On the #uploadfilter problem

The copyright holders in europe are pushing hard mandate upload filters for internet. We have been here before - when they outlawed circumventing DRM. Both have roots in the same problem. The copyright holders look at computers and see bad things happening to their revenue. They come to IT companies and say "FIX IT". It industry comes back and says.. "We cant.. making data impossible to copy is like trying to make water not wet!". But we fail at convincing copyright holders in how perfect DRM or upload filter is not possible. Then copyright holders go to law makers and ask them in turn to fix it.

We need to turn tables around. If they want something impossible, it should be upto them to implement it.

It is simply unfair to require each online provider to implement an AI to detect copyright infringement, manage a database of copyrighted content and pay for the costs running it all.. ..And getting slapped with a lawsuit anyways, since copyrighted content is still slipping through.

The burden of implementing #uploadfilter should be on the copyright holder organizations. Implement as a SaaS. Youtube other web platforms call your API and pay $0.01 each time a pirate content is detected. On the other side, to ensure correctness of the filter, copyright holders have to pay any lost revenue, court costs and so on for each false positive.

Filtering uploads is still problematic. But it's now the copyright holders problem. Instead people blaming web companies for poor filters, it's the copyright holders now who have to answer to the public why their filters are rejecting content that doesn't belong to them.

Linus Torvalds is wrong - PC no longer defines a platform

Hey, I can do these clickbait headlines too! Recently it has gotten media's attention that Linus is dismissive of ARM servers. The argument is roughly "Developers use X86 PCs, cross-platform development is painful, and therefor devs will use X86 servers, unless they get ARM PCs to play with".

This ignores the reality where majority of developers do cross-platform development every day. They develop on Mac and Windows PC's and deploy on Linux servers or mobile phones. The two biggest Linux success stories, cloud and Android, are built on cross-platform development. Yes, cross-platform development sucks. But it's just one of the many things that sucks in software development.

More importantly, the ship of "local dev enviroment" has long since sailed. Using Linus's other great innovation, git, developers push their code to a Microsoft server, which triggers a Rube Goldberg machine of software build, container assembly, unit tests, deployment to test environment and so on - all in cloud servers.

Yes, the ability to easily by a cheap whitebox PC from CompUSA was the important factor in making X86 dominate server space. But people get cheap servers from cloud now, and even that is getting out of fashion. Services like AWS lambda abstract the whole server away, and the instruction set becomes irrelevant. Which CPU and architecture will be used to run these "serverless" services is not going to depend on developers having Arm Linux Desktop PC's.

Of course there are still plenty of people like me who use Linux Desktop and run things locally. But in the big picture things are just going one way. The way where it gets easier to test things in your git-based CI loop rather than in local development setup.

But like Linus, I still do want to see an powerful PC-like Arm NUC or Laptop. One that could run mainline Linux kernel and offer a PC-like desktop experience. Not because ARM depends on it to succeed in server space (what it needs is out of scope for this blogpost) - but because PC's are useful in their own.