Posts by eldakka

Google hit with lawsuit for dropping free Workspace apps

Re: Isn't perjury in court still illegal?

> I think that question should be asked of Steve Bannon

And Alex Jones (Damaging Alex Jones texts mistakenly sent to Sandy Hook family’s lawyers).

Qualcomm, GlobalFoundries double down on US chip production

"Just days after we passed my historic, bipartisan CHIPs and Science bill, ...

What a self-effacing modest person!

Specs leak of 5.7GHz AMD Ryzen 7000 chips with double the L2 cache

PPT (up to) 230W

The 5900X can suck down as much as 200W when the chipmaker's Precision Boost Overdrive — an automated overlocking profile found in the bios — is enabled.

Unless AMD has changed the way it reports TDP since the launch of its 5000-series parts, there's a good chance the chip designer's Ryzen 7900 and 7950 parts could near 300W in real-world power consumption, putting them in the same territory as Intel's 12th-gen chips.

AMD reports both the TDP and PPT of their platform. The maximum PPT of AM5 is 230W, therefore any particular CPU can in theory draw up to 230W and still be within spec for the platform. Typically, TDP*1.35 is the allowed (at stock) PPT of any particular consumer Ryzen.

AMD corrects socket AM5 for Ryzen 7000 power specs 230w peak-power 170w TDP:

"AMD would like to issue a correction to the socket power and TDP limits of the upcoming AMD Socket AM5. AMD Socket AM5 supports up to a 170W TDP with a PPT up to 230W. TDP*1.35 is the standard calculation for TDP v. PPT for AMD sockets in the “Zen” era, and the new 170W TDP group is no exception (170*1.35=229.5).

Anti-piracy messaging may just encourage more piracy

Re: Piracy is a service problem...

> I'm more than happy to pay for the content I watch, but I'm not - and it would seem the vast majority of people are not - prepared to pay for 8 different subscription video services to watch one or two shows from each.

Speaking for myself, I 100% agree with this.

I am happy paying for 3 subscription streaming services (1 mostly for sport, 2 for TV/movies), and having done so feel completely morally comfortable still watching content sourced from all the others in addition to those 3.

There is a path to replace TCP in the datacenter

Re: Translation.

> So no worries walking 2000 miles to pick up your printout?

I might not be the one the printout is for.

That's the thing with computers and WANs, what you are doing may not be local to you. I've had cases where someone in a remote office has contacted me for some form, and I've provided the form to them by sending a print job of that form to their local printer in their remote-to-me office 13000km away from me, but 13 meters away from them...

US EV drivers won't be able to choose vehicle safety alert sounds

A Maori Haka would be better, it is basically saying "I'm coming to kill you, ahhhh, ahhhh, get outa my way, ahhh, ahhh".

> And pedestrians don't hear those! (or ignore them)

I think the problem is that the sound is so common now, so many vehicles emit this sound, it's not really a warning sound of something reversing that you have to be cautious of. Is it that truck? Or that one? Or that one? I mean, if there are 8 trucks nearby, why would you pinpoint that noise to the truck that is reversing behind you in your blind splot?

Warning noises are only useful if they they aren't routine sounds. If that sound is emitted continously all around you, you do tend to filter it out.

> I'm a cyclist and often hear the noise of tyres on the road

Right, but can you hear the tyre noise of a car stopped at a stop sign at an intersection? A car that is about to accelerate away - you need to know there is an 'active' but stationary vehicle so that you can anticipate a potential moving vehicle in a few seconds.

Or a car slowly backing out of a driveway or parking space? Do they produce enough tyre noise to hear? Even if they produce enough tyre noise when moving slowly, when walking along the footpath pierced by driveways, it's nice to be able to get notice that a car might be about to start using that driveway by being able to hear an 'idling' car in the driveway, which signals that there soon may be a slowly moving vehicle.

This proposal seems to be about vehicles moving at less than 30km/h - including stationary idling vehicles - for situations where tyre and wind noise may not be adequate to signal that there is a slowly moving or soon to be moving (in the case of stationary 'idling') vehicle.

Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 141 requires electric vehicles to produce a pedestrian alert sound when stationary, reversing, and in forward gear up to a speed of 30 km/h.

How data on a billion people may have leaked from a Chinese police dashboard

Re: A good example that won't be listened to

> Why, you're a government?

No, I'm not a government. But you did call me a hypocrit for being critical of the Chinese government. But since I am not doing the things I am being critical of the Chinese government for, how can I be being hypocritical?

Re: A good example that won't be listened to

> I'm not pro-China, I'm against hypocrisy.

I'm not spying on anyone, nor forcing death row prisoners into involuntary organ donation (i.e. being murdered for their organs). How am I being hypocritical?

Re: A good example that won't be listened to

> I'll add this to my list of examples for why collecting data you don't need leads to problems for everyone

But all this information is necessary. If China dones't collect everything from everyone, how else will they know some 12 year-old is calling another 12-year-old a poo-bear in a DM? Once they know who it is, they can arrest them, sentence them to death for insulting the poo-bear-in-chief, and once on death row their organs can be harvested for the children of the poo-bear-in-chiefs cronies.

Australia bins $41m app contracted to Accenture

Australia bins $41m app contracted to Accenture

As is the fate of every Accenture app.

API rate limits at the core of Elon Musk’s decision to ditch Twitter

Re: Ah, twitter

> Where I can't view tweets in my "timeline" newer than a week old, yet if I post something about (say) Amazon or Google Maps, I get a bullshit vague bot response in less than 2 minutes signed by "Joe" or "Sally" or "Beth" completely unrelated to the tweet it's "replying" to.

I'm not sure what you are complaining about. There is a widely known and perfectly suitable fix for this problem.

Delete your Twitter account and never go back. Problem solved!

Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy'

> If he can prove fraud, which it could be argued that the dodgy bot numbers are

What are you basing that on?

Twitter says that 5% of it's average monthly monetizable users are spam-bots, not that 5% of its entire account base are spam-bots.

The 'monetizable users' are the user accounts that remain after they have filtered out spam and other accounts that they don't generate money from. They could have already eliminated over 50% of their total accounts to come up with this 'monetizable users' number. What they are saying is that their filtering process is not perfect, that after they have filtered out what they think are junk accounts, that remaining set could still have a few - 5% - bot accounts.

Re: Burn

> he can find the $1bn breakup fee if he has to

The problem is he may have to come up with the $44b. Musk cannot terminate the takeover deal at will by just paying $1b. There is a contract between Musk and Twitter for the takeover of Twitter. Unless Musk can find a sufficiently valid legal reason to break the contract, or Twitter agrees to Musk backing out with just the $1b break-fee, Twitter could force Musk to go through with the full $44b takeover. Don't forget in that takoever contract, Musk specifically waived standard due diligence conditions. Therefore it would have to be something really huge, something beyond normal due diligence - since that has been waived - problems cropping up, and Musk's complaints about the bot-rate isn't it. That spam-bot estimate - 5% - has been public knowledge, it's been listed in previous Twitter SEC filings, since before the takeover proposal. Therefore that is something that Musk should already know, at least if he performed normal due diligence, but of course he waived that right.

Calls for bans on Chinese CCTV makers Hikvision, Dahua expand

Re: All Chinese CCTV systems connect back to China

> Most 1st world nations are guilty of the things china has been doing.

The difference is most of those actions are in the past, and those coutries acknowledge that those actions were wrong and should never have happened, and are trying to prevent them from happening in the future.

China has not only done those things in the past, they are doing them now and they not only don't think there is anything wrong with it, they are actively defending those actions and are expanding on those actions as current policy.

Re: All Chinese CCTV systems connect back to China

So basically you seem to be saying "Let's allow others to torture and exterminate their minorities and totally ignore it because we have our own problems to deal with".

Nice humanity you are showing there. "It's not my problem".

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

The CCP in China is an authoritan, genocidal regime who are intent 'securing their position in the world' by destroying everything they can't take control of. Just look at what they are doing in Hong Kong and their actions to Taiwan. They are cheering on that maniac Putin because they want to do to Taiwan what Russia is doing in the Ukraine. They are systematically raping other countries fisheries, extending their military possessions, and trying to make everyone kowtow to them.

"Either we hang together or we'll be hanged separately"

Iceotope attracts funds for liquid cooling from global investors

Iceotope attracts funds for liquid cooling from global investors

So you could say Iceotope has become more ... liquid ... now?

Large Hadron Collider experiment reveals three exotic particles

> Are these really "new" particles or just chips off already known particles, like electrons, neutrons and protons?

For starters, neutrons and protons aren't fundamental particles. They are composite particles made up of sets of three quarks - the exact combination of the set of 3 gives rise to it being either a proton or a neutron. The electron is, however, a fundamental particle, along with the neutrino.

They have not found any new fundamental particles, but have discovered new composite particles, e.g. tetraquarks and pentaquarks, made up of never seen before combinations of quarks.

Actual quantum computers don't exist yet. The cryptography to defeat them may already be here

transition to quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms in preparation for the time when quantum computers make it possible to access data encrypted by current algorithms, such as AES and RSA.

This statement is 1/2 accurate ;)

The concern with quantum computers and cryptography appies to Asymetric algorithms such as RSA, it does not apply to symmetric algorithms such as AES - at least not to as great an extent.

All of the algorithms being tested in the article are Asymetric replacements. A sufficiently large AES key (256), is large enough to defeat quantum computers - at least in the time scales we are conerned about with respect to asymetric keys being defeated by quantum computers.

Therefore for data at rest, as long as it is AES-256 (128 is probably sufficient, but to be sure to be sure if we are talking uber "I could tell you but I'd have to kill you afterwards" secret it should be 256) encrypted, it should be safe for well beyond the 75-year "this must remain encrypted for" period.

However, when data is transmitted between systems that don't both have knowledge of the symmetric AES key, asymetric algorithms such as RSA are used to establish the trust between the two ends, through which the symetric can be exchanged, to do the actual heavy lifting of encypting and ecrypting the data stream in flight using AES. Therefore if 'safe' AES-256 data is being transmitted between two systems, and an unsafe RSA mechanism is used to exchange the AES-256 key between the 2 end points, someone listening could obtain the AES-256 key while it is being exchanged with RSA, thus netting them the (in practical terms) 'unbreakable' AES-256 key directly as the raw key is transmitted without having to 'crack' the AES-256 stream itself, they now have the key and can just straight decrypt it using that intercepted key.

See this article Will Symmetric and Asymmetric Encryption Withstand the Might of Quantum Computing?from 2021 for reference.

Google location tracking to forget you were ever at that medical clinic

Re: Google's minimum viable response

> It's not as if the line stopping shortly before the clinic and the line starting shortly away from the clinic could be used by the inquisition as proof of guilt, could it?

The other issue is - how will Google even know a location is a location that needs to be filtered out? I mean, Google isn't a pubic utility, so they don't get automatically notified when a new facility opens or an old one closes. There can be a lag of months, if not years, between Google being updated with an addresses purpose and it's use for said purpose. And some of these facilities, especially violence shelters, are 'secret' (not national security secret, but more commercial secret/off the grid), they are safe-houses that don't advertise or otherwise publicly list their locations or even their existence outside of "need to know" circles, such as domestic violence councillors and other such services (whether government or private) precisely so that abusive partners can't just type in "find domestic shelters near me" in a search engine to stake out to find their victim.

Soviet-era tech could change the geothermal industry

Gyrotron?

Is this just a new marketing name for hula-hoops? Are we about to see a second fad wave of 'gyrotrons' being sold to kids?

DMCA can't be used to sidestep First Amendment, court rules

> So, you can see why the judge asked this “How did Bayside come to acquire these copyrights, and from whom?” I would say there is a question as to whether Bayside has the copyright.

No, as your own post notes, that question is asked to help answer the question of:

> “Is Bayside owned or controlled by someone associated with Brian Sheth? Was Bayside formed in response to these tweets? ..."

The judge isn't questioning whether Bayside has a valid copyright assignment, how Bayside got that assignment is relevant to the predicate question of whether this is a SLAPP suit. It is what the motive is for the suit. The judge asked what relationship Seth has to the company. The lawyer for Bayside says "none". So the judge is asking, if there is no relationship to Seth, how did Bayside get the copyrights for something related to Seth? Surely that shows some sort of relationship - i.e. the lawyer is at least being misleading if not outright lying about there being no relationship between Bayside and Seth. Asking about the copyright assignment to Bayside is a way to dig into what relationship Seth has to this matter, and if that relationship can be demonstrated, it is most definitely a SLAPP suit, with potential contempt of court charges against the Bayside attorney for misrepresenting the relationship in court, against Seth for not exposing an interest, and against Bayside for abuse of process.

> I am pretty sure that I can have in a few minutes a document showing that I am the rightfully owner of the

There isn't any question as to whether Bayside has the copyright. It has a valid registration with the copyright office.

However, the sequence of events shows that this is entirely a SLAPP suit with the intention of unmasking the owner of the account that posted it rather than an attempt to protect valid copyright interests. Therefore the judge has thrown it out on, basically, first amendment grounds being stonger than the copyright claims.

Days after the tweets were published, an LLC claiming copyright ownership of the photos filed a DMCA request with Twitter, which it honored

The LLC in question, Bayside, is an extermely dodgy entity in its own right. From the judge's ruling (PDF):

As far as the Court can tell, Bayside was not formed until the month that the tweets about Sheth were posted on Twitter. It appears that Bayside had never registered any copyrights until the registration of these six photographs, which happened after the tweets were posted. And there appears to be no information publicly available about Bayside’s principals, staff, physical location, formation, or purposes.

During the hearing, when the Bayside attorney claimed that Bayside was a company who's business was licensing copyrights, the judge had the attorney bring up Bayside's website on the spot, and pointed out that there were no contact details on that website - no email, no phone, no postal (or office) address, no names of people to contact - there was no information provided to allow a potential licensee to contact the company to procure such a license.

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

Re: Am I the only one

> Is that good for environment to extract lithium?

Not particularly, no. But it's also no worse than extracting petroleum. In fact, I'd say it's much better than extracting petroleum because petroleum gets used once only, whereas lithium in the existing batteries is used again and again and again each time it is charged and then dischared. 100's of times. It's not a single use item like petroleum is. And it is recycleable, petroleum is not. While there may not be a lot of recycling yet, that is an industry that is still being built up and long term there will be recycling. It just isn't possible to recycle petroleum (combusted in an internal combustion engine to produce power) at all, ever. It's just gone (well, besides the pollution its combustion has caused that is). And you have to extract more petroleum for the next use of the vehicle.

> Produce electricity from gas or coal?

Why do you say this? Those aren't the only sources, even now, of electricity. Hydro. Nuclear. Thermal. Wind. Solar. All of those contribute a significant proportion of electricity right now. In some countries (e.g. France) Nuclear produces more electricity than coal and gas. In others, e.g. Canada, hydro is a huge component of their grid. And those sources are gowing over time. And yes, actually, grid-scale coal and gas electricity generation is, in fact, much, much, more efficient and cleaner (relatively speaking, it's still dirty) than burning petroleum products in a car engine to produce power. For starters, they benefit from efficiencies of scale. Being stationary, they can implement efficiency measures that the extra weght to implement just isn't possible in a mobile device like a car. There is less waste of energy as compared to with a IC car, a gas or coal plant can run at its most efficient level in terms of turbine speeds and the burn-rate of coal and gas to maintain that speed for months on-end, no wasting extra fuel on speeding up, slowing down, speeding up again, idling at lights, and so on.

> Produce a new car using resource and energy to replace a still working one?

Why do you say this? At the current price of BEVs, they aren't purchased by the type of people who run a car into the ground over 20+ years. They are mostly purchased by the sorts of people who buy new cars every 3-10 years (often on lease-type arrangements), replacing perfectly good internal combustion cars with other combustion cars. Therefore buying a BEV does reduce internal combustion engined cars, because the purchaser hasn't replaced their IC car with yet another IC car, which they would be doing anyway, but a BEV. And, are you honestly, seriously saying with a straight face that a 3-10 year old IC car is going to be scrapped? Really? You haven't heard of the 2nd-hand car market? No. The IC car replaced by the typical buyer of a BEV will end up in a used car yard, being purchased by the sort of people who do run their car into the ground after 20+ years, to replace their 20+ year old, hugely inefficient by todays standards IC car, and that piece of shit car will then be recycled. Thus a buyer replacing their 3-10 year old IC with a BEV will result in some 20+ year old car, built to older emissions standards, being taken off the road as it is replaced by their 3-10 year old, more modern, more efficient, better emission-standard compliant vehicle that they traded in for their BEV.

> And what about recycling it?

Recycling what? Their IC they replaced with a BEV? They have done better than recycling, they will have reused it by putting it on the used-car market to replace an even older car, as per my previous point. And reusing is better than recycling for the environment, with recycling being better than tossing out.

If you mean recycling their BEV, what of it? Apart from the battery, the rest of the car (shell, chassis, etc.) can be recycled by normal scrap-metal recycling, as any current car is. The battery can be recycled too. In case you hadn't noticed, BEVs haven't been around for very long, therefore the recycling of the battery is an industry still in its infancy, as is the entire BEV market. They currently take up an absolutely tiny percentage of cars on the road today. As the volume increases, more recycling will come on line to deal with the batteries. What? You expected capitalism to have the entire end-to-end process in place before they started selling BEVs? As each part of the end-to-end lifecycle (building from 'virgin' materials, new-mined lithium, etc., then those getting recycled to be used in later production) starts to build to commercial vialble levels, later stages will come online as it becomes economic to implement those parts of the system. Since BEVs have only been on the roads for about 10 years, and only any significant volume in the last 5, very few batteries from those vehicles relative to the overall production rate have 'worn out' or otherwise need to be dealt with.

There already is recycling of batteries, many countries have legal requirements for what to do with lead-acid, alkaline, NiCad, NiMH, and Li-ion batteries. They already do recycle these types of batteries, just not at the scale that will be required as the volume of BEVs increases. But, hey, it's an existing industry, it can be scaled up as soon as the economic incentives are there for them to do that.

Re: Am I the only one

> Yeah, the net effect of burning that Tesla is probably to put into the atmosphere greenhouses gasses in excess of the equivalent CO2 which has been saved during the car's (unduly short) lifetime.

So one out of 1000 BEV's doesn't end up being as good for the environment as we had hoped.

I guess that makes the other 999 perfectly fine BEV's that haven't experienced this spontaneous combustion event that replaced 999 oil-buring cars useless?

Re: Another one.

A burning Chevy will be a not burning Chevy in a couple hours (or a few minutes if the fire brigade arrives and extinguishes it). And once put into storage (dumped at a junkyard), it doesn't tend to catch fire on its own without outside influence (such as dowsing it in petrol and throwing a match in).

A burning Tesla (or any other BEV) is more like a tyre-junkyard fire, just sit back and watch it burn for weeks. And it'll just spontaneously combust weeks after any impact event without any outside assistance. Even with fire brigade intervention, it'll still burn for days without extraordinary intervention - digging a whole, shoving the still-burning car in it, then filling it entirely with water.

Tesla lawsuit alleges unlawful layoffs at Nevada gigafactory

Re: WARN employees they are being fired?

> the proven agile waterboarding pattern

Surely waterfall would be a better process to follow for waterboarding?

US lawsuit alleges tool used by hospitals shares patient data with Meta

While I think Facebook is a terrible company founded and managed by a reprehensible person, I doubt this suit has legs. The plaintiff's have a valid complaint, but they are targeting the wrong entity.

HIPAA is very specific in the entities that are subject to it. Healthcare providers, insurers, and related entities that provide health services. For example, the taxi company that a hospital uses to travel to another hospital wouldn't be covered. And if a hospital revealed HIPAA-protected information to an entity (said taxi driver) who is not subject to HIPAA, the taxi driver would not be breaching HIPAA by repeating that information as they are not a covered entity.

It is the healthcare providers who are providing this information to FB that are the ones who should be the targets of the suit.

For reference, see the LegalEagle Youtube video This Video Is A HIPAA Violation! (According to Wrong People) that talks about HIPAA in the context of various people claiming "because HIPAA" as to why they couldn't talk about their vaccination status and other absurd claims resulting from a misunderstanding of HIPAA.

Wi-Fi hotspots and Windows on Arm broken by Microsoft's latest patches

Re: Testing?

> Unfortunately you've signed away your right to do this by accepting the T&Cs.

That depends on the laws of the country you are in. For starters, any T&Cs have to be within the law. Furthermore, many countries have strong consumer laws that require things like 'merchantability' of sold products - that is, they do what they are advertised as doing - irrespective of what the T&Cs claim.

Re: Testing?

> How do so many US employers manage to have people sign away their right to a trial, then?

Because there is no right to civil trial. The right to trial only applies to criminal charges, not civil disputes. Employment disputes are mostly in the civil realm (with exceptions for actual law breaking, which would be taken up by the state in a criminal trial) as contract disputes.

Former AMD chip architect says it was wrong to can Arm project

Re: AMD / XILINX

> Xilinx makes quite a few CPLD and FPGA chips. Hope AMD won't force them to shelve them.

AMD bought Xilinx for their FPGA and other similar assets. While it's always possible they'll sqaunder it - many companies have bought other companies and squandered the takeover - since that was the purpose of the takeover, I see it highly unlikely they'll force them to shelve those products. The form those products take may change (embedded into server systems etc.), but the technology should remain.

If Twitter forgets your timeline preference, and you're using Safari, this is why

Re: Ermmm...

> It may be a surprise to you, but "I want different settings on small-screen, low-bandwidth mobile and large-screen, high-bandwidth desktop" is a use-case.

And since Twitter knows from what sort of device you are connecting - Android browser, Brave on Windows, etc. - it can save a different set of settings for each of those use-cases, and use those settings next time conect from that same browser. It could also have configurable profiles, so that you could choose at login various preference profiles, e.g. profile1, profile2, profile3, moblile, desktop, laptop, fred1, fred2, work, home, ...

Airbus flies new passenger airplane aimed at 'long, thin' routes

> Although Airbus is pitching this for long thin routes, I suspect it will be more commonly used to replace widebodies on existing routes.

I don't.

Most existing widebody routes are between major nodal airports. There airports have very high traffic through them, so it is more efficient to use fewer large aircraft than many small ones. There is only so many landing/takeoff events that can happen at a single airport. So having a single landing event with 500 passengers vs in the same time one and a half landing events (smaller aircraft can land closer together) with 150 pax planes is going to reduce the passenger capacity of an airport.

No, what they want are long range planes that are capable of using the smaller, regional airports. An A380 just can't physically land at these sorts of airports, the runways are too short, the handling and refueling facilities are too limited. Therefore a smaller craft is required to use it for it to become viable at all. Using smaller aircraft allow new long range/international/intercontinental routes to be opened.

One of the examples was New York to Rome. Using a A321XLR means you can add routes between regional New York airports and fly to regional Italian airports without having to travel to JFK in NYC or into (or out of) Rome, while the wide-bodies still fly the main New York to Rome route.

Sydney to Tokyo means an A321XLR flying from a small regional Greater Sydney airport that doesn't have runways long enough for A380s, A350s, 777s or (larger models of) 787s, to a similar greater Tokyo regional airport. They open up new routes.

Re: No space for the crew rest area

> I think Priti Patel has plans for something like that.

Nah, she needs planes. Rwanda is landlocked after all.

How did you mourn Internet Explorer's passing?

Re: IE has died

Nuking it from orbit is the only way to be sure.

Tesla Autopilot accounts for 70% of driver assist crashes, says US traffic safety body

Re: any comparison needs to be based upon *Miles Driven*

> The only useful measures are based on miles driven per "road type" and preferably speed range

You would also need to include driving conditions as well, e.g. dry, wet, good visibility, poor visibility (fog and rain levels), day time, night time, dusk, dawn, etc.

Re: "a recall of 830,000 Autopilot-equipped Teslas"

Nah, disabling Autopilot should be able to be done OTA ...

Proposed Innovation Act amendment would block US investment in China

Re: Dodging

> Terms can change.

I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.

- Various unnamed despots and their sidekicks

Woman accused of killing boyfriend after tracking him down with Apple AirTag

> You had to buy them on AliExpress rather than your local Apple shop but it's been easy to track people if you really wanted for years.

Sorta yes, sorta no.

Yes GPS trackers have been around for decades, but the price of entry was - relatively - steep.

In the early days (90's to early 2000's) you basically had to buy them from 'spy' shops, and they weren't cheap, they'd cost at least as much as a low-end phone, $100-$200 or so.

Then you had to buy a SIM, and get an account (usually pre-paid) created, which costs more $ and requires much more effort.

Then they became cheaper and easier to get as places like AliExpress came along, and prices dropped to about $40, but then you still had to go through the hassle getting a pre-paid SIM for it, etc. But you generally still ahd to wait a week or 2 to actually receive the unit after buying it, enough time to cool off and think better of your revenge plan.

With the AirTag, you just walk into an Apple Store or even just the Apple section in an existing chain-store, pay you $40 or whatever it is, walk out with it 'register' it to your Apple account, no SIM for the device necessary since it doesn't connect to the cell-phone network as it piggybacks onto other already cell-enabled devices (iPhones).

It's the same as privacy problems around police surveillance. Sure, the cops could always see with their own eyes a person in public, or decide to follow someone in their car. But that takes manpower, time, effort, money to do. So it didn't happen often or on a long-term or large blanket-scale due to the cost of doing it. But as technology has evolved, it has become problematic due to the reduced barriers to entry. Want to follow someone? Attach a GPS tracker to their car, hell, buy 100 GPS trackers and tack them onto 100 random cars for the cost of a couple days work, and now you can follow 100 people for a month before the battery runs out. Or place a camera on a utility pole in front of someone's house for 6 months to monitor them, no teams of plainclothes cops sitting in cars or vans outfront, not even surveillance or wire-tap warrants needed. Easy. Don't get me started on ANPR and reverse cell-tower dump warrants and so on.

Apple has reduced the barrier to entry from a not trivial expense and effort, more than most people are willing to expend - certainly difficult enough to not be an impulse-buy opportunity, to a trivial amount of money and effort that a spur of the moment decision can implement in 20 minutes - "hey, I want to track this person, there's an Apple store right there, I can just go in, buy an airtag off the shelf, spend 2 minutes registering it to my Apple account, and dump it in their back seat all for $40 and 20 minutes effort most of which is waiting in line to pay for it".

Airtags have become a 'force multiplier' in the ability for the impulse-control-deficient to track and monitor their victims.

> Hmm. You don't know that the USA has the world's biggest prison population rate? And a lot of good it does them. Not.

Ahh, but this doesn't involve drugs, m'kay?

If there was even spec of crack on the floor of the car she'd be going away for life. But murder that doesn't involve drugs? Just assault with a deadly weapon.

Remember kids, drugs are bad, m'kay.

Meteoroid hits main mirror on James Webb Space Telescope

Re: Mitigation Options?

> Reflected heat from the earth and moon would be insufficient to have any impact on the telescope - they could only heat it to their own average surface temperature.

The average surface temperature of the Earth - at a guess - is about 20C.

The entire telescope on the 'cold' side of the sunshield needs to be no higher than 50K, -227C. One of the instruments, MIRI, must not exceed 6K (-267C).

Are you really saying that the reflected heat from the Earth would be insufficient to have any impact on the telescope? I mean, maybe you could explain that to the people who spent $10billion on a telescope and decided to put it at the Earth-Sun L2? From NASA's Webb Orbit

... What is special about this orbit is that it lets the telescope stay in line with the Earth as it moves around the Sun. This allows the satellite's large sunshield to protect the telescope from the light and heat of the Sun and Earth (and Moon).

...

To have the sunshield be effective protection (it gives the telescope the equivalent of SPF one million sunscreen) against the light and heat of the Sun/Earth/Moon, these bodies all have to be located in the same direction.

...

Re: Mitigation Options?

> That is why it is at L2 (in the Earth's shadow) and why its only shield it has is the sun shield.

It's not in Earth's shadow, otherwise the solar panels on it wouldn't work.

It's at the L2 so that the 2 objects most likely to heat it up - the sun and reflected heat from the Earth (probably from Earth's moon as well considering how delicate the instruments are) - are all in the same direction, so that a sunshield on only one side of JWST can block both sources at the same time. If it was placed closer to Earth, it'd need more shielding covering more sides to be able to cover sources coming in from multiple directions.

Microsoft accidentally turned off hardware requirements for Windows 11

Re: The Windows Web

Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL windows 11 upgrader!

Re: Microsoft can't be trusted!

> You still have to accept the update don't you?

For now, yes. But since MS has a documented history of either upgrading without prompting or totally ignoring the response to the prompt, there is zero trust that this will continue.

In fact, I'd say there is absolute trust that MS will introduce those shenanigans now that the upgrade rate has started to drop. Most of the early adopters or those who need it (e.g. reviewers, people sho's job is to test these new versions) have already upgraded, so the adoption rate has started to decline after that initial hump has been satisfied.

US Copyright Office sued for denying AI model authorship of digital image

Re: What's a 'natural person'?

> There was a famous copyright case in the US where an ape grabbed a camera and took a selfie.

What? You mean the one already referenced in this article?

The Copyright Office referred to two previous copyright cases, one being the infamous macaque Naruto, which was said to have snapped a grinning selfie using a man's camera and was ultimately denied copyright rights for being a monkey.

That one? That already covered what you've said?

"Copyright law only protects 'the fruits of intellectual labor' that 'are founded in the creative powers of the [human] mind' ... The office will not register works 'produced by a machine or mere mechanical process' that operates 'without any creative input or intervention from a human author' because, under the statute, 'a work must be created by a human being'," the government body ruled.

oh, and "what's a 'natural' person?"

It's a common phrase used in law that refers to an actual human being as opposied to a 'nominal' person, i.e., a company.

So it a law says "a person must" then it refers to all 'categories' of people, humans, companies, etc. Whereas " a natural person can" means it does not apply to companies and other 'non-natural' persons.

Tweaks to IPv4 could free up 'hundreds of millions of addresses'

Re: Yeah, there's a matter of philospophy there

> I'd be fine with down scoping 127, but it should be more than just a single address. Some real it does stuff code uses multiple local addresses. Re-scoping them would be an easy re-factor. Rewriting everything to use just 127.0.0.1 would not.

Where does the article say that it'll just be a single address, 127.0.0.1, for loopback? The article states that there'll be 65k addresses - 127.0/16 - available for loopback:

Schoen's proposal is to reduce the range of this block so that only 127.0/16 is reserved for local loopback purposes.

Quantum computing startup probed in report, securities suit

Re: Quantum startups

> Besides, I hate short sellers even more than venture capitalists.

I don't understand this hate for short sellers - naked short-selling I understand the hate as that's nothing but outright fraud - but 'normal' short-selling seems perfectly reasonable to me. All normal short-selling is doing is taking a position that a company's value is overinflated, and puts other investors on notice that some people are willing to put their money where their mouth is when making claims that a company is over-valued.

Disclaimer: I don't play on the stock market, only ever owned shares once, worth about $500, 15 years ago.

Elon Musk needs more cash for Twitter buy after Tesla margin loan lapses

Re: If "Musk" does eventually buy Twitter...

> Will he personally own or control 51% or not?

That depends entirely on the agreements he has with each of those investors. For example, even though an investor might purchase 10% of the company, the agreement with Musk could be that he has a perputual exclusive proxy on those votes, and that the investor cannot sell them without his approval and/on passing on that proxy obligation to the buyer.

Unless you can view all of those individual contracts, then I'm pretty sure the answer is: NFI.