Posts by streaky

No more free API access, says Twitter: You pay for that data

Re: They just did this in the wrong order

Still free.

Chris Bouzy

Anything that will get him out of twitter's data has got to be worth doing.

For password protection, dump LastPass for open source Bitwarden

Vaultwarden

Just saying. Don't forget to donate.

To protect its cloud, Microsoft bans crypto mining from its online services

Power

"There is something wrong with a price model that doesn't cover electricity and cooling costs"

Was my thought too, but bare metal servers also don't bill power and you don't see providers mass-banning crypto. Okay it's harder to police, for one of the many reasons why bare metal is just better, but you could write it in your ToS anyway just to cover your rear, if this was a thing. End of the day price appropriately, if you're that thin on margin that those costs matter, which is possible, maybe you should be looking at your business model or figuring a way to charge for wall power usage.

But yeah it probably is that despite the above, plus it could be argued about life-shortening various components.

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Re: Q) How did Musk become a Millionaire?

#MightBeTrue

Re: So what happened to this freedom of speech thing then?

It's a different deal when you're calling out your boss about the business, in public.

Not for nothing but yes, turnabout sucks, maybe certain political classes should have stopped and thought when they were cheering it on and being warned about consequences.

Power Move

If you're right it's a power move, but be right and make a good argument. Not a fan of GQL myself but people swear by it. [Not an attack on GQL but a more general point] we reached Peak Software some years back where we suddenly gained zero-cost infinite compute power and nobody had to think of things like performance because servers could just instantly produce the data and we didn't have to pay for that CPU time, latency wasn't a thing and data bandwidth was totally free - and thank god because you no longer needed competent software engineers.

Lets be real: Twitter has been one software engineering fail after another since day 0. At some point it became vaguely stable because they figured out how to horizontally scale it but it just shouldn't need the compute resources it does, this one of the many reasons why it was a money eating machine above all else: it's a very simple piece of software at it's core and it just shouldn't be that way, it's orders of magnitude simpler than say Facebook, this is why they had trouble doing easy things like editing tweets. They also struggled to monetise the platform too but if you have a base platform that doesn't eat money that becomes way less of a pressure.

I'd go back to first principles and rebuild (yes, from scratch) the thing to be efficient as a first priority and make good choices that allow it to be extended in useful ways in future, but apparently I'm not down with the kids and live in the olden times when we had to actually pay for resources. But no seriously come up with some good torture tests and make people pay for slowing down the system and expenditure with finding savings elsewhere.

Girls Who Code books 'banned' in some US classrooms

Haven't read the books..

.. but a quick perusal of their website highlights some fairly obvious reasons.

Turning your kids into activists (under the guise of something actually useful I might add - presumably they never expected anybody's parents to check their aims and the content) isn't a good way to make them into contributing members of society who can pay their own way. It does the other thing. Also not for nothing there are better ways.

Unless they're after racial studies grants (which are not long for this world).

You may now downvote me for being right.

Prima facie it's a good cause, I suspect the reality is radical leftist intersectional ideology and nobody is supposed to mind, right?

Cloudflare tries to explain why it protects far-right forums that stalk and harass victims

Some day

These people (as in the people who try to get these sites dropped by service providers) are going to find out what tortious interference is.

Carry on with the insanity and lies.

Also smol PSA: Keffals isn't under attack because of Kiwi Farms, Keffals in under attack because Keffals is Keffals - go watch Keffals for yourself and figure it out for yourself.

Amazon books rocket flights for its Kuiper broadband internet satellites

Re: Obviously.

"OneWeb are targeting businesses and institutions rather than domestic customers"

Starlink are doing both. There is a reason for OneWeb to exist, but they are actually in competition.

Might point was you can guarantee they skipped SpaceX ideologically rather than as a business decision - SpaceX are looking for excuses to launch stuff into orbit, they're desperate for more customers because the more customers they have and launches they do the cheaper the platform gets.

Obviously.

Because why use the most stable, busiest and most cost-effective launch platform to launch your sats? Amazon aren't sat on endless cash for nothing y'know?

Amazon aren't going away any time soon, doesn't mean you have to run your business like it's a government with masses of wastage and poorly-selected contract partners. You /could/ do other, interesting things, with that money and I suspect some would argue you could pay your warehouse staff more - but what do I know, it's a free market and whatnot..

I talked about this with OneWeb when the whole Russia thing blew up, people thought I was nuts for suggesting that they use SpaceX (and should have been all along) - like it's bad to make your business more streamlined on costs or use the best available launch platform, you're not in competition with SpaceX you're in competition with Starlink and Starlink is going to exist regardless of if you use SpaceX to launch - at least keep your costs down and successes high and give yourself a fighting chance.

I own that $4.5bn of digi-dosh so rewrite your blockchain and give it to me, Craig Wright tells Bitcoin SV devs

Re: In summary then ...

It's like suing a central bank because you dumped your cash in a fire. About as valid a legal case, at least.

Web3: The next generation of the web is here… apparently

Yikes

Rumour has it you couldn't edit web 1 and you certainly couldn't own bits of it (this was actually said, in testimony to congress, by a supposed expert, I shit you not), or something (presumably the infra was all owned by aliens and the lizard people and all the content was written by AI, or something).

I hate people and don't want to live on this planet any more - it's these sorts of morons who don't know what they're actually doing who are advising governments on a pandemic that should have been over last Northern Hemisphere summer but for the dragging it out with explicit intent of feeding cash into the mouths of the likes of Pfizer.

Sigh.

Kremlin names the internet giants it will kidnap the Russian staff of if they don't play ball in future

Oh noes..

Pretty sure I know what my response to that would be..

Sovereignty? We've heard of it. UK government gives contract to store MI5, MI6 and GCHQ's data to AWS

At a loss

"Hopefully the data will be properly encrypted with user-held keys."

As opposed to what? AWS just providing the platform..

Windows 11: What we like and don't like about Microsoft's operating system so far

Power Users

Pretty clear Microsoft hates us. This is about all. I have many complaints - the biggest is the new taskbar; Microsoft have spent a lot of effort over the last decade or so making it harder and harder and harder to switch between tasks, now it's all but impossible - the more wider monitors are a thing (I have a super-ultrawide myself) the more Microsoft go out of their way to pretend everybody uses a portrait monitor and nothing else.

7+ Taskbar Tweaker used to resolve these problems and make Windows 10 usable, now it can't because they've reengineered how it works. If you only use a single browser window and that's your day - great, but you might as well just have a chromebook. I have a lot of horizontal real estate, let me use it please, Microsoft.

The snaps thing, yes, again, super ultrawide, super useful. A lot of third party apps including one of MS' powertoys let you do this kind of stuff before but nice to have it in there - but you see how this conflicts with what they've done with the taskbar? They pretend everybody is using 4:9 monitors with the task bar, but yet include stuff that's useful for those of us with 32:9 monitors. Very bizzare.

The good news is that the wsl2-wsgl stuff works extremely well so maybe we can dump the shell entirely and just use gnome, kde, xfce or whatever. Could be an option worth exploring.

OVH data centre destroyed by fire in Strasbourg – all services unavailable

BRB..

Making backups..

Palantir and UK policy: Public health, public IT, and – say it with me – open public contracts

Public Data

The benefits to society of open data about a reasonably large nation's health that can be mined and new things found that weren't known before, potential treatments, being able to spot disease clusters before anybody really knows they are happening and all the other things you can do with this data are obvious - properly curated and well anonymized by people who know what they are doing of course - and it probably isn't illegal here what happened given it is actually, technically the government's data to basically do what they like with in our law; I personally want to feel like taxpayers are getting value out of that data and in this case I don't feel like we are. That's what really matters here.

'Massive game-changer for UK altnet industry': BT-owned UK comms backbone Openreach hikes prices on FTTP-linked leased line circuits

Rofl

"not part of the relevant market where we have significant market power"

Yeah only basically all of the market. I remember when they were supposedly broken up pointing out it was in name only.

Surely they don't think they're going to get away with that?

Microsoft warns against SMS, voice calls for multi-factor authentication: Try something that can't be SIM swapped

Re: U2F

I usually register 3 keys, one on my keyring, one sits in a fire and water resistant lockbox and the other normally stays at my parents' house. Having just one key is nuts, you're absolutely right. If you can backdoor it using email or sms or something then there's no point in it - most services that support it offer recovery codes, which is a little questionable but I keep them in a password vault that supports secure notes, although that is secured by.. U2F so probably not practical :)

My biggest issue I'm having with U2F (which should be *universally* supported by now, it not being by banks, Paypal et al is criminally negligent) is dumbass companies who support U2F and *then* force you to click an email link or something after, so dumb..

Re: U2F

"Interesting project, but at the moment it only works on Chrome."

Incorrect.

U2F

U2F

U2F

U2F

Also U2F.

Not difficult.

Iran sent threatening pro-Trump emails to American Democrats, Russia close behind, says US intelligence

Re: Uhm

Why would Trump condemn people who have done nothing wrong?

Uhm

Why would anything to do with the proud boys make people vote Trump. It's an operation to discredit Trump, on behalf of the Biden family.

Nice disinformation though.

Don't leave your laptops at repair shops, kids.

Four years after Europe sorted this, America is still going around in circles on data privacy in stuffy hearings

Re: Yikes.

No the problem is we *do* know how the EU works, thanks. That's why we want far away from it.

Re: Yikes.

"that the eu gdpr is objectively better for consumers than the current POSL the us has"

Nice straw man argument, shame that's (clearly) not what we're talking about - quite the opposite in fact. Yikes.

https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-data-protection-gdpr-general-data-protection-regulation-facebook-google/

https://tobaccocontrol.bmj.com/content/25/1/108

Facts matter.

Re: Yikes.

"we can’t fix them from outside"

There's no evidence to support the statement "the EU can be fixed from the inside" - we've been trying for decades, used carrots, sticks and outright bribery and it's just got worse every administration. The only way to fix the EU is to tear it down.

Re: Yikes.

It's not entirely clear that "Europe" didn't make matters significantly worse and we know that the GDPR was *heavily* lobbied to favour the likes of Facebook, Google et al against potential competitors, for example, not unlike what happened with the TPD.

Until the EU sorts out its lobbying problem and outlaws things that are even illegal in the US, it's never going to produce good legislation, on anything.

Yikes.

You lost me at "Europe sorted this".

Fighting an insurer over lockdown payout? UK policyholders just won an important COVID-19 test case

Questionable..

How the insurers ever thought they would win given some of the policy wording involved.

TL;DR:

If there's a pandemic, we'll pay out.

There's a pandemic.

We're not paying out, you're not covered in pandemics.

Either these people are covered or you mis-sold many of them insurance, would you like to talk about compensation now or later?

Re: I can imagine this will ultimately be a phyrric victory

"And yes, your policies will cost twice as much next year"

That's the nature of insurance, it's a hedge against unforeseen but potential events, that's what you're paying for.

It won't however be priced in such a way that insurers will assume this will happen every year until the end of time, for one thing because such a policy won't be viable.

Brave takes brave stand against Google's plan to turn websites into ad-blocker-thwarting Web Bundles

Re: Solutions...

I'd pay to see google try that. It's already looking like they're going to be broken up, that will be the final nail in the coffin.

Re: Solutions...

Sure, except for the part where it isn't.

Solutions...

.. for problems nobody has.

Not sure why people are worried, nobody is going to use this tech.

UK govt reboots A Level exam results after computer-driven fiasco: Now teacher-predicted grades will be used after all

Re: The fun part..

Yeah because nobody asked. Even government.

Re: The fun part..

it was run on 2019 year data and the results it produced did not match real results

To what degree, was the model updated, etc etc etc.

Nobody interested..

The fun part..

.. is nobody cares if the algo was correct or not. Not the slightest interest. We don't like what it told us so it can go away.

You were right the first time, lads.

WSL2 is so last year: Linux compatibility layer backported to older Windows 10 versions

2004

Only way to get out dev/beta rings is to reinstall windows by the way, for, y'know, reasons question mark.

Had to go dev to get the GPU goodies for TensorFlow, not so fun..

That all being said not had any major issues touch wood other than not being able to install MSFS because Microsoft don't test their own software against their own OS, or something.

NCC Group admits its training data was leaked online after folders full of CREST pentest certification exam notes posted to GitHub

Wat

What's that certification supposed to be with such remarkably easy questions in a test?

Virgin Galactic pals up with Rolls-Royce to work on Mach 3 Concorde-style private jet that can carry up to 19 people

RR..

.. went in deep on REL's series B, just throwing that out there.

UK space firms forced to adjust their models of how the universe works as they lose out on Copernicus contracts

Rofl

What a load of bollocks.

Dutch spies helped Britain's GCHQ break Argentine crypto during Falklands War

Uhm..

This story is complete bull, UK would have been fully aware. The Dutch probably didn't know the UK would have been fully aware - but even if neither of those things were true the Dutch wouldn't have considered for a second blowing the CIA's op. See the issue?

Utter nonsense story. Complete unadulterated nonsense.

Eclipse boss claims Visual Studio Code is an open-source poseur – though he would say that, wouldn't he?

Re: Eclipse has other lives....

What exactly is stopping you running vscode on Linux?

Re: VSCodium, VSCode without the telemetry

I'm not. Everybody is either so anti-Microsoft and therefore won't touch it despite it being the best solution available or will be total buy-in to VSCode. Middle-ground solutions like that are completely alien to most people in these parts..

Rust core devs mull adoption of alternative compiler front-end for improved IDE support

Re: Nuthin' up my sleeve ...

TabNine does that sort of thing very effectively in a plethora of languages so..

Assange should be furloughed from Belmarsh prison, says human rights org. Here's a thought: He could stay with friends!

Re: Incompetent Also...

whilst prison-states like Iran and Turkey have released one third of their inmates

Yeah when you're locking people up for literally no reason you can do this - Assange isn't locked up for no reason. If he hadn't fought the extradition which always was and always will go through because he has no viable legal argument then he'd be in the US and you never know he might have been bailed - I doubt it but it's possible. Sure as hell aint happening here.

Re: As long as UK.gov keeps the money this time

Wasn't even their money - they weren't required to forfeit the bail money which is *nuts*.

LUL

Yeah here's a man who will ever get bail in any country ever again. Not.

We got plenty enough capacity to hold this man.

Python 2 bows out after epic transition. And there was much applause because you've all moved to version 3, right? Uh, right?

The only surprise here..

.. is that there are no major Py2 forks yet.. Py3 aint happening any time soon, sorry lads.

Zoom's end-to-end encryption isn't actually end-to-end at all. Good thing the PM isn't using it for Cabinet calls. Oh, for f...

Stronk Disinformation

Crucially, the use of the Zoom software is likely to have infuriated the security services

Because? There was like 40 people that we could see ignoring staffers, families and the like. You think they discussed privileged information? Really? Oh dear.. That's not what cabinet meetings are for.

while also raising questions about whether the UK government has its own secure video-conferencing facilities

Nah man they just use Zoom for everything despite the contracts for video conferencing being fairly well publicised.

We asked GCHQ, and it told us that it was a Number 10 issue. Downing Street declined to comment.

As they should.

You people can't possibly be this simple? It's clearly a massive diversionary tactic. Pointless one sure, but lets get a grip? They wouldn't talk about anything of note over the public internet, full stop.