Posts by doublelayer

Email blocklisting: A Christmas gift from Microsoft that Linode can't seem to return

Re: I am not surprised

"So I'm supposed to leave my systems open to SMTP auth and spamming attempts from Linode hosts to allow for a maybe one day in the future I might get a legitimate email from there?"

That's what I would recommend. Use something more targeted to deal with the spammers themselves. Fail2ban is a good starting point, and you can build on that or custom-build your system if it's not good enough. That locks individuals out without having to ban everything. Your system should be secure enough that you don't need to eliminate bot probes to keep them out, and assuming it already is, then you don't need to go nuclear on background noise.

I have a server that can send emails or act as a VPN endpoint. It has a dedicated IP. I'm the only one who can use it. It shouldn't matter what the person who controls my IP + 1 is doing. If they're spamming, block that address, not the address block or the hosting provider altogether.

Also, you may be overestimating how much other providers are monitoring to prevent spam. I don't get a lot of spam, but it often comes in from addresses controlled by email systems rather than home-run mailservers. Sometimes it's basic GMail addresses. Sometimes it's from an Office 365 account they've gotten access to. Often, it's from a domain provider they've just used to set up the endpoint for the phishing link. In each case, it's a place that can't be blocked because too many other users use it. Because of this overeager approach to spam prevention, the spammers can still do their thing, but individual mailservers are restricted. This is harmful and unproductive.

Until someone on a different IP but in the same block sends out a lot of spam, and someone decides to ban the whole ASN or subnet. It's not a logical thing to do, but it happens all the time. The same way some people will firewall off an entire country just because they get bots running from those addresses; it's opening a nut by driving over it but sometimes people are too lazy to do it properly.

Re: Mark my words...

"How many thousands of spam complaints did Linode ignore before getting blocked? A quick search shows that they have active problems."

You can't run a service where users can send out packets of any kind without getting people sending spam. I'm sure they do have spammers using their systems. However, this doesn't mean they're unusually helpful to spammers. Microsoft also has spammers using their systems, but I doubt they would be very happy to have Azure's IP blocks shadow-banned.

Google says open source software should be more secure

"What obligation does one have as an author of an open source program?"

None. None at all. The users need to understand that and plan accordingly. If they want you to have a responsibility, they're going to have to get you to agree to it specifically.

"What obligation does one have as a user of open source software?"

Again, it's basically none. They could be responsible for incidents that occur from their use, but that's pretty much the extent of it. They have to decide what to do whenever something happens that they don't like.

"Does it depend on means?"

No.

"Does it depend on use?"

It might for users depending on what they're doing with it. For example, if it's used to store personal information in a GDPR country, they could be obliged to fix or change it in a certain time to prevent breeches.

Re: Sorry

I have argued that as well, but the reverse is also true. If someone else makes money off the thing you did for free, it is still their, not your, responsibility to ensure it's good enough for their uses. That means that, if there are bugs they want fixed, they don't get to argue that you are failing in your duty to fix it quickly enough (or failed when the bug first came into being). You have no responsibilities to them just as they have no responsibility to pay you.

Re: money is not the way

Very nice. Make the people who are already developing stuff for free also code review for free. I'm guessing that will also include some restriction to ensure they review well and with the security and quality goals you have in mind? If the security of components is so important to companies that make money, they can afford to pay for that developer effort, hiring the developers themselves or paying into an organization that will do it for them. They shouldn't be forced to do that, but they certainly shouldn't be able to argue that they need it, therefore I have to do it and likely also pay for others to do it.

'IwlIj jachjaj! Incoming LibreOffice 7.3 to support Klingon and Interslavic

Re: Fourth gender

That's gendered pronouns, not grammatical gender. You, for example, do not have different adjective forms if the described noun is one of those genders, nor do you assign those genders to inanimate nouns. For that matter, you also don't have different adjective forms (though there are different verb conjugations in some cases) for singular or plural nouns.

Re: Fourth gender

"English is (almost?) unique, globally, in not having masculine/feminine verbs as well as netuer"

You may be unfamiliar with non-European languages, but it's really not that unique. For example, one other language that doesn't have grammatical genders is Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, and other variants included). Most of languages spoken in eastern Asia do this, including Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese. That's quite a large one. Here's a short, non-exhaustive list of largely-spoken languages that don't have grammatical gender: Bengali, Yoruba, Javanese, Basque, Persian/Farsi, Turkish, Finnish, Tamil, and Quechua. There are loads more. It's just that a lot of the languages spoken in and around Europe do have genders, so they have become expected in many cases.

EthereumMax, a Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather Jr sued over alleged 'pump and dump' cryptocurrency scam

"Maybe it's because I'm getting old, but I cannot 'appreciate' or 'understand' the value of crypto.

It doesn't exist, and to understand the irony - it's in the ether(eum)"

In most cases, you are absolutely correct. A lot of cryptocurrencies have no value. However, your reasons aren't sufficient. Many things don't have intrinsic value and yet have real value. Most money, for example. The pound is worthless. It's a piece of paper with some writing on it and some circular bits of cheap metals. It also might not even have those and be a number representing the number of pieces of paper someone should give you if you ask. Yet we don't tend to throw it away. Some cryptocurrencies have value in that sense, because others are willing to give you stuff, most often a different currency, in exchange. That's the only value they have, and it could disintegrate. It is certainly more likely to disintegrate than it is for the pound to do so (though note it is also possible for the pound's value to be destroyed).

That cryptocurrency doesn't have tangible existence, that it owes what "value" it has to fickle and uninformed investors, that it takes resources to operate, these things are entirely true and don't make it evil. The same is true of a number of other instruments of value, including but not limited to national currencies.

That is how pump and dump works. Theoretically, if you bought then immediately sold, it would work as you would benefit from the same scheme the fraudsters were doing to others. If you didn't, because you expected a normal, unfraudulent investment, you lose due to their fraudulent actions. The effect would be the same if it were a stock they were selling. In every case, it's a loss due to a fraudulent action which is a crime, so if you can prove it, they are in trouble.

Re: Is there a way they can both lose their money???

Both sets of lawyers lose money? Not a chance. That's not how lawyers work. Sometimes you can get it where one set of lawyers loses money. That's as close as it will go.

Open source maintainer threatens to throw in the towel if companies won't ante up

Re: Tech crash?

Yes and no. We sort of already live through this right now, in that vulnerabilities in open source code cause security problems with some frequency. Reliance on open source distribution systems leaves opportunities for hijacked packages to cause problems elsewhere in the chain. However, this isn't specific to open source because the same problems exist in proprietary software as well, with similar effects.

I think the better answer is no (yes, I'm hedging). We're always going to need code to run something, so unless we voluntarily return to the 1980s, people are going to build systems out of something. As stated, proprietary software and open source software have the same risks; either can turn out to be fatally flawed to your detriment. If people are still using the same components in similar ways, it isn't really a crash. That would imply that a radical change has occurred, and this seems unlikely. Laws intended to require security run up against the problem that it's impossible to write bug-free software, and that existing laws that regulate against more obvious deliberate abuses already get enforced laxly. Consumer choices are unlikely to provoke change because most consumers don't have a clue what the terms mean and those who do often have no clue what code got used in the products they buy, use, or interact with. Companies are unlikely to change on their own without some external reason, most often a change to their profit or costs.

Re: A bit self-righteous?

I don't think anyone thinks that. The people who write the software are under no obligation to maintain it or do anything to help the users, commercial or otherwise. At the same time, the company or other user is under no obligation to pay them for it. How or if they choose to do those things can depend on how they want the project to proceed.

The attitude of the maintainer in the article makes perfect sense to me; basically, it boils down to "I won't keep working on this unless there is enough money donated for the purpose, and I know the people who would benefit from my work can do that". I support that decision and have no problems whatsoever with those who do that. The argument that makes less sense to me is "I gave this away for free, but you must pay me for it". At that point, I have to ask why they gave it away for free if they're looking for people to purchase licenses. If I write something and give it away, I don't expect the users to pay me. If they want me to do something to improve it that I wasn't already planning to do, then I could give them an estimate, but if they just take the code and use it, which is what most people including companies are doing, that's what I expected when I used a license that said so. Donations are appreciated, but they are voluntary, just as my maintenance effort will be voluntary.

Open source isn't the security problem – misusing it is

Re: If every cloud server is dark with all inbound ports close, do we care about Log4shell?

I think this is a bingo for anyone who chose a card for "meaningless technobabble buzzwords for security project".

We have that. It's called IP. It has ports, and you put a firewall over them. That lets you connect some things to the internet and block others. It works great. It would have worked great for this vulnerability too, as long as people remembered to turn on the firewall part. All the components used to do this can be open source and often are. They're designed for a zero-trust environment, the internet, and the problem is when the software being contacted doesn't properly check what the user wants to do and whether they should be allowed to do it (or the software being contacted shouldn't be contactable).

To the extent that your suggestion means anything, it appears to mean that we shut down the IP system and make another one, so that any bot scanning ports won't find anything. If that ever works, then bots will be rewritten to scan the new one again.

Did you read the article? How about this bit:

If, and it's a big if, those eyeballs are there and looking. If the code just sits there getting copied over and over again without a moment's thought, no bugs will be found. Simple, isn't it?

or this bit:

But would Goers get paid to go over old Java code with a fine-tooth comb looking for security vulnerabilities even if Oracle were to hire him just to work on Java? I doubt it. Coders are paid to make new code, not fix old code.

The argument really does hold some water, but since you're incorrectly attributing that argument to the article author, you're already going the wrong way.

Anonymous employee review site Glassdoor research: Tech companies dominate the best places to work

Specific criteria

"Research from anonymous employee review site Glassdoor shows that dominant software giants Salesforce, Microsoft, Google and SAP are the only companies — from any sector — to appear in all the top 50 best places to works lists in the UK, France, Germany, the US, and Canada."

But a company that operates in only four of those countries wouldn't even be able to appear on all the lists. That means the only candidates that could appear there need to employ a lot of people and have operations in several countries. Given the number of largish employers that don't operate everywhere, it's possible the sample size was smaller than it sounds.

That tech rates highly doesn't surprise me much. It's a field with a distinctive culture because it's relatively new and because individual employees usually have more ability to change things. That certainly doesn't mean it's the best way to operate, but there are many things about the tech culture that don't seem common in other types of company.

Mobile networks really hate Apple's Private Relay: Some folks find iOS privacy feature blocked on their iPhones

Re: Simples to get around

That's an issue with carrier-purchased Android devices, but Apple is very controlling about their hardware. It's annoying for the user who wants lots of access, but one perk of their stance is that carriers don't get to load unwanted software onto the phones they sell. It's still locked to them, so better to buy an unlocked version.

If you have to buy a carrier IOS device, it's generally safe. I wouldn't suggest anyone get a carrier Android device ever.

Re: "Apple doesn't know which ads I see"

Hold on. The person you replied to is indeed incorrect, but I suggest caution before attributing those protections to Apple's system. The description you have supplied represents what they've said, but there is reason to doubt it. They operate both the ingress and egress proxies, meaning it is technically possible for them to connect the network activities all the way through. This is in contrast to Tor, where each proxy is ideally run by independent people* who don't coordinate. Since it is possible for Apple's system to identify your path, you need to identify yourself to them, and if they did collect that information you wouldn't know about it, I think it can be dangerous to assume it functions in a way similar to Tor. It is an Apple-run VPN only, and you should only use it if you trust Apple to handle your traffic.

* When you get a random path through the Tor network, you don't necessarily know that your path isn't controlled by a single person pretending to be from multiple operators. However, because you generate new paths frequently and have some control over how you route traffic, it is unlikely.

Re: Cry me a river (of fake tears)

They will try, and they might succeed, but we have seen that it can be done despite their efforts if there are enough people willing to go to the effort required. GDPR may be poorly enforced, and CCPA may be significantly weakened from the original ideal, but the big data collectors didn't want either of them to pass and they were. They have also resulted in some action (definitely not enough, but they really do have the force of law). If they're going to fight, we have the option to fight back or crumble under the assumption that they cannot fail. They've failed twice and they can again.

Re: Cry me a river (of fake tears)

"If they're making money from customers' data the fairest way of recompensing the customers is to give them a lower priced service."

I suggest an alternative:

If they're making money from customers' data the fairest way of recompensing the customers is to fine the company under privacy legislation (if there isn't any, pass some first). Then, if the company hasn't entirely stopped doing it by the next day, fine them again. Continue until the data is private or the company has ceased existing.

Back to school for Microsoft as it prises apart the repairable Surface Laptop SE

Re: Good as far as it goes

To me, the only other part I would care about is the storage being replaceable. That does wear out eventually. I think the chance that schools are going to increase the RAM on a cheap device for students to use is remote. Screen and battery are the most important, because they'll be broken or wear out more quickly. Now, since they have proven they can do this, let's see if they'll start doing that with the ones I might end up repairing.

Spruce up your CV or just bin it? Survey finds recruiters are considering alternatives

I have a feeling we're not going to agree, but I still have some objections to the methods it sounds like you're using.

"But you can provide a link to your [Stackoverflow] profile when you apply for a job so others can see what comments you've made. This gives potential employers an insight into not only whether you're knowledgeable, but also whether are you able to help others in a meaningful manner."

I don't think that's a useful yardstick. In order to earn a job at your place, I not only have to be good at writing code in the systems you are using and solving the problems you have, but I also need to have volunteered a lot of time answering others' questions and proving myself to be a good teacher. Are you trying to hire a teacher? Because that's the skill you're measuring with this. If you want to see that the candidate can explain a technical thing, ask them to explain a technical thing of your choice during the interview. This demonstrates that A) they can explain technical things, B) they know about the thing you chose, so you can tailor it to something you want them to know about, C) their skill can work with people of the knowledge level you have, rather than someone who may not have a clue, and D) if you aren't sure yet, you can ask them about something else.

"Regardless of whether they're directly relevant to the job you're applying for, [GitHub repos] will give an insight into your abilities to structure and design code."

In my original example, I pointed out why that could easily be misread. I gave an example where the code you would see is the stuff where code is likely to look of poorer quality and where the person has little experience, thus giving an unrealistic idea of their quality.

"If they're personal projects, they will show you have a genuine interest and passion for software development outside of it merely being a way to pay the bills."

This is a problem I didn't deal with last time, but let's do it now. Why does someone need to spend a lot of time on writing code outside their job in order to qualify in your mind? If you're hiring an architect, you generally don't require them to show you the several hobby building designs they have. There are several reasons a candidate might not have a lot of contributions for you to comb through. They could be limited by a legal contract that prevents them from developing or releasing things outside work. They could have a job with long hours and obligations outside it such that they don't have the time to maintain a complex project outside work. Or they could have interests other than computers and still be entirely capable of doing the job you want.

"Whether you agree with them or not, a potential employer should use all tools available to evaluate a potential candidate,"

I disagree. A potential employer should endeavor to establish whether the candidate has the needed skills without being creepy and without requiring unreasonable steps on the candidate's part. The definitions of creepy and unreasonable are subjective, but it's easy for "all available" to start spilling over into them. I've seen employers who do the creepy investigation into anything they can find with the employee's name on it, which has caused problems for people who share names with other people. I've also been asked for everything under the sun by companies because they couldn't possibly know whether I can develop a system unless they can talk to everyone I've ever worked with back to jobs as a student. In each case, they had the ability to ask me to prove something but chose an unreasonable method instead. I don't work there.

That's a distinct possibility, but you could ask the same question about interviews, tests, puzzles, or basically anything else that could be used. The CV can at least be reviewed or improved by others, is mostly factual (if the right person is reading them), and can be used to establish the skills of the applicant during other parts of the process. Unless you can find something that accurately represents the candidate no matter their communication skills, the CV may still be among the better of the options.

I would guess a lot of them. I send my own copies to the manager as soon as I connect with them to ensure they're getting what I've written. I don't know what it is with agencies not paying attention to the job requirements or the candidates' qualifications; I would have figured that a company wouldn't pay an agency for someone who lacks critical qualifications.

My problem with agencies is that they don't seem to understand what the jobs they have are about. I recently had one where they asked about my skills, and I told them that I don't have experience with frontend. I also don't really want to do frontend, but even if I were to relax that and take a job, they're going to have to accept a person who will be learning (and they're going to have to be unusually interesting to me because I don't like frontend). The recruiter then suggested a job which I rejected as too much frontend. At the end of the conversation, the recruiter had found a better job who wanted the skills I actually have, and they sent the description to me. It's well they did, because the hiring company wanted five years experience with client-side JS, React, Angular, and a number of other frontend frameworks. The recruiter was grumpy when I informed him that it still wouldn't work. They could have saved themselves the effort had they had a clue what "frontend" means.

"There are other ways to evaluate potential candidates.", but I have some reservations about many of your suggestions.

"Most people have a LinkedIn profile these days which usually duplicates the majority of things on a CV."

There are three problems with this. One is that not everybody should need a Linkedin profile to apply to a job. Most of them will have it, but not everyone. The second is that a CV can be tailored to the job, listing qualifications of interest to them without listing the things they won't care about. True, it can also have lies on it, but so can a profile. Third, even if we assume the two contain the same content, you could either write a bot to scrape the data from their profile and analyze it for you or have the candidates send you the information in a more readable format that requires no coding or searching to quickly scan. The resume is the easier method for both sides.

"GitHub repositories of personal projects and StackOverflow comments/answers/etc can give an indication of practical knowledge."

Yeah, I generally don't like this. I don't post answers on Stackoverflow often, and when I do, I don't post under my name. I don't think answering people who potentially don't have a clue what they're doing shows much about my practical knowledge. It would speak better of my ability as a teacher, but even there it's not great.

Github is a little better, but it also can be risky. My Github projects are those things that I do as a hobby, at least mostly. That means they're not necessarily the stuff I have the most experience with. If my job is mostly writing a process that runs on servers, but in my spare time, I'm writing something that runs on an embedded system with limited resources, someone reading my Github will get a skewed image of what I know for two reasons. They could misinterpret what the project is and assume that the hacks I'm using to fit my program into the limited resources are what I would do all the time. Even if they don't, they could assume that I only know embedded stuff, and take my less experienced code as what I can do there. This would not take into account that what I write at work can be different and better. Yes, I have multiple repos out there, but not all of them are updated and some of them are simple tools that are useful to me and others but not particularly complex.

The coding challenges before an interview can be a better filtering system as long as they're realistic.

BeOS rebuild / Haiku has a new feature / that runs Windows apps

That's still adding the device to a domain with multiple users, where it can be accessed by other users. MDM doesn't negate the multiple users status I mentioned, especially as I already mentioned it when I said that the admins may never actually use their account on the device but nonetheless it has significance by existing.

As for phones, you're correct that they are mostly single-user, although this is one of the restrictions that makes mobile OSes unsuitable for many organizational uses. However, they're not necessarily that way. Android supports multiple users. Sure it's a pain and doesn't do very much, but even they knew the option was necessary. People share phones and tablets, even things as simple as a parent giving their child one temporarily (that happens all the time). Just because the OS doesn't allow you to have separate logins doesn't mean that only one person uses one.

"However, in their eyes, and in mine at the time, this was a feature, not a drawback. No end-user computers are normally multiuser any more: people sharing computers was how things worked in the 1960 and 1970s, not in the 21st century."

That's mostly incorrect; any computer that's run by an organization does have multiple users. While each desktop is probably used only by one person, they have a restricted set of privileges because the administrators run some components. The administrators, while they don't use the machine routinely and may never access it physically, are effective users. Many organizational machines are also available for others to log in, even if they mostly don't do so. Home machines may still have multiple users if it is shared among family members or friends, which was a lot more common in the 1990s but is still common today.

A multi-user OS can have any number of users, including one. A single-user machine always has the limitations of that design. I think the decision by basically every OS to remove single-user limitations was necessary at the time and still remains useful.

And yes, servers are multi-user. Not in the sense that every client logs in and runs programs, but in the sense that there are multiple people who do things where they log in and run programs. The server's admin needs root privileges, whereas the clients who run a website from it probably don't. If there are multiple admins, they probably each have their own user account which enables per-user privilege management (even if it's only locking out a user when they leave). Not every server has one admin or a set who can all act as root.

Signal CEO Moxie Marlinspike resigns, leaves WhatsApp co-founder to run things until a successor is named

Yes, as in all the successful privacy technology, whatever the platform or effectiveness, in common use by the public today. Even things as simple as TLS/SSL are open source. PGP is open source. The encryption algorithms themselves are open source. The clients on the endpoints are usually open source. What exactly was your objection?

Time to party like it's 2002: Acura and Honda car clocks knocked back 20 years by bug

Re: GPS week rollover

I think the chance we're still using the GPS satellites in 3238 is quite low, especially as we already have three other options that work everywhere and don't have such a restricted version. By then, those satellites won't work if they're still in orbit at all. Even if we didn't ever redesign them, one problem that affects people in 3238 beats problems for people in 1999, 2019, apparently also offsets of those years, and almost certainly in 2038. The 1265-year option is only if they wanted to keep their design--they also had the option to report dates in a more configurable way.

Re: GPS week rollover

"When GPS was being specified a 1K field was more than enough given the memory limitations of the time"

That's 1kweeks, not 1kbytes or 1kbits. In other words, it is ten bits. Memory was expensive in those days, but so were rocket launches and they paid for a lot of them. Had they sprung for 16 bits for the week counter, they could have kept all the rest of their design and only had a rollover every 1265 years. I think that, even in 1973 when the project was started, they could have afforded less than a byte extra in memory per satellite. A single game console of the period had more memory than they'd have to add throughout the whole constellation.

Avira also mines imaginary internet money on customers' PCs

Re: Tried Avira...

"* does that statement make me an AV hibster?"

No, it makes you one of literally everyone here, at least I think so. Has anyone who used Windows before Windows 10 not had the experience of finding an antimalware program that runs well enough, doesn't take up tons of resources, doesn't have some sketchy method of pushing the paid version, and is pretty good at keeping up to date with new malware only to have that program lose one or more of those factors in an update? This also counts if you don't use Windows or don't get malware yourself but have to recommend or even operate antimalware for friends.

Bitcoin 'inventor' will face forgery claims over his Satoshi Nakamoto proof, rules High Court

Re: Old Nicknames

No, I don't think they would do that. The tax issue is easy enough, as shown by existing governmental tax policy toward cryptocurrency. Whoever controlled that key hasn't sold any from that chunk, thus no gains to be taxed.

There's no copyright available to be claimed. The code wrote for Bitcoin was released a long time ago and is completely public. We know what it says. Anyone who was going to claim copyright would have made their allegations a while ago. They would almost certainly lose now even if they had written it, and they didn't.

As for a government kidnapping him to take the money, no, they won't do that. A criminal organization maybe, but even they would probably know how unlikely it is to work. If any Bitcoin is sold from this account, it will be immediately noticed and could trigger a collapse in the price because that's 5% of the supply right there. The United States can spend trillions of dollars whenever they want to, so they're not going to kidnap someone for fifty billion. North Korea might want to, but their thefts in real currencies already dwarf this one, so they have better targets.

Re: Old Nicknames

I agree it's almost certainly a publicity stunt, but I don't think anyone would do the things you claim.

"all real and imaginary agencies on earth would be going after to sue / kill / interrogate / seize assets"

Why? The only one I could see here is seize assets, just because they'd be worth a lot of money (temporarily). What would they sue about? Uses of Bitcoin are the responsibility of those who did them, and they're already being prosecuted all the time. What questions would they want answered? Bitcoin's workings are already public, well-understood, and controlled by others. And why would anyone be so motivated as to kill them? It takes time and resources to do any of those things. I'm not seeing a benefit.

Snap continues to make a spectacle of itself as it tries to trademark the word spectacles

Re: Is it in the dictionary?

It's trademarked, but trademarks are limited to a specific type of market. Windows can be used for tech products. Apple can as well. I think they'd be fine to trademark spectacles if they were naming an app that. Their problem is that the thing they want to call spectacles is a pair of spectacles. If Apple sold apples, they'd have a similar issue.

The Apple trademark thing had a bunch of legal fights until the two companies agreed to let Apple (computer people) have the trademarks and allow Apple (music people) to use them as before. Most likely, this also involved computer people giving music people a healthy chunk of money to go away, but neither Apple wanted to say.

It takes more clicks to reject their cookies than accept them, so France fines Facebook and Google over €200m

Re: It's not enough

Some options:

1. Ask for donations.

2. Non-creepy ads, following the laws in place.

3. Demand money and don't let me see the content unless I pay.

4. Go out of business and let someone else try.

Indian government tells Starlink to refund pre-orders placed before licences approved

Re: The problem with ... most American companies is they see the world as their "market"

You may need to look at the rest of how the business works.

"in this case if the Indian government don't like what he's doing what can they do?": A lot. A really massive lot. A really massive unpleasant lot to everybody involved. That doesn't mean they necessarily would do all these things, but I'm starting with what they or other countries with the motivation could do. Let me show you.

"The Internet lets you ignore national borders if you want to, and from what I understand the antennae are small and unobtrusive."

The equipment itself is smaller than other dishes, but it's not invisible. It requires line of sight to the satellites. That means you have to put it outside. Outside, someone can see that you have it and report it. They could even send people to drive around and look for them. You can't just hide it in your house.

Let's say you were going to hide it and only bring it out at night (nobody's driving around at night). Sorry, that's not going to work very well. The equipment requires calibration and installation by experienced people. It's not enough to plug it in and put it on a table.

Alright, you have a place where you can have it operating constantly and nobody can see it, so you don't have to move it. It's still emitting a radio signal in a band used by the satellites. That can be scanned for. Many countries have radio surveillance vehicles that could be used for these things. The UK used them to detect the operation of old TV sets, and those weren't even trying to broadcast a signal. You are, meaning there's a better signature for them to use to find you.

But what if the government doesn't want to go to the effort of sending out teams to find the system. No problem. There's another possible mechanism to deny you the service: block payments. If Starlink wanted to give you the internet for free, they could manage it under that case. They don't. In order to succeed, they need to get you to pay them every month for the service. If paying them is illegal and blocked, that's going to be hard. That's assuming they will set up back channels for receiving payment, distributing equipment, managing accounts, etc. That's a crime, so it's quite likely they won't bother doing that when there's plenty of not illegal business to be had.

Satellite internet is not magic. If it was, the existing geostationary satellite providers would have already killed censorship globally. It doesn't matter that the new satellites are in a different place now. The same laws of physics and behaviors of society get in the way.

Re: Ransom

You need to look up what ransoms are. They want him to be able to sell something before he sells something. Big difference.

As for spying, you have no evidence for your claim. India's internet policy is not good, though mostly for shutting it down rather than monitoring, but they haven't said anything about those regulations. Starlink, on the other hand, has already said multiple times that they plan to collaborate with local censorship and surveillance regulations in order to operate legally. You shouldn't make up reasons when you don't know them.

Mozilla founder blasts browser maker for accepting 'planet incinerating' cryptocurrency donations

I don't know if their numbers are correct, but I do know you've read the post wrong. They could still be flawed or lying.

"I wonder how they compute the energy efficiency as "900 times more efficient than a visa payment"? Perhaps they are privvy to the internal operating procedures, software and hardware systems of the VISA system?"

Their numbers for Visa are cited in the post, which you've referenced later on, so why are you asking where they got them? You already have the answer. It wasn't them who came up with those numbers. Attack that source (Statista) if you will.

"Or perhaps they are actually using their own referenced figures which appear to show that a Bitcoin transaction is about 1200000x the cost of a single VISA ... So allowing for a 99.95% energy reduction that means it's still 6000x less efficient than VISA. Or am I not seeing something?"

What you aren't seeing is that it is Ethereum who said this, and Bitcoin you're comparing it to. Ethereum is already more efficient than Bitcoin, and they anticipate cutting their energy usage. The comparison to Bitcoin is just so they can use the dataset. If Bitcoin improved by 99.95%, it wouldn't give them parity with Visa, but Ethereum could surpass them with that level of improvement. The numbers you've cited cut the Ethereum step out and acted as if it was Bitcoin getting improved. Bitcoin is not getting improved and will stay as inefficient. Time will tell if Ethereum's claims work in practice.

Re: Cryptocurrencies are a scam?

I don't know what goals, if any, that post wants to recommend. Whichever way that was supposedly going, it's not getting it right. If circumventing sanctions is a positive thing in their mind, then cryptocurrencies are one of the many ways that can be done. They don't really work as well--North Korea does use a lot of them, but mostly by keeping and exchanging them in other countries where it's less obvious it's them. They do the same thing with dollars and euros. Exchanging cryptocurrency for other stuff is hard if you're located somewhere with sanctions, just like with other money, so the situation is mostly the same.

Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes found guilty of fraud: Blood-testing machines were vapourware after all

Re: 20 or 80 Years?

"If you defraud rich people, you get the book thrown at you. 120 years for Bernie Madoff."

Wrong, and a bad example. The Madoff scheme involved lots of people, many of them not rich at all. Some invested most or all of their life savings in his fake fund, which is not a wise way to invest but they had reason to think it was at least an honestly-run one. Many others had their money invested without their choice by investment managers, including institutional pension programs. Madoff's scheme did not limit itself to rich investors. The number of victims and the scale of the damage done to them was a large contributory factor in the sentence.

Re: But, she did do one good thing

"As a company producing medical devices, wasn't there some agency required to look at and test this equipment before licencing it for use?"

Yes. The short version of the licensing situation is that they failed to get licensing for nearly all of their stuff (they sometimes lied about having it or the reasons for not having it yet). The one product that did get used was licensed because the machines they used only collected blood from people and sent it to a lab that had received a license for being safe (though not for being good at the job). Investors didn't know the extent of the problems because the licenses take a long time to get, leaving the company a lot of possible excuses for why they weren't ready. Had they not been exposed, that would probably have been their largest issue and caused a similar set of problems only a few years later.

Re: "what sort of person would think about having a child ... possibility of 20 years in jail

"Are you suggesting the child be punished for the crimes of its mother?"

Why do you consistently fail to understand what people are arguing? You have only one point you keep making over and over, and while it's a valid one and one that can easily be argued, it doesn't respond to what they were talking about.

Of course they aren't "suggesting the child be punished for the crimes of its mother". They never said anything even tangentially related to that. They are suggesting it's possible that the mother had a child for a self-serving purpose, without considering the welfare of the child. This is an accusation without evidence, which they have already admitted themselves, and in this case, the poster has moderated it to a possibility rather than a certainty.

And once again, they weren't saying that, if this happened, it was done to get protections from the legal system. Not a change in prison terms. Not a delay in the trial. The purpose in doing it, if it was done, is to manipulate the people involved. The law doesn't treat pregnant defendants differently, but juries might. I would like to indicate here that I really don't know her motives, and I don't even know the facts related to her pregnancy. I am not agreeing with the posts you oppose. However, if you would like to convince me or others reading it that they're wrong, you'll have to stop arguing against points they don't make.

Re: I'm not defending any of them... but I'm not sure "scam" is right???

I'm curious what your definition of scam is. In mine, scam and fraud frequently go together. Basically, if the answer to "are you taking money for a service you know you won't provide" is yes, it qualifies as a scam for me. It's in the law books as fraud, but I don't really see those as separate things.

Re: I'm not defending any of them... but I'm not sure "scam" is right???

"the overall diagnostic services being sold were genuine, they just weren't using the wonder-tech Theranos were shopping to their investors as underpinning the process."

This is very, very wrong. The tests they sold not only didn't use the devices they claimed to use (a technical detail the public wouldn't care much about anyway), but they were also frequently inaccurate. The company had changed the protocols to use less blood in many of the tests, but the machines couldn't produce reliable results from the smaller samples. They knew this, as they frequently had to fake the results for important people (people who could give them money). The diagnostic services were flawed and sold to the public knowing they would at times receive incorrect medical information. That the company offered a couple tests that weren't knowingly fraudulent doesn't make the rest of their services genuine. They were not.

"There is absolutely no advantage in terms of being sentenced or your overall prison experience in being an expectant or new mother. There is no evidence for this claim and no potential upside. It's pure fantasy."

They stated their supposed upside in the original comment. To attempt to get sympathy from a jury. If that worked, it wouldn't matter what the prison system does because the attempter wouldn't get imprisoned. You can easily disagree with this if you don't believe it would work, but your failure to recognize that as the point they were making is harming your attempt to argue against them.

RISC-V CTO: We won't dictate chip design like Arm and x86

Re: … The interview demonstrates little grasp....

I wonder if this interview was verbal and transcribed. If so, I think that the punctuation might be incorrect. The phrase reads as "It's a lot easier to talk about all the variants of Linux – Zephyr, FreeRTOS, Alpine", but I could also see it being "It's a lot easier to talk about all the variants of Linux, Zephyr, FreeRTOS, Alpine". I.E. a list of things, and the variants of Linux are just one item in it. Since Zephyr is also not Linux (Linux foundation project, but doesn't use the Linux kernel), this seems likely to me.

As for the automotive companies, they use and develop a lot of technology, but so does basically everything that manufactures stuff. This gets even worse when we include software development, because now every sufficiently large company that develops some computer-based service is in tech. In that sense, I'm not sure I have an objection to having a category for those companies that develop tech as the primary product, rather than developing tech only for a different type of product for which their company is known. Where would you draw the line?

AT&T, Verizon delay 5G C-band rollout over FAA fears of passenger plane radars jammed by signals

Re: Altimeters

Assuming there's a real problem*, it's still probably unimportant outside airport range because the planes will be much higher when flying over that area. The towers are only located at ground level, so the signal strength would be much lower. During takeoff and landing, the planes will be much closer to towers.

*I am not an expert in this, but I have not heard any convincing explanation why this band would interfere with altimeters. Without technical knowledge, the mobile companies' statements seem a lot more logical.

Samsung adds non fungible token trading app to its tellies

Re: Whaat??

You would own a cryptographic signature and a key that you can use to change who owns it. The cryptographic signature was in turn signed by the original creator who sold it, who is probably the person who created the file the signature is from, but who knows. Or, you can have as many signatures as you want by finding files and running existing hashing algorithms on them. It is your job as an NFT owner to eventually convince someone else that your number is better than all the free numbers.

Low on passengers, low on memory: A bad day on the London Underground

Re: Crazy

It has higher specifications than some parts of the system need, but a board like the Pi is likely much better than a microcontroller anyway. If you run the system off a microcontroller, you'll need to add a networking system as you've said and also some display system--it's easy to connect most microcontrollers to a small screen, but not so easily to a big one with lots of pixels to work with. That's likely three different processors you have to write code for and then connect them up. Most single board computers have at least one display interface (the Raspberry Pi has two dedicated ones and the GPIOs to use others) so they need no assistance outputting to them. They also have networking support with all the libraries already written for the platform. That means you don't have to do your own TLS library which speeds up development.

Additionally, being a standard environment that most programmers are familiar with, you don't lock yourself into one supplier. Even if you have the source code for a microcontroller-based affair, you might find it hard either to repair the system or to use the same code on an updated one with different components. With SBCs, you can probably just drop your application on a completely different board and, as long as it finds the right screen to print on, it will work fine.