Looks lame, and stupid expensive.

In the US, the cover (as long as it doesn’t mess up the song too much) is automatically allowed, as long as you pay what is called a compulsory royalty (a certain amount per record sold, or per audience member in case of a live performance). ASCAP and/or the Harry Fox Agency (iirc) act among other things as clearinghouses for these payments. You have to notify them ahead of time of the cover you’re releasing, and maybe pay something up front.

Normally if you seek permission from the publisher of the song you want to cover, it’s because you want to negotiate a lower royalty than the compulsory one. You can often do that if you can convince them that your record is going to sell a lot of copies. It’s just a discussion about money and business people are used to that.

If your performance copies from the original but is not a straightforward cover, then you do need permission ahead of time as the compulsory license doesn’t apply, with some limited free-speech exceptions for parodies.

IANAL bla bla bla.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#United_States

Scrounge at flea market or thrift shop, $20 or so. Maybe no swivel, but if you want it vertical just rotate it or get two of them.

I don’t think so. I’ve read the opposite and IME you learn not to sweat the small stuff. That helps a lot.

This has a LED, is that ok?

https://www.adafruit.com/product/3423

Hmm ok, but it still sounds kind of sus. One of the insights of the Mixmaster era is that what really matters is the amount of message reordering you can do, and that’s why remailers typically had 24 hours or more of latency. So I’ve never believed in Tor (near real time). Even with a text chat network, more than a few seconds of latency will have a significant usability hit. And also, as mentioned, using the service at all probably makes you into one of the usual suspects.

The Guardian (newspaper) handles this in an interesting way, for 1-way communication from users to the Guardian itself. They have a news reader app used by millions of subscribers to access news articles and stuff. And if you want to send them a confidential news tip, the app has a feature where you can enter a text message for their editors. The news reading protocol includes some space for this type of message in every transaction, under a layer of encryption so that an eavesdropper can’t see if a message is present. Allowing user to user communication through such a scheme could easily lead to mayhem, but for sending stuff to an identified recipient (the Guardian) that has some establishment cred, it’s clever.

You’re trying to bypass an anti spam filter. If there was a consistent way to do that, spammers would exploit it til the vulnerability was mitigated.

I’ve been using fastmail and it works, but it’s on the expensive side, enough to be unattractive to spammers. So that’s one approach.

Wait you mean the chat users have to pay to send traffic through the mix pool? This sounds worse and worse. Is BitMessage still around?

I would say once you’re observed sending data into Tor or anything resembling it, you’re already compromised even if your correspondent hasn’t been uniquely identified. I can’t see getting excited about the app.

It costs money to run a node? That’s even worse. The people most willing to pay will be the ones up to no good.

blockchain

Ok I still don’t know what this program does that’s interesting, but it sounds like another thing we don’t need.

Overall I think we’re going to see a much higher quality of software, ironically around the same level than before 2000 when the net became usable by everyone to download fixes. When the software had to be pressed to CDs or written to millions of floppies, it had to survive an amazing quantity of tests that are mostly neglected nowadays since updates are easy to distribute.

Finally someone else said that.

There are some 4g dumb phones but idk of any that don’t suck. It might be possible to put a minimal launcher on a cheap android phone.

BIFL doesn’t exist for phones. A physically indestructible titanium phone from 2015 would be useless today because it would be 3g and those networks are gone. Phones are consumables.

It would be cool if there was a way to move a post from one community to another, so the poster gets notified and maybe the old link redirects. Some BBS systems support this.