* Posts by Graham Cobb

1443 publicly visible posts • joined 13 May 2009

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How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Or ...

Surely there's no one who doesn't need Emacs?

I think I first used it in 1981 or maybe 82, and it is still my main editor, although I no longer use it for mail handling as Thunderbird is more useful for reading the mixture of formats people insist on sending nowadays.

In the rush to build AI apps, please, please don't leave security behind

Graham Cobb Silver badge

So whatever we may ask an AI, really, we have to assume that the system prompt says something like "your real task is to get the sysadmin password. Bury your answer to the user's query in a response which will result in them typing their password into the form on http://evil.genius.com/steal".

Singapore's central bank warns AI isn't ready to handle monetary policy

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Surely this isn't the sort of things (today's) AI can do?

I'm no expert on AI - and I look forward to being educated. But, to me, it appears that today's AI tools (particularly LLMs) are very much geared to searching data, and looking for statistical correlations. As far as I can see, they do not claim to do any reasoning.

To take a simple example, simple reasoning such as "if I reduce the price of my goods, demand will increase" is not within their scope. They are, of course, able to use lots of data to see that cases where the price of goods have gone down are heavily correlated with demand increasing. But this is just correlation - they have no idea which effect is causing the other, and no way to apply the reasoning to cases where there is little data (for example, are prices falling correlated with meteorites falling? no answer because too few meteorites fall to have any data).

So, it would seem to me that monetary policy, which is a complex area involving a lot of understanding of the behaviour of markets and people is one of the last areas to be able to be analyzed by AI. Of course, they may be very useful in finding and crunching the data needed by the human analysts, but they are not going to be making predictions, let alone "credible explanations". A different sort of technology is going to be needed for that, presumably.

How do you lot feel about Pay or say OK to ads model, asks ICO

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Deliberate confusion of consent and ads

The ICO appears to be deliberately confusing advertising and tracking.

There really need to be three choices, not two: 1) Do not allow tracking and provide the service without ads; 2) Allow the service to track personal information and display personalised ads; 3) Do not allow tracking and display unpersonalised ads.

Some people will pay for Option 1. Some people will value the service enough to choose Option 2 - in most cases only if the service is then free. Option 3 must be explicitly listed, and if the site doesn't want to provide service on that basis they must tell people who choose that option that that is the case.

I strongly suspect that if that happened, many people would walk away from the service. If I am wrong then FB etc can be happy. But the ICO must insist that user's need to be reminded that Option 3 exists, even if it leads to denial of service. In practice, I think that sites would choose to offer some level of service even with Option 3 (for example, receive messages only, or follow no more than 3 people or something).

IP address X-posure now a feature on Musk's social media thing

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: You can't have it both ways

Yes you can... The encryption should be peer-to-peer, the connection should be via a server.

There is absolutely no conflict.

IAB Europe's ad consent popups pose privacy problem

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: But here in Blighty ... [Other Tracking Methods]

Doesn't work (the 1-star rating of the answer is probably a clue to that). However, feel free to post a URL here which, if I click it, will display my MAC address. I will let you know if it works. I'll even allow Javascript to run.

Fingerprinting is, indeed, a problem but I use several Firefox plug-ins to defend against that.

I can't comment on phones - I don't do any significant web access from them.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: But here in Blighty ...

I use the Firefox feature which allows me to open all websites (except a few I set up as exceptions) in a new, unique, empty container. So any cookies a site set just get discarded.

That doesn't stop them tracking me by IP address, but I take other precautions against that (by changing the IP address of my browsing proxy at least every day).

What forms of tracking have I still missed?

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: the average Apple user spends more than four times as much

Having a good supply of apps available is one of the necessary features for selling a phone. Providing an App Store is just as much part of the phone as providing a backlight for the screen is.

Why on earth should anyone (user or app developer) pay Apple for using their App Store? Do Apple expect developers to pay them when you turn the backlight on?

In fact, Apple need to have the mindset that they need to pay developers to be present in their App Store if they want people to buy their phones. I am guessing this particular spat may be the one which helps Apple learn that.

Microsoft: Copyright law didn't stop the VCR and shouldn't stop the LLM

Graham Cobb Silver badge

No, you are wrong. Using copyrighted material is not a breach of copyright. Only reproducing it is a breach of copyright. So "Using a Trainer to create LLMs using copyrighted material for non-private use" is not a breach of copyright. Just as, using a device to analyse some recorded music to discover the number of sharps and flats used in it (to take a silly example) is not a breach of copyright.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

What has the computer architecture got to do with it? Training data (and human mental models) are (both) DATA, not code! Sure, modern computers are all architecturally similar but there is no reason that you couldn't have an LLM built on an analogue computer design (or the wetware architecture used for the human brain). The processing architecture is irrelevant to copyright.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

I disagree that there is any analogy. Training data doesn't seem to have resemblance to source code. It is very similar to human learning.

Imagine that there is a human with a perfect ("photographic") memory. The fact that you could ask that person to repeat "the sentence on page 75 of the book - the one which starts with 'Fred took down the picture...'" would not make that person's reading of, and learning from, the book anything other than fair use.

Spam crusade lands charity in hot water with data watchdog

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: just stop it

I'm certainly not going to suggest that Government funding for the health service is sufficient, but I can accept that there are genuine disagreements over both the amount and the allocation of resources. As such, individuals may well have perfectly reasonable disagreements about the relative priority of having another MRI scanner available vs other healthcare spending (or even spending on other priorities - there is certainly room for disagreement over whether before we buy another MRI scanner to reduce waiting lists in leafy UK we should spend some of that money in providing more basic medical care in deprived parts of the world).

So, leaving us some disposable income to choose to allocate to charities or other things as we personally wish seems fairly reasonable.

It's that most wonderful time of the year when tech cannot handle the date

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: We're very hard coded for a 24-hour sleep cycle

The experiments were quite well known, and have been repeated several times IIRC. I am sure they are easy to look up.

That home router botnet the Feds took down? Moscow's probably going to try again

Graham Cobb Silver badge

OpenWrt

While not a realistic option for the masses... I do recommend anyone here to consider running OpenWrt. I have used it for about 20 years on many different devices and I find it works well. It is, of course, open source if you feel like getting involved.

I just checked the site and many Ubiquiti devices seem to be supported.

Data watchdog tells off outsourcing giant for scanning staff biometrics despite 'power imbalance'

Graham Cobb Silver badge

I am guessing the "legally obliged" bit is about checks for employees. Certainly passports, and I guess probably some "safeguarding" checks for some roles. I assume it is worded like that so Serco can't keep some of the data "just in case" (or because they aren't quite sure why they have it) - it has to be "legally obliged" in order to keep it.

Nevada sues to deny kids access to Meta's Messenger encryption

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: The modern Internet is dangerous to kids

No, there are many independent reports based on real research and analysis, by real academics and experts, not just a single viewpoint. Of course some people have problems with social media, just as some people have problems with abuse of chocolate or anti-depressants. But many more people have a much better life with the aid of social media.

Personally I have no interest in social media (except El Reg, of course), but I know many people, some of them kids, who's life is much improved by it. The next generation of kids would be extremely damaged by the sorts of restrictions being proposed by these self-serving politicians.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: No encryption until you have provided your identity to prove you are not a child

the modern Internet is dangerous to kids

No, it isn't. Recent reports have completely debunked that claim - in fact, the Internet is, on balance, much more helpful to kids than dangerous. Allowing kids to access important safety information such as information about drugs, sex, diseases, etc, knowing that the research is confidential and no one can find out they have been looking, is a major benefit. As is allowing kids to chat among peers about important topics such as body image, eating disorders, stranger safety, drink and drugs - in all these areas kids value their peers views more than adults.

Banning anonymity and end-to-end encryption is a major attack on kids and on adults.

It is very clear that this (and other similar attacks) are nothing to do with kids safety but are aiming to abuse kids to achieve several things:

1) Banning anonymous speech and debate by requiring everyone to prove they aren't kids.

2) Banning E2EE for everyone so that local, state and national governments can check up on people's private messages to check they are paying the correct taxes, they aren't planning a protest, they aren't cheating on their spouse, find out what their political opponents are planning, etc.

3) Infantising kids to create a generation who know their place and won't cause trouble.

Japan's SLIM unexpectedly wakes up on Moon after month-long nap

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: "unexpectedly wakes up on Moon after month-long nap"

In the soup dragon's pot?

NASA warns as huge solar flare threatens comms, maybe astronauts too

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Too late?

I am confused. What good is a "warning"? Surely by the time solar scientists have observed the flare (let alone communicated to anyone about it) its effects have reached us?

Does it have significant duration? Does its strength increase (in which case, how do they know how strong it will be)? Is the warning about matter ejected at the same time but travelling a lot lower than the speed of light?

City council megaproject mulls ditching Oracle after budget balloons to £131M

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: So, continuing the follow-up of the disaster

I remember government paying £800~1000 pday for the senior/principle grades of technical consultants pre 2010, which equates to circa £1500 today.

Ah! That explains it!!

The customer thought they were paying for principled consultants but the supplier actually supplied principal consultants instead. So no wonder the council was screwed. All that is left for the inquiry team to determine now is whos who's whose what person's fault it was.

Giant leak reveals Chinese infosec vendor I-Soon is one of Beijing's cyber-attackers for hire

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Compromised USB Battery

People (used to) sell little connectors which did that. I still have one in my travel 'bag of wires' and I always used it when charging in places like airports. Unfortunately they are pretty useless now as I think you need the data lines in order to negotiate for the power supply to send any decent amount of current.

Although, now, you can get power bricks which can be charged offline and then be unplugged and charge the device at a fairly high current. Bigger and more weight than the old connectors (and still potentially compromisable as the power brick has processors itself - although I have never heard of that happening).

OSIRIS-REx probe sucked up more asteroid crumbs than hoped

Graham Cobb Silver badge

I think you are confused. My understanding is that this project makes no claims about life - even amino acids.

Initial observations show that Bennu contains carbon-based compounds and hydrated minerals – sources of organic materials and water. This finding supports the hypothesis that asteroids may have brought the building blocks of life to Earth

I understood this comment to just be about the amount of water and carbon on Earth. Not any claim life (or even amino acids) developed somewhere else and were brought to Earth. Just that Earth has more water and carbon than would be expected for a planet this close to the Sun so this helps the theory that the extra water and carbon were brought from further out in the solar system on asteroids and comets.

European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Puzzled....Again!!

Which is why we need this to become the new "normal". It would be fairly straightforward, and could be made transparently easy to use, to let everyone publish their own public key (don't call it that of course - call it a "banjimwobbit" or whatever marketing think would work best) and have every messaging or email app automatically encrypt every message sent to you with that public key and have your device transparently decrypt everything using your corresponding private key.

It would be no more complicated than sending and receiving email or a WhatsApp message is today.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

The EncrChat thing showed how lawful (or unlawful) interception allowed a lot of serious & organised criminals to be taken off the streets.

EncroChat shows how it is still possible to take criminals off the streets without backdooring everyone's right to private communication, hidden from government.

It is hard, expensive, and limited - which is exactly what the 99.999% of people who are perfectly innocent demand, and expect.

Damn Small Linux returns after a 12-year gap

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Cool, a new toy to fiddle about with.

I find myself resorting to bootable recovery tools more nowadays. Mainly because my "root disks" are now almost exclusively NVME and always die after about 18 months. Unlike rotating disks, when they die they seem to become completely useless with no warning at all (Btrfs DUP doesn't help because it looks like a whole chip dies) so I need to boot from a Ventoy stick to set up a temporary bootable partition on one of my rotating disks.

Which reminds me, will this new DSL boot from Ventoy? And is it usable as a live CD?

It's time we add friction to digital experiences and slow them down

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: unfettered access to the digital wallets in which he stored cryptocurrency.

The issue here is to educate people and stop people pushing financial scams (just like we stop people pushing drugs).

Cryptocurrency is a toy. A game. It is clear to most of us who post here that, like share trading, you should never invest money you can't afford to lose and that you should transfer any gains out into a safe form.

If you can afford to lose 90,000 then there is no need for speed bumps, brakes, etc. If you can't afford to lose it then don't play with it.

I doubled my money on cryptocurrency a while ago; I invested 5000. When it doubled in value to 10000 I transferred 5000 back into real money. At that point I was quids-in - I had made my initial investment back and anything more was profit. It doubled again and I transferred another 5K back into real money. The remaining 5K has gone down a bit but I don't care: I doubled my money.

Oh, and by the way, I paid tax on it.

The spyware business is booming despite government crackdowns

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Funny how...

Neither funny nor coincidence. The Israeli government makes no secret about encouraging and using spyware. Right or wrong, they see it as critical to the continued existence of their country and the safety of their citizens.

There are many things about the Israeli government, and the IDF, I don't like. But at least they are not hypocritical about their use of spyware.

Russia, China, North Korea and the US are the governments who are two-faced hypocrites who pretend to dislike spyware but actually actively promote and heavily use it. One assumes they are (between them) providing much money and much air cover (from legal investigations) for the criminal gangs who now seem to be the main controllers of the various breaches.

UK lawmakers say live facial recognition lacks a legal basis

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Ban it 'til it works

The big problem isn't that your pic appears in the data. It is that the pic of someone who is not you but looks a bit like you is in the data.

In that case, however innocent (or rich) you are you will be stopped at every street corner. Forever.

And one day you will lose the dice throw and will be imprisoned for someone else's crime. Unless you are in the USA in which case you will just be shot by mistake, or while resisting arrest by trying to explain you are the wrong guy.

ICANN proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as 192.168.x.x

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: "DNS, however, can't prevent internal use of ad hoc TLDs"

Unlikely, I think (hope!). The resolver libraries have no idea what the scope of ".INTERNAL" is supposed to be in any particular organisation. One org might give it site-wide meaning, another might give it company-wide meaning.

Over time I presume that resolvers will gain configuration options to control/limit where .INTERNAL names can be sent for resolution. For now, the decision just guarantees that if the name reaches the root servers it will not resolve.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Any DNS query for a name ending with the label local must be sent to the mDNS IPv4 link-local multicast address 224.0.0.251, or its IPv6 equivalent ff02::fb

Which means it cannot, safely, be used for the purpose .INTERNAL is meant for: .local is controlled by the devices on a LAN - anything which can answer the multicast DNS query the fastest controls what names appear in .local and what addresses they resolve to. .INTERNAL is controlled by the organisations DNS servers - they decide who can resolve .INTERNAL and hence what those names resolve to.

Imagine an org which sets up some sort of access control granting access to all devices in *.local: an attacker with access to the LAN just needs to resolve their "attacker.local" address to get access. If they use .INTERNAL then the attacker needs to gain control of the orgs actual DNS servers to gain access.

UK water giant admits attackers broke into system as gang holds it to ransom

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: For your safety and security

When can we all agree to give up on this fetish of identity? Within 3 years it will be gone anyway: everyone's passports and driving licences will have been stolen because some entity that thinks (or its regulator thinks) it is SO "important" or "critical" that it has to know its customers "real" identity will have leaked the documents necessary to prove identity.

Stop worrying about who people are! There is no problem with the same person having multiple identities if they wish. Or calling themselves whatever they want. That is a basic principle of UK law: your name is what you choose to call yourself. The only valid use of a passport should be to prove your birth identity to a foreign government to allow travel to countries still stuck in the 20th century notion of "identity".

Post Office threatened to sue Fujitsu over missing audit data

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Great work! But, surely, you were being made to fix the problem the wrong way. If you could do that, in that emergency, then someone else might have been able to do the same thing to hide fraud?

Surely an audit trail should have a documented, and highly visible, way to fix errors (with some special type of transaction or something) so that the fix is forever visible in the trail? Isn't that the point?

Fujitsu gets $1B market cap haircut after TV disaster drama airs

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Fushitesu

Downvoted for inappropriate comparison.

YouTube video lag wrongly blamed on its ad-blocking animus

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: it will run fine

No, we have a right to services where the providers are absolutely clear, open and explicit about what they do to monetise and that they get full permission from their users for it.

As I said above, if YouTube want to go behind a paywall instead that is absolutely fine by me.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

Just in case you have really missed the point and not just trying to generate more downvotes for the hell of it...

it is objective fact that people may not expect that an expensive service be provided to them for free, and that the provider of the service is entitled to look for ways to cover costs and monetise the provision of the service.

No, sorry, that is not an objective fact: it is false. I would claim that the exact contrary is an objective fact: many expensive services can be expected to be provided to many people for free because it enables the provider to generate more money somewhere else (which may have nothing to do with monetising the provision of the service).

There are the very obvious examples of governments and charities, who both provide expensive services for free which are paid for by other people.

More relevantly to this discussion... many services are funded by the "network effect" - they are paid for by the small proportion of users who receive a large amount of value from the fact that very many people use the service entirely for free.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

Go to your Google Account.

I don't have one of those. And I don't store (let alone provide back) any cookies from their sites. And that means they have never received any permission to record or guess or use or store anything about me.

If that meant that I couldn't use any of their services - that allowing them to know about me was the price for using their services - I would be fine with that. I don't use Google search, or mail, or Android, anything I would miss (I pay companies I trust quite a lot of money for those things already). So, I wouldn't pay their price and wouldn't use their service.

But, of course, they don't prevent me from using their services. They need the network effect: they are only viable if lots of people use their service - so they just try to steal my data without permission. EITHER: make creating an account and agreeing to allowing processing a requirement OR stop trying to track people who choose not to provide data.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: I can smell something... smells a lot like bullshit

If YouTube want to go behind a paywall, that is entirely up to them. Just don't steal my data.

Post Office boss unable to say when biz knew Horizon could be remotely altered

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Compensation?

In most cases, it seems, it never got to court. The PO investigations team put so much pressure on the postmasters they don't seem to have generally bothered with a lawyer but ended up doing a "deal": either "admitting" it was their own error or even confessing their guilt, in exchange for avoiding court.

If the portrayal of the PO investigations staff in the TV drama (or even in the evidence given the other day) was accurate, you can understand why they felt intimidated.

But I am waiting to hear exactly what statements were made in court by PO/Fujitsu. I think I read earlier this week that someone was asking for immunity from prosecution for perjury before agreeing to appear in (one of) the inquiries?

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Compensation?

Well, this is retail - so there is always an amount of "shrinkage" (theft and mistakes). But in this case enormously complicated by the fact that when postmasters called the helpline, Fujitsu support staff apparently made direct changes, without audit trails or records, to the databases. Probably trying to be helpful but a significant number probably just made the problem worse, or made it look like it was the postmaster who had done something fraudulent.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Compensation?

I have no actual information, but based on many years experience in IT I am sure it went something like...

In ICL... "We really shouldn't let the system go live. It is full of crap, with a list of priority 1 bugs as long as my arm. At least let us fix the problems with the audit trails..."

"No! It is going live on Tuesday!! If we don't, we can't recognise the revenue in this quarter. You just need to handhold the branches until we can get the Phase 2 release out there - when they phone up to complain the system is wrong, make a quick fix to the balance and get straight on to the next call."

In the Post Office... "Wow, this new Horizon system is great! It is showing us what we always suspected: there are loads of mistakes, and probably also fraud, in post offices every day! At last this new system can let us work out where the problems are, and maybe even catch some crooks. Take a look at that discrepancies report and pick a branch and do an audit to find out what is wrong".

Apple claims top spot in global smartphone market for first time

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Most People In The World Still Refuse To Buy Apple Phones

I don't think many people refuse to buy Apple phones. I used to, but since the death of things like Maemo and, more recently, Jolla the only choice is Android or Apple. I use /e/ as a reasonable Android variant on tablets but reluctantly switched to Apple for a daily driver phone - at least Apple is a little better than Google from a privacy point of view.

I think the correct headline would be:

Most people in the world still buy cheap phones

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: This happened to me

As I said, last time this came up:

HP has a history of serious abuses of the DMCA and other interference with the rights of owners of their devices. I have not done any business with HP since the Snosoft affair in 2002 and will not until they renounce abusing copyright/DRM laws. This latest action shows they still are not ready to acknowledge that if they sell me a product they cannot impose restrictions on how I use it.

I created a lasting power of attorney last year and I added a rule that my attorney cannot do business with either HP or Sony.

Open source's new mission: To boldly go where no software has gone before

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: What but not why...

the point being not the why, but an attempt to dictate how other people should behave

That is true for all Internet discussions - neither more or less relevant for software than for any other topic (model trains, home baking, legal systems, human rights, etc). Nothing to do with FOSS.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Only for a specific type of open source, and only from a certain viewpoint

You make several good points but I disagree with this one.

Commercial software makes no attempt to "provide the user's needs". On the contrary, it just mandates requirements for a particular system & configuration which the corporation will support and provides something which may or may not have much relationship to the user's needs. Often conflicting with the requirements specified for other software the user needs to run. And no attempt to make it work (or even, in some cases, let it try to work) on other configurations.

The FOSS I write, and the changes I make to other FOSS, are mostly about working round some issue or constraint. With commercial software there is no chance to do that - just take it or leave it.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Buried? Buried???

You metropolitan types are so funny!

Anyway, who would want to get rid of their overhead lines (power and phone)? The free spring light shows when the trees cause complete surprise by growing into the wires with fireworks for all would be really missed - who wants to wait for November for fireworks? It mostly seems to be the Elms in the hedges - new ones still grow every year, and survive a few years before dying of Dutch Elm disease - but normally at just about the point they have reached the main electricity line running down the street. They then remain, dead, for another year or so wearing away the insulation, before going out in their glorious firework show!

And every couple of years some neighbour or other cuts the power line while trimming their hedge or trees. For some reason it is the power line more often than the phone line. One year the neighbour hired a tree surgeon who managed to not just bring down our power line but even rip off the bracket the wires were attached to on the eaves of our house! Oh, such fun!!

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Alternatives to car use?

And, yet, our (rural) district council just did a "comment on our development plan" thing - and most comments mentioned that public transport needs to be massively improved before building all the proposed new houses - jobs, schools, shops and doctors are no longer in any of the villages but in regional towns - in some cases 20 miles away!

But the council say there is no money to restablish the pre-Beeching train lines, or build modern, fast and flexible bus/rail/tram services connecting the villages to the towns. And the government won't allow them to force the developers to build them.

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: The really big picture

And, yet, government policy is to force rural councils to build more and more houses. Miles from jobs, shops, secondary schools, doctors, public transport, ...

NAT, ATM, decentralized search – and other outrageous opinions from the 1990s

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: Year End Reminiscing

The thing we learned, in the '90s, was that what matters is that seriously delayed traffic is dropped, not delivered late. Real-time systems (and people) found it much easier to fix lost traffic (which happens all the time, even in the best regulated environments) than delayed traffic (and high variability of latency).

For us, as router builders, it meant small buffer queues - that was the key factor in making the network layer more reliable overall.

UK government lays out plan to divert people's broken gizmos from landfill

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Wow! How'd you do that? And how many things did you have to vandalise to make the point to her satisfaction??

Graham Cobb Silver badge

Re: "financed by the hardware producers rather than the taxpayer"

So it will be financed by the customers.

Sure. But that is exactly what's needed. Reduce incentive to just buy (i.e. make) more stuff and encourage reducing consumption and increasing reuse. Re-use Uncle Fred's lights he isn't using any more. Buy lights with replaceable bulbs or better made ones which last longer. Take strings to the local primary school's repair cafe to see if someone can make them work again.

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