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Alan Greenspan: The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Fidel Castro: The next war in Europe will be between Russia and fascism. Only that fascism will be called democracy. wordsmith.social/protestation/…


Ugh... I am sick of finances right now... my cat had an emergency followed by my sibling/roommate having emergencies and I have been running in poverty mode for weeks now with at least a whole month to go...

Latest issue: gotta pay rent and my phone bill on the 5th, but only enough money to cover on... Need to scrounge up $150 or so before Tuesday ($10-$20 more if after Friday because some other things are hitting) or they're going to put restrictions on our phones (yes it's alot, it's 3 phone lines + 4 device payments). And it's not that I don't really have the money... I just have the money 3 days later...




Hey there, autistic with a special interest in intellectual property law...

Chime in below if you'd like me to actually debunk the misinformation going around about Mickey Mouse's public domain status.

I'm low on energy so I'll save my rant until I know someone actually cares to learn what I know...

#copyright #trademark #MickeyMouse #PublicDomain

reshared this

in reply to Shiri Bailem

I'm always interested in debunks by people who know what they are talking about. Let us hear your take, please.
in reply to Ga Schu

@Ga Schu You can find it here: foggyminds.com/display/c6ef095…


I think I feel confident enough that people may actually read this now:

First of all is to throw out just about everything you've seen. Extremely few things are even mostly accurate, and the few I've seen of those bury the facts deep under fearmongering...

Public domain means you can use that version however you like... so long as you're not violating some other law (such as trademark) in the process. Copyright no longer applies and it's much the same as the works of Shakespeare, or the Brothers Grimm (which notably Disney used to build much of it's empire...)

Since Public Domain is as simple as it can get, that part is fairly clean and hard to distort... Trademark on the other hand goes way over many peoples' heads.

First, basic idea of trademark: it's specifically narrow in scope, does not prohibit others from using the trademarked property in general, only prohibits it's use in ways that would confuse people or would dilute the trademark.

Simply put, if a reasonable person would get confused looking at that usage of Mickey and could think it was something official from Disney... then it's a violation of their trademark.

Notably the trademark they have applies to the name Mickey Mouse (and names have no copyright) as well as the depiction of Mickey Mouse (in all versions, both copyrighted and public domain).

The reality is there's only really two things you can't do:
* Use Mickey in any way that's not clearly separate from Disney (and including things like a big bold "Unofficial" or "Not Licensed By Disney" or similar does cover that, just so long as they're not hidden).
* Use Mickey or a mouse reasonably confused for Mickey in your branding (this constitutes dilution, which means while people may not be confused it does make it so Mickey stops being associated with Disney)

Notable odd details not usually covered:
* If you make a significantly different version based on this version. (For instance if you were to re-animate Steamboat Willie with entirely new art.) You own the copyright on that version, though your copyright only extends so far as the significant contributions you've made or the exact depiction (ie. if someone tries to sell your rendition of Mickey without significant changes to it... ie. you can't grab someone's fan art and sell it, but you can make your own similar fan art and sell that)
* This actually applies to Disney's own copyright on Mickey as well, all later versions retain only the copyright on their significant contributions. For instance depicting Mickey in color is a grey area (pun intended), but precident says it is allowable as "adding color" is not considered to be a meaningful contribution to the work. (The Fantasia Mickey of course is a prime example of a meaningful contribution as that depiction is very distinctive).




The server has been updated.


Friendica 2023.12 released

We are very happy to announce the availability of the new stable release of Friendica “Yellow Archangel” 2023.12. Finally wrapping up the changes since May – the highlights of this release are

  • the bluesky connector has been made bi-directional,
  • moderation reports can now be send by users and reviewed by the node admins,
  • user defined groups are now called Circles and forum accounts are now Group accounts, and last but not least
  • users now have a better control over their network streams with the new Channels feature.

Note that the minimal PHP version for Friendica was raised to PHP 7.4 with this release.

For details, please the CHANGELOG file in the repository.

What is Friendica


Friendica is a decentralized communications platform, you can use to host your own social media server that integrates with independent social networking platforms (like the Fediverse or Diaspora*) but also some commercial ones like Tumblr.

How to Update

Updating from old Friendica versions


If you are updating from an older version than the 2022.12 release, please first update your Friendica instance to that version as it contained some breaking changes.

Pre-Update Procedures


Ensure that the last backup of your Friendica installation was done recently.

Using Git


Updating from the git repositories should only involve a pull from the Friendica core repository and addons repository, regardless of the branch (stable or develop) you are using. Remember to update the dependencies with composer as well. So, assuming that you are on the stable branch, the commands to update your installation to the 2023.12 release would be
cd friendica
git pull
bin/composer.phar install --no-dev
cd addon
git pull
If you want to use a different branch than the stable one, you need to fetch and checkout the branch before your perform the git pull.

Pulling in the dependencies with composer will show some deprecation warning, we will be working on that in the upcoming release.

Using the Archive Files


If you had downloaded the source files in an archive file (tar.gz) please download the current version of the archive from friendica-full-2023.12.tar.gz (sha256) and friendica-addons 2023.12.tar.gz (sha256)) and unpack it on your local computer.

As many files got deleted or moved around, please upload the unpacked files to a new directory on your server (say friendica_new) and copy over your existing configuration (config/local.config.php and config/addon.config.php) and .htaccess files. Afterwards rename your current Friendica directory (e.g. friendica) to friendica_old and friendica_new to friendica.

The files of the dependencies are included in the archive (make sure you are using the friendica-full-2023.12 archive), so you don’t have to worry about them.

Post Update Tasks


The database update should be applied automatically, but sometimes it gets stuck. If you encounter this, please initiate the DB update manually from the command line by running the script
bin/console dbstructure update
from the base of your Friendica installation. If the output contains any error message, please let us know using the channels mentioned below.

Please note, that some of the changes to the database structure will take some time to be applied, depending on the size of your Friendica database.

Known Issues


Following the release of Friendica 2023.12 the following issues were reported:

  • S3 addon unusable [13760]


How to Contribute


If you want to contribute to the project, you don’t need to have coding experience. There are a number of tasks listed in the issue tracker with the label “Junior Jobs” we think are good for new contributors. But you are by no means limited to these – if you find a solution to a problem (even a new one) please make a pull request at github or let us know in the development forum.

Contribution to Friendica is also not limited to coding. Any contribution to the documentation, the translation or advertisement materials is welcome or reporting a problem. You don’t need to deal with Git(Hub) or Transifex if you don’t like to. Just get in touch with us and we will get the materials to the appropriate places.

Thanks everyone who helped making this release possible, and especially to all the new contributors to Friendica, and have fun!


friendi.ca/2023/12/24/friendic…




DDOSed by... facebook chat?


Apparently some facebook interface decided to DDOS the site a little over an hour ago.

It's not overwhelming the network, just an absolutely ridiculous number of requests.

I've solved it by instituting a global rate limit. It should be high enough to not affect anyone actually using the server.

Basic gist is that any more than 10 requests a second gets a 429 error (Too Many Requests, like all error codes with this site it'll give you a cute cat picture specific to that error). This is purely per second, so if you see that error at any point the time it takes you to refresh again the limit will already be reset.



Aaaaaand We're back


So that one bad hard drive that was left went completely kaput and managed to throw the whole array into an unstable state. I couldn't boot the server until I got the replacement for the replacement drive.

Got that this morning, did a few hours of tinkering to get the array to accept the new array while the old drive was completely removed (it didn't like that lol). But once I got that in, everything came right back up.

Tomorrow I should be getting a replacement for the impaired server and I should be back to 100%.

After that, I intend to use the refund for the old one to get some extra SSDs into the two servers. That'll let me arrange things so that this site doesn't rely on the network storage and can be both faster and less prone to failure.