> As of March 2025, the current development version of MuPDF now supports reading PDF files with Brotli compression. The source is available from github.com/ArtifexSoftware/mupdf, and will be included as an experimental feature in the upcoming 1.26.0 release.
> Similarly, the latest development version of Ghostscript can now read PDF files with Brotli compression. File creation functionality is underway. The next official Ghostscript release is scheduled for August this year, but the source is available now from github.com/ArtifexSoftware/Ghostpdl.
Yes, I do not see any source of financial gain that could motivate them for this, because both MuPDF and Ghostscript are free.
MuPDF is an excellent PDF reader, the fastest that I have ever tested. There are plenty of big PDF files where most other readers are annoyingly slow.
It is my default PDF and EPUB reader, except that in very rare cases I encounter PDF files which MuPDF cannot understand, when I use other PDF readers (e.g. Okular).
It did have a remarkably low price, though - less than a tenth of UCSD p-System or Topspeed. Even the competitors in the hobbyist space like the original IBM/Microsoft Pascal and DRI's Pascal/MT originally cost 4-5x as much.
Really, it was responsible for as big a step change in pricing of programming tools in the 1980s as GNU, BSD, and Linux were in the 90s.
You are getting downvoted, but this is a fair point. The only other country with a higher estimate for illegal immigrant population is Russia. The next closest Western European country is France, with barely over half the rate of the US. [0]
In the poorer parts of the world, people absolutely detest illegal immigrants (or basically most working migrants as well) because they are taking jobs from the locals. They hate refugees because there's not enough resources to go around to use in feeding and housing them.
Welcoming people in because "no-one wants to do those jobs" is very much a luxury belief of the well off.
I think the number of people who welcome immigrants for this reason is actually quite small, and is mostly business owners. And to be fair, they are not entirely wrong -- all evidence we have suggests that many of the jobs are so hard that getting citizens to do them would require bumping the wage 3, 4, 5 times, and even then it is a tough sell.
What I think has happened culturally is that Americans see us as the shining beacon on the hill, where everyone wants to be, and so we feel sympathetic to those who will do whatever it takes to come here. There are lots of cultural references historically that reinforce this mythology. Call it American Exceptionalism or whatever, but the mythology is real.
Between our own loss in confidence and the onslaught of 'America Bad' inundating the online dialogue, this mythology is dying in a hurry. Makes me a little sad, honestly, because I am of the opinion that a nation benefits from a strong mythology. Sometimes that is served by religion, but in the US it has for a long time been 'Land of Opportunity' and associated beliefs. I dare anyone to go to the US Capitol tour and watch that 15 minute intro video about the founding of the country and not come away with a tear in their eye. It's quite moving, even if it is largely a fabrication.
It's always the land of opportunity for those who want to come in and displace the existing inhabitants. Fun when you're the one displacing until you are on the other side.
No, but subnets can't be as easily associated with unwanted traffic. If IPv6 gets blocked you just get another IP. A VPN or hosting provider can't simply rent, or god forbid buy IPv4 addresses and subnets, arbitrarily. The IPs they use are rather static and easy to discover. Rather trivial to block all them, preemptively. Residential IPv4 VPNs are not legal offerings and their use is limited.
VPNs can fight traffic analysis, they can't fight preemptive IPv4 blocking.
See, it doesn't matter if it's somehow possible to control IPv6 traffic, factually, it is sooo much easier to control and observe IPv4. IPv6 adoption isn't going great at all and now there are new strong business incentives against it.
The direction we're moving right now isn't free intergalactic mesh networking, but holistic control and centralization by the tech oligarchy. IPv6 is good things... we can't have those.
> How do you think VPNs are getting past VOD providers’ VPN block lists?
In my experience, they most often don't. If you got more insights, please enlighten me. I presume VPNs which get past VPN block lists, are just not yet on the radar, or don't provide the privacy claimed, not actually fully in control of their infrastructure.
> What’s illegal about them?
Where do you think residential IPs are coming from? It's often botnets or otherwise compromised devices, or people tricked into sharing their connection. In any case, it's most certainly breaking the ISP's TOS. Because of the effort behind providing residential IPs, these VPN services are rather expensive. And certainly not trustworthy in regard to privacy. If offering residential IPs would be legal, every VPN service would provide them.
> And does it matter to uncooperative/aggressive bots?
No. They are used for mostly shady/criminal activity, where the limitations and legality don't matter. I doubt commercial LLM crawlers and data intense campaigns aren't bothered by legality, stability, connectivity or (upload) bandwidth limitations. Like, you wouldn't crawl the web on a mobile connection.
Or it could end up like some Asian countries with a large afterschool tuition industry. I guess at a minimum you don't want the kid to get shot up at school though.
https://pdfa.org/brotli-compression-coming-to-pdf/
> As of March 2025, the current development version of MuPDF now supports reading PDF files with Brotli compression. The source is available from github.com/ArtifexSoftware/mupdf, and will be included as an experimental feature in the upcoming 1.26.0 release.
> Similarly, the latest development version of Ghostscript can now read PDF files with Brotli compression. File creation functionality is underway. The next official Ghostscript release is scheduled for August this year, but the source is available now from github.com/ArtifexSoftware/Ghostpdl.
reply