hedgehog
Sure, but if everyone does it then it wouldn’t work (no one would be drawing excess when the solar is at peak)
If everyone did it then electric companies could prioritize investing in batteries and capacitors and further reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.
If everyone did it, then even without extra storage capacity, net metering would still work. You don’t get credits for generating energy, just for sending it to the grid. All they have to do is the same thing they already do - curtailment.
Finally, it’s impossible for everyone to be on net metering because NEM 3.0 doesn’t have net metering and NEM 1.0 and 2.0 are only available if you’re grandfathered in.
If oversupply were really a concern, then you’d think the prices during oversupply would reflect that, dropping to basically nothing. They don’t. If they did, then EVs could be charged for super cheap when solar power was flooding the grid.
that sounds a lot like what they are talking about
What they’re talking about is revoking the law that grandfathered people into NEM 1.0 and 2.0 contracts. Keep in mind, the people who purchased solar under NEM 1.0 and 2.0 did so under the presumption that they would be able to stay on it for at least 20 years (because that was codified in law).000
only getting paid some large percentage of the price for energy sent to the grid
NEM 3.0 reduces the way credits are calculated to, on average, 25% of what they were before, and that are not the same as the retail rate.
https://aurorasolar.com/blog/explaining-and-modeling-californias-net-billing-tariff-nem-3-0/ has some examples. At the same time that electricity from the grid costs $0.44/kWh, solar sent to the grid only returns a $0.05/kWh credit.
5 cents is not a large percentage of 44 cents.
If your neighbor has solar and you charge your EV in the middle of a sunny day when your neighbor is at work, you’re probably using your neighbor’s electricity to do so. That’s gonna cost you $15 and net your neighbor a $1.71 credit.
Under NEM 1.0 and 2.0, if you import from and export to the grid in the same hour, those amounts are netted, even before NBCs come into effect. But under NEM 3.0, you could get billed for importing in the same hour even if you exported far more than you used. If you imported 1 kWh from the grid, you’d need to export 9 kWh to break even.
Again, this doesn’t make sense. Someone is paying $0.44/kWh for the energy you exported, but you’re only getting $0.05 credit for it.
If your solar system has storage, you can strategically export energy to the grid when the compensation is higher. That’s something you can consider when installing your solar system… but that’s not true for the people who are grandfathered into NEM 1.0 and 2.0, who knew they were grandfathered in by law.
And from what I’ve heard, even that doesn’t actually help that much, because the credits don’t apply to the largest part of the bill - they apply to “generation,” not to “delivery.” I haven’t found a reliable source confirming that, but if true it just adds insult to injury - if you pay the added cost to install an intelligent storage system and configure it to return money to the grid when their costs are highest, you get a credit equal to the cost you helped them avoid, but then the credit’s actually only usable on a small portion of your bill. If the calculations are based on avoided cost, you should get those credits even if it means the electric company is paying you.
It doesn’t really seem like net metering is sustainable.
Not sure why you think that.
Say for example someone generates the same amount of electricity they use, in that case they pay $0 for electricity even though the grid has to take the burden of storing the electricity until they use it later in the day.
The grid isn’t storing their energy - it’s sending it to other customers, meaning that non-sustainable, polluting energy sources don’t have to be generated.
The only time that’s not true is when the net load on the grid dips below zero. According to the duck curve graph from the article, it does appear to be very briefly dipping for a very brief time period each day. At that point it could make sense to store the rest, but if the grid doesn’t have storage capacity then any excess is “wasted,” but at that point the grid engages in a process known as “curtailment,” which means it rejects the excess, meaning that nobody gets credit later for energy that isn’t used now.
Also, curtailment is often not because the grid itself is over-supplied, but because specific regions are over-supplied and the grid lacks transmission lines from them to regions where demand is higher.
in that case they pay $0 for electricity
True under NEM 1.0, but NEM 2.0 also includes “non-bypassable charges” - components of pulling from the grid that cannot be offset by what they contribute. Those charges are roughly 5% as far as I can tell, meaning that if they pulled $300 worth of energy from the grid and sent back $300 worth (or more), they’d still owe $15.
The article explains the infographic and adds a lot more context.
The amount of arsenic depends on location - if you’re in a region that has standards on arsenic levels, like the EU, UK, or the US, then you’re probably fine, but the levels may be higher than what’s considered safe for children. This method would allow you to reduce the levels by around 50%, and since the levels for children are a bit under half of what’s acceptable for adults, that’s likely to make it safe for them.
The time savings are relative to other methods for reducing arsenic content, like cooking it with excess water (like a 12:1 ratio) and then discarding the excess, as this method allows you to use a rice cooker for the remaining time and to cook with a much smaller water:rice ratio, even accounting for the discarded water.
Cool, didn’t know that about Ecosia.
Qwant: looks like maybe they used to have a browser that might have been forked from Firefox, but it hasn’t been updated in a while - per the App Store listings, I think they now just have a lightweight search engine frontend.
Brave on iOS appears to have been forked from Firefox on iOS back in 2018-2019, which was news to me. (“Appears to” regards the date; it was definitely forked from Firefox).
the rest of the browser is derived from Firefox
This might be true for some, like Ecosia, but I’m guessing that Brave isn’t pulling changes from Firefox. It seems like they basically used the Firefox codebase as a starting point - and in 5 years of development, a lot can change.
I wasn’t saying that this is generally true for IOS browsers, just that a pretty large part of FOSS ones are
Gotcha, that makes more sense.
One more thing to point out is that your comment reads like they were based on Firefox and that Firefox didn’t use Webkit (but of course Firefox on iOS also uses Webkit).
more like Floorp
Meaning that they’re forks of Chromium on desktop in the same way Floorp is a fork of Firefox on desktop?
Sorta turns the AD&D mechanic on its head. And it makes more sense than the way it was done in AD&D - I like it!
Context: in AD&D, humans could “dual class,” which is similar to what you described - effectively retiring in one class and beginning to advance in another - and non-humans could “multi-class,” where they gained experience in two or more classes at the same time, leveling more slowly but getting the benefits of both classes.
They are based off Firefox for IOS which uses WebKit, but they are still based on the browser like Edge which is based on chromium vs Flakon which uses blink but not the rest chromium
I’ve reread this like 5 times and still have no clue what you’re trying to say.
The person you replied to was technically incorrect - other browsers aren’t UIs on top of Safari, but (outside the EU) they’re all limited to the same browser rendering engine Safari uses, Webkit.
This means that other rendering engines - namely Firefox’s Gecko and Chromium’s Blink, as well as niche engines like Ladybird’s - are unavailable there (outside the EU).
They are based off Firefox for IOS
This is not generally true of browsers on iOS, and might not be true of any.
Flakon
I didn’t know what this was at first - apparently this was a typo for “Falkon.”
which uses blink
The browser rendering engine used by Chromium browsers is Blink, which was forked from Webkit over a decade ago, but I’m not aware of any non-Chromium browsers that use it… including Falkon, which appears to leverage QtWebEngine, which itself uses Chromium.
but they are still based on the browser like Edge
By “based on” do you mean “uses the same branding as and is loosely inspired by?” Because I highly doubt that the iOS codebase is based off the desktop codebase for many Chromium or Firefox-based browsers… they may share some code and assets but I doubt they get to share much more than that.
It’s a bit unclear what you mean by “Apple” - I’m assuming you mean Safari on both Mac and iOS.
The search engine I use is SearxNg. On Firefox on Mac it was pretty easy to add.
To use it in Safari, I installed the Keyword Search extension from the App Store. It has the option to set a search engine as the default if you don’t use a keyword, so I did that. This works in both Mac and on iOS / iPadOS.
There are other Safari extensions that do similar things, like Customize Search Engine (free). Kagi has an extension that can make Kagi the default search engine, for example (it doesn’t appear that there’s an equivalent for Startpage, though). I haven’t used anything other than Keyword Search for this, though.
Eligible libraries, archives, and museums have a few exemptions to the DMCA’s anti-circumvention clauses that aren’t available to ordinary citizens, but these aren’t unique to the Internet Archive. For example:
Literary works, excluding computer programs and compilations that were compiled specifically for text and data mining purposes, distributed electronically where:
(A) The circumvention is undertaken by a researcher affiliated with a nonprofit institution of higher education, or by a student or information technology staff member of the institution at the direction of such researcher, solely to deploy text and data mining techniques on a corpus of literary works for the purpose of scholarly research and teaching;
(B) The copy of each literary work is lawfully acquired and owned by the institution, or licensed to the institution without a time limitation on access;
© The person undertaking the circumvention views the contents of the literary works in the corpus solely for the purpose of verification of the research findings; and
(D) The institution uses effective security measures to prevent further dissemination or downloading of literary works in the corpus, and to limit access to only the persons identified in paragraph (b)(5)(i)(A) of this section or to researchers or to researchers affiliated with other institutions of higher education solely for purposes of collaboration or replication of the research.
This exemption doesn’t allow them to publish the content, though, nor would it provide them immunity to takedown requests, if it did.
These exemptions change every three years and previously granted exemptions have to be renewed. The next cycle begins in October and they started accepting comments on renewals + proposals for expanded or new exemptions in April, so that’s why we’re hearing about companies lobbying against them now.
Dunno, I think regardless of the method used by the extension, I think any extension called “Bypass Paywalls” that does what it says on the tin can pretty unambiguously be said to be designed to circumvent “technological protection measures”.
“Bypass” and “Circumvent” are nearly synonymous in some uses - they both mean “avoid” - but that’s not really the point.
From a legal perspective, it’s pretty clear no circumvention of technological protection measures is taking place*. Yes, bypassing or circumventing a paywall to get to the content on the site itself would be illegal, were that content effectively protected by a technological measure. But they’re not doing that. Rather, a circumvention of the entire site is occurring, which is completely legal (an obvious exception would be if they were hosting infringing content themselves or something along those lines, but we’re talking about the Internet Archive here).
* - to be clear, I’m referring to what was detailed in the request, not the part that was redacted. That part may qualify as a circumvention.
In this case, it circumvents the need to login entirely and obviously it circumvents the paywall.
Following the same logic, Steam could claim that a browser extension showing where you can get the same game for cheaper or free circumvents their technological protection measure. It doesn’t. It circumvents the entire storefront, which is not illegal.
That’s the same thing that’s happening here - linking to the same work that’s legally hosted elsewhere.
Though as you said, these guys should probably be sending DMCAs to the Internet Archive
Yes - if they don’t want their content available, that’s what they should do. They might not want to do that, because they appreciate the Internet Archive’s mission (I wonder if it’s possible to ask that content be taken down until X date, or for content to be made inaccessible but for it to still be archived?) or they might be taking a multi pronged approach.
Maybe archive.today is the problem? Maybe they don’t honor DMCA requests.
Good point. If so, and if their site isn’t legally compliant in the same ways, then the extension becomes a lot less legally defensible if it’s linking there. That’s still not because it’s circumventing a technological protection, though - it’s because of precedent that “One who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, going beyond mere distribution with knowledge of third-party action, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties using the device, regardless of the device’s lawful uses,” (Source), where “device” includes software. Following that precedent, plaintiffs could claim that the extension promoted its use to infringe copyright based off the extension’s name and that it had knowledge of third-party action because it linked directly to sites known to infringe copyright.
The Digital Media Law Project points out that there are two ways sharing links can violate the DMCA:
- Trafficking in anti-circumvention tools - which is obviously not what’s going on here
- Contributory copyright infringement - which is basically doing something described by the precedent I shared above.
I’m not sure how the extension searches web archives. It if uses Google, for example, then it would make sense to serve Google ae DMCA takedown notice (“stop serving results to the known infringing archive.piracy domain”), but if the extension directly searches the infringing web archive, then the extension developers would need to know that the archive is infringing. Serving them a DMCA takedown (“stop searching the known infringing archive.piracy domain”) would give them notice, and if they ignored it, it would then be appropriate to send the takedown directly to their host (Github, the browser extension stores, etc) citing that they had been informed of the infringement of a site they linked to and were de facto committing contributory infringement themselves.
Given that they didn’t do that, I can conclude one of the following:
- The lawyers are incompetent.
- The lawyers are competent and recognize that engaging in bad faith like this produces faster results; if this is contested they’ll follow up with something else, possibly even the very actions I described.
- The archives that are searched by the extension aren’t infringing and this was the best option the lawyers could come up with.
How is the accused project designed to circumvent your technological protection measures?
The identified Bypass Paywalls technology circumvents NM/A’s members’ paywalls in one of two ways. [private]
For hard paywalls, it is our understanding that the identified Bypass Paywalls technology automatically scans web archives for a crawled version of the protected content and displays that content.
If the web archives have the content, then a user could just search them manually. The extension isn’t logging users in and bypassing your login process; it’s just running a web search for them.