Posts by doublelayer

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

As a musician, I like the idea, but there are lots of ways it might not work. They might hear differently than we do; a piece written for human instruments and transposed into ultrasound might prove to be unpleasant due to differences in propagation and absorption in those higher frequencies. Or, a simpler thing, they have music themselves and find ours to be too different for their general liking. A lot of traditional music from one part of the world isn't very popular with those who have lived elsewhere and is interpreted quite differently.

Not to mention that there are differences between societies with the use of the standard musical components and, in some cases, those components themselves. For example, a lot of music is based on a 12-tone scale between notes that are octaves apart, but not every musical tradition on Earth uses this. There are some instruments that are designed for more than twelve notes between octaves, which sound kind of weird if you're not familiar with them. I think that an alien civilization that has music is likely to have more similarities between theirs and ours than in any other type of art, but that's no guarantee.

Re: Thermodynamics would like a word

so the military has photos of this object and has certainly analyzed them, because radar-jamming flying objects that obviously exist are somewhat concerning in war zones and just in general. When it was a balloon, they took notice of it and people were pretty worried about what it was doing, resulting in a missile strike. No, according to this guy, nobody did any investigation and nobody got the camera feeds. That could mean that the military simply does not care about UFOs of any kind, which is already disproved but maybe they just don't care about them in the place where they're fighting wars next to multiple enemy countries who might have them as weapons or surveillance systems.

What evidence do you have to suggest they were caught on camera? So far, I'm hearing that something happened to the radar, which could be mechanical failure, software glitch, or nothing, and conveniently means there's no radar evidence, and something happening to infrared, which is compatible with there being nothing there and means there's no IR evidence. Why does there have to be visual evidence, and how do you know it ever existed?

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

I did just post, but I had one more idea I want to wedge in. Another part of this problem is our assumption on what we'll have in the future. We do not have terraforming technology now. We have been talking about it in the past. A few people were stupid enough to suggest that nuclear weapons could be used as a terraforming tool, for example. We assume that we'll get that stuff at some point, but it might turn out to be more difficult than we thought, and there's no guarantee that we'd get it by the time we have transportation that can easily deliver it to another planet. For that matter, we don't have a guarantee that we'll be able to make interplanetary transport cheap enough for some uses; there's a possibility that it will eventually get cheap enough for more serious work, but that fast travel will take a very long time to be efficient enough for us to use it. We can only guess about which of those will come first and by how far, and it's likely that our ideas of what 2073's technology will look like are very different from what we'll actually have by then.

This also has a parallel in human technology. Five centuries ago, we had the transportation technology to go to almost anywhere on Earth. Some places hadn't been visited, and some would be dangerous to try, but it was not prohibitive to travel to the opposite side of the planet. What technology did the people have for doing things? Very little. They didn't have the power of communication with home, they didn't have the power to prevent themselves being infected by diseases, they didn't have safety equipment to survive or avoid storms, they didn't have the power to drift down and observe without notice, and they didn't have a lot of information about themselves or their world either. While space travel is a lot more complex than sea travel, and many technologies will be needed before anyone can have space ships, this is an indication of how disconnected some advances can be. Nothing intrinsically requires people to build navigation technology before they make advances in medicine; it could go in any order people want.

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

I see some flaws in your argument as well. The ideas that, if one kind of technology is better, then all of them must be at the same level. This is not guaranteed here, so why should it be guaranteed elsewhere? Our technology is a function of our biology and our environment, and the common threads in that technology are common because all humans are roughly the same shape and live in roughly similar places. Even with that, some countries have specialized in certain technologies and not others. North Korea, for example, has spent a lot of time and money on pretty good weapons systems and can't make any computers; they import all the hardware from China and they run Linux on them. Some countries have had nuclear power for sixty years, and others have none and don't intend to build them, either because they have energy from other sources and don't see a need to build one or because they have fears about safety or something else that mean they refuse to build them.

Aliens could not only have these kind of beliefs or priorities that change what they choose to build, but they almost certainly have different forms and environments. Something that we consider normal because everyone finds it useful and it quickly spread could be almost entirely useless to a certain alien species. They might visit us and decide to adopt our version, or they might visit us and decide that they don't need ours either.

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

"We're already struggling to find tasks that people are intelligent enough to do, but that can't be automated."

No, we're not. Haven't you seen all the people saying that they can't find workers for basically every job? Yes, they could probably do something to get them, but they're admitting that they could not automate that job yet and find it more efficient or better to have a human do it. We've been building robots for decades and we still don't have one that is as reliable at figuring out how to reproduce tasks that one human can do quickly. Of course, when a machine is needed to do one specialized set of things, we're quite good at building that, but humans still work pretty well for tasks where quickly interpreting a situation in a non-static way and responding quickly to unusual situations is a frequent situation.

Aliens might have improved on this. There's a reason to believe that they will prioritize it before interplanetary travel. However, that is not a guarantee of that. Different countries here haven't pursued every piece of technology in the same order because some of them had preferences on what was most important. For all we know, aliens could have preferred transportation technology to mechanization and AI, either for pragmatic reasons, for instance if they inhabit somewhere small and need transportation for sufficient space, or ideological ones, such as a belief that AI is unreliable or dangerous.

"As for food, there have to be hundreds of planets they could terraform to support their own native nutrients, without the hassle of dealing with an organised indigenous species. Nope, not buying that either."

And we could easily eat whatever can be grown outside our houses, but we often import things from elsewhere because we think it tastes better. I suggest that, if our nutrients are the same as theirs and they appreciate it, they either destroy us and try automated farming of our crops and livestock, or that they have the humans do that after eliminating threatening technology and organizations. This also assumes that they have terraforming abilities, which is not guaranteed. Possibly our planet is also livable for them and they find it easier to live here than to turn a place like Mars into a pleasant environment.

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

It is, but if they're doing it, outside a relatively low-chance situation, they have no reason to choose here. If there is a lot of life, they will have seen a lot of it and had a chance to research many different versions, so why this one? If there is not a lot of life, then they'd have to get very lucky to end up in one of the few places that there is something to research. That's no guarantee that they wouldn't, because there's always a chance that we're relatively close to wherever they are so we're the first research-worthy place they've found, but if we're the 52nd planet with life, we might not prove to be an interesting research project.

Also, research might not end well for us. A lot of the organisms we've researched didn't enjoy the experience, and some of those were other humans. I've already covered what could happen if the result of the research is that they conclude that we're a problem and they don't want the pollution to spread.

Re: Nonsense

Of course, but not to land your own here. Instead, to do some investigation, you could start having your drones retrieve some stuff that can be found on the surface and bringing it back. That way, you can experiment on that in peace, and if it turns out to be dangerous or unwanted, you can drop it into the sun. Quarantining possible sources of infection is a good protocol for investigating things you don't know about. Of course, if they are exploring, I'd expect to see their version of the rovers we've deployed when we wanted to explore another planet.

Re: "it needs to have oversight"

Probably because, in the world where TV show logic applies, they buy into the secret US agency that has technology the rest of us could only dream of which is used to intercept all of the UFOs over every country and bring them back to the US, because if you have a secret organization that cannot get help from anyone else for fear of breaking your secrets, you would want all the potentially dangerous stuff in one place where it can all blow up simultaneously. They're entertaining shows sometimes, but not so much when you find people who think they actually happened.

Re: Not impossible, just ludicrously unlikely

It depends what the aliens concerned already have, but there are two general options that science fiction provides:

1. Slaves with sufficient intelligence to do things they haven't automated, but not enough intelligence to design our own spacecraft after they smash up our basic ones.

2. Lunch, assuming that our protein is of use to them, although in that case I think they're better off removing humans and eating the animals we already farm.

There is an alternative: they might just not like the idea of having to deal with us later and figure that destroying us now would be an easier cleanup job than trying to remove us from multiple planets, the way that if there is one sample of Ebola in a lab that doesn't need it, it's usually time to completely wipe out that before it finds its way into any humans. Maybe the aliens will be nice enough to assume we won't be that harmful if we spread, but no guarantees.

Google's browser security plan slammed as dangerous, terrible, DRM for websites

Re: DRM enabled things

"However DRM enabled video and music streaming. All video and music streaming nowadays is because DRM exists, like it or not."

I disagree. I think that piracy enabled streaming. When the producers of media realized that people wanted to view their content on computers, they tried for years to pretend that nobody wanted that and they could get away with not providing it. This was the time when people who weren't willing to break the law had a lot of difficulty finding somewhere to legally purchase access to something without a huge hassle, and those who were willing to violate copyright had an easy time locating almost anything. That's what made the sources understand that, if they didn't provide the service that people were obviously interested in, they'd have to do a lot more against all the people who were pirating it, which would have been a bit difficult.

DRM is quite weak. I have never made any pirated content in the past. I'm not sure where I could start posting it if I did. Yet, I can think of several ways that I could obtain the content to post in the first place, even if it required running a cable and copying the content on it. I've done that before for legal uses. There's some work involved, but it's not a big problem. DRM is there because producers demanded it, and it does make the task of pirating content a little harder, but not so much harder that it can't be done.

"I'll probably get downvoted to hell about this but this has the potential to enable even more things."

I won't downvote and I entirely agree. The only difference is that I think the things will all be bad.

"Anything that has multiplayer goes into extreme lengths to prevent client tampering and cheating."

That's fine, as long as that only applies to people who use the thing. They can make their client, and gamers can install it. The client can check that it's signed on every start. Or if they want to be really secure, they can make their own game-specific hardware and only allow players to use that. What I don't think they should be able to do is insist I run locked-down software because, if I decided to play their game at some point in the future, they want more control over my system than I have.

"Ensuring the validity of the client is a very common in gaming but also in enterprise."

In enterprise, the enterprise owns the computer and does the verification. Outside of enterprise, I own the computer and I can verify it if I want, but that doesn't give you the right to verify every machine or decide what can be running there. Neither should the enterprise need to use someone else's system to verify what's running on their machines; they can do that with their own tools, just as I can now.

If you want us to stop treating you as evil, stop treating us as criminals. I do not pirate content. I don't consume that much of it anyway, but when I do, I pay the asking price for it. After I've done so, I might choose to consume that on a number of different platforms, including on my own computer through the web client that your company made. If you don't want me to have that, discontinue the client with sufficient notice for me to stop paying you. Just because I chose to buy access to the content you have doesn't give you the right to have control over all the software I run, nor to cause damage to my privacy in the search for more confidence, but still no certainty, that I'm not going to copy it. If you do, I will just stop choosing to use your service, but others will start looking for pirated copies. I won't support that decision, but neither will I be surprised when it happens.

It's the same thing with other systems. I used a piece of software once which had a hyperactive license check system. It was tightly bonded to a computer. This was a major problem if that computer ever broke, but that's at least understandable. What was less understandable was the frequent decisions to cancel the license in response to system updates, installation of other software, configuration changes, etc. You'd do something else with the computer, and when you next launched the software, sometimes days later to add the extra "I don't even know what I did" factor, the software would announce that your free trial had expired. You couldn't even register it again. You had to uninstall it, purge some files it left behind, install it again, and license it again. Since you couldn't revoke the previous registration either, you were also subject to the opaque process that decided how many licenses were in use but wouldn't tell you the answer, so there was a chance that you'd have to call support and try to convince them that it was all fine. You know what I learned from this? I learned that I needed some other piece of software to do this job, even though I'd paid plenty of money for this one. I found one. They lost a customer.

Re: Scraping

It's not as much that anything you can download can be used for any purpose you like. That is clearly against the law and, in my opinion, it should remain so. What I'm less convinced should be made a legal issue is how you go about downloading data that is public. In short, it should be easy to successfully sue someone for violating your copyright and impossible to sue them for using a bot to download content, whether that content itself was illegal for them to have or not. They can take technical measures against people who use bots. They can disable accounts for that if they like. I don't think they should be able to pursue criminal charges for it. Copyright is unrelated to this topic.

Re: Tracking...

Aren't pranks fun when they mean that, should someone know what you did, they would hate you? Whether pranks should be done at all is subjective, but it's much less subjective when you've chosen a goal like that. The common prank of emailing out something as the unsecured user which announces their failure to follow procedure and often some common message is better because it informs the user what they did wrong and instructs others that the situation is taken seriously. In some situations, it might just be better to lock the computer concerned and give the user a lecture on their return.

It's official: EU probing bundling of Teams with Microsoft 365

Re: Money grab

"Like in the 90's browser wars, why would companies bother with Slack etc when they are essentially getting the same thing for free and deeply integrated with something they already pay for?"

Slack might have to actually develop features that are better than the alternative. I get the idea why it has the look of something anticompetitive, but on that logic, Microsoft should be forbidden from adding any feature at all to Office, because theoretically someone might have a business that could get hurt. I also don't know what level they'd have had to go to to have prevented this. Had they not bundled it, but allowed someone to use their existing licenses for it, would the not-automatically-installed factor have gotten them out of this, or are they required to have it be a completely separate product which you have to pay for in order not to restrict competition with the alternatives, all of which have a free version of their own? At some point, it becomes a stick to allow the other competitors, who didn't exactly have a tiny slice of the business communication market, to prevent themselves having to compete with larger companies.

I've used Teams before, and I use Slack now. Teams wasn't very good. I have many complaints about it. Slack has problems as well, just different ones. They're both basically fine depending on how their used, but both could be substantially improved. Maybe if Slack wants to improve its market share, it might look at areas where people want different features and start adding those.

Re: s/Internet Explorer/Teams/g

In the same way that you don't care about Safari because you don't use IOS, I don't care about this because I don't tend to use Windows search as a web search tool since I use a browser of my choice. Both of them probably qualify for someone to complain about the bundling, but in Microsoft's case, it's quite easy to use a different search system whereas in Apple's case (on mobile devices anyway), it is not possible to use alternatives. I have more worrying ones I'd prefer them to focus on, but if they're going to do one of them, Apple seems to fit the requirements better.

The choice: Pay BT megabucks, or do something a bit illegal. OK, that’s no choice

Re: Don't get me started on # and £

I taught some computer science students at one point, and they were somewhat consistent as reading it "hashtag include", "hashtag ifdef", etc. I didn't like it, but I don't really have a name for that symbol which everyone can agree on. Similarly with the various brackets or braces, or for some reason the | character which always seemed to confuse people unfamiliar with the shell when I tried to describe the syntax for piping commands. You know, that vertical line. There's only one vertical line, so there shouldn't be much ambiguity by the point I'm using that descriptor instead of a shorter name.

Apple demands app makers explain use of sensitive APIs

Re: Oh the irony...

What attributes indicate that? For example, if it's that you're using an old browser because your device isn't compatible with an updated one, that is also compatible with someone who doesn't install updates for a very long time, and I've seen those people, so I know they are out there. Also, I don't think they're doing any analysis of what these attributes mean as much as they're storing them to better log what you're doing online. They probably don't know about the age of your device and it will neither prevent them from storing your stuff nor coming to incorrect conclusions about what you might buy and spamming you about them.

What does Twitter's new logo really represent?

The use you have to demonstrate can be quite small, even as small as keeping around the original website and redirecting it to products you make, or attaching the trademark to something but not putting any focus into that part. However, trademarks are challenged on the basis that they are no longer in use, and part of the renewal of a trademark is affirming that you have used and continue to use the trademark, because otherwise you are deemed to have abandoned it. At least one case I know of involved someone intentionally making some products and pricing them unreasonably high in order to be able to keep a trademark they didn't want others to have, but they didn't want to use at the time. They were required to have some token effort to make a product or service available under the trademark or it would either be automatically canceled or more easily challenged by someone else. Keeping a trademark may be easy, but it's not like a domain name where if you keep paying the money, you can have it forever.

Be careful, because on those vague terms, a lot of things could come under that. Linux, for example. Sure, it's maintained by multiple people and organizations, and you could technically maintain it yourself. In practice, those organizations are currently working on the basis that the others exist and don't have the ability to maintain it singlehandedly if they shut down, and individual users of Linux in many cases don't have the skills to fix it themselves. I don't think Linux will become unusable, but it could theoretically do so. If it did, would you want to hear people making the argument that, since it was free, anyone who relied on it was stupid and should have relied on some alternative for which they provided money? Because I've heard that argument before even when it was running, and trust me, it was annoying.

Re: X... 15 Overlapping Circles...?

The circles were used for the previous bird logo, not the X. It makes it a bit easier to understand how they got there, since I don't see any way to make an X out of circles without making more trouble for yourself than you need to. The best way would be to use very small circles, but then you could as easily just use pixels.

Re: Let's hope it stops the hate comments

You want constructive comments? Is that a euphemism for unquestioning support of people you like? If you've read enough of these comments to dislike them, then you already know what their views on Musk are. Yes, some of them express those views negatively, but you don't really need to ask about what their views are; they've explained them at length. Therefore, I must conclude that you aren't looking for "constructive comments", but are instead simply complaining, in the same way that they are, about things you don't like. They don't like Musk, and you don't like expressions of disapproval against Musk.

Your use of the word "wokesters" made that, if anything, even more obvious than the rest. Some people might also express that they've seen as much of complaining about "woke" (whatever the writer is choosing to mean by saying it) as they ever want to, and I have seen people who have made that point. It doesn't stop you from making the post you did, nor should you be required to refrain from posting your views simply because someone doesn't appreciate them.

They might have to argue about whether Meta is using that trademark. You have to either be using it for something or have serious plans to do so. I'm unaware of any Meta property using the name (that's not saying much since I don't know much about Meta's products anyway). They've also had it for four years and were able to make their latest social media product in months, so they might have a hard time explaining why they hadn't built the product they wanted to use with the trademark yet. So Twitter has the choice to attempt to argue that Meta has left the trademark unused and therefore should lose it. That might lead to a long legal fight which will manage to be more boring than it should be.

Crooks pwned your servers? You've got four days to tell us, SEC tells public companies

Re: Four Days........Someone, somewhere has a sense of humour!

Yes, that is often it. The malicious party was able to impersonate someone with access and access data in quantities small enough not to set off alarms, or if they're better at the job they disabled the alarms. The main way to figure out what happened is to go into the logs and look at what happened when you know that represented an external attacker, not an internal authorized person or system. More alarms would be useful, and some places are certainly guilty of not having them when they needed them, but sometimes they were there and the attacker managed to bypass them at the time.

Re: WAT?

That happens and works, but regulators look for it and, if they find out, they will punish everyone in the group. Insider trading that goes that way usually leads to tax fraud because you can't explain how you came by the profits of that trade*, and that means that not only will the tax authorities be looking for it, but if you're caught, you'd likely be charged with tax evasion or money laundering in addition to insider trading. So yes, it can be done, but it's risky to attempt.

* The person who engages in the trade can explain their profits and pretend they didn't know about the internal information. The person who leaked that information, on the other hand, will have to be paid off by that person somehow. If they just buy expensive stuff for the original source, it would be a lot of assets that they didn't earn, and if they pay it in cash, then the tax authorities will expect an explanation of why because it will affect how it is taxed. Not perfect, but it does work.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

Re: My takeaway from this article...

How much of that was Windows and how much was it files that you or an application stored there? Yes, Windows did get much bigger, but so did all the files I store on my computer, both in individual file sizes and in the quantity that I tend to store there.

"I'm writing this on an elderly Thinkpad X60 with two 1.8GHz cores. It takes about one minute to boot Linux Mint. What 216000000000 things does it need to do, exactly, before it can let me login?"

I know you're probably joking a bit, but those cores are not both operating at 100% utilization through that process. Some of that process is single-threaded anyway, so your second core is doing nothing then. Most of the process, though, neither core is doing anything, because they are waiting for data to come off the disk into memory, during which they spend a few million cycles doing nothing, and then some of that data is loaded from memory into registers, during which they spend a few hundred more doing nothing. Only then can the cores start computing something useful, such as decompressing some data back into memory (a few hundred more cycles for it to write), verifying the integrity of the system, and creating lists of components that need to be located on the disk and loaded into memory (a few more million). If you attach the same RAM and disks to a very fast processor, you'll get some speed improvement, but if you attach the same processor to a much faster disk and RAM, you'd get a significantly larger improvement. This might not be possible with the hardware you have available, but those are some of the factors that lead to the boot time.

Re: My takeaway from this article...

I have to agree with this. I wasn't around for the earlier generations of computers, but I got to try some of those things that are lauded here and they weren't always fast. I have also seen lots of historical complaints about the hunger for resources of Windows 98, XP, early distros of Linux, or basically anything new. Years later, when computers naturally came with more resources, and when there was a new new thing to complain about, the old one would be praised for its prudence in comparison.

Sure, XP runs quite nicely on a 2010 machine. It also ran nicely on a 2003 machine. I had a while where I was running it on a 2000 machine, though, and it wasn't so fast. It was usable, but I would spend some time waiting for things to complete because I had gotten used to some actions taking longer than they looked and ignoring my typing until they completed. Startup times were quite long, applications would take a while to load, and it couldn't handle large operations anywhere near as well as more modern computers could. For example, I remember an animation that Microsoft added to the search feature, possibly because you would be waiting for several minutes and they wanted to avert boredom. On modern Windows, file search even on my disk with hundreds of thousands of extra files takes a few seconds at most. That's not to say that everything added to a modern OS is for the better or justifies the high resource requirements, but nostalgia is often incorrect about how good something really was.

AMD Zenbleed chip bug leaks secrets fast and easy

for (int i = 0; i < data_length-key_size; i++) {

if (is_valid_private_key(data, i, i+key_size) {

report_possible_key(data, i);

}

}

No, nothing that can be done. We're all safe now.

Re: Parsing the data

"The only way that I can think that this would work is if there were multiple versions of library routines in a library, and the runtime-loader decided which version to link to at execution time depending on the model of processor it was running on. I don't think you could make this decision in during the program flow itself, because otherwise any code would be deciding which varient of code to run as much as running the code itself! Maybe someone can enlighten me here."

I don't know how common it is, but where I've seen it done, they do exactly this, but to save time, they figure out which versions of the functions they will call at the beginning of execution and cache those. The rest of the program doesn't need to spend any time checking the processor and branching to those different versions since that work was done once at the beginning of the program and was stored in memory, meaning it can be consolidated into two instructions.

Re: Also, I just noticed...

It could be both. The first documented use of EternalBlue was North Korea failing to do ransomware*. Not too long after that came a Russian government attack on Ukraine and sort of anyone who looked a bit like Ukraine. Others figured out pretty quickly that this vulnerability was nice and started using it as well. If it becomes known, someone will try to use it, and unless it's fiendishly difficult, that includes smaller criminal organizations and individuals.

* Well, they succeeded at infecting a bunch of places, but failed to keep their malware functional by leaving in a kill switch and failed to collect very much money.

Re: Also, I just noticed...

It's a feature I have used before for that purpose, but it does absolutely nothing for this vulnerability. If you want to have both windows open, the level of isolation required is a window in another browser running on a different computer. Anything where the same processor is in use is potentially vulnerable to the attack.

OpenAI pulls AI text detector due to it being a bit crap

Re: Correlating Commentards Causes Confusion

One reason that won't be very interesting is that there basically wasn't any debate on that topic. GPT sometimes prints large chunks of text verbatim, but even more frequently mashes up small bits from lots of chunks and returns those. Either is pretty easy to prove, since it can be made to either quote something accurately which can be verified (depending on what it quoted), or to incorrectly state something which its training text would have accurately stated, demonstrating that it had modified the original text to get there. So the answer to the debate is that it does both.

It's also not interesting because what would a failed classifier prove about what GPT was doing? Yes, one thing they could have done is to have the classifier classify anything from the training data as AI-generated and everything not in that as not. Obviously, that wouldn't produce the results they were going for, so they didn't do that. The other method they used also didn't work, probably because these LMMs have mastered English to the extent that their output and human output is hard to tell apart just on the basis of word usage or sentence structure, although depending on the subject matter, it might be more obvious to humans who have more context. Of course, nothing guarantees that they were competent while making that classifier, so it could have failed for more basic architectural reasons. I have little confidence that they will ever be able to make an accurate classifier for this purpose.

Apple patches exploited bugs in iPhones plus other holes

I don't know what you can do with an Apple TV, but if it can be used to browse the web, watch content rendered by a browser of some sort, or receive messages, then there are some attack vectors. It might be something as simple as TV OS being basically the same as IOS with a different frontend (as I recall, a while ago they didn't bother having separate names and called it IOS), so if they patch one they are going to patch the other to keep the codebases in line.

Framework starts taking orders for 16-inch repairable, upgradeable laptop

Re: Obligatory

Usually, it's an existing English layout modified with one or more keys used as modifiers to add diacritics. I've seen them made from both the UK and US layouts, usually with one or two of the less used punctuation keys set to diacritic mode. For people who primarily type in English but who speak a language that uses Latin letters, but not the subset used in English, this layout can allow them to use one layout for both languages and to have labels on the keys telling them what they do.

As a touch typist, I don't find this necessary; when I use a different language, I switch my layout to that one and it doesn't matter that the symbols on the keys don't show up when I'm typing in that language. This is not true of every user, which is why the international variants have been created. You can always get an international English variant and set the OS keyboard layout to something familiar. The only downside is that a few keys will have symbols that don't represent what they do under your new choice of layout. The only thing you have to be careful about is that the keyboard has the keys in the shapes you prefer, so if you're used to an extra key near your Z key, getting a keyboard that doesn't have one could be more annoying and vice versa.

I would also like more ports, but the modules are not large enough to put a bunch of ports in one section. A module measures 3 cm square and about 0.7 cm thick, so you're not going to be able to get two card slots and a USB port in one of those. You could probably get two USB-C ports into a module that size, although I'm not sure how that affects charging through one of those ports and connecting to a device through the other as they're both handled by one upstream port. I have hoped that others would manufacture modules to increase the set of choices. So far, only one has been made that way. Not all the ports are £20 or so, as the basic ones tend to be £9.

I ended up accepting this anyway because I've found most alternative laptops to be somewhat lacking in ports as well. Sometimes they include more in total, but that often includes something I won't use. If the alternative machine I'm considering only has a few ports as well, then I have no reason to prefer one over another.

Re: Laudable, but perhaps not commercial

"Now fast forward a couple of years, when there's more demanding software, inevitably bigger files, and newer machines are faster and more capable. Will an upgraded Framework machine still be viable option? For some it will be. But for some it won't, and that erodes the parts sales potential etc etc."

I'm curious what problems you envision. If Framework continues to follow the plans they have for two generations, then one of the upgrade options is a new CPU. If you bought one of the first generation with 11th-generation Intel processors, you can open it up and swap in a 13th-generation Intel or 7th-generation AMD board keeping the rest of the computer. So if software gets bigger and you need something faster, why wouldn't that be sufficient to give you that access?

Of course, if Framework doesn't keep making mainboards or switches the format, that could stop being an option. I don't think that is likely as long as there is sufficient demand. The alternative is that the laptop can't be upgraded at all, so you'd just have to buy a new one. The value of spares is only helped if they can be used on more and more models, so if they end up being less valuable than spares for models that can't be upgraded, it would seem that's down to their company selling fewer laptops altogether.

Re: I have to say I would really like a laptop with the touchpad to the right

I suppose that depends when you replace your laptops normally and why. If you need the latest processors at all times, the new mainboards are a somewhat expensive way of doing it, but if the old ones are still used, then it might work out for you. I don't think it would prove that much differently than buying new laptops as frequently, although the old ones could be more useful than the old mainboards. If instead you are like me and replace computers because hardware has failed, then the Framework's model makes more sense. The last computer I replaced was replaced because the following had happened to it:

1. The battery was weak (relatively cheap and easy to fix on a Framework machine)

2. The disk had failed once and I didn't like that it was in an unusual form factor (Framework, along with many other computers, uses a standard M.2)

3. I had worn out the included keyboard, which wasn't too bad a problem but a bit annoying sometimes (also replaceable)

4. Apple had blocked me from installing new Mac OS versions without overriding them.

Of this list, only point 4 would require a processor change, that only happened because the computer was nine years old when they dropped support, and I was still fine with the performance I got out of that CPU. Had the other parts of the hardware kept up, I would have used it for longer, and I do have it running a few things, just in a less primary role.

Apple owes Brit iOS app devs millions from excessively high commission, lawsuit claims

Re: professor of competition policy

Sure, why not? There are both legal and economic facets to competition, and it's something that students might focus on if they're looking to work at a regulator, a company that either is or looks like a monopolist, or a place that wants to fight against monopolists. Is it that different from a professor of cryptography, even though they'd be organized under the mathematics or computer science areas, or a professor of copyright law?

Re: It is a pain

"Apple and Google have practically identical side-loading features."

Let me guess. When you say "side-loading", you're referring to taking the app you just wrote and installing it on your phone from XCode or Android Studio? Yes, those are similarly easy. That is also irrelevant to the discussion and to basically everybody. Developers can figure out how to load their test version.

The side-loading that others are talking about is when you've finished developing your app and someone who doesn't have the code wants to install it. On Android, you can get a file containing the app and install it on any device, with two to five security screens in your way. For an iPhone, you can ... well you can get a device-specific package by collecting an identifier the device tries to hide from you, individually made by the developer. Or you could get a corporate profile installed on your phone, assuming you don't already have one which will make it difficult to add others, and that also has to be maintained by the developers and will break should they shut any part of it down. So the part that we're talking about is not identical in any way.

Judge lets art trio take another crack at suing AI devs over copyright

Re: Extension of the Existing Situation

While unfamiliar with the cases, I looked up a summary. The cases I can find where a suit was successful involved using the characters' names at least and often large parts of the setting. So it's not just some child being sent to a magical school, but children using the same names from being sent to schools invented for that book, sometimes both applied and sometimes only one. Of course, there may be others that Wikipedia didn't choose to list.

Re: Whoops ... I Hear Solicitors Getting Rich

I don't think satire means what you think it means. I'm not sure it was intended as satirical in the first place either. Extrapolating or exaggerating something doesn't automatically make it satire.

Re: Whoops ... I Hear Solicitors Getting Rich

Since the law works on the basis that copying is not allowed unless you have the right to, it already holds that ebooks are illegal unless you have permission to make them. Interpreting it in a different way would be very difficult. For example, even if a judge takes the strongest position against the creators and operators of LMM programs, giving the most rights to the original creators of training data, it would not prevent them from making something out of training data to which they have the copyright. Microsoft could still train on the code they wrote. An author could train on their own writing (subject to their contract with their publisher). So if you really think a judge could somehow ban ebooks as a concept, I'll take the other side, and I'm curious to see your proposed logical error that could lead them to do so and have any legal viability (if it doesn't have that, then another court will quickly throw it out, so that will be a requirement to obtain the situation you describe).

Re: Can you 'own' a style?

That's not what they are claiming or asking for. They are not saying that they own a style and you can't produce anything that looks too close to that. They are saying that the bots are only able to imitate that style because they have, without permission, used a lot of their copyrighted artwork to produce those new pictures. In some cases, identifiable pieces of that work have been produced by models such as this. The court has to decide whether those parts are sufficient to be violations on their own, and whether there is a right to use copyrighted content as input to a program without permission and despite complaints from the copyright holders.

Re: Whoops ... I Hear Solicitors Getting Rich

Not a problem, since that is already how the law works. If I scan a book, make an ebook out of it, and sell that ebook, I'm violating copyright. If the publisher does it, they have the copyright and can grant themselves the rights necessary to make that ebook. The law already works as you describe, and it always has done. In my opinion, that's how it should work.

Re: Extension of the Existing Situation

The problem comes when we try to decide whether LMM processing counts as reading and understanding, like a human brain does, or mashing and reconstituting, like a dumb program does. It isn't clear, and although media hype likes to paint these programs as sentient systems that build an understanding of concepts, their output indicates that they are not.

Parallels are difficult. Here's an attempt. I have recently opened up an embedded software image and extracted the important program from it, which I am disassembling. It's not even clear whether I'm legally allowed to do that, which is one reason I won't name or describe the product. I'm interested to see what this software does and I'm just reading for that point. However, let's assume that I was going to use that software for my own purposes. If I were to port that software to run somewhere else, large parts would be left behind. The entire UI system is related to the manufacturer's proprietary hardware, which I wouldn't be using. All that code would have to go and be replaced by something that could handle a different set of interfaces. There are some components I could do without. Those would also be deleted and the various gaps covered. There are also certain aspects where the software could use some improvement, so I'd be making lots of edits. Since I don't have the original source code, a lot of the decompiled bits would be significantly changed, by compilers and other tools, in order to fit them into my modifications. My theoretical version would end up being very different, both in appearance and in function, to their original version. If I published it, there's a reasonable chance they would never notice that I had used their software in developing mine. If they did figure that out, especially if I admitted what I had done, they would not accept that as legal use of the software and neither would a court. It didn't matter that I've used only a small part of their work and added plenty of my own, it wouldn't count that my binary didn't contain chunks of theirs, and it wouldn't matter that software made many of the edits; that wasn't my software to use.

Bots that cheerfully quote sections of text or reproduce original images make it rather clear that they have no ability to avoid printing significant portions of copyrighted content. There's an argument that, even if the program doesn't print the content, it is not legal for it to be trained on that content unless it has been legally obtained, and since copyright does not include an automatic license to produce derivative works, it may not have been. This won't be the last time the human-to-bot analogy will be made. We will have to decide for ourselves whether having a computer provide plausible deniability by randomizing things so much that you might not get the original input back is sufficient to equate its actions with that of a human. I don't think the legal arguments clearly indicate a winner.

World's most internetty firm tries life off the net, and it's sillier than it seems

Re: Workers will still be on Google's internal network and have access to the normal tools

If the air gap is implemented with "You can contact Google Cloud, and Google Cloud can contact the internet", then they're doing it wrong. I can put a machine in Google Cloud, so their air gap needs to isolate their machine from that instance I've created in both directions. A network on which everything is disconnected from the internet qualifies. A network in which some things are and some things are not is just a more inconvenient part of the internet.

Meta can call Llama 2 open source as much as it likes, but that doesn't mean it is

Re: OSI vs FSF definition

I think we mostly agree on this, but not so much with this part:

"Although I completely agree that "open" is too vague, and is therefore vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse."

Sure, "open" isn't very clear, but neither is anything else. "Free software" is more often used to mean something else, simply because it is also the right phrase to describe software which I'm not going to charge for, even if I won't give anyone the source to it, hence all the speeches about speech and beer. The developers of software for which there is no charge don't always refrain from using the term, and there isn't another one that is easily understood by the general public.

This has led some people to start using the term "libre" instead. This doesn't have a second definition, so points there, but it's also not an English word. It works for people who speak French, Spanish, or one of a few other primarily Romance languages in which that's a word, but those who do not and want to interpret it as an English word will have a bit more trouble with it. It also isn't at all clear about what kind of license terms qualify as libre, I have not seen a "Libre Software definition". For example, some people I know thought that libre software meant that software would have a stricter license that placed additional restrictions on what a distributor would do, and used it as a contradictory word to free software. In their misconception, they had proprietary, for which you'd probably need to buy or negotiate a license, free which you could use with relatively little effort in software you intended to be free, and libre which you could use only if the licenses were compatible because they would likely place so many restrictions on a work that they couldn't practically work together. I took issue with this definition, and the group eventually decided that libre didn't mean that, but it doesn't make it any clearer what qualifies and what does not.

Meanwhile, both "free software" and "open source" have definitions which are easily understood, not too difficult to use to check whether a license qualifies or not, and at least known by most people who work in this field. I can't see a better way to classify things except if the FSF and OSI trademark those terms and attach them to their definitions. If they did so, I imagine at least some people would be unhappy with them.

It depends what definition you are using, but I'm sure you already know about the OSI's definition, which is much more expansive than you claim, including requirements to provide the right to distribute, to make derived works, to not discriminate or place requirements on the user that would limit those rights significantly, etc. Has that stopped everybody from claiming to be open source? No, it has not. However, neither have people been stopped from declaring something "free software" when they do not meet the FSF's definitions either. I've linked a case above where a court agreed that the term generally requires more than the source being readable. People who are interested in clearly defining how much rights a certain license provides have a lot of terms to describe different levels, and their use of "open source" is not the same as "source available", a term whose common use is much closer to the situation you describe.

Someone just blew over $190k on a 4GB first-gen iPhone

I don't know when that became the case, because I was able to successfully activate an iPhone 5S without an internet connection about three years ago. That may no longer be possible, and it might not even have been possible had that device been running the latest version of IOS available for it, but at the time, I was not prevented from doing it.

BOFH: You can be replaced by a robot or get your carbon footprint below Big Dave's

Re: Error in binary expression at line 61

It's a perfectly functional synonym for "closer to being carbon neutral". Since you can easily measure your level of neutrality, and therefore you can easily compare being not neutral but close to it and not neutral by a wide margin, you can be less neutral by either pumping out more CO2 if you're carbon positive, or sequestering more if you're carbon negative. Since being less neutral is possible, being more neutral isn't that hard to understand either.

This is even clearer in a position where neutrality isn't measured. It is possible to determine whether you are exactly carbon neutral, whereas it is not possible to determine if you're politically neutral. This means that it's even easier to understand, if not implement, becoming more politically neutral.