Just imagine if there was an actual open consortium not spearheaded by monied commercial interests that could temper recent Google decisions. They’ve lost a lot, if not all, of their goodwill with old guard, open web standards nerds. And the old guard that still actively support their standards influencing schemes now make too much money to stop.

Is it still a meme when you feel it in your soul?

I don’t know why, maybe because it’s Sunday morning and I’m just drinking my coffee and browsing around while the rest of the house sleeps in, but this triggered a rabbit hole for me. I already have a lil plugin just for quickly saving direct to PNG or JPG when I right click a WebP in my browsers, but I SHOULDN’T GODDAMN HAVE TO.

WEBP as a wrapper (as coupled along with AVIF/AV1/VP8/etc) seems all about reassertion of corporate control of web file formats by pivoting codecs back toward patent encumbrance as a control factor, just without universal royalty hooks attached to anyone that touches even free and open software utilizing it. We were actually FREE of that bullshit for a short time. PNG has no patent encumbrance. GIF, MP3, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2 all have expired patents and can be used freely.

[Don’t get me wrong, MPEG as an org was and is pure corruption and greed, and MPEG-4 Part 2 adoption was fully diminished outside of ‘free’ circles based on their stated intention to apply a ‘content fee’ to the royalty requirements. It’s obvious why VP8 -> AV1 had to happen one way or another to break their royalty cabal insanity, but it still doesn’t taste good at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_2 ]

The consortium of companies behind WebP and AV1 are all taking part in the enshittification of the entire technology sector, from web sites and web apps, operating systems, and application ecosystems. Why would we ever trust them to not rug pull the ‘irrevocable but revocable’ patent license scheme? They only put it together in the first place to end run having to pay someone who was ‘not them’ any royalties for image/video/audio encoding.

References:

WEBP is patent encumbered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebP

https://github.com/ImageMagick/webp/blob/main/PATENTS

Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free,** irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license** to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, transfer, and otherwise run, modify and propagate the contents of these implementations of WebM, where such license applies only to those patent claims, both currently owned by Google and acquired in the future, licensable by Google that are necessarily infringed by these implementations of WebM. This grant does not include claims that would be infringed only as a consequence of further modification of these implementations.

GIF is not patent encumbered since 2004.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

In 2004, all patents relating to the proprietary compression used for GIF expired.

PNG was never patent encumbered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PNG

PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)—unofficially, the initials PNG stood for the recursive acronym “PNG’s not GIF”.

AV1, VP8, VP9, and other modernized “open source” or “free” Video Codecs all appear to be patent encumbered.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23747923

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVIF

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VP8

Now we just need a Brennan Lee Mulligan flavored fully charged rant about the billionaire class of corporatists forcing webp with its patent encumbrance on us all.

Edit: I kinda ended up channeling him after I started writing a short comment for OP that just kept going. https://lemmy.world/comment/10914387

Deinitely never editing that

All it needed was a goddamn network pork instead of a dialup modem and it would be alive today. DC was the best.

This is pure corruption.

What action are you trying to imply, exactly?

Sounds like a divisive call for violence and civil war, the exact sort of shit the nuttier conservatives play up when talking about liberals. You aren’t even advocating attacking the definite bad actors in positions of power, you are advocating attacking neighbors.

This even works as the exact sort of propaganda foreign state adversaries would use to stir up unrest to keep the US frozen from the inside, in to reduce our impact on potential global conflicts, ie Ukraine, Taiwan, South Korea, etc.

When all you see are enemies, you’ve embraced the very hate you think you are standing against.

Don’t spam the same thing in multiple communities like this, it’s poor etiquette and it will get you bans sooner rather than later. Thanks and have a nice day.

Good catch, I got interrupted with work mid post, thats probably the most notable example for sure.

What?

Those examples are after-it-actually-happened reports of the US government actively getting corporations to do what they want.

Get your head out of the sand.

I don’t trust China, but I’m not going to lie to myself to feel better about a political hitjob, even if Bytedance has it’s multinational corporate governance primarily under China.

Kapersky is the example you want to point at for an example of a bad actor corp capturing classified data and sending it to an adversarial government. TikTok just trended anti-political messages for a few different popular politicians and lit a match as a result.

Sorry broke the link somehow, edited and fixed.

Lemmy is an open system in and of itself, and the resultant platform algorithms are open by design, it’s just wishful nonsense to think a state actor can’t ‘surface or suppress’ ideas even here with a little effort.

And even american commercial social media sites don’t really do it for a specific political agenda

Oh my sweet summer child, we’re at the coercion of news media redux for social media…

https://www.reuters.com/legal/us-supreme-court-blocks-order-curbing-biden-administration-social-media-contacts-2023-10-20/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/biden-administration-blocked-from-working-with-social-media-firms-about-protected-speech

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/fbi-white-house-likely-coerced-social-media-platforms-appeals-court.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens'_Commission_to_Investigate_the_FBI

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/hearings/ciasuseofjournal00unit.pdf

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/cia-rdp91-00901r000500050029-0

That was about money, this is about controlling speech.

It was always about butthurt Trump opening the floodgates on the idea of banning it after TikTokers kept attacks on him trending.

It’s brainwashed lunacy to the point of propaganda to continually claim it’s over China using the platform to sway public opinion. They can and do use EVERY platform to do that.

You think even Lemmy is immune?

He had several affairs become public, and that’s what led to the divorce, don’t just make shit up. Qanon is not a reliable source.

I mean, I dunno, ACAB and fuck tha police and all that jazz, but 5 bil for 36k is 138k/each, and that’s not too unreasonably bad for NYC cost of living vs the inherent danger and work regime of the job as a police officer in such a populous city.

https://apnews.com/article/alec-baldwin-politics-new-mexico-state-government-clovis-prop-gun-shooting-4318dd3bce9974099a8cdb599264f876

This was always a political bag of bullshit. They even had to fund it as a special prosecution with legislation, going so far as to assign a special prosecutor that happened to also be a state Republican legislator.

The gymnastics people keep using to align blame for manslaughter onto Bladwin have slowly become accepted as if it is factual like propaganda is meant to do.

It’s just usb-c power right?

Putting on my rollerblades now.

I mean, they at least offer a blank + clear ANSI and blank + clear ISO keyboard options along side their 14 other keyboard formats.