Posts by doublelayer

BBC points Russians to the Tor version of itself

Re: text vs. image

In the article. Or pasted here:

https://www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion/

Re: Fahrenheit 451

It isn't unreachable. Quite easy from a normal internet connection. It might be unreachable from Tor exit nodes, because it's using a redirection service (found that by looking at the scripts pulled in from the first HTTP request). Those tend to block Tor because they don't trust people coming from there. Or perhaps, since you don't appear to have checked normally, you just lied about that. I see little benefit in bothering to check.

Saving a loved one from a document disaster

Re: Rather computers than cars

In addition to there being lots of problems with cars, they also do a lot less than a computer does. Users have so many problems because computers can do a lot of things. If it was as simple as a word processor and no other applications, you'd see a lot fewer support requests. When you demand a box that can run any program that has been written for the OS and processor and run them all at the same time, with the same files, with some level of security between them, and with sufficient options that a technical user can make that box do any number of tasks, you end up with a much more complex system than a car that can go, stop, change speed, and turn.

ICANN responds to Ukraine demand to delete all Russian domains

Re: firewall

Exactly. There is nothing preventing them apart from the technical problems. I'm not sure whether Ukraine had set up any of the required infrastructure to do it as have some other countries. Being somewhat democratic, it's more likely that they didn't think they'd need it.

Re: Very Vichy of you

We certainly could do more. I am surprised to see that we have done what we have given our tepid responses to the other crimes Russia has committed recently, so I may start off with a different attitude to you, but we both agree that there are things we could be doing that we are not. I still take exception to those who imply that our countries have done nothing or will do nothing when that's obviously false, as well as with people who extend that argument into hypothetical areas that would be clearly different.

Re: firewall

They have the right to do so. There is no international law against censorship, at least anything that's enforced or phrased any more clearly than "censorship is bad, signed by censors". Depending on their local ISPs' control over the networks and internal systems, they could try doing that already. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they are trying it but finding it harder than they thought to implement at short notice.

Re: Very Vichy of you

You clearly didn't understand what they said. I'll summarize it. If nuclear weapons are involved, the internet situation isn't the problem you need to work on.

And by the way, we wouldn't do things for Putin if he threatened to nuke us. If he threatened that, we would threaten to nuke him in return. It gets kind of scary, but that's what has happened each time and would happen this time as well. People are cowardly when it's someone else suffering but can turn strong when it's themselves at risk. Those who don't switch get replaced when public concern gets high enough.

Re: They won't and can't get everything they ask for.

"The problem is that when one nation uses that same network to attack another nation, that's when the neutrality gloves need to come off. In order to maintain that stability you need to defend it from serious abuses like the very one being done by one nation against another."

The problem with that is that Russia's information war would not be stopped or even dramatically harmed by carrying out Ukraine's requested action. They have propaganda sites ending in .ru and with servers based in Russia, certainly, but they also have propaganda sites ending in .com and .ua with servers in lots of countries. As each one is identified, the hosts can be targeted and requested to shut down the site or revoke the domain. Even if they wanted to set up this shutdown and had the authority, it wouldn't solve the issue. Doing it, however, would have some dramatic side-effects.

I think nearly everything should be done to get Russia out of Ukraine and charge them with war crimes. If an action will cause significant harm to unconnected things and also not work, let's not waste time trying it. Let's spend our time finding an alternative which corrects the latter and ideally the former.

US exempts South Korean smartphones from Russia export bans

Re: @Snake - South Korea

"According to you, a free, independent country can not chose to remain neutral and must instead take orders from US"

That's not what they said and you know it. They disagree with what South Korea is doing and has done. They did not say that South Korea's right to do so should be revoked. I disagree with your choice to make blatant misstatements in service of a national stereotype, but nonetheless I would object if you were banned for saying what you did.

"I'm not a huge fan of the U.N., but isn't this the sort of thing that it is supposed to take care of,"

No. The U.N. does not have the authority to decide what sanctions you use. They wouldn't be supposed to do that anyway because they aim for neutrality. So on no account would the U.N. get involved in what is sanctioned and what isn't other than votes to approve or disapprove which everyone votes on and nobody cares about afterword.

"instead of leaving everyone kowtowing to the US's decisions?"

South Korea is an American ally. They can ignore the U.S.'s decisions, but they choose not to. The U.S. is going to do what it wants and South Korea has chosen to work inside it rather than go on its own, which it would be perfectly in its rights and able to do.

The zero-password future can't come soon enough

It depends what data is included. It's usually a database of all the users passwords, but if those passwords are hashed, they need to break each one independently. They get them one at a time, but since they have the cracking computer running all of them, they can get many done in a day if they're starting with the low-hanging fruit. If the company was stupid enough to store them in plaintext, then they get all of them without doing any work.

Re: Way, way, way too much hassle

The other problem with captchas is the set of users who don't appear to have a clue what they're for. They put them in weird places. I had one that required me to fill out a captcha on every login. Not even just logins from new places (that is also not a good use), but every single one. I think they viewed the captcha as a 2FA solution. That business lost me as soon as I could migrate my stuff off them.

Re: fingerprint

"Given a sentence for not disclosing a password or encryption key might be less of an offense than what they'd have if they could have a nice rummage through your files."

What crimes are you expecting they'd decide you committed by looking at your files? I agree that I don't want them to look at them, but serving up to five years is a strong penalty, exceeding many normal crimes. Having a secret delete password is destroying evidence, another crime they can charge you with. I probably have the same view as you, that such laws are illegitimate and would be better repealed. While they're there, however, it's important to know what the law says so you can act accordingly.

Re: fingerprint

Well, at the risk of causing a debate over which countries are civilized or not, you are not correct. Some countries do protect passwords in the way you state, for example the United States, but in others, such as the UK, failing to disclose passwords, encryption keys, etc is a crime in itself for which you can be imprisoned. This is the case even if you are exonerated from the original investigation.

Linux-on-an-SBC project Armbian releases version 22.02

Re: Gemini rising

My response would be somewhat different, namely that either they need to work on making it easier to update Android or they need to have a regulatory incentive not to have such a short planned obsolescence time.

Google has been talking about lowering barriers to updating Android for years. And, as useless as many of those attempts have turned out to be, they do appear to have made some improvements. Still, it's annoying that they have a situation like this at all--after all, nobody needs to ask whether the new version of Linux (kernel or distro) will support a particular old laptop. If the laptop had drivers already, it probably still has them and you can go get them. If it didn't, you may have network, sound, or graphics issues, but the problem will be the peripheral hardware, not that Intel or AMD no longer support the chip from 2009.

And I do tend to blame the manufacturers of the devices to some extent. There are projects that manage to update Android past the typical cutoff point. They don't need to wait for the SoC manufacturer to do everything for them, and if for some reason there is one where they do, then they should know not to use that one. There's a simple way to check which one Planet has turned out to be: how were their security patch level updates? They don't need SoC assistance for those, and if they stopped releasing them, it's clear they moved on and let their product's Android version die.

BitConnect boss accused of $2.4bn crypto-Ponzi fraud has disappeared

Re: All cryptocurrencies are Ponzi schemes

And this isn't cryptocurrency, it's a straightforward fraud. Had this guy said he had a bot that would trade on the stock market, it would have gone the same way.

I've said this before too, but a Ponzi scheme is a very specific kind of fraud. Cryptocurrency has seen a lot of fraudsters, often not doing a Ponzi-style fraud. Continually saying that it's a Ponzi scheme when it's a different one only makes it seem like you don't understand what Ponzi schemes are or what cryptocurrency is. It's as if I started calling all crimes burglaries; they would still be crimes and I'd still be correct that they're bad, but I wouldn't convince people because I'm continually using incorrect terms.

Ukraine asks ICANN to delete all Russian domains

No, it really wasn't. By that point, petroleum wasn't as critical to the world as it is today. In fact, it went the other way--because of World War I, petroleum became more commonly used, for example replacing coal as the fuel for most naval ships. The participants in the war weren't major petroleum producers. The closest you get is Russia, which produced it but whose production wasn't targeted, the Netherlands, which produced it from their colonies in Indonesia, and the Ottoman Empire, which didn't produce it but could threaten the place (Persia) where the British were getting theirs. The land that changed hands wasn't taken for oil wealth. It turns out that the land lost by the Ottomans had a lot of it, but that wasn't known until later.

ARPANET pioneer Jack Haverty says the internet was never finished

Re: Credited with developing File Transfer Protocol

"Arguably, without FTP, or something like it, The Internet (as used by consumers) would never have been built."

The key part being "something like it". I don't have much objection to FTP, which is probably because I never had to write an FTP client, but if he hadn't made that, someone else would have used a different protocol to move files. It's kind of obvious that, if you have files and you have a communication system that can send data, you will eventually want to put those together. FTP is important historically and in many modern-day situations as it's one of the oldest protocols commonly supported, but many of the protocols used by those consumers have superseded its function in a different and often simpler way.

Re: Elaborate

Not the part where you want to get data from a different system or put your data onto one. That requires the machine-to-machine bit. That is one of the levels of the internet, but if you want to limit the definition only to OSI levels 3 and 4, it's still critical to lots of systems and has seen many refinements. It's not done, and it never will be done, but it's impressive how well it tends to work.

Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400

Re: Stealth patent?

On that basis, it could as well be a folding phone. In fact, it's probably more likely to be talking about that because the phone mostly has input devices on the outside (touchscreen, cameras). Smart glasses, while they may also have cameras, will need a lot more effort put into the output devices (screen that is easily seen by the wearer without distracting from the environment, same for audio because most glasses don't go over the best areas for bone conduction). I'm not sure how much you can outright lie about what your product is before a patent doesn't apply to it, but as none of these three concepts is patent-worthy anyway (the Pi 400, many Android folding phones, and Google Glass respectively as prior art), it probably doesn't matter that much to them.

I like the way you think, though.

"Anyone noticed that _nobody_ is building a device like this right now?"

I know of a few places making such things. Running Mac OS, no, but the hardware exists. However, you've asked for a different product so you can bring your own keyboard, and there are lots of those. Tons of small desktops exist out there. Depending on exactly how small you want them, you can quite easily get ones that mount onto the back of a screen and have Intel or AMD processors sufficient to run Windows or Linux with pretty good speed for average workloads. There are even a few computers still using the form factor of the old Intel ComputeStick, but I wouldn't recommend them.

Apple can build a computer in any shape they like. It won't make it patent-worthy, and if it's what you've asked for or what their claims appear to describe, it won't be something otherwise unobtainable.

Re: I can't see the point

Yes, but they still need a computer that is trusted to access that data. If the company has purchased laptops, the user just has to move that one to have an identical environment without needing a second computer. Most companies I've dealt with don't trust users' personal computers for the required access.

As for phones, I'd like that to be true, but the software often restricts the utility as a desktop device. I'm not only talking about things that require specialist software on the client, but also more normal office tasks. I have never seen a company attempt using phones in the role in which laptops and desktops are routinely employed.

As I understand Apple's concept, it's just a laptop without being useful when the user doesn't have desktop peripherals, which seems unhelpful to me. The only possible benefit I can see is if they were able to make the hinges work so well that the keyboard and all the computer components could be pocketed, thus making it more portable than a general laptop. I don't think that's happening, and even then it wouldn't be that useful.

Re: Acorn electron, Sinclair QL, various pre-built Raspberry Pies...

If they argued that, it would fail just the same. They would have to have patented it then to claim ownership. If they did that, protection would have expired in 1997 and anyone could copy it. So that would be a fun argument to watch them play out.

Your app deleted all my files. And my wallpaper too!

Re: Partitioning

Me: "a user who already backs up their data"

Reply: "And I am Florence Nightingale. If they do, it's on to an USB stick at best. Which will get overwritten with the ISO to reinstall their system."

Granted, but this isn't really a solution to that problem. Failing to back up is a problem in lots of cases, and reinstalling the OS is the simplest of them--the data's still there and you can back it up just for that case even if your routine backup option is lacking. This argument is a lot like if I said "Never use SSDs, only mechanical disks, because most SSDs will immediately remove data when it's deleted but mechanical disks won't so you can use undelete tools much more reliably". It's technically correct, but there are advantages to the alternative, and if people are relying on that relatively fragile protection instead of properly managing their data, it's just a matter of time before it backfires.

The rest of your examples are good ones but fall into the category I previously mentioned where you are doing it for a specific goal, readily understood by the user, and requiring some technical skill to use.

Re: Partitioning

"On every laptop I've used I always had /home on a separate partition, and just NEVER have I run out of space on / or /usr due to stuff happening there."

Yes, that's probably the most normal situation. After all, you're unlikely to suddenly decide you need tens of gigabytes new software one day. However, if you ever did, the partition situation could make it hard to install that. If you kept a bunch of space around for the case where you did, then you're unnecessarily restricting the space available for /home.

In my case, on the systems where /home is sharing with /usr, I don't pretend my usage is normal. I have an old device with a 128 GB drive which is used for a bunch of random, at times experimental purposes. I decided to test out the Gitlab CE software by installing it on that (for those who haven't done this, it brings its own Nginx version, a bunch of Ruby libraries, is rather large in itself, and is designed to store data outside the home directories). When I was done experimenting with that, I removed it. Having one partition gave me the flexibility to do that without repartitioning either time. You don't have to do that, and if you don't or have a larger disk (I got the laptop for free from a user who wanted it junked), you probably won't encounter the situation very often.

That said, try explaining to a standard user why they should do that. Not with the separate disks situation, not with a server, just a standard user with a single disk that all the partitions are going to go on, a user who already backs up their data. What benefits can this provide that justifies the extra complexity, complexity that is absent on lots of other systems and optional here? The best reasons I've heard that apply here are as follows:

If /home is separate, you don't have to replace it when you reinstall. This assumes that you'll be reinstalling a lot, which they probably won't, and it also assumes that every installation will be smart enough to figure this out, not repartition, not create a new partition for /home, and correctly mount it later on (this last one is mostly an editing of fstab if it doesn't, but if you have to manually reconfigure your filesystems and don't get anything out of it, maybe not so useful). A correllary to this argument is that it's harder to trash the /home partition. The user can point out that the chances of breaking their home directory are already quite low, most likely ways will use the filesystem instead of the partition and won't care where the home directory is, and that they have backups to deal with both.

There are lots of good arguments for keeping /home on a different partition. In each case I can think of, it's a case where, if you ask "Why do you have it partitioned this way", the user will have a specific set of benefits that doing so provides them and that they know about. It's possible that there has always been a clear benefit that keeping the partitions separate provides, even when a user isn't doing it to implement a desired feature, but if there is, I do not understand it. I would welcome learning that lesson, but it should be better than "We do it this way because most Unix servers do it this way and, even though they have lots of reasons that don't apply to this, we must follow them".

Re: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

Ok, I think I missed that with the talk about hidden folders. I missed it because configuration often does go in a hidden folder and ... Windows doesn't put the user data in hidden folders. It puts it wherever you set when you're in the save box. That different programs have different default locations doesn't change the fact that you can set any of them to save in any directory you please and most of them will remember your defaults for next time. I don't like it that Outlook thinks that it should save attachments into the documents folder. I treat saved attachments as downloaded data until I organize it, so the downloads folder is far more sensible of a default. So when I first save an attachment on a new installation of Outlook, I point it at the downloads folder and it remembers that. If I want it to save the attachments to a downloads folder on a different disk, I could select that as well. No hidden folders or forced organization involved.

Re: Even Worse

The problem is that it really can't. Email clients can easily categorize by such things as sender, recipient(s), thread (subject line, in reply to, or checking for copies of previous messages), dates, and if they're willing to add even more storage, some keyword database for message contents. That's great, but it's also what I can quite easily do from the client's advanced search controls. I don't need the client to categorize my archives by sender because it's pretty easy for me to do that manually if it comes to that. The categorization that could be needed is more advanced processing of the message content to link related messages together. For example, if I am included on thread A about something, then start thread B about the same thing but with different people, and later am involved in thread C which reports a problem with the thing implemented by thread B, those things are related in my mind but will not be linked in the software. The intelligence to identify that link is usually absent, and if you try to build it in you end up with all the standard language processing problems and likely won't get useful results. If the messages were crucial and required frequent cross-referencing, I would perform that organization manually, thus having the certainty that I've done it correctly and in a way I can quickly navigate. When you consider that, at least in my example, all the effort spent on this autocategorization is for messages the user is keeping around because space is cheap and with the expectation that they will be unneeded, it is often not worth it.

"A non-trained person is unlikely to be reinstalling their laptop OS."

They don't have to. On literally every commonly-used consumer OS, the primary storage is treated as a single unit. If you are low on storage, you could delete some personal files or uninstall some software to free up storage, with the free storage being usable for either. You do not need to reinstall the OS to be in that situation. A user who does that on Windows, Mac OS, IOS, and Android is unlikely to accept Linux if they think they have to do it all separately.

"If someone trained does do a reinstall for the user they're not going to be happy finding it was on a single partition."

Not necessarily. In my opinion, a lot of systems for personal use should use a single partition. Programs are data, just like your documents. They're stored in different directories to keep them organized. That's good enough. There are many reasons to have separate partitions for servers, most of which don't apply at all to a personal machine. You can also have as many extra disks or partitions as you like with software on them if doing that has a benefit to you. Windows and Linux make it really easy to point to installed software that's on a different disk, even if it's not mounted at a typical path for binaries. Even if you know what you're doing, there's not a lot of benefit to having separate partitions for different parts of your root filesystem when they're all sharing a disk and all have to be present for your system to work.

A note, this doesn't necessarily extend to all parts of the system. Having /var on a separate partition to deal with something that doesn't handle it correctly makes sense. Having /home on a separate partition so it's easy to share between multiple booted OSes or persist after large changes does too. In both cases, it's a thing that is useful to a user who understands why they're doing it and can configure it themselves.

Take the placement of /home on a different partition. I've just explained two reasons you might want to do it. If you're going to make any big changes to your root filesystem, having /home partitioned insulates it from damage. You can install a new OS without having to move anything. However, you could always do what everyone else does: back up your home directory, reinstall the OS, and copy your files back. You should be backing up already, so it's not quite as bad as it seems if /home ends up sharing. Many of my systems do have /home on a different partition, but often because it's loading from a network FS or external disk. On the self-contained system that uses one internal disk with one OS on it, I have kept /home on the same filesystem so I can use the available space for whatever kind of data I want.

"You could just check programmically the folder was a sub of the desktop and not the desktop ."

It could have been in the documents folder, home directory, or somewhere else depending on how the user did it. You would have to just check it against a bunch of too general directories, and if you started down that path, the user could always find a new wrong one.

"or if it were me I'd have nominated a specific folder on the desktop for them to put stuff in ."

If you were doing that, just nominate the network folder the stuff is supposed to go in. The program is supposed to file things for the user because they were either slow or incorrect when doing so on their own.

Re: A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

"As to where Windows puts files. Madness. Buried in the C: drive in a concealed folder within "Documents and settings" as if user data was in some way equivalent to OS function and needed the same kind of access."

You mean just like where Linux, Mac OS, and BSD programs store their files? Because the patterns are quite similar for most software. Each program decides on its own where configuration files should be, and you can find programs that still insist on storing configuration with their binaries but not so much after Vista blocked it (the emulation is still there but rarely used anymore). But for the typical setup, here's what they do:

On Linux: /home/user/.[program name]

On Windows: c:\Users\user\AppData\roaming\[program name]

In both cases, a hidden directory inside the user's home directory. If the user's home directory is put elsewhere, the configuration goes with it. What's so wrong about that?

Re: Even Worse

"Used to see that in Outlook. Important emails in the deleted items folder!"

I've definitely seen that, and I kind of understand the philosophy depending on how they do it. In many organizations, emails are kept around for longer than they're really needed for a paper trail or similar. The important ones should be filed separately, but there's a case for general archives of emails which aren't being used, might not be needed, but shouldn't be deleted. I think some of the aggressive deletion policies are due to the historical email systems when disk space was a lot more expensive. As things currently stand, if I want to waste five gigabytes of disk space storing a hundred thousand messages I probably won't read again, it's kind of small. I have a Windows XP virtual machine on a backup drive that I haven't used for a decade that's larger than that.

The problem with work emails especially is that there's somewhere between a lot and a complete flood of incoming email, so people can't always spend the time rigorously categorizing each piece of mail they're pretty sure they don't need. That makes it harder to find stuff later, but the time efficiency calculation can make that the faster choice anyway.

Which, if you're running a server with a trained admin, makes sense. If you're running a laptop with a nontrained person, it's a mess. If you reserve space for each of those things separately, but you still only have one disk, you're just creating new limits for how much data in each category the user can have. Users who don't know that happened will get confused about why they can't install some software when they have a hundred gigabytes free on their storage or why, when they were low and decided to uninstall unneeded software, it didn't get better. Even for a user who set all this up and knows what's going on, it can be annoying if there's limited disk space because reallocating between those partitions isn't a simple, risk-free process.

Ukraine seeks volunteers to defend networks as Russian troops menace Kyiv

Re: Not optional

The world isn't yet in agreement that Russia should be cut off. They haven't even managed to get SWIFT cut for Russia, though they claim the financial industry sanctions are of a similar strength. From that, which they've used before, to actively trying to cut off international communication which hasn't yet been used as a sanction is a big step. In addition, you would need a lot of countries to work together to get that done. If only one country does it, it only blocks routing of packets from them to Russia, but doesn't do anything to people who are willing to route into a country that isn't on board. Since Russia has allies*, the decision would quickly have to be made whether to include them in the blocking, ignore them as only a few types of people would be able to use them, or convincing them to change their mind. It's harder than it looks.

*Russia has allies: While they don't have allies that are also fighting in Ukraine with them, they have a few countries that actively support their claims (Belarus being the most obvious example). They also have a lot more countries that are willing not to do anything against them, including both China and Pakistan quite actively. Both are large countries with active internet presences through which Russia can route some traffic.

Cyberwarfare looms as Russia shells, invades Ukraine

Re: Shutdown their Cloud accounts

It would work. None of the big three have big datacenters in Russia. They do operate CDN endpoints and some edge stuff there, but not the big regions because nobody outside Russia wants their data there and most companies inside Russia don't either. Whether that would do much to weaken Putin is another question, but it can be achieved technologically.

Re: Just disconnect them

I'm afraid that it really wasn't. The original comment implied that you could cut off all the attacks by blocking Russian traffic. What you could do is dramatically decrease the bandwidth available to the Russian public, but since the Russian government has priority access to whatever links still exist, some of which they own, they would still be able to run all the criminal operations they want. So you can't, in fact, prevent them from hacking into stuff even if you could cut off their internet, and once again, it isn't feasible to cut off their internet because there are several countries that wouldn't be on board.

Re: Just disconnect them

I commented on that in the comment to which you replied. I pointed out that, if you could block literally every packet, you could cause them a temporary problem but that they would find an alternative (E.G. put some people in a different country and relay instructions through a different connection such as phone, satellite, etc. I also pointed out that you can't drop every packet because there are numerous countries you don't have on board. They have cables that go through central Asian countries such as Kazakhstan. They can quite easily pretend to be Kazakh traffic unless you can get Kazakhstan to join you (they won't, they're allied with Russia) or are willing to ban them as well. If you do ban Kazakhstan, they have many other countries to use.

Re: Just disconnect them

"Just block all traffic coming from Russia. This will also block 99% of cyberattacks originating from them."

No, it really won't. The Russian government has this ability to pay for servers in other countries and to take over equipment on residential networks in other countries. They have and they will. They launch attacks from those devices, which are controlled by non-Russian servers. If you could block all the network traffic coming from Russia, they'd have some disruption as they put some operators elsewhere and sent instructions internationally, but if even one cable remains, they can proxy around your blocks to control their zombies. Since they have lots of connections, including through countries that aren't part of NATO and that have taken their side if only unofficially, you can't get a 100% block implemented.

Yes, Mark Zuckerberg is still pushing metaverse. Next step, language translation

Re: "Let's add some clouds,"

If my theory is correct, then you'll get some really weird blobs, some obviously pasted-in flat images, or a crash as soon as you give a command that wasn't expected in its exact form. AI systems that interpret textual data already have lots of problems understanding the main meaning of sentences. There's no way they have one that will correctly interpret "over there". It's the same story as when Google showed off its system for calling companies on your behalf using speech recognition to carry on a conversation. It sounded convincing (partially because they deliberately included unnecessary human sounds), but it turned out that they had run several tests on a person who knew about it and only included the successful one, thus making the product useless in practice and the demonstration a sham.

Re: "Let's add some clouds,"

That was my thought as well. Not only were the commands themselves completely scripted, but I'm willing to bet there was no AI scenemaker in there, even one that was trained only on those commands and thoroughly tested. I'm expecting some premade video slices were created and someone got the job of pushing the button to cycle in the next one as soon as he finished each command.

Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS

Re: I wonder

You misinterpret the reason for dropping it. If they had a problem with the name or the developer, they'd have dropped it a decade ago. It's because it hasn't been updated in a long time, isn't much used, and may slow the development of other features that they're considering dropping it.

Ukraine's IT sector looks to business continuity plans as Russia invades

They have made significant moves to imply they're taking more than that. If they didn't, the land they said they were going to take contains more than the land controlled by separatists. If they did just take the land controlled by separatists, they are still committing an act of war with bombings elsewhere. And even if they did none of that, they have no right to take any land whatsoever.

Whether you are correct or not, it doesn't justify anything. While I am not an expert on Ukrainian military maneuvers, I also doubt that Russia's claims can be at all believed given the constant stream of lies we've seen so far.

AI really can't copyright the art it generates – US officials

And, when he's done with this failed copyright claim, he can move on to trying to let a program own shares in a company. That is also not going to work--in order to own things, you usually have to be able to file tax returns about your ownership.

"However, presumably his whole point is that the AI should now be considered as a legal entity."

This appears to be his goal. Why he's willing to spend so much time and money banging against a wall to prove this academic and for the moment unimportant point is less clear. My theory is that he read a lot of 1950s and 1960s science fiction short stories about the thoughts and rights of robots, and he has forgotten about how those robots had full consciousnesses and that the stories were written for entertainment.

If we ever create AGI which does simulate (or depending on your philosophy have) consciousness, and it is capable of deciding to create something and going on to do so, we may have to answer such questions. I think it's pretty obvious that we don't have that now. Some people think it's impossible. I think it is possible but won't be done because it's very hard and has little benefit. Either way, leave it until then.

US imposes sanctions as Russia invades Ukraine

Re: Two questions...

"Would Black-Holing their internet not achieve something?"

Annoyance, but probably not more than that. If we dropped all the packets coming from Russian cables to countries in Europe or North America, they'd have lots of outages. There would still be active cables going through Asia, and they could use those for the bandwidth they need. Important companies and people would have internet through those. Cybercriminals operating for the Russian government would have proxy access through them as well, and nongovernment actors would probably be able to buy that access. The public would have any remaining bandwidth they had and might suffer as they failed to access services operated internationally. Meanwhile, the government-approved services that have servers in Russia would continue to work just fine, driving more people to those.

We generally don't want to hurt the Russian public any more than necessary. Partially, that's because they didn't choose Putin so they're not at fault. Partially, it's because, if they replace him, we'd like them not to hate us. Mostly, it's because Putin doesn't care when they suffer, so it won't help make him stop.

Re: re. more blankets

"Even Afghanistan could become Russia's problem again at the Taliban look for sources of income and power."

No, that won't happen. When it was the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, it worked because they shared a border (and even then the Soviets had to start it). The Taliban may want to make trouble to the north and even earn the wrath of some countries, but the countries in the way aren't Russia. While some of them are friendly with Russia, they're not going to get automatic Russian protection. And that's if the Taliban is stupid enough to launch an all-out war against those countries, which they probably won't try because, though those countries are small, they have militaries and people who have faced the Taliban's ethnic policies and will be more open to their use.

Airtag clones can sidestep Apple anti-stalker tech

Re: "we condemn in the strongest possible terms any malicious use of our products."

Fine, I'll make a slight correction:

"These guys have found a way to use the Find My network with a device that isn't Apple-licensed, which is already not supposed to work."

As this goes, I'd have preferred an open network anyone could use over one that Apple controlled, but the fact remains that Apple didn't go that way and designed a restricted network for people who license access to it. They would consider an unlicensed device using the network as a bug. I'm certain that, for commercial reasons alone, they're going to try getting this bug fixed. I'm more interested in what if anything they will do about the other bug which bypasses their alerting system.

Re: "we condemn in the strongest possible terms any malicious use of our products."

I'm not on Apple's side here, but the person to whom you replied has a point. These guys have found a way to use the Find My network with a device that isn't Apple's, which is already not supposed to work, and to evade the announcement features in Apple's equipment. Those are both technical bugs, and Apple should be fixing them. I'm afraid that Apple will only care about the first one so they can make only their products work on their network, but even that would patch this. This is a case where Apple should have been quietly told about the problem rather than code for attacking the vulnerability being publicized.

I understand that, at some point, security researchers will release proof of concept attack code. This should, however, follow a procedure of getting that vulnerability fixed or at least trying to. Doing otherwise puts users at risk for little benefit.

Alarm raised after Microsoft wins data-encoding patent

Re: Ban software patents.

You were going so well. I was nodding in agreement. Then "Then the patent office should decide on a fair royalty amount; which might be nil if the invention is sufficiently important to need widespread adoption."

About that, no. The patent office isn't there to take inventions and push their adoption. They shouldn't be responsible for deciding how a patent that you've already acknowledged is valid by the point they're doing this can be used. If you do that, nobody will apply for patents anymore because you've given some examiner, the same people who already can't tell the stupid applications from real inventions, the power to declare your invention public property and negate any purpose. Why would anyone spend the time and money making a patent application if that was going to happen to them?

Patent protection exists for a reason, and if you have real patents, it works. The reason is that people will get the protections of the patent, allowing them to be rewarded for inventing things, but then it becomes public knowledge and people can copy it when the time runs out. If you don't have the reward part, then inventors won't bother applying or telling people how it works. Some inventions will be reverse-engineered sooner, but some others will never be disclosed.

Should we expect to keep communication private in the digital age?

Re: A fundamental issue with 'human rights'

"The trouble with "not voting" is that it doesn't send any coherent signal at all."

It isn't meant to. Some people may vote for each of the reasons you've mentioned. That is usually their choice, and if they do, I support them. Here's what I think of each option:

"didn't vote because hated all parties or candidates": This is a choice that makes sense to me. I would prefer people not be compelled to vote for someone they dislike and to refrain from voting to indicate this.

"didn't understand issues", "didn't care": In this case, I'm fully in favor. If you don't know or care about the election, then don't vote. If people who don't care have to vote anyway, you're likely to get random votes or votes on a weird basis. This doesn't mean that people need to do anything to earn the right to vote, but if they on their own decide they don't care, then I'd prefer they not vote.

"didn't get the chance because of work or life": This is not an issue with compulsory or voluntary voting. It's an issue with the way the election is run. The solution isn't to force people to vote, but to make it easy to vote. Check how many people wanted to vote and couldn't, and figure out what can be done to make that possible.

"didn't know how": Similar to the last one. Provide more information in more places.

Google's Chrome OS Flex could revive old PCs, Macs

Re: First, break XP and 2K and 98...

Of course you can. The root certificates aren't secret. You can install them. You just need something to render the pages. The latest browsers may use Windows features that are newer than that, but you can use older ones or minimalistic ones that have a TLS library in them. It's not a great idea to do it, but it is possible.