Posts by doublelayer

Chromebook sales in recession: Market saturation blamed as shipments collapse more than 63% in Q4

To get around this, two methods have been used. First, Google has decided to let security updates expire on specific dates, not due to any technical limitation. All Chromebooks have a support death date on manufacture. Second, they have increased the resource requirements of the software that runs on the devices. When they were new, the theory was that you could put a budget processor and 16 GB flash chip into the devices because, as long as you had sufficient RAM, everything would run fine on the remote server. That's no longer the case. Modern Chromebooks frequently have similar processors to modern Windows laptops and storage too has increased. The low-spec models have been rendered obsolete long ago. This also has the effect that the prices of Chromebooks are also comparable with low-to-mid range Windows laptops again.

Machine needs more Learning: Google Drive dings single-character files for copyright infringement

Patents aren't perpetual. You apply for a patent, and you can use it to confirm your ownership until that provision expires, which is at least twenty years though may be longer in some countries. Then it expires. You still have the patent for the record that you invented something, but you can't use it to prevent others from developing your thing anymore. The protection rights entailed in a patent are time limited.

Re: Separate issue

"Indeed but a university may not want the security risks involved in allowing random students access to their network from random devices in random locations (aka setting themselves up as a private cloud provider)"

You may need to look at what a cloud provider does. Hosting your own website with files uploaded by your employees is not being a cloud provider. The students don't need to have upload access to the system (although many universities give them that and it's just fine). If the access needs to be restricted, put a login page in front of the files. If you only want logins from inside the university network, put a firewall rule on it. If you want authenticated access from outside the network, give the students a VPN option. These things are really basic and the university already has the infrastructure to do it.

Separate issue

Google's system is clearly unfit and a problem, but there's another one. Why can't a university provide sufficient storage for class materials, thus making professors resort to Google Drive? Google Drive is a terrible distribution system as it requires the user to click through to download files, either using an unnecessary web rendering page or presenting a page saying that the web rendering page won't work for this file. It's functional for people who don't want to pay for the bandwidth usage, but a university already has servers that can store some small text files.

Because, given the quality of this, every encrypted zip file (which has a distinct signature) will become copyright-infringing overnight. If they're using machine learning rather than a big list of hashes, this wouldn't even be surprising as it's exactly the correlation such models tend to identify.

Idea of downloading memories far-fetched say experts after Musk claim resurfaces in latest Neuralink development

Re: Nice one Adam Rutherford

"Star Trek also had a "magic" body scanner that was pure fiction at the time. However it was the inspiration for the invention of the MRI body scanners we have today."

Rubbish. The physics used for MRI was somewhat understood before that, and like other physical discoveries, the idea to use it for medical purposes was kind of obvious. Just as when x-rays were fashioned into a scanner, the idea to see if this thing can tell us about the insides of the thing we don't want to take apart wasn't hard to come up with. Nobody needed to have a popular science fiction show to show them that medical scanning was useful, especially as existing medical scanners using different imaging technology already existed in real life.

Mostly irrelevant pedantry, but:

"Saying that you're walking to the sun after lunch is just another way of saying you're walking West."

No it isn't. If you say you're walking to the sun, it means that you intend your destination to be the sun. If you're walking west, you can call it walking toward the sun, or marginally closer to the sun. If I choose to walk to France, then I must either set foot in France or admit that I've changed my goal.

Re: Let's start with the obvious

"I'm sorry but in the 1970s with my "huge" minicomputer systems with 10^3B RAM I would have laughed is anyone had suggested the ability to hold a phone in my hand with 10^11 bytes of ram on it ..."

Both of those are misstating the reality a bit, though. 10^11 bytes of RAM in a phone, no. That's 93 GiB. They don't have that much RAM until you get to desktops. I admit, it can be purchased by a single person, but you're overstating how cheap it is. Similarly, 1k of RAM in the 1970s wasn't a ton. The Apple I had 4k already, and that could be afforded by individuals. I'll grant there has been a significant increase, and there's likely to be more of them (though not coming as quickly).

However, even if we assume the ready availability of petabyte hard drives, two issues make that not enough, in addition to the lack of connection technology you already acknowledged. The first is that you need to read and write that data really fast We may have massive storage, but we can't read in a petabyte in a second. If we can't compress the data well, we're going to have to read a lot more faster than we can. A thousandfold increase in storage efficiency is already hard. A millionfold increase in transfer speeds is going to take quite a bit longer. Second, you don't need one of those drives, you need a large set of them. Even if most of the synaptic data can be compressed or discarded, they change a lot. There's also no frame rate for the brain. And you'll need sufficient computing to compress the data in real time or enough extra storage to cache uncompressed data until the memory recording is done.

Even without the biological interface, it's a herculean task. Musk can fantasize all he wants, but he should be careful to make sure people know he can't actually do this any time soon. I also must admit that people who fantasize too much lose my respect unless they're doing it to write fiction.

Hands up who ISN'T piling in to help Epic Games appeal Apple App Store ruling

Re: "allow an Office competitor to exist that users didn’t need to install"

"Everyone seems to forget that Epic willingly signed a contract agreeing to Apple's terms and conditions. And now they want to get out of it for free."

Nobody forgot that. They didn't get to choose the contract, and you have to be in the contract to use the system. In addition, you have to be in a contract to challenge it in court. If they think the contract is unfair, the only way for them to make the claim is to be in the contract.

"Using the same argument should I now stop paying my Barclaycard because I have decided they are wrong for charging me so much interest? And they should maybe lend me money for, preferably, free or at least a much lower rate?"

Not yet, but maybe. First, you should go to other cards and see if they offer you better services. You can switch to them. In Apple's case, they don't allow any other options. If you were to find that all competing cards have agreed to overcharge you, you could in fact sue them for collusion or monopolistic behavior depending on how many there are. If you can prove that they are intentionally harming you through illegal market domination, the court would decide in your favor and force them to improve. The only problem in your case is that it's harder to prove for payment cards than for one software supply system.

Re: Apple is getting shafted by very guilty parties

I agree; it set off my possible lie sensor as well. I didn't bother to check the reality though, because in addition to being less plausible, it's also pointless for them to bring it up.

Re: Next up, Google

Me: "sideloading option is available on all Android devices"

Reply: "That is an unrealistic assertion."

I'm not sure I see your points. Taking them one at a time:

"Firstly, the technical difficulty."

The steps are \1) tap on the .apk file, 2) the box tells you it's not allowed, 3) tap to enable it, 4), tap on the .apk again. A lot of users are not confident when they see the warning box in step 2, but it's not technically difficult to do.

"Secondly the security risk."

Granted, but irrelevant. That's also the argument Apple uses, and you can't win there. If you agree with me that there should be a mechanism of installing software which is not controlled by Google, then this is going to bring some chance of malware. Users decide whether they will use that mechanism given the risks.

"Being able to Install a different OS might be a better claim."

No, it really isn't. That's a case where Google can more easily be charged with anticompetetive actions, because their licensing for Play Services restricts manufacturers from offering other forks of Android. Most devices do not support any variant, creating one requires significant effort, and Google keeps taking more functionality out of AOSP and into their frameworks to weaken it. Sideloading can be activated on any device using the standard UI. Different OSes cannot be installed without at best playing with the bootloader and using a command line tool with many opportunities to break something, and often not even then.

Re: Next up, Google

I generally agree, and there are many obvious targets around the Android ecosystem. However, in the specific case of app distribution, I think Google's case is stronger as the sideloading option is available on all Android devices. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but it gives Google an argument Apple cannot use, which might cause it to win even if Apple's dominance is recognized.

Re: Apple is getting shafted by very guilty parties

Well, this was nice and rambly. I'll take a few of the points that are clearer.

"Yes but they did build this house a brick at a time and now they reap a decade of very solid marketing and engineering."

They have the right to reap a profit from that. They don't have a right to use that as a club to beat profit out of other companies. They reap that profit all the time when they sell phones with massive profit margins, and in that case, there's no legal argument against it. Their effort doesn't entitle them to control others' businesses any more than the author of some code they used could come to them and insist that they give them a cut of their hardware sales.

"Just look at Amazon. And try not to think of what became of all the Malls across the country, or the many bookstores that used to exist that are long gone."

So? Just because their competition caused a different business to fail doesn't make them wrong, but when they use unfair market power to cause that harm, they can be penalized for it. There are indeed antitrust actions being pursued or suggested in Amazon's case, and they make sense too.

"Then we have Epic, the very founding "poor puppy". Epic hasn't operated a profitable enterprise in its entire history of existence! [...] Let Epic make and sell a profitable business, prove they are operating on a fair basis with ALL their competitors and then, let them come back and make claims."

I'm not going to bother checking whether this is true. I'll assume you're correct. In which case, it is meaningless or actively harmful to your point. You do not need to be profitable to sue someone and win if they're harming you. Also, Epic's complaint is that Apple is charging them too much, so if they're correct, Apple's charges might be the reason they're unprofitable. Somehow, you seem to think that profitability should be required to contest a contract's legality. Fortunately for everybody, it doesn't work that way.

When forgetting to set a password for root is the least of your woes

Re: Back in day with Unix NFS auto-mount

When you have root access, it means you have ... root access. And you can do all the things that root can do, including reading users' files. If you are supposed to have access to run some commands as root but not to read others' files, then the admins should not give you full root access.

Re: Remember - CLOUD COMPUTING is NOTHING MORE THAN ..

Was that relevant? They weren't using cloud systems in the article. The comments haven't been talking about them. If they were, nothing would have been different. Why did you feel the need to say this?

Apple Mac sales break records amid ex-86-odus to Arm-compatible M1 silicon

Re: Count me in...eventually

I think their attitude is supported by history. When Apple switched from PowerPC to Intel processors, they had a similar situation. The first range to use Intel chips had support lifetimes shorter than the models that followed. Some of those were due to using 32-bit processors which didn't stay in the range for long, but some ones just stopped supporting OS X releases at 10.6 without that excuse. The ranges that followed got 10.7 at least, and those that had enough memory by default usually got to run many more versions after the original release. This, too, is just switching a component in an otherwise similar product, except that the component concerned is a really important one and requires a lot of effort to switch correctly. They ran the Intel-to-ARM transition very well, and they could easily subvert the expectations, but those things aren't necessarily connected and they have sometimes chosen not to in similar situations.

Re: Count me in...eventually

Would it hurt you too badly to read what they said?

"Blimey, so your iPad is 12 years old and not supported with new updates anymore..."

They weren't complaining that their 2010 product wasn't updated in 2022. They were complaining that their 2010 product was out of updates by 2012. That's very different.

"And you are calling it a "first generation" product. Well, there was the A4, then the A5, then the A6, then the A7 (that's the first 64 bit processor), then the A8, then the A9, then the A10, then the A11, then the A12, then the A13, and then the M1 - renamed because they stick it into Macs."

And the one they were talking about is the A4 model, so it really was the first generation of iPad there was. Since Macs with M1 are a big change, they're predicting similar things for the M1 Macs as the A4 iPads.

Re: I don't understand the draw of windows....

I don't understand what problem you encounter.

On Windows, Python isn't installed by default. So if you want it, you install it. You can go to python.org and download the installer. Or you can type "python3" at the command line and they will open the Windows store page for it. I suggest the former, but either works. Then scripts run. Pip runs (it's installed at the same time unless you change the settings). Virtual envs run. So, is your complaint just that Windows doesn't come with Python installed by default?

BOFH: On Wednesdays, we wear gloves

Re: I'm not sure about the key stuck to the phone at the end?

My guess is that key is another copy to the shed, and that there's a third one hidden in the other guy's house. That way, either of them could be investigated for the purchase. The papers describe the purchase of the fertilizer and what the reports about the purchase will look like. Most likely, the rest of it takes one of two forms:

1. The documents simply indicate that the higher-level guy is going to be investigated, causing him to rush home to search for and hide evidence, thus making more for the investigators who have already started.

2. The BOFH doesn't really want to do the full investigation, and the papers indicate what the guy needs to do to get it shut down and what will happen if he doesn't.

Linux distros haunted by Polkit-geist for 12+ years: Bug grants root access to any user

Re: Eyes

"I doubt any business allows any old user to connect to a Linux terminal, and even if they did that person still has to have the knowledge to manipulate it to get root."

Businesses do allow users to connect to terminals. True, few of them are still using the one big computer that does everything and everyone's accounts are launched on it, paradigm, but root on one server can be used to collect data useful in breaking into others.

The other side of this is that it might not be someone using this to attack a system that they've already been granted non-root access to. If an external attacker manages to get into a system through some other exploit, but they only have access to a particular user's area, they could use a bug like this to get somewhere else.

Farm machinery giant John Deere plows into two right-to-repair lawsuits

This argument is rubbish for a few reasons:

"if people who are signing up to these contracts, actually read them first..,. I mean, they are blindly signing up to paying a huge amount of money? Sod "right to repair" they have signed that right away."

Incorrect. For one thing, there isn't such a contract. The tractors don't come with the right to repair in the first place. There is no contract that, if it had remained unsigned, would allow the owner to retain the right.

"I use only Apple products in my business. Yes I know the downside. But I got a solicitor to read and explain the contracts to me. maybe the complainers should have done the same? How can you run a business, and sign a contract without taking advice?"

You're very intent on contracts here, even when the contract is not the problem. The problem is the technology and how it was designed to provide additional revenue streams. The situation which the farmers dislike is not due to legal or contractual restrictions.

Incidentally, contracts can't override laws. If the courts find that the restrictions are abuses of monopoly power, then, even if it was a contract that every user signed (it wasn't), the contract would be in violation of laws and would be nullified when the court renders its verdict. So even if your argument was factual, it would still be wrong.

Pakistan considers ten-year tax holiday for freelance techies

Re: I hope I'm wrong, but...

I think you are. I read this as suggesting the taxes are not collected between 2023-2032, then it goes back to normal in 2033. The hope is that things will be so cheap in the intervening decade that people will get a bunch of business and be in a position to pass the tax payments on to the clients who won't have something to switch to. That would increase the amount of money available to be taxed in the 2030s at the cost of not having the taxes on the money in the 2020s. It's not a window that can be started at any time.

Assange can go to UK Supreme Court (again) to fend off US extradition bid

Re: Immigration Status

Sorry, the "say no" meant that Australia could refuse the U.S. extradition request, not that they could refuse to take him altogether. They could try to refuse him entry, but it would be legally difficult and there would be little point in doing so.

Re: Immigration Status

They can, which would be the same as denying extradition. They have an obligation to consider the request for extradition, but they have no obligation to accept it. If they don't accept it, they are unlikely to permit him to remain in the UK, so he would likely be sent to Australia. The U.S. is then able to restart this whole affair with them. They probably have the paperwork ready to go to avoid him running to another place to hide, but once again, Australia would have the choice to say no.

IPv6 is built to be better, but that's not the route to success

Re: Can't disagree with anything there

Effectively, they will. You keep your computers around a while, right? So do I. The way I do this, and likely the way you do, is by using software that runs well with limited resources but is still new, such as modern versions of Linux. Which bring modern networking systems with them. Modern BSD, Windows, and Mac OS does that too. If you're keeping your software updated, then you've already replaced the outdated stuff that can't handle changes in networking. If you're running your old computer with old software, Windows 7 has IPV6 support as well. Computers have supported IPV6 for quite a while.

The stuff that doesn't is usually either old phones or cheap IoT junk. That stuff does tend to fail or become unsupported more quickly. People replace phones when those phones don't run apps anymore, and if that doesn't happen, they will when the screen breaks and they can't replace it or the battery has aged so much that the system shuts down unexpectedly. The nontechnical public also tend to discard computers more frequently than we do* as they are unable or unwilling to take some of the steps we take to maintain their usefulness. There are certainly devices that live on far longer than their manufacturer predicted, but people get updated equipment and software without us having to do it for them.

* The family member that still has the Windows 98 box excluded, as they probably don't know how to connect to the internet anymore but are still paying some ISP for it.

Re: Uhm... no

If you are a programmer, you should also be pretty good at converting hex to binary. If you're a network engineer, you should learn it; all the programmers did and it didn't take very long. You probably know it already anyway. It's not difficult to recognize a prefix if you use it a lot.

Myanmar's military junta seeks ban on VPNs and digital currency

"just curious what was the main motive behind this?"

VPNs: "If they can't talk on Facebook, and we don't let them circle around our block by using a VPN, then they can't figure out that everyone else hates dictatorships, right"?

Cryptocurrency: "If they're all using local currency, we can cut it off with greater ease when we don't like what they did with it."

Of course, with cryptocurrency, they're eventually going to have to add real currencies other than theirs to the list or give up on that one. Citizens are more likely to use dollars, rupees, or whatever international currency is easy to import than to agree on a blockchain to use.

Re: I wonder ....

And you post those pictures where, exactly? And the person who decodes them and forwards on your message is where?

For individual and short communications, this works great. Were there a small set of people plotting against the junta, be that planning to act to remove them from power or merely planning to spread some information that they want the public to overlook, steganography could be used to exchange those messages. The participants would have to find a service which is still allowed and post images that aren't suspicious. However, they can also simply use a shared encrypted channel that isn't yet blocked and get the same result. For example, they could log into a shared Google document using HTTPS, and if they did so, the traffic would look like normal Google traffic.

The primary use, however, appears to be Facebook, or more broadly, large group communication. Steganography isn't useful in this case. A message hidden in a picture can't be broadcast to thousands or millions unless someone takes it out of the picture. Even if we made a steganographic VPN that would decode hidden messages and reencode them for each user, the required bandwidth for sending innocuous data would end up being infeasible. It would also end up having a distinct signature making it perhaps even easier to block than normal VPNs.

Privacy is for paedophiles, UK government seems to be saying while spending £500k demonising online chat encryption

Re: Sure. Why not cull E2EE...?

The company in the book has a very Googly feel about it. Basically Google+Facebook. It mentions that that company bought all Facebook's data at some point for data mining. What happened to Google isn't mentioned. The culture of the company, though, would probably be very recognizable to anyone who has read the articles about the Google employee experience.

Re: Sure. Why not cull E2EE...?

There's a book which describes that situation: The Circle. In it, a company manages to get the required infrastructure to do that and enough public support to make everybody, including politicians, publish everything they do. This to the extent that people have to wear cameras at all times. It has some short-term benefits, but it predictably doesn't do much other than hand power over to the company which has many inventive ways to use that power. It can be a bit depressing to read it as what it suggests is possible, but still worth a read.

Wolfing down ebooks during lockdown? You might want to check out Calibre, the Swiss Army ebook tool

Re: Upwards thumb

I don't like the interface, but fortunately for me, it also includes a bunch of internal command line tools which can be put into any interface you want. So I am still using it even though I haven't had to get lost looking for the right control or dismissing an irrelevant function in a while.

APNIC: Big Tech's use of carrier-grade NAT is holding back internet innovation

"By far the biggest headache with IPv6 is that they stop being easy for human's to read and comprehend"

I don't think that's the problem. It's just unfamiliarity. Take this parallel. I do not live in the UK, and I do not understand UK postal codes. There's a space in the middle, somewhere, but sometimes it's left out and I don't know if that's a valid shortening technique or if someone wrote it wrong, and while the first half makes some geographic sense, the right half seems completely random. It contains letters and numbers, but not as a base 36 value, because some positions only contain one or the other. How do you verify that a string is a valid code? I don't know.

This is not because the UK's postal codes are in fact confusing, it's just because I've spent all of ten minutes looking at them a year ago. I skimmed the top part of the Wikipedia article, got lost, grabbed something from elsewhere that solved the problem, and moved on. If I ever needed to understand them, perhaps if I moved there, I would spend some extra time and figure it out. I think all of us see IPV4 addresses more often than IPV6 ones. Even on local network equipment which supports IPV6 natively, the important addresses are often IPV4. For example, my home network supports IPV6 just fine, but the configuration address is still an IPV4 one (yes, it probably has an IPV6 address too, but I don't know it). If we just put in the time required to learn how the address structure is mapped out, it is something we can learn just as easily.

Re: Welcome to MUMSnet

Be careful. The people who don't understand extending the length of addresses aren't always the people who "are telling their bosses they need to stay on IPv4 with NAT because it's more secure and privacy friendly." I have made that point here, but I made it clear when I did that I was referring to the default configuration for home users, where I fear that firewalls will be insufficient and lead to vulnerabilities. I.E. it's not IPV6's fault, and NAT on IPV6 would be equally fine, but either the defaults are going to have to improve the firewall rules or use NAT in order to prevent devices opening themselves up to the internet when they shouldn't. Those complaints are not the same.

Re: FFS!

"If you procure a cgnat connection you will know it’s limitations and will need to pay more for a non cgnat connection or for a solution that works across a cgnat."

Oh please. Most users will not know the limitations of CGNAT, but let's just assume that anyone who doesn't know won't operate the things that need it. The problem is that if an ISP is doing that, you probably have little or no option to get around it. If they're very short on IPV4 addresses, which is why they wanted to do CGNAT in the first place, they're going to be expensive for you to purchase a static one from them. That is if they offer it at all. A lot of ISPs have different packages for business and residential users to the extent that business service cannot be purchased in some areas.

Furthermore, this proves why IPV4 is unfit for some purposes. When we get to the point where I have to pay extra because we have a shortage of numbers, but not for any technical reason such as needing more reliability or bandwidth, there's something wrong with the system. This is especially true when I could have all the numbers I could feasibly use if they just enabled a protocol that already works on their equipment.

Re: I've said it before and I'll say it again

I suppose it depends how your cartons are set up. I could see a possibility if yours has a lid that is flat all the way over, and thus you could balance an egg between some others and have the lid go over that. I think the analogy requires that you not break an egg or the carton and it still has to close though, and although I can't prove it, I think the cartons I know can't do that.

Re: Thanks, but no thanks

"Under v6, my phone has a long lived identification that persists across all WiFi, mobile connections etc."

No, it doesn't. It will have separate addresses for each network. The system doesn't have your devices keep their IP wherever they go because that would make routing a lot more complicated. You're right if you stay on one network, but if you move between them, the address will change when you do.

The trackability of addresses is one reason I prefer to use NAT for nonpublic devices, even under IPV6. However, don't interpret it to be more powerful than it is. For example, you may think that using a dynamically-assigned IPV4 address makes it hard to track you, and it would if it changed a lot, but it probably doesn't. If you leave your router turned on all the time, then your ISP probably just extends your DHCP lease. The IPV4 address is assigned dynamically, but you've probably been assigned the same one for the last few months continuously. CGNAT does provide more; you probably also kept the same address but there's a lot of people sharing it with you. However, tracking companies know about both of these things and find better ways to identify you. It's certainly a problem, but it's not the biggest problem.

Re: I've said it before and I'll say it again

You're right that it's simple, but this still worries me because it's very unlikely to be the default. The benefits of nontechnical people on a NAT system include the assumption that, purely for the ISP's self-interest, the default config is likely going to prevent publicly-accessible ports for the user. That helps when they bring in untested devices or software. It's not hard for me to have a firewall which prevents incoming traffic by default, but many cheap, ISP-supplied routers I see leave that to the device's own firewall which, if it's a security nightmare already, probably won't do it.

I've dealt with this by having devices on my IPV6 home network connect to a NATed subnet unless configured to have statics or to be trusted, but I can't set that up for my friends or family, let alone trust that the rest of the public is going to get it. This doesn't mean that IPV6 is to blame, but I would like to see a general improvement in default router configs and I don't think it's going to happen.

Re: It's the mobile networks that seem to be stuck in CGNAT

I'm far from a zealot, but it does have a few benefits for some users, me included. One of the aspects that is nice is that I don't have to do weird things to have some dedicated addresses. With an ISP that gives me an IPV4 address through DHCP, I have to forward ports to individual devices, remember what the ports are should I have two or more of them operating there, have a method if they switch my address, etc. If they used CGNAT, I might not be able to do it at all. With IPV6, I just configure the static IPs and firewalls on my end and put the devices online, and since there's so much address space for now, they're not going to change my block. Getting dedicated IPV4 addresses from an ISP is usually not easy. I could get a business package, which will definitely cost more, may require extra equipment from the ISP, and might not be available in a clearly residential area.

IPV6 is extra work, no doubt. It has some problems that impair its usefulness and require a configuration change to remediate (multiple IPs for end-user devices on the same network, I don't think so). If IPV4 was good enough, these could be enough to simply ignore IPV6. Unfortunately, IPV4 is not good enough. It's a little pathetic that I have a weird network setup just because we have run out of numbers, and it's a terrible reason for everywhere on the planet to keep getting more snarled in the organization of a limited resource. At least with other resources, the scarcity is due to physical limits. With addresses, it's a shortage we can fix ourselves.

You might want to consider the cost of not upgrading legacy tech, UK's Department for Work and Pensions told

Re: Manual

I've never done that, but I have this feeling that it doesn't work that way. It seems to me that you're just as likely to get fired, but if you are, things go really badly for the company that fired you in that case. For you not to be fired would rely on the people making the decision knowing that what you do is hard for others to take on and hard to improve quickly, but that information rarely seems well-understood by those who don't do the processes themselves.

Open source, closed wallets, big profits – nobody wins the OSS rock, paper, scissors game

That's overly literal. It's a phrase example from a well-known speech, clarifying that the word "free" means freedoms to use and modify. I put quotation marks around the phrase to clarify that I was referring to that meaning.

If payment to the original author is required for certain kinds of uses, then the freedoms to use and modify are not absolute. Those restrictions are already often seen in proprietary licenses of all kinds, from the simplest noncommercial license to the most defended product of Oracle's lawyers and the most arcane formation of weird legal terms. They are perfectly possible and acceptable, but they mean something clearly different and users will treat them very differently. That is the point I was making.

Re: Sounds very much like the music industry

That's not a good idea in my opinion. In order to do that, you run into lots of definitional issues. For example, which of the following people gets funding, and how much in each case:

1. A developer who writes a project important to many people in their free time, but has a job at a tech company writing other code as well.

2. A developer who maintains code, fixing bugs and the like, but didn't create the project and doesn't add new features.

3. Someone who writes documentation only.

4. A translator who localizes open source software.

5. A person who spends a lot of time on a project they came up with, with few other users.

6. A person who commits occasionally, but not very much.

7. A person who frequently switches what projects they're working on.

I don't know how France's music system works, but that already sounds like a bad idea (I write music as a hobby, but I don't think you should pay me to do that). Open source contributions are perhaps even harder to assign a monetary value to.

You can do that if you want, but there's a reason that doesn't fall under either the FSF's or OSI's definitions. I agree with them. If you do that, I won't contribute to the code or donate, because it gives the author or owner too much power to restrict the rights of the user. The whole "free speech not free beer" bit has gotten old, but it's still accurate in this case; letting the author decide that someone can't use it because of who they are or how they intend to use it is a very different philosophy and one I will treat differently.

Depending on how you want to make a living, you have to decide the way you want to do this and structure your work accordingly. If you use a license that says the user can use, modify, distribute, and sell your code without receiving permission from you, then they're not required to pay you. If you use a license that says that they must pay you to do those things, then you probably won't get assistance from others. If you started with others' code, you may be required to adhere to their license. If voluntary donations aren't sufficiently secure for your comfort, you may want to do something that gets you a more stable income stream, but the consequences of your choice are your responsibility.

I have a library I wrote to solve a problem for me. I considered releasing it as open source, but I didn't. One reason is that there's already a better version out there (mine is only better if you have to run on an embedded device with very little memory). But another reason is that I thought maybe I could turn this into a commercial project. In order to leave that option open, I didn't give my work away. If I did, I shouldn't expect companies to come to me and pay me for the thing I just gave them for free.

Big shock: Guy who fled political violence and became rich in tech now struggles to care about political violence

Re: Maybe Not Mistaken

It might not be much, but caring is still important. If I found a way to benefit them, I would do it, making some sacrifices to do so. At the moment, there is some action sanctioning individual companies who use forced labor in the camps. This may be cold comfort to someone suffering now, but at least I, and likely you, would do something. The person covered here could do various things, and certainly has more power than I do because he has billions of dollars to spend on problems, but wouldn't choose to do anything because he doesn't care.

Re: The land of the "free"

I don't applaud people just for telling the truth. I applaud people for sticking up for ideals in the face of adversity, and more so if I share those ideals. Someone who denounces a human rights abuse even though their employer won't like it has taken a major risk. Someone who defends a political view I don't agree with may still face a risk. This guy's view, which he is defending as if someone is going to do something to him for it, is "I don't care". That's not an ideal, and he isn't going to face any consequences for it as he already has billions of dollars to insulate him from any negative response (which probably won't even exist).

Re: Too true

"The only thing the Chinese are intolerant of is trying to bite off pieces of their country."

Wrong. The crimes for which people are imprisoned are a lot more than advocating independence. And that's assuming we believe them every time they claim that a more serious crime is related to their imprisonment of another group. Advocating any level of democracy is heavily punished there, and there are restrictions on cultural activities as well. China has several minorities, and throughout their modern history, they have tried to wipe many of them away. From attempts to reduce the use of minority languages in schools to ethnicity-based concentration camps, this is not just for the integrity of their borders.

As with the case of Spain, I also don't think countries should repress serious interest in regional independence. However, I will point out that nobody is being locked up in Spain for speaking Catalan or requesting independence. Only the government leaders who declared independence were charged, and I do not think that was justified. China's actions are in all respects more severe.

Apple grabs smartphone crown as iPhone 13 wakes up the fanbois, leaves Chinese rivals eating dust

Re: Made in China

It's not about manufacturing location, as Samsung's phones are made in a bunch of places and everybody's phones contain parts from at least a few countries. It's about the location of the creating company. The companies based in China had slight decreases in market share.

Plumspace's Smart SFP TAP can monitor, capture or relay gigabit-speed comms – for legitimate business reasons

Re: ......but it's not clear whether the monitored traffic....

Depending on the use case, there's another option:

3. It's not sending the data, but it is manipulating it to modify the traffic sent through it.

Even if it is one of the others, it could be either depending on what the attacker (or normal business user) wants. If they can get away with using the network it's already on, they can upload captured data that way. If they're afraid that will be spotted, they could add a different channel for getting the data out.

North Korea pulled in $400m in cryptocurrency heists last year – report

Re: Let me get this right..

And from central banks. They like stealing the monetary reserves of countries and convert it into something more easily kept away from others. A lot of it is in cash, but some is converted into cryptocurrency. They've also launched smaller robberies from personal accounts as well, though they're not as big, so less often done and much less often reported. But why let reality interfere with your attempt to insult all victims of a crime and cryptocurrency in one easy sentence?

Re: cryptocurrency

"And I thought the North Koreans were starving and so had other things on their minds. How do the find the time to train these people?"

Take a look at why they're starving. It's because all the money goes into government and military investments instead of public services. The things that get investment are the leaders' personal comfort, a lot of troops to stand around the southern border in case it's time to invade, a lot of troops to stand around elsewhere in case someone needs quick imprisonment, nuclear weapons, and stuff that makes more money for those things listed above. Ways to make more money include manufacture of illegal things (counterfeit money is one of their specialties), weapons systems for sale and internal use, and cybercrime. In other words, they are starving because the resources that could help are being spent on training these people. Entirely consistent.