games consumers lease today.
That clarity is the point, though not the ultimate goal. If you understand from the start the ways in which you can be screwed, then you’ll think harder before giving them money and may refrain from doing so. Which in turn hurts their profit, which in turns makes them reconsider the business model.
But it translates to "real world" writing very poorly. "Pay for this game now!" "Revocably license for $N". Hope these examples aren't too contrived, in my head they all sound so if I replace the standard "Buy" as a call-to-action.
I'm not sure I see a difference between renting and subscribing, with regards to software. I do know, however, that I hate both models because both seek to milk the user for all they are worth.
Is it? I know cancerous companies like EA and Ubisoft do that, but are they actually the majority? I’m not a mainstream gamer, so I really can’t tell. None of the games I play require an internet connection.
That's what "digital ownership" is these days. The companies will outright tell you that you are "purchasing an item" and that you "own it" in your library. But will bury deep in ToS that it's a revocable license. That is the status quo of digital ownership. This is what it means in the context of reality.
If you contort the "digital ownership" definition to mean that you properly own things, you are right. But that is not the definition we go by.
And that's the issue. The word "ownership" has a very long history, it existed long before "digital" did. We need to get rid of the twisted terms and go back to calling a spade a spade.
> We need laws that say "if your software can stop functioning if a company goes under, without a technical reason, you can't say 'buy', you can only say 'rent'".
No, we really don't, because the only thing this will accomplish is make them change the "buy" button to a "rent" or "subscribe" button. People will pay for it anyway, because most of them don't care. Things like Game Pass have already gone a long way in normalizing the renting of digital games, and digital media in general is slowly moving towards a subscription-only future. Almost nobody buys music and movies anymore, for example.
If the problem is to actually be solved, we need to stop this shift towards an online-only subscription-based future entirely. Unfortunately, I don't think that's ever going to happen.
There's a non-zero chance that a mandatory change in the user-facing language allows them to set reasonable expectations after parting with some of their money will result in more users choosing to support content which they actually will own
I don’t find that clear at all. “My collection” implies I own it so it’s back to square one. Plus your wording is too long for a button and doesn’t make it clear at all that money will exchange hands.
How do you make that assumption? I dodn't expect one of a comic collection or classic transformers to disappear in a few years, other than theft. Which is what this more closely resembles in practical terms.
I've been saying for years that copyright should have a mandatory escrow, just like patents. If you want to apply for long-term copyright, an original copy should be stored somewhere like a national library. That copy is not allowed to be encrypted or otherwise protected either (at least not with a key that's not available to the escrow party).
The fact that the word "piracy" is somehow re-used for copyright infringement is one of the largest victories in language wars of the 20th century. It's Orwellian double speak at its best. Everyone know we are not talking about actual pirates raiding someone goods, but we use it none the less.
The intense irony of this is that piracy was often sanctioned by nations during times of war in the 18th and 19th century. It gave them an option to conduct commerce raiding without the need for an explicit expansion of their navy. It could even be considered patriotic.
I see some (including RMS) get hung up on the term "piracy", even though for most people the word pirate is not really associated with real-world crime and criminals, its a fun cartoonish thing, Jolly Roger hat, eyepatch, hook hand, wooden leg, parrot on the shoulder, arrr etc. They don't think of pirates on the Somalian coast holding AK47s.
Digital "ownership" isn't really ownership even when the companies aren't being assholes because you can't resell the thing. Hardly anyone noticed this ability being taken away, but back in the day, the secondary market for games on physical media, especially console games, was huge. It was much more affordable to buy a pre-owned game than a new one, with no downsides.
This has also led to the preservation of many of the games I grew up with. There's still a market for NES and Atari consoles and a market for the cartridges because you can still play and use them.
It's going to be a very different story for modern consoles.
All current-generation consoles do still take physical media, but yeah, there already are some smaller games that only come as digital. For those, I guess, piracy is the only way they could be preserved.
Not only would most of the game not require an internet connection to function, but people actually found out that the game already contains an official offline mode but Ubisoft couldn't even be bothered to make it available.
Well, hate to be a devils advocate but the entirety of The Crew was designed from the very start as an MMO-like experience with your session hosted on a server. It's not like the game was built as a single player experience and then Ubisoft HQnsaid "you know what guys, make it online only because that will make us more money". Ivory Tower wanted to build a permanently online car MMO-like game from the start. Arguably they didn't have to build it that way, but if that's the creative vision then I wouldn't say it's wrong. What's wrong is shutting down the servers.
> I can now confirm that local save data functionality is indeed built into all our copies and is not absent from the game, we have even obtained a sample save data file. This + the fact that we literally see offline mode in action in the prologue means that there 100% is an offline mode, if anyone was doubting at this point.
If you should ever bother too look into your end user license agreements (EULA), you'd know you never owned anything to begin with. Nothing was ever sold to you. You acquired a license to use the product under the specified terms set forth in the EULA. If the terms of this license agreement don't sit right with you, I suggest you don't take the deal.
And what exactly have you bought then? I mean beyond hopefully a physical medium, the right to use that software in perpetuity and to transfer that software to others?
Every time this comes up someone in the comments pops up to smugly remind us that the EULA says we, as consumers, don't have rights. Why are you like this? Everyone knows we don't have rights. That's why we're complaining.
You clearly have rights and you clearly have a choice: You can for example say no to this kind of software and not license it. You could also accept that you will only be able to use the software fully for a limited time and be fine with paying for that.
What is striking me as quite disingenuous though is the loud complaining when the manufacturer does what was made clear right from the start. As if somehow a betrayal or theft was happening here which clearly isn't the case.
Ahh yes, EULAs are known for their stark clarity and ease of reading and understanding. They totally do not employ any dark patterns or intentionally mislead people. That would never happen.
Could you please not break the site guidelines like this? We have to ban accounts that post this way. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.
Any agreement can't supersede laws. At least in my country. So I don't really care whatever EULA says, when I have bought something, and it was taken from me, I want it back or a refund.
Is it the EU? A lot of people feel that the particular action of Ubisoft of shutting down their online service and thus making their game unplayable should violate some EU law, but I can't find anyone actually pointing to a particular law.
If the law ever changes you may have a better chance. Or such games will not be published in the first place.
I haven't read it, but someone else here mentioned Directive (EU) 2019/770 (... on certain aspects concerning contracts for the supply of digital content and digital services)
Beautiful. I'm rooting for these guys.