Posts by Phil Koenig

Zen Browser is a no-Google zone that offers tiling nirvana

"John 110" wrote:

Not been there for a while, have you.

I saw the part where Moonchild threw his former right-hand man under the bus after the users revolted and started abandoning the project. And realized that some of his bright ideas like the other fork were going nowhere too.

That doesn't change anything about how the project leader allowed all that toxicity to go un-punished for years, oftentimes with the leader chiming right in himself to make things even worse.

The project head demonstrated where he was coming from despite attempts to make nice after everything started to implode.

Not going to darken that doorway again.

Liam Proven wrote:

I don't. It's a fork of a very elderly version of Firefox. It's as FOSS as Firefox is, but it is much older, much less capable, uses an obsolete version of the rendering engine, can't usefully exploit multiprocessor machines, can't sandbox pages as Firefox and newer forks such as Waterfox can, and is generally rather crippled.

And don't forget that "Moonchild" and his minions have created such a toxic dumpster fire on their community fora that you have to be either a fawning acolyte or someone who is blissfully unaware of the kind of people with a habit of savaging and banning anyone with a respectful, thoughtful yet differing opinion on something to put up with them.

I was a PM user for several years when FF was going through some annoying times but regardless of the technical attributes at this point I cannot stomach software projects run by people like that.

GrapheneOS is another example.

"Liam Proven" wrote:

Zoom works fine.

There have definitely been versions of FF that would not zoom a page. I've been frustrated by that on a number of occasions. In the past it was like that for FF and almost all its forks for quite a while.

In recent times on the Android platform, Firefox Focus is one example where there is no still no obvious way to make this work. Whereas FF forks like Fennec and Mull can.

But why Mozilla devs are so attached to the un-zoomable mode to make it the default (and only put an override for this in the "Accessibility" menu) is pretty strange. Especially on a mobile platform where the page elements are often tiny if not microscopic.

Zuckerberg says Biden administration pressured Meta to police COVID posts

Re: Personal Facts (sorry there are only 2 sexes in mammals)

@jilocasin

I think a lot of intersex people would not be particularly happy about how those like yourself categorize them as a "disorder" - especially since a significant proportion of humanity is born that way.

In fact this "disorder" is apparently so upsetting to so many parents of such children in western cultures that it's been common practice for many years now to choose to surgically mangle their sometimes "ambiguous" genitalia to meet their idea of "normality" before the poor children are in a position to understand what is actually going on. Many of such children grow up to be rather disturbed by that parental decision that they had no control over at the time. And this little "secret" doesn't get discussed in public much because of the perceived stigma associated with it.

Whereas many other cultures around the world have taken an accomodating approach for thousands of years to these relatively common "disorders" by creating a place in society for them. (The term for this gender category in Native American cultures varies by tribe but in recent years an umbrella term that embraces all of them has been created, because it is so common: "Two spirit")

Our binary-gender-obsessed societies that embraced Abrahammic concepts of gender seem to be the main issue here.

And I think that's a problem.

Re: Words fail me...

Cowardly Person wrote:

It was quite a while before they admitted that aerosols could carry it.

No one had to "admit" anything because they were not hiding anything.

The great thing about science is that it is inherently anti-dogmatic.

In the ideological dogma cesspool, people are forced to "admit" things all the time because they never bothered to check the veracity of the things they choose to believe in. And then get caught with their pants down. A lot.

Scientists do not have this problem because they do not claim that something is a certain way until they see proof of this. Usually multiple times, under carefully controlled, repeatable experimental conditions. (Technically, enough times to be statistically significant)

Pretty cool, huh?

Re: Words fail me...

"Lars" wrote:

Also note that when he finds out again he is an idiot he tries to claim it was only sarcasm.

I first encountered this rhetorical tactic employed by one of my classmates when I was about 8 or 9 years old, when they made some really obnoxious remark, and myself or someone else called them out for it. "Ohh, it was just a JOKE, HURR DURR...!"

And that's about the level of maturity that one expects from those who employ such childish attempts to escape culpability for making a blatantly self-promoting, false remark.

But the sad thing is that this "genius tactic" seems to be on a steep rise in the USA the last 10 years or so, apparently supercharged by Mr. Orange Tinyhands bringing these manchild types out of the woodwork and telling them they're all actual geniuses.

Re: Words fail me...

"Charlie Clark" wrote:

...policies enacted around the world by various governments, who frequently resembled headless chickens. There were plenty of idiots on both sides who were keen to ignore established, and therefore tried and tested) epidemic protocols, and the evidence about the source and spread of this or other viruses."

In fact, it took quite a long while before the actual experts figured out all the details of this new disease, and much of the "conventional wisdom" was wrong.

For example, it took the better part of a year or more to convincingly conclude that all the hysteria about sanitizing surfaces everywhere was a waste of time, and that probably 95% of transmission was occurring via aerial droplets instead. Here in the USA all suppllies of surface santizing products evaporated for 1-2 years on store shelves because of all the initial panic about that. But the scientists had to do extensive tests - all while the virus was continuously mutating - to figure this out. It was not possible to know at first.

Another major problem here were the politics where tons of unfortunately influential science-deniers (including corporate interests that wanted their workers to work in unsafe conditions and bitterly partisan politicians which wanted to create false controversies any time they thought they could single out their political adversaries for "restricting our freedumb") were applying heavy pressure against government-suggested practices like mask-wearing and social isolation of infected people. (Policies which were later convincingly proven to cut down on the spread of the virus and save lives)

Personal Facts

"jilocasin" wrote:

there are only two biological sexes

This has NEVER been true, you need to find a better example.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

And in fact any virologist will tell you that Covid IS much more dangerous than the common cold as well. The fact that some people get it and have no longstanding negative impacts doesn't disprove that, any more than the fact that your brother didn't die after getting a heart attack "proves" that heart attacks are not dangerous and often fatal.

That's 0 for 2 then.

Tho I'm not actually disagreeing that there ARE some things that reasonable people can disagree upon. For example: "Green is a better color than blue".

Now let's talk about "corporations as people" when it comes to their so-called "free speech rights"...

"Paul Stimpson" wrote:

...please pardon this non-USian if I'm wrong...

Just an actual USian upvoting your comment because of the use of "USian" - since I happen to think calling ourselves "American" is kind of obnoxious.

Facebook whistleblower calls for transparency in social media, AI

Re: Kitemark

"Khaptain" wrote:

It's almost as though someone very high up prefers to keep the "educated" at an extremely low level of critical thought.

This is precisely what I started wondering about when Reagan and his cohort went about disassembling public funding for higher education which resulted in many educational institutions ending up being much more dependent on funding coming from corporate sources and organizations allied with religious organizations. (During the GWB administration this was continued with his "faith-based initiatives", and then Trump appointing notorious anti-public-school crusader Betsy DeVos as education secretary)

I don't think those things were an accident.

Re: Kitemark

"Bendacious" wrote:

Companies do not voluntarily do anything except generate profit.

That may be nearly true in the USA due to the laws here that are extremely biased in the direction of corporate shareholders but it's not true a lot of other places in the world.

I agree with you that something needs to be done about the way social media essentially warps reality with how they present data to users. Finally the public is starting to wake up to this.

In the USA we can start by bringing back the Office of Technology Assessment.

This was a non-partisan government agency whose mission was to educate members of the US Congress about up and coming technology so they could be at least somewhat educated about the new issues that come up as a result, before they have to decide how to deal with them legislatively. (And hopefully before corporate lobbyists get their claws into them and brainwash them about such things)

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Office_of_Technology_Assessment

Because I think one of the biggest problems is that most members of Congress are quite pathetic when it comes to understanding things like the rise of online social media until much damage has already been done.

AC wrote:

...does she actually provide solutions...

Frances Haugen is a data scientist and a former member of Facebook's "civic integrity team" which apparently was tasked with trying to maintain a reasonable level of fairness and transparency on the platform. She became increasingly disenchanted over the choices that FB staff were pressured to make, and when FB dissolved the civic integrity team she decided to become a whistleblower.

Given that she's never been a management executive responsible for policy I don't personally expect her to come up with such detailed strategies, she's just the "canary in the coalmine" who figured out that Facebook's hardcore stance of always picking the choices that added to profits even when they had a demonstrably serious negative impact on the quality of life of their users is causing some serious problems for society.

It's up to the bigshots to decide what to do about that. The first step is even recognizing there is a problem. Luckily more and more people are beginning to see that now wrt social media, in part due to her contributions.

Personally I think we should start thinking about a way to start bringing the public actively into the process of content decisions on large social media platforms, instead of just allowing them to do whatever greedy things they want to do. (Including all sorts of secret content policy decisions that I think many people would be aghast at if they knew they were being made.)

Big Tech: Malaysia won't let us set our own rules and that's not fair and makes us grumpy

"Tron" wrote:

Every technology we have ever had enables crime one way or another

Not really.

The platforms in question here are specifically designed to create discussion and social engagement in general.

It has often been said that they are progressively replacing the former role of the "public square".

Which is true to a great degree, but it's more than that.

The public square did not dictate the contents of the discussions or how many people were participating/listening. (Except that there are only a limited number of people who can hear what you are saying in a public square. Online, you are potentially "speaking" to ~6-7 billion people instantaneously. Bit different impact there.)

In addition to that, that dictating of the contents thing. Modern social media has a very large degree of control over what "content" gets "surfaced" to any particular group of people, and what gets effectively hidden. As it turns out (surprise!) the most controversial (which often means "false or inflammatory") material gets the most attention because that is what the social media algorithms effectively promote. (Because it makes them the most money. Surprise, surprise..)

As a result, many of these platforms are basically misinformation and controversy magnifiers.

And that's a problem. It's a problem you can see the impacts of everywhere these days.

Woman uses AirTags to nab alleged parcel-pinching scum

Re: "police declined to pursue the matter"

"Daniel M" wrote:

San Francisco is not a country, and certainly not one known for law enforcement.

Regarding the actual subject of the article, the state of California contains 40 million people, only about ~850,000 of which are in San Francisco.

Including the place - 300 miles away - where the theft at the subject of this article occurred.

As for the author's particular personal example - SF these days has been having a hard time the last few years hiring police officers, seems that after some recent highly publicized police abuses around the country, it's hard to get people to work such jobs.

So if it's a matter of spending that limited personel time on rapes and murders vs radio and bike thefts - the violent crimes get the top priority.

Sorry to interrupt your kneejerk stereotyping.

Broadcom boss Hock Tan says public cloud gave IT departments PTSD

After laying off 2800 people...

I'd say the future is really open to question after spray Tan's company eviscerated VMware, raised the prices, joined the perpetual enslavement payment model, and sold off parts to hedge funds.

The Network Is The Computer

"Androgynous Cow Herd" wrote:

In the future, you can use your Network for Storage! Your Compute for Network! And Your Storage for Compute!"

"The Network Is The Computer!"

Hey! Where have I heard that before??? :-D

Telegram founder and CEO arrested in France

@remainer_01 wrote:

Wow, the amount of “but think of the children” comments here is truly astonishing.

I forgot to post the following link in my own recent comment so I may as well share it here. :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

Errors and Assumptions

There are a variety of errors in this article as well as incorrect assumptions the commenters here are making.

1) Telegram has never been an “end-to-end encrypted messaging app” - there is ONE special feature called “secret chats” that is e2ee, but the vast majority of Telegram users do not use it because it only applies to 1-to-1 chats and it's a lot less convenient to use than the default chat functionality.

2) The claim by an apparent official Telegram source that “All Telegram chats and group chats are private amongst their participants” is also false. Telegram users have been able to create public chats for many years, and Telegram’s one-to-many “channels” are public by default. In fact, Telegram actually publishes the contents of such public group chats on a separate website BY DEFAULT.

3) Virtually all the assumptions by journalists as well as commenters about why Durov was actually arrested are based on rumors and speculation. To my knowledge none of the French authorities have made ANY official statement about this arrest. (They may be leaking things through certain media organizations but I don’t consider such things to carry the same weight as an official statement. And the fact that the French authorities have NOT made any official statements on the matter is very strange to me.)

The tactic of claiming that some person or entity is “endangering the children” or “contributing to human trafficking” has become so widely abused as a tactic of slandering people and organizations that it’s become a meme at this point. The response from various commenters here is a good demonstration of how easy it is to rile people up with such amorphous claims that contain no actual details.

I’m not suggesting that somehow Telegram and Durov by extension is categorically innocent of such things (and Telegram as a platform certainly is setup and run in a way that can make it easier in some ways for such people to gather there than perhaps some other large messaging platforms) but as with any legal matter if one expects to have credibility on such issues the public needs more than these generalized meme-like accusations that do not even come from official sources.

Before we all jump to conclusions on any of this I think it’s worth stopping and thinking about the wider impacts of making it so easy to rile up large numbers of people around the world against someone via unofficial rumor and innuendo. Something which any of us could be victimized by if we were unlucky enough to cross paths with some sociopath with nothing better to do. Modern technology has given virtually anyone the ability to do this on a global basis in the blink of an eye.

Under pressure from Europe, Apple makes iOS browser options bit more reasonable

Re: Groan

there are many alternative smartphones on the market

There are NOT "many alternative smartphones on the market".

The fact that there are a bazillion different companies that manufacture hardware that ships with ANDROID OS on them doesn't change that when it comes to actual smartphone PLATFORMS, there are literally, for all practical purposes, a sum total of TWO.

And THAT is the problem.

I remember the days when there was quite active development going on amongst a variety of smartphone platforms, from PalmOS, to Symbian, to BlackBerry, Windows Mobile/Windows Phone, to Meego, to FirefoxOS, and some Linux handheld variants etc etc etc, in addition to the two platforms we know today.

Yeah there are some microscopic experimental projects out there like Sailfish, but they do not even begin to compete with the duopoly platforms in terms of full functionality and availability.

Russia tells citizens to switch off home surveillance because the Ukrainians are coming

Re: This attack was brilliant strategy

J.E. the Kremlin Apologist wrote:

Again I'm puzzled that so many seemingly intelligent IT types cheerfully swallow all the bs and then regurgitate it on command.

That's funny, after looking at the last 10 comments of yours I came to the conclusion that your command directive is pretty straightforward:

SET PERSPECTIVE=KREMLIN; START

I posted something like 6 or 8 links, you cherry pick a sentence or two from a couple you don't like because they disagree with you and pretend that's some kind of discernment? LOL

Putin and his regime minions are cynical, pathological liars who make "agreements" only to buy themselves time to do the exact opposite of what they promise. Of course Ukraine is not going to try to attempt to "negotiate" with a party like that, all they understand is superior force. They've been screwed repeatedly on that, it's time to stop playing Putin's charade.

Like all the unmarked vehicles and soldiers wearing insignia-less military fatigues flooding into Ukraine from Russia in the weeks before the "special operation" and when questioned about what the hell they were doing there: "THAT'S A BLATANT LIE! YOU ARE SLANDERING US! THIS IS ALL JUST A CYNICAL PLOT TO UNDERMINE MOTHER RUSSIA!!" or the incessant denials of their proxies shooting down the Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 airliner with a Buk missile - more of the same feverish, screaming, lying denials. Target hospitals and schools with guided bombs and missiles: "WE DIDN'T DO THAT!", and they didn't kidnap scores of children and take them to Russia for "re-programming" either, or incessantly torture and sexually abuse prisoners of war, bla bla bla bla... "WE WERE JUST TRYING TO HELP THEM!!" - yeah, did it occur to anyone over there that the best way to help war refugees you were responsible for bombing them out of house and home is to LET THEM GO BACK TO THEIR COUNTRY?? And it's cheaper, too!

Like Trump, these people literally do not know how to stop continuously lying.

I hope you get an extra 100 rubles this week, you've definitely been putting in an extra effort.

Re: This attack was brilliant strategy

"Russia hasn't started conscription, yet."

Not only have they been doing it since at least last year (when they increased the age range at which they can force Russian subjects into the military), in March they increased the monthly target numbers of doomed cannon fodder to throw onto the fire again. On the volunteer soldier front, in July they doubled the enlisting bonus for military volunteers and are now giving out other regional signup incentives eg in Tatarstan.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-putin-signs-decree-spring-military-conscription-2024-03-31/

https://theconversation.com/ukraine-war-russia-toughens-up-draft-law-to-round-up-more-people-for-the-frontlines-233048

https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/16/europe/russia-putin-war-ukraine-intl-latam/index.html

https://www.scmp.com/news/world/russia-central-asia/article/3272672/ukraine-war-russias-putin-doubles-signing-bonuses-volunteers-fight

https://www.politico.eu/article/tatarstan-russian-military-recruitment-war-in-ukraine/

https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/07/17/russia-s-payments-to-soldiers-and-their-families-amount-to-eight-percent-of-federal-spending-study-finds

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/06/03/we-want-justice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_Russia

Re: This attack was brilliant strategy

They have already destroyed several bridges and I'm sure more are going to fall.

Re: This attack was brilliant strategy

Yes, higher, but that's the Kremlin's pain threshold.

What the people actually think does not enter the calculation. They're being continuously fed propaganda and having the truth removed from all data sources, and those who attempt to share the truth end up in jail breaking rocks.

Time after time I read about the details in various places (including places closer to Russia and Ukraine, not the usual propaganda outlets) and it's extremely clear that Putin is just throwing cannon fodder at that war in obscene numbers including former prisoners, young men from poor Eastern Republics, etc etc etc.

We are literally watching a madman at work.

Re: Ukraine is spying on your ring

Re: "Human Rights":

I think it's pretty clear that Kirill has been a warmonger against Ukraine from the start, and Ukraine has had a lot of problems with people spying for the Kremlin - including within the Russian Orthodox church, so I am not very surprised at all at their efforts to shut down that particular fifth column along with various others.

Given how Putin laughs at the entire concept of human rights, I'm just gonna laugh at your effort to slander the Ukraine govt for taking such measures against the invaders.

You know the best way to respect human rights? Don't invade a country that hasn't attacked you, slaughter thousands of civilians, women and children, bomb entire cities and towns to rubble for no military reason, target hospitals, schools, basic services like electricity and water, etc etc etc etc etc.

Meanwhile they are jailing teenage girls in Russia because they oppose the "special operation" in Ukraine.

https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/life-and-public/2023/03/arkhangelsk-student-olesya-krivtsova-cut-her-electronic-tracking-bracelet

Any rational human knows who is on the right side of history here.

Biden tries to cut through fog of confusion caused by deliberately deceptive customer service tricks

Re: But why do things only get done around election time?

Wrong, see my response to @snake

Re: About time.

waiting until 3 months before elections to do useful work??

Biden administration has been systematically appointing and hiring what probably amounts to the most pro-citizen regulatory regime in my lifetime, and I remember the Richard Nixon days.

This is not just an "election year" thing. A lot of these actions have been in the works for several years. Many have gotten shot down by Trump-appointed judges already.

He put the strongest people in charge of the antitrust division of the DoJ's antitrust division, the FTC, the FCC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that I can remember, ever.

Despite Republicans in the Senate whining and griping and trying every trick in the book to block them, it was Kamala Harris that often broke those ties in the Senate to get those people seated. Some were still forced to withdraw from consideration. (Gigi Sohn is one I remember specifically)

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/07/biden-fcc-nominee-gigi-sohn-withdraws-citing-cruel-attacks-.html

We will looking back on this era with nostalgia. I only hope that it doesn't all come to an end at the end of the year if the orange clusterbomb gets elected again.

Is Lenovo a blind spot in US anti-China security measures?

Re: lenovo security

They probably unwittingly installed an ad-supported utility on some of their LT's that became a bit of a controversy because it turned out it was an early version of commercial spyware and when people found out about that they were not happy about it.

So I'd personally chalk that up to probably just a weak team responsible for vetting the apps they pre-install on their devices, not some nefarious plot. They certainly were not the only PC maker that fell for that at the time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish

Re: Lenovo

Hauwei isn't in the Chinese Government's pocket like ZTE

Well let's see - the company's founder and current CEO was an engineer in the Chinese People's Liberation Army for 11 years, and joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1978.

About 1 of 15 Chinese citizens is a member of the Communist Party, it's not required to be a member.

History worked out a little differently for Liu Chuanzhi, Lenovo's founder and CEO. He joined the military too, for a short time, but because of relatives who were political dissidents, they wouldn't put him on any sensitive assignments. During the Cultural Revolution he got sent to a succession of labor-camps because he thought the Communist Revolution was stupid and said so openly. The CCP wouldn't take him if he begged them. ;-)

Re: Promise you won't smell no...

China has already proven that they will use nefarious tactics (SuperMicro and Lenovo as examples) to place hardware sneakers on motherboards.

I am not aware of these allegations, care to share a link or two?

Because SuperMicro is a US company, founded in and still headquartered in Silicon Valley. Some components come from overseas, just like in any Dell, HP or Apple computer.

Lenovo really does seem like a fairly rare Chinese technology company with a diverse management team, research teams in various countries outside of China, and a generally "cosmopolitan" attitude. Rather than the blatant and insular nationalism that a lot of Chinese companies seem to ooze these days.

Contrast that with Huawei for example, which literally has direct ties to the Chinese military (PLA) and probably also to various high CCP officials, and is a notorious intellectual property stealer. (For example Cisco fought them for years over appropriation of trade secrets and even after they reached one settlement they later said that Huawei had lied in its presentation of facts of that case)

Whereas I cannot remember a single case of Lenovo engaging in blatant copyright or patent abuse or any other sort of corporate malfeasance other than an occasional sloppiness in some of the software they bundled with their computing products.

When they took over IBM's PC business in 2005 I was very skeptical as I had become very fond of IBM Thinkpads at that point. It didn't take long for that skepticism to fade away. I still prefer Thinkpads and Lenovo is the largest PC maker in the world now.

Yes it's true that Chinese companies theoretically are supposed to help the authorities snoop on people if asked. But Lenovo's field of business would mean that if they ever got caught doing such a thing, it would destroy their reputation and their business. I doubt even the CCP would put the company and their 80,000 employees at risk for that.

Intel's processor failures: A cautionary tale of business vs engineering

Re: Shareholder Value

"What exactly is efficient about this method of running the market?"

It's a terrible model but on the other hand, many of the companies that get contrasted with Intel in this piece and many others as the "heroes" - be they nVidia, AMD and so on - are operating within exactly the same national business environment.

Seems to me one of if not the key difference here is that almost all of those "hero" companies (including ARM and Apple's chip operation) are all relatively puny fabless semiconductor operations that have Big Daddy TSMC and others actually manufacturing all their stuff for them, and don't actually have to keep a state-of-the-art semiconductor manufacturing operation running around the world all by themselves the way that Intel does.

Intel may not have a competitive 5G modem chip right now (if you're comparing to Qualcomm - also a fabless company) but neither does that other giant vertically-integrated silicon manufacturer named Samsung have one either. (Just compare those Samsung-built modems in the Google Tensor SoCs for evidence) Nor does Broadcom these days, either, as far as I know. Qualcomm is in a class by themselves, if we're talking about top-tier performance.

So anyway, in reality Intel is doing a lot of heavy-lifting that all those fabless competitors don't have to bother with, and that sucks up a substantial portion of their resources.

Could they execute better? Sure. But unlike most of their so-called "competitors" they also don't have to worry about things like China invading Taiwan, taking over TSMC and UMC and shutting them down, either.

Broadcom boss Hock Tan acknowledges 'some unease' among VMware community

Yeah I was thinking just the same.

How do you provide "value" to customers by ballooning the prices and chaining them to a perpetual rental property whose attributes you can change on a moment's whim?

Kinda like the value of a web-ad-clicking nameless human who is only valued for their clicks.

FTC goes undercover to probe suspected antivirus scam, scores $26M settlement

Another evil doer escapes with paltry fine and "admits no wrongdoing".

I have given much respect in general to President Biden's picks to head citizen-protection agencies after decades of so-called "regulators" who were deep under the covers with the exploitative entities they were supposedly tasked to regulate.

But we are back to the same-old/same-old again with these relatively small fines that carry no actual criminal penalties.

Perhaps Lina Khan's experiences with Trump-appointed federal judges shooting down her attempts to actually be a citizen advocate is souring the FTC on even attempting to get a pro-citizen ruling through the federal court system.

But if that's the case that's rather depressing as well.

Japan to probe Google over 'suspicion' that antitrust laws are being broken

Re: "Android is an open source platform"

It's actually worse than that.

In addition to your points, over the last 10 years Google has been systematically migrating critical system services out of the open source AOSP code and into their closed-source "Gapps" code like Google Mobile services, Play Services and Firebase stuff, to literally cripple AOSP to the point that using raw AOSP as a daily driver is worthless to most device users, literally pushing them into their closed-source stuff whether they like it or not. (For instance, they have recently stopped any further development of the AOSP phone dialer app, FFS.)

All while constantly throwing around the "OPEN SOURCE, OPEN SOURCE!" badge which helps to burnish their corporate image among the masses of know-nothing trend-followers. ("Do not pay attention to the man behind the curtain!!")

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

Re: What About The Current Resident?

One of the key takeaways for me when it comes to POTUS #45 is the fact that the US founders and framers of the US Constitution never seemed to imagine that someone as incredibly sociopathic as this person would ever manage to ascend to the presidency. And with the help of various Congressional allies and enablers, set about to systematically disassemble the foundations of democracy in the country.

For example I think it will take decades to fully undo the damage that that administration did to various federal agencies by systematically purging long-term more or less apolitical experts in high positions and then replace them with legions of inexperienced political hacks that mostly have no commitment to good government and are simply looking for ways to politicize the federal government in favor of the currently unhinged Republican Party that gifted them these plum positions.

Re: What About The Current Resident?

Sorry, sometimes I can't help myself..

Re: What I cannot understand ...

About his EGO???

IMPOSSIBLE!

Re: I can finally admit something

Pretty sure it was not "class" on Dick's part that led to him resigning, but a US Congress which still had enough decency in those days that the political party of a besmirched POTUS was still able to acknowledge the fact that what he did was so unacceptable and illegal that they made it clear they would vote along with his political opponents to impeach him if he did not resign himself. Nixon was in no position to refuse.

Of course after Ford took office he pardoned a bunch of the co-conspirators so that decency only went so far.

Re: What About The Current Resident?

The way that was handled by #46 when he was asked to return them was he just returned them.

This case revolves around an egregious effort by Cheeto & Co. not only to NOT return them, but to extensively lie about what they were doing right in the faces of the DoJ attorneys and judges.

At this point fraud and lying has become so integral to Cheeto's psyche I doubt he's even capable of knowing when he is or is not doing it. (Though exceptions of the latter sort seem quite rare anyway)

Re: as did his aide Walt Nauta

If I'm not mistaken Mr. Smith's decision to move the jurisdiction from DC to FL was either not known well in advance or the Cheeto's team assumed he would not be indicted so did not prepare for this.

There's a longstanding assumption and narrative by Cheeto & Co. that the only people that can ever rule against him are somehow all biased partisans from birth, so they didn't suspect that he would do the indictment in his backyard where Cheeto support remains high. (And as it turns out, with a presiding judge who is a notorious Cheeto appointee who has already embarrassed herself with her earlier pro-Cheeto rulings which resulted in a reversal and rebuke from the Federal Appeals Court over her head.)

Alien versus Predator? No, this Android spyware works together

Re: Time for REAL security.

RIM - which changed their name to BlackBerry about 10 yrs ago - was still selling (Android) phones up until 2-3 years ago.

Nowadays they are mostly doing enterprise mobile management tools and their QNX realtime embedded OS which among other things has been commonly used for car infotainment systems and various commercial/industrial things.

They might have survived in the mobile market longer with their own OS platform if it weren't for them repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot.

Egad, did Apple do something right? End-to-end encryption for (most) iCloud services

Daddy fooled you again, iDweebs

So Apple covers barely more than half dozen specific items with e2ee - making it sound like they're, like, toootally protecting everything on your device from the whole world. But not really.

They predictably leave all sorts of other highly sensitive things open to exploitation and snooping, as per usual.

What about browsing history?

What about contacts?

What about calendar events?

What about the boatloads of stuff you gave permission by default for Siri to "learn" about everything you do, every day?

What about location history/bookmarks/favorites?

What about active/current email data?

What about active/current SMS data?

What about 3rd-party app data?

What about all that juicy metadata everywhere?

.

And that only scratches the surface.

.

Last but not least, they quietly pretend to abandon so-called CSAM snooping, while keeping the one piece of metadata that makes that whole regime work: all your image checksums. They could turn that on again tomorrow and have the cops at your door the day after that for their latest fishing expedition.

.

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When will people ever learn.

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

Re: Serves Google right

You have no idea how many junkmails get blocked not just before they hit your tertiary "spam" folder that you can actually see, but actually most of them at layer 3 of the IP stack when they open a socket on an incoming Gmail SMTP server that recognizes the IP from the other 3 million spam attempts it just tried to deliver and cancels the connection before it tries to even say "HELO".

Mozilla will begin signing Mv3 extensions for Firefox next week

Re: How about letting Android users choose the plugins they wish for Firefox

Use Firefox Nightly, Fennec (a FF rebuild available from F-droid) or Mull (from the Divested Computing Project) and you can also use "unapproved" add-ons/extensions.

BTW: "plugins" are typically content-renderer things like the old Java plugin, the Adobe Reader plugin, etc. Add-ons (Firefox or derivatives) or Extensions (Chrome/Chromium and derivatives) are different.

TSMC triples spending on Arizona advanced chip site with extra 3nm fab

When Hawks morph into Doves..

Every time I hear about the KMT's dovish attitude towards the CCP these days it always throws me for a loop because the KMT were the ones that bitterly fought against Mao's Communist revolutionaries for control of the country after WWII.

I wonder what Chiang Kai-shek would have thought of this modern development..

Germany advises citizens to uninstall Kaspersky antivirus

Re: Who do I trust?

Mister McAfee has been permanently uninstalled.

The Pecking Order

Vulture > Crow

Re: Just don't use ANY anti-virus

A modern AV engine will only do that scan ONCE - when it is first installed. (And all the OS files are already known and they have hashes for all of them, so they have no need to scan any of those either, unless their checksums don't match their database)

Subsequently it skips all the files it inventoried on first install/scan, because it vastly speeds up subsequent scanning and lowers resource usage. AV tool makers figured out this "trick" probably 20 years ago.

Re: Who do I trust?

This reminds me of SMTP admins that used to geoblock entire continents as their method of "anti-spam".

If the bad Russians really want to get you, your uBlock filter is not going to help you..

Re: Just don't use ANY anti-virus

I work in IT security too, and if you don't understand the concept of heuristic and behavioral detection that has been in modern AV tools for decades now, maybe you shouldn't be in IT security, AC #9315347...