#No coding knowledge

[i4technolab]

Power Apps, a part of the Microsoft Power Platform, empowers users to create custom business applications without the need for extensive coding knowledge. However, to ensure the success of your PowerApps development projects, it's crucial to follow best practices and leverage essential tips. In this blog post, we'll explore key strategies to enhance your Power Apps development experience.

[reds-skull]

Soap "dog-coded" MacTavish my beloved

(This took 5 weeks help)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The US Copyright Office frees the McFlurry

I'll be in TUCSON, AZ from November 8-10: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.

Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine – for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017Jul/0005.html

But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around tools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.

Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-ass time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."

As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metastasized into every kind of device imaginable.

Garage-door openers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Refrigerators:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

Dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

Tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

Cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty

And even printer paper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#dymo-550

DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.

I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.

I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive tools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally – without any help from anyone else – figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

That is what is meant by a use exemption without a tools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.

The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one – but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255074/former-jockey-michael-straight-exoskeleton-repair-battery

When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks – without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.

This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvent access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":

https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-ifixit-free-the-mcflurry-win-copyright-office-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines/

While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request – filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit – was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines – which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts – are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of them broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.

This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).

In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/28/mcbroken/#my-milkshake-brings-all-the-lawyers-to-the-yard

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[buttercupshands]

small purefount comic bc I really liked the idea of drawing them

(totally didn't fill this one with codes)

[reality-detective]

Cracking The Code 😂

[featheryalarmclock]

"wait, you're NOT jesting about the whole possession thing?"

Okay but what if Berdly would actually lock tf in and be supportive the moment he learns about the soul situation and realizes that Kris is genuinely distraught about being treated like a game character without much of an agency

[tangramkey]

i love my Basketbot Portal AU

[mikakuna]

its interesting when people are like "characters in jason's comics always get ruined because of him" and yk what? that would be a sound point if those characters were ruined to prop jason up-- to prop him up as both jason todd and as red hood, and to push his moral agenda. but that's just not at all the case.

another character gets horribly mischaracterized? fine, but in most cases, it's done to push the narrative that jason is inherently bad and wrong. or it's all an elaborate plan to eventually show that his ways would never work. jason never gets anything good out of it. he's made out to be the bad guy, the impulsive idiot, the stupid one, the evil poor kid-- that's something that's consistent.

so when other characters in jason comics are ruined, just remember that jason's character is not getting anything good out of it either. the moral of the story in basically every single one of his comics post his original robin run and utrh is that he will always be wrong and inferior to batman. it's that he will never succeed because he's not meant to/doesn't deserve to. he might have a good moment or two but that's all. at the end of the day, the audience must remember how bad jason is and how much more morally superior bruce and the other bats/heroes are. the writer wants us to know that his way of fighting crime will never work and the only way for him to succeed as a hero is by obeying bruce.

[corrie-zodori]

Hi /comes in swinging with a baseball bat This is a long post but bare with me, if you like spamtenna and deltarune theories strap in for this one. My running theory is this: I think that Mike sabotaged Tenna and Spamton's relationship.

I got thinking, where does the animosity between Spamton and Tenna come from? In the snowgrave route of chapter 2, Spamton implies with the line "Are you gonna f*ck me over at the good part, what are you a game show host?" He thinks Tenna was going to screw him over. And we know that because Spamton ran off after that phone call, Tenna thinks that Spamton ripped him off and abandoned him. And because Spamton ran off, they never got to talk or clear the air. Ever. (That's ALSO Why Spamton only comes out of your pocket because he thinks Tenna CARES suddenly.)

Why would he think that specifically? In Spamton's shop, when you bring up friends... Why does Spamton go from "Mike..." to talking about Tenna? "Don't trust anything you see on TV, that man's a criminal". He was thinking about Mike specifically, there, so why would he suddenly switch aggressively to warning Kris about Tenna? Because, by remembering Mike, He's flashing back to that last phonecall he took right before he ran out of the room. The one that Tenna referred to in the sword route. AKA, Likely, the last time he talked to Tenna, and POSSIBLY the last time he talked to Mike. And what did Tenna wanna do? He wanted Spamton to sign a contract. Spamton would have been so easy to manipulate here, for Mike, ESPECIALLY since Mike had already had his trust (assuming Mike was the person he was in contact with all along. Someone we've seen him get defensive of, in the spamtons sweepstakes. Mike was the one who helped him gain all of his fame, after all!) And Spamton was already used to people using him /gestures to his old 'friends'. It would NOT have been hard to convince him.

All Mike would have to have said was something like: "He'll make you sign that contract and you'll lose everything. He'll own you. He'll screw you over and use you. You'd just be his puppet." Anything along these lines. AND/OR, also, bringing up the prophecy. Telling spamton that Tenna is doomed, and its not worth sticking around. Because CLEARLY Spamton knows Tenna was meant to die (as, if youre wearing the dealmakers in tenna's fight and check him, it says "the tragic businessman who dies at the now of the story". There's no way Spamton should have known that unless spamton knew the prophecy, or some parts of it.) So why would Mike do that? To avoid being found or exposed, of course. He didn't want Spamton to run his mouth and reveal him. He knew spamton knew too much. He was afraid that Spamton would out him to Tenna. Tenna clearly doesnt know who the real Mike is, but Spamton supposedly does. To quote this from the sweepstakes: "You leave him out of this, you dont know who or WHAT Mike is." (And he's right. We don't.) WHY Mike wants to remain hidden, it's uncertain at this point. Possibly because he's the one pulling the strings. We already knew that he found Spamton, not the other way around, via phonecall. He only wants to be found by specific people, under specific conditions; to manipulate them, for what goal, is still possibly unknown. My conclusion: Mike is shady and manipulative and I do not trust whatever strings he's pulling. And I believe that the misunderstanding between spamton and tenna came from Mike intentionally manipulating Spamton to drive them further apart. And it breaks my heart. If Mike IS a stand-in for gaster, or if it's JUST him, I don't know for sure. We're still missing pieces.

I'm curious to hear y'alls thoughts because I am very not normal about them or the implications of literally any of this. It's possible I could be missing some key information here.

[ryrolie]

Dr. Isinglass and Glubot 525

[thisisnotkitty]

securitywaiter headcanons bc i found out about this ship an hour ago and i'm already too deep into it

-generally agreed upon but ness is DEFINITELY a conspiracy theorist. i think he was into conspiracys since he was younger, starting off with more silly ones like birds aren't real and the moon landing is fake and then getting into deeper ones with maybe a bit of a lean towards true crime. then when the local pizzeria had missing children well...

-mike takes abby to the diner for her birthday bc what can u do in a small town! they give a free slice of cake for birthdays and have the workers come around your table to sing except ness is the only one to genuinely enjoy singing it and he's also arguably got the best voice out of all the workers (or at least he does in mike's opinion)

-abby ships it. yknow how little kids are almost too observant and then proceed to say the most cryptid things?? yeah, she notices mike smiling and making more small talk with ness than with any other waiter they get and suddenly shes playing matchmaker

i'll probably have more once i let them microwave in my head a bit

[muffin-snakes-art]

I learned about Silver and this is my conclusion

[originalaccountname]

None of this means anything to me but being able to read the lines is funny in concept so I'm screenshotting it just in case someone else wants to look at it. Also the fact that he gets warnings towards the end there cracks me up (this is the screen while Fyodor is setting up the elevator to flood in Meursault)

[cybertron-after-dark]

Being constantly surrounded by the presence of a loving God sounds great until you realize you never know when his freaky fuckin eyes are gonna show up to check on you.

And man. They do it a LOT.

[reality-detective]

🇺🇸 Nothing Is What It Seems: Trump, Symbolism & the Flag

I have learned through the last few years, that in Trump’s world, nothing is ever just optics. His words often carry hidden meanings. His actions; parades, flags, positioning, are deliberate signals. They may seem casual, but they are not.

Interpreting them isn’t easy, but when viewed through the lens of history, timing, and symbolism, they reveal a pattern. The past week offers one of the clearest examples of this:

Flag Day Parade – June 14, 2025

Trump oversaw the 250th anniversary parade of the U.S. Army on Flag Day. At the height of the ceremony, he was handed a folded American flag—flown over the Capitol and delivered by a Golden Knight parachutist who descended in a free fall.

That phrase—“free fall”—may seem purely technical, but in a symbolic context it carries weight: a controlled descent from above, a return to earth. A flag once elevated in the sky is now placed back in the hands of its rightful stewards.

As the flag was presented, Melania stepped in front of Trump. Like a Queen shielding her King, it was a visual shift—subtle, but loaded. In chess, the Queen is power, strategy, and protection.

Flagpole Installation – June 18, 2025

Just days later, Trump funded and installed two 100-foot flagpoles on the White House lawns. He said:

“This is something they should have done 200 years ago.”

Until then, the White House had only ever flown the flag from the rooftop, but these new poles are different. They rise from the ground—from the soil of the Republic. The message is clear: the flag no longer floats above the people; it stands with them.

This is the flag of We the People.

Why “200 Years Ago”? — 1825

In 1825, Andrew Jackson won both the electoral and popular vote. But Congress handed the presidency to John Quincy Adams through a backroom deal. Jackson called it the “Corrupt Bargain.” It was America’s first openly fraudulent election.

That same year also marked the end of the Founding generation and the beginning of entrenched elite control.

Trump’s reference to “200 years ago” was no accident. He’s pointing to the moment the people lost their voice and signaling a reversal.

In just a few days, Trump orchestrated a deliberate sequence:

– A military flag delivered by air

– A Queen’s move on the national stage

– Two flagpoles anchored in the people’s ground

– A reference to the Republic’s first great betrayal

This wasn’t theatre. It was a declaration.

The flag is back where it belongs.

The people are back in the picture.

The Republic is being reset. 🤔