Posts by doublelayer

Google hit with lawsuit for dropping free Workspace apps

Re: $5M for not getting something for free

I've not read the contract that implemented this service, but I can virtually guarantee it doesn't say "It's free forever and it means everything". Lawyers are smart enough not to give that kind of guarantee. Whether or not they knew back in 2006 that it would go commercial only, and it's been long enough that they might have thought it could stay free forever, they also knew they might have to change what people were getting for free and would have written the contract accordingly. If it really does say "free forever", then you've found the lawyers with the least foresight and have fun with that.

I assume they meant "offer the service" as "offer the free service", which they're no longer doing. That's the kind of sneaky language places like using. I can't feel too annoyed at Google though because they gave people a free service for sixteen years; if they made it a short time before taking it away, I would also think it's a bait and switch, but I never expect free or unlimited things to stay available, and sixteen years is plenty of time for a service to last before something changes in it.

GitLab versus The Zombie Repos: An old plot needs a new twist

Re: Remember, please, that GitLab the software is Open Source!

You pointed this out in your comment: the people who contributed to the source would, whatever happens to Gitlab, still be able to self-host the system. That's what the contributors and everyone else gain by contributing, and it isn't being taken away. Making something open source doesn't guarantee the authors will also run a free service running the code, but it should mean that the code remains available to those people for their use.

I definitely see the complaints of the open source community about this, but not because they contributed to the code. If Gitlab had not promised a free tier, I wouldn't at all object to their service being commercial. I don't have a solution to this problem, but just because someone contributed doesn't entitle them to a service.

The problem is that, when people who didn't update or maintain anything and who might have forgotten the thing exists don't pay $1, Gitlab would still have to do something about their repos. If they delete those, people will still complain. I suppose the only thing they could do is freeze them so you can only clone or fork and not offer any more free services to cut their losses. I'm not sure if this would earn a favorable review.

Re: I don't understand the suggestion...

You must install some software on your computer which allows Gitlab to store some files there and upload them. How this works for people who have limited bandwidth, turn their computer off with some frequency, or simply don't continue to have the software running isn't explained. Could it work theoretically? Yes, it would fix a number of problems. Would it work in practice? Probably not so well unless you had a really large set of users who kept it consistently operational.

Re: Turtles All the Way Down Scenario?

You can know all your dependencies if you put in a little effort. If you use a package management system, it can print out a list of all the packages you have. If you're building everything from source, you know what code you've had to compile. Only if you're using a combination where the user has to install some libraries but you compile in others is it even a little tricky, and you can start from nothing and simply count which packages you have to install to get it working, then identify any dependencies those packages list. Not everyone does this, and it's not an automatic process, but nor does it require an unreasonable effort on their part.

Re: Off the cloud

I challenge you to prove that. Use the article's number of 145 PB of theoretical project storage. I'll even let you assume that the average user is only using a tenth of that (balancing out the people with tiny chunks of code and those who store larger assets there). 14.5 PB, with redundancy and availability, for $500 a month. Go.

Before you try, you can't assume that everyone isn't using the storage, that the data can be compressed, or that the data can be usefully deduplicated. Someone storing as much data as Gitlab is has already investigated compression and is likely using it. You have to find sufficient raw storage.

Hi, I'll be your ransomware negotiator today – but don't tell the crooks that

Re: Eventually…

I think they probably stick to text comms when they can because this allows them to use people without having those voices recognized and tracked. That also helps if the language they're using to converse isn't their native one. If they did use a voice system, there are a few programs for distorting a voice that don't make it obvious that's happened, especially through a bad laptop mic.

Re: Get more creative

"Also, non destructive hacking of suspected malware teams infrastructure be de criminalised."

That won't happen because, if you suspect something to be malware that's not, the people who owned it are not going to take "I thought you were a malware gang" as an excuse for why it was acceptable. If you're correct and end up hacking the real operators, it will already be effectively allowed because the criminals are unlikely to report your activities to the police, knowing that they too can be convicted based on the data you have and they'll face larger penalties than you would. Not to mention that, in a democracy, I think most juries would cheerfully nullify the charges if you somehow got them for successfully targeting a malware organization without causing external damage.

Re: It's time to end this.

I can see some companies finding a subcontractor whose contract says they'll negotiate with the ransomware people but whose real purpose is to pay them in whatever illegal way is needed without requiring anyone at the company to know what happened to the cash that was sent over. It certainly wouldn't be as many companies as do so now when the stuff requested is legal, but I wouldn't expect it to be zero.

It's also worth considering that, without cryptocurrency, there will still be people who have successfully ransomed data for millions, and those people can pivot to a different payment method. Those who ask for tiny ransoms may well change focus if cryptocurrency becomes unavailable, but if you can successfully get $3M in cryptocurrency, you can also get $2.95M and budget $50k for the company to get that value to you in something else, such as gold. Sadly, they've already decided ransomware is a business model that works, so not all of them will just move on if part of the old structure becomes undesirable.

Re: He would say that, wouldn't he?

-> The biggest reason is because most ransomware groups specifically and explicitly say: 'We don't want to work with a negotiator...

Says ransomware negotiator. A slight case of conflict of interest in that statement. You need new tyres, says car tyre salesman.

No, you've got it wrong. It would be that if he said that employing a ransom negotiator always gave better results. As it stands, he just said that the criminals themselves don't want you to use one. This is at least sometimes true, and probably because they know a negotiator who has experience with ransomware will do things like checking whether their encryption has been cracked already or whether they're the type who asks for money and then vanishes. Whether you have a negotiator or not, which he didn't recommend in this statement, don't admit you have one.

DuckDuckGo says Hell, Hell, No to those Microsoft trackers after web revolt

Re: My name is unique and...

So your SEO isn't very good, if that's your goal. Sorry to hear that. Search engines have to deal with misspellings all the time, so if the people with names like but not identical to yours are more often searched for, they'll show up. You can try quotation marks if this is annoying you. My anecdotal experience has been that DDG's search results have been good enough for my use cases for years, but I wouldn't expect them to be perfect about it.

By the way, if you type in prawn, you get a definition, a wikipedia page, a bunch of pages about prawns, shrimp, and their uses in cookery, and a system called PRAWN.

Nomad to crypto thieves: Please give us back 90%, keep 10% as a reward. Deal?

Re: Tax...

The criminals who stole it. You can report additional income, source criminal activity to your country's tax authorities. If you don't, you can be charged with tax evasion as well as theft.

If you're willing to break more laws than just the theft ones, but not tax evasion, you can also set up a system to launder it. On successful laundering of it, you'll likely have paid tax at least once and probably twice as a business and in your personal capacity.

"What will be the basis of the legal action?"

Manipulating a system to gain possession of property you aren't entitled to. Courts deal with this all the time, and they're not going to take "The code had a bug so it's all cool" as a defense. Even if you see this as ridiculously bad security, it's still illegal to walk into a building whose door is standing open and take things, and while the owner probably won't be getting sympathy or an insurance payout, the taker can still go to prison for it. Some early cryptocurrency people might have enjoyed saying "the code is law", but the real law doesn't tend to think so.

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Re: As an application developer ...

"You do write a log, don't you ? Not just ping up unmemorable messages and expect the user to do your work for you ?"

And you now need to get the user to send you their log, or have an automatic collection system so you can find it. When does it become the user's job to use the software as it was designed? Why, when something happens during the user's use of the software, on the user's machine, while the user is controlling it, on the user's data, is it the developer's fault when someone won't read a message?

Unless that error message says "We should never get here. Start panicking now." or "Segmentation fault", it's likely a message that's been written by a developer so the user can read it. Yes, sometimes the developer is available for a user who is confused, but it's still the user's responsibility to provide information so they can get answers. It is not my job to read every log so the users never have to do something easy while doing their job.

Re: As an application developer ...

Which works if you can get a user to send you the right file when they have an issue. You could have the program send it automatically, but this can lead to privacy problems (I argue for privacy all the time and I won't give up on that, but having worked with user support requests there's a reason people like automatic telemetry). I've had users automatically delete the log file on completion, users who got annoyed if the log file was anywhere but the temp folder, users who couldn't find the temp folder, and users who couldn't find the file even when it was set to a path they selected. Logging helps, but a user can still find a way to weaken it.

Re: Power fail

The UPS might be configured to expect a higher load and a generator, so when there isn't one, it assumes it's going to die in a few minutes and you need to shut down things attached to it. It might be possible to disable that warning beep in the settings.

Re: Nothing to see here

When available, I tend to make a bot to read the reports and send me a summary, usually a one-line summary, when things are fine. A single message at a predictable time confirming that the expected reports have been received, are available for me to read, and contain no issues means I have a good amount of information. If I don't get one when I expected it, the monitoring bot or my email is broken. If one of the things it's reading doesn't show up as expected, this gets recorded as an anomaly and a different message is sent. On a normal day, I read a message with a subject line indicating that I don't have to read other things. It's not always feasible to do it that way, but when it is, it's nice.

Re: Another great victory for Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive

At least that's an option that has to be manually enabled and can be disabled easily. The one I hate is when they put up a notification inviting me to install Mac OS 12. The only good thing about this is that it doesn't have a notification sound. Unfortunately, it does sometimes steal keyboard focus and cause me an urge to go down to Apple headquarters and start swinging my laptop as a club shouting "You obsoleted this thing so I can't install Mac OS 12. Either bring back the long OS support lifetimes or shut up, and both would be fine.".

Amazon to buy Roomba maker iRobot for $1.7b

Re: Oh crap!

Having optional features is how product manufacturing works, even when some of those features are desired by nearly everyone. This is no different, even if it would likely put many people off their cheapest one.

Consider saws. For a long time, they were rather basic moving blades for cutting stuff and that's it. There are now saws that have sensors to check whether what they're cutting is likely to be flesh, so if your finger is there, they'll stop. Objectively, this is the better saw. Still, for years, people dealt with this problem by not having their finger near a saw blade and you can still buy plenty of saws that won't have that sensor. The ones that do will be more expensive. You could easily say "The fact you have to pay extra not to cut your finger off is still a pretty big mark against [saw manufacturer] in my book", but it wouldn't change how saws are manufactured or used.

When we consider a product, we may all have features that, in our opinion, are necessary for the product to be useful. This doesn't mean that the product is useless without them; someone who is careful can use a saw without the finger sensor and someone without pets can probably use the no-detection vacuum, but they aren't desirable to us. The cheapest vacuum is undesirable to you. All of these vacuums are at least somewhat undesirable to me, which is why I've stuck with the manual vacuum for now. Yet that doesn't mean that the product is fatally flawed.

Re: Oh crap!

If you weren't looking while using a manual vacuum, you'd have the same problem. If you choose to use a robot to do something, you should expect there to be some cases where you need a more advanced robot to do everything a human would do. For complex things, it's why there are no robots available to do them. If you expect an environment free of those hazards, you may be able to use the simpler version. For each situation, there are tools that can be used for it.

Amazon already has products with cameras that are expected to have consistent unobstructed views. If you don't trust them to use that data in a way you would accept, which you probably shouldn't, don't put one there. I would inspect any data collection statement from any robot vacuum that is going to send data elsewhere, and when possible, use one that can function without an internet connection. If they put a flash chip in it, it should be able to store the maps it creates locally, so unless you have multiple ones that are working together, and I don't even know if that's a feature they have, they shouldn't need to communicate. Whether you can get one from this company I don't know.

Bloke robbed of $800,000 in cryptocurrency by fake wallet app wants payback from Google

Re: Pearlman

"To be fair to Google ti sounds like they identified a problem and were dealing with it (arguably ineffectively) but whilst getting the filters, systems or whatever sorted they put up a warning."

No, there was no warning. That's in the claims as why it's Google's fault. The only warning came from a third party on a different communication system. There are also no filters or the like; they get a request to take something down, investigate to whatever extent they want, then take it down. They already have all the systems to do it. The problems taking down this particular fake app were not technical.

At the beginning, I don't support the argument. The internet has dangerous things on it, and it's not automatically someone's responsibility to prevent you from getting one of them. Had this been about Google search results, I would be firmly on Google's side. However, I also have to support the original argument of this thread that, since Google likes to claim it charges a massive fee and has a dominant position on Android app distribution for the safety and security of its users, it would be nice to have this as proof that their claims are overblown.

Too little, too late: Intel's legacy is eroding

Re: So called lead...

Because they improve. Everyone improves to some degree, and Intel has produced better products recently than they had before. The question isn't "has Intel exceeded its processors from last year"? If the answer is no, they have really big problems. The questions are "Has Intel's improvement over last year's designs exceeded AMD's [or a similar competitor] improvement in the same time" and "Is Intel's product better or worse than a comparable AMD one".

The way you define "better" changes the answer to this question, and many have their opinions on the subject. You can consider performance, power usage, and cost to decide what variables you value and how you weight them. In addition, the example you show is from processors that are five years old. This was a nice improvement, but were the subsequent generations similarly improved? Was the power usage really the same between these (one thing that both Intel and AMD have been doing to annoy me is using power consumption numbers and then dynamically consuming so that the actual consumption is something very different than the reported number).

In many ways, Intel's CPUs are fine. They're still reasonably fast and work in a lot of things. I have no problem using one. I similarly have no problem using someone else's, and when it comes time to get a CPU for something, I'll let the performance, power usage, and price govern my decision. Intel needs to continue keeping those values up if they want to stay in the running.

Re: Subsidies for multi-billion dollar companies ?

By "at Wall Street", do you mean market capitalization, I.E. how much your entire company is worth when investors apply a multiple of what you actually have? If they value your company at a billion, you have much less than a billion in reserves and profits. Meanwhile, do you know how expensive semiconductor manufacturing plants are? Having a few million to throw at the problem won't get you there. Companies are certainly greedy and ask for and accept money they don't need or deserve, but your scale underestimates the costs of manufacturing at scale and overestimates what a billion in someone else's imagination can buy you.

Strike days should serve as 'wake-up call' to BT's top brass, says union

Re: Maths

Both of you are correct. Increasing wages will lead to more workers with more money, which stimulates demand for most goods, some of which are still in limited supply for other things, so the prices of those go up, which causes price inflation. This works great while there's a lot of resources to absorb it, for example a company with tons of profits which go to workers instead of investors. It doesn't work for companies that don't have enough money to do that, who have to increase their prices, requiring higher wages to afford them. Low inflation is best for everyone, but getting there while hurting the fewest people is a challenging task. I won't say what BT should do here, but there's a reason that wages can't be infinite and a reason that people need wage increases right now, and a balance will eventually be needed between these things or we'll have a larger economic problem.

Obscure Asian fintech AMTD Digital becomes the new GameStop

Re: Good!

"if retail investors have managed to take a slice of the pie, through coordinating their efforts, then what's not to like?"

If that's what's going on, which hasn't been proven yet for this one, there's lots not to like. One thing is that a lot of people are gambling their money on unreliable information, possibly from scammers. Sure, some people will make money and some people you don't like will lose it. Chalk those up as wins if you want. What about those who buy on this information and end up losing a bunch of money? Is that great too? Don't expect me to be sad when they lose something through their own ignorance, but it's still better if they didn't get lured that way in the first place. If the source is someone running a pump and dump scheme, that's also a negative. There are winners and losers in this, and if you only care about those who win, then everything will look great.

Be careful where you install software, and who installs it

Re: Who is your customer?

If you're going to give a presentation, you likely trust the armed people in the facility. An armed guard from there is preferable to an armed person you don't know pointing a gun at you. It still doesn't instill confidence, because it's usually less preferable to nobody pointing a gun at you.

Raspberry Pi 4 takes a trip to Vulkan, sharpens 3D vision

If I understand your request correctly, which I admit with the quality of your writing is not guaranteed, you'd like them to increase their sales price so that a scalper can't? Thanks for the suggestion, but I don't think I'll be supporting it.

Other SBCs are available at higher prices if you want to use one of those.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

Re: Amazing... But also a bit stupid

"If you have, say, a terabyte of non-volatile RAM, why do you need disks or paging at all?"

Until you need more than a terabyte of stuff stored, you don't. One kind of storage is a lot like another, so a terabyte of optane will function just as well (no, better) than a terabyte of SSD. It will also cost more. The question is whether you need the speed of optane enough to justify its price. Either way, you'll be using it for the same purposes, whether you use a memory byte-mapped model or a filesystem block-model approach to organizing it.

"There was a time when RAMdisks made sense. When it was doable to have a meg of RAM in a computer whose OS used 5% of it, but you only had one floppy drive. That meant you could temporarily stick things in the RAMdrive and not need to switch disks to access it. Why do you want to emulate a 1980s version of a disk in memory?"

Because the filesystem is the way for me to move data from one program to another. I can't take a downloaded audio file from the browser's memory and tell my audio editor to edit this. If it makes the file bigger, the browser will get very confused about why the contiguous block of bits either became noncontiguous or moved. I can't even find that chunk of memory by its address without pulling out a debugger and mapping between the OS's memory regions. We could remove the isolation of processes' memory areas to let this happen, but meanwhile, I can use the filesystem to obtain a set of bits and point something at that set to change it, using a filename I provided for that set. Ramdisks are sometimes useful to keep that useful operation in the fastest memory available to me.

"No current OS organizes its RAM as a filesystem. Right now I am typing in a browser window. That browser has, no doubt, many allocated areas of RAM. They are not files. There is no directory."

They are already mapped objects, but there is an organizational structure. There are objects holding other objects as members in a hierarchical layout. The members have names. The members themselves have members. A member can refer to its parent. That's a lot like a filesystem, but since the type of each thing is known and only the browser's code is operating on them, they don't all have to be bit streams.

Re: "Windows, and many apps, still suffer from memory leaks."

"What would be in non-volatile memory is the application code - the usual RAM would be used for volatile data. You would be able to shutdown the system and restart it "clean" - it just means when it starts the code is already in memory, no need to load it again from disk. Volatile RAM would be initialized again."

That's not new and you don't need optane to do it. The concept of "cache this thing so you don't have to build it again" is well-known. So is "store the cached thing on a faster kind of memory so it's easier to get at it". Windows already shuts down by storing a memory image on the disk. What optane does to change this is provide a way to address the image as if it was RAM instead of requiring it to be copied to a disk. It speeds up what is already available and well understood.

Of course, the first thing that would happen when booting an image like this is that the OS would copy the most important things off of the optane image into normal RAM again because normal RAM is faster and the OS wants its frequently-used cached objects in fast memory. Optane can, in this case, become a mixture between disk and memory: you page to optane instead of disk because it's faster, you cache nonvolatile objects in optane instead of disk also because it's faster, and you store more objects in optane instead of memory because it's bigger. All sensible actions that can benefit from a suitable memory type, but actions you can do on an SSD if you have no optane at the cost of a slight increase in latency.

Re: "Write a memory contents file to whatever storage device you like [...] and restore it"

No, that's exactly what I said. Starting an application from disk requires initialization. You could take an image of it after initialization and store that, so next time you return to the program, it has an exact copy of its running memory state. You don't need optane to do that. All optane does is that, instead of copying from RAM to SSD, you worked in optane and left it there. There's a speed boost doing it that way, but it's not guaranteed to be useful.

In addition, unless you eliminated your RAM entirely and always worked from optane, you'd still have to occasionally copy the stuff from RAM over to it. Again, that's faster than copying down to disk, but is a necessary step if you want to freeze programs so they can be restored from persistent storage. Eliminating RAM would make a lot of things worse, and the article didn't suggest doing that, so your OS would end up looking very similar.

Re: One thing may be data files...

We have that. Write a memory contents file to whatever storage device you like, which can be optane, and restore it. In the older computers, it happened that that file was the only thing on the ROM chip and so you didn't have to use a filesystem to find it, but you can do the same with this if you want; have a partition at a specified offset and find it that way. If you want to use this as direct memory, that works too. The functionality to do that is already available and doesn't require but can use optane to accomplish the goal.

Nancy Pelosi ties Chinese cyber-attacks to need for Taiwan visit

Re: ... the likes of TSMC turned Taiwan into a vital source of technology

Yes, for several reasons. They have always wanted it because it was once conquered by China and they think it should be theirs. They like carving out pieces of land and calling it theirs on a tenuous historical basis, so for that reason alone they'd take it. It also provides them with a useful area for military installations to mess with east and southeast Asian trading and naval traffic and denies the same advantages to anyone else. They wanted it when it wasn't democratic or wealthy, and now that it is, they want it even more.

Bad news, older tech workers: Job advert language works against you

Re: So?

You can enjoy those things if you're older, too. So you don't want to go to another country, but most of the young people aren't going to anyway. I know old people who like rock climbing, other sports, and spending some time with colleagues. I know many older people who would quite like drinking. I am younger and I don't, so maybe I should suggest that that item is targeted at a different generation, but we both know it's targeted at people who want to spend more social time with their colleagues.

Re: Anon CVs

"Introduce yourself with a quick note about how you can help, that's all I need to decide if I'm going to follow up or not."

This isn't necessarily a bad approach, but it depends very heavily on how good your information is. I've applied to jobs that don't bother to give important details to deciding whether I'm interested or capable. They each have a list of qualifications and goals which I process (Using that language, check. You want performance increases, sure I can help. Secure design, fits very well). If those fit, I apply. I've had some come back later and mention requirements that aren't on their list or better characterize the thing I'd be working on which causes me to become less interested. Both our times could have been saved by providing better descriptions.

It goes the other way as well. You know what kind of experience you're looking for, and I don't. I can take a guess about it, but if I were getting this job by word of mouth, I'd ask a lot of questions to establish your situation before telling you how I could help, which I can't do with a job posting. Sending a longer resume is a way of telling you what I have done which should help you to decide if I have the profile you want. It will be more reliable than if I simply guess from the paragraph you wrote what you need, get it wrong, but actually have the kind of experience you want.

Re: Anon CVs

Not necessarily. If the job needs the qualifications of the person with two degrees and that much experience, then sure, the younger person isn't going to qualify. If the younger person would qualify, you might see the one with more experience as having more to bring to the role which could result in a faster or better solution to your problem. In many cases, what they did during the last few years might be more important than their degrees seeing how much technical skills can be gained while working. There are many jobs that could fit both suggested profiles.

Re: Not New News

I've been in the job market for significantly less time than you have, to the point that I just overlook that sentence as having no meaning. I see something like that on almost every job posting, whether their work-life balance is good or not. It feels to me that someone somehow convinced everyone writing these posts that if you don't have some adjectives like that, you're asking for someone who has no initiative. I'm still waiting for job descriptions that tell you exactly what thing you'll be working on, rather than being sort of vague with general concepts of what the company does. Invariably, my first question asked during a job interview is "What specifically would I be working on", and the interviewer always knows enough details that I can get a good picture with two or three questions, so they could put that in the description instead of some HR template.

Re: So?

I don't want to defend them, but it sounds like they just collected resumes. Having someone receive a copy of a file I already have then tell me to go away because it's research is a lot better than going through interviews when they don't want me. Neither feels good, but one wastes two minutes of my time, whereas the other can be significantly worse. I'm not sure if there is a way to do this ethically except surveying people about what they'd apply to, and I don't think you'd get valid results with a survey.

Yes, it's true: Hard drive failures creep up as disks age

Re: "their failure rate over the past four quarters [has] now reached 3.42 percent"

It doesn't look like they're trashing the lot just yet, but they are getting extra copies of the data on them in the expectation that they'll have several failures in the near future. They may be kept around for existing data, but I doubt they'll put new data on them and will be cycling them out as they start to fail.

Sage accused of misselling perpetual licenses it knew would soon be obsolete

I think it just means perpetual license, but support could end after fifteen years. The license would presumably still activate the product, but you might not get what you wanted from it. I have, for example, perpetual licenses for old versions of software which won't get updates unless I buy new licenses or their upgrade packages, but I can still use the old version. At least until that got updated to "perpetual license until we break it tomorrow".

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: We all know why

Yeah, that's not it. It's going to happen around the largest or best connected cities, not necessarily the capitals. London is the largest metropolitan area in the UK. It has a lot of power and networking and technicians and companies in it. In the US, the Washington metropolitan area is the fourth largest. Yes, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago exceed it, but that still makes it kind of big. There are many DCs in those cities as well, but in some cases, people outsource to areas with good connections to those cities, which puts more pressure on the eastern US cloud regions.

In some other countries, the capital isn't as large and won't be the bottleneck. When we see a story about Canada, expect to hear about problems near Toronto, not in Ottawa. In Australia, it will be Sydney and eventually Melbourne, not Canberra. Germany has a few cities it could be first, but I'm betting on Frankfurt. It's about where everyone puts the servers, which doesn't have to be where the capital is. Even if surveillance consumed most of the resources, which it probably doesn't, that's not a latency-sensitive activity so it's likely they'd use resources in more remote parts over which they have more control, not rented facilities next door.

Chipmakers warned: US CHIPS Act funds are not for 'stock buybacks'

Re: Capitalism

You are aware that you can sell your share for a higher amount if the company does well and is generating more profits, and that they can pay you a higher dividend if they have more profits, right? This just says that they can't take a chunk of money and call it profit. They can still build something with it, generate a real profit from the use of that thing, and use that profit. They also won't have to pay as much in the construction costs for the thing that eventually generates the profit. Unless your theory is that they will fail to build the facilities they say they will, this should encourage you to hold their stock, all other things equal.

Linus Torvalds releases Linux 5.19 – using Asahi on an Arm-powered Mac

ARM itself already dropped most of the standards, which is why the teams getting Linux to run on it have to hack around with their firmware. To get Linux booting on an Intel-based Mac, you put in your disk and select it in the boot menu. One standard down. In addition, it's not just ARM64. It's ARM64 with Apple's extensions added, and they haven't documented everything they did. You can just ignore their extensions and compile for straight ARM64, at least for now, but it probably won't be as efficient. They don't follow standards when it suits them because they don't care about the limitations of not doing so. To be honest, I think a lot of their users don't care either, so maybe it's logical if annoying.

As for "very high" build quality, that's being charitable. They have acceptable build quality most of the time. Some models from the competition are clearly worse, but Apple's not perfect and the other manufacturers do it too. Apple has design defects, they have unrepairability issues, they have had model-specific problems and persistent ones. If you compare it to the cheapest Chromebook made by another manufacturer, Apple's looks better. If you compare it to a laptop of similar cost from another manufacturer, it's a toss-up who will end up with the better quality, design, or cost-efficiency.

Samsung adds 'repair mode' that hides data on Galaxy smartphones in South Korea

Re: How do you turn it off again?

It sounds like you might need more credentials to turn it off than you do to open the device. Perhaps the pin unlocks the device, but the user has to enter their account password to disable the feature. I wouldn't expect this to withstand an attack by someone with exploits, but hopefully it's at least a step above what we have now.

Tim Hortons offers free coffee and donut to settle data privacy invasion claims

Re: Why. RAR, particularly?

I think .zip files are almost always the first archive format to be decompressed by scanning or blocked outright. I know some email systems simply won't accept any .zip attachments at all. I don't know why .rar wins out in the other format wars, as I can say from experience that I've never found a mail system that rejects .7z files. Maybe because the format's not open source, attackers think scanning tools are less likely to implement decompression for it than for the other formats that are open, but I think the code to decompress has been written already, so I don't think that would be well-placed confidence if that's their reason.

Re: Why. RAR, particularly?

That can either go to a URL or to a local application, including arguments. It's likely that's either a way to launch a shell with a small script that pulls down other data or a way to send someone to a webpage without having a link in the email text. Don't click on one.

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: freestanding!

Very good idea if you never use any symbols or language other than English. There's a reason we use Unicode now. Parsing the bytes and figuring out what they mean is a problem competent programmers have dealt with for a long time.

Re: freestanding!

"a. Sell one item with unlimited lifetime for an one-time fee (quaint old method)"

How many things can you think of that did that? I've seen many claims for unlimited things, and not one has really been unlimited. Some of them are limited at a level above what I'm going to do, so for me they end up working well, but they always have some restriction or expire. For example, you list smartphones as having a limited lifetime, which they do. How would a company be able to make that unlimited? They could make it longer by supporting updates and repairs, but eventually, the phone will get broken or the software will expand to use more resources than are available. Nothing lasts forever.

Reg readers tell us what they wanted for SysAdmin Appreciation Day

Re: What do I want?

or to ask even the most basic diagnostic questions such as "What is the error message?"

This is the one I wish I didn't have to ask so often. People often come to me reporting either "It gives me an error", or with some inaccurate paraphrase of the error text. It's on your screen and you're calling me. Is it too much to ask that you call me before you dismiss the message? If you're calling me later, take a screenshot, write it down, copy it into an email, leave the box open, whatever you need to do so I get the text the computer wanted me to see.

Not long ago, a user translated "This site has an invalid security certificate because it has expired" into "My antivirus software wants to control my system's certificates". I'm not even a sysadmin or helpdesk person, but I still get this too often. My profound sympathies to those for whom this is an even more frequent experience.