Posts by doublelayer

Netflix sued by South Korean ISP after Squid Game fans swell traffic to '1.2Tbps'

"The problem here is that the Internet is a hugely inefficient way to deliver television to millions of people compared to broadcasting radio-waves, and that's not going to change any time soon."

It's not that inefficient for delivering specific videos. If I want something that you don't want, then the internet gets it just to me without impacting you. Radio waves work very well for people who all want the same thing in the same format at the same time, but a lot of modern videos don't work on that basis. People want video on-demand, they want to watch things that others don't want to, they want full streams which aren't popular with their neighbors, and in each case wire works better than radio waves. This isn't new or limited to the internet. Although digital broadcast has increased the number of channels you can send through the air, it's nothing to the number you can send over a wire.

Re: If only there was a protocol to replace client/server by a network of peers

And this would decrease the bandwidth when lots of people want the same file how, exactly? The servers didn't go down. The network was overburdened. P2P will do nothing to change that.

Re: Frightening...

I suppose that's a commentary on Google's changability. I get the wikipedia article about the animal and two non-squid-game results on the first page of Google. Everything else is about the show, and mostly because Google's auto-suggester is pushing most real results onto the second page to make room for news articles and videos about the show they want me to read. If I go back to Duck Duck Go. I get three articles about the animal, including anatomy and behavior; two about cooking squid; the wikipedia article for the animal, the Squid caching proxy, a dictionary definition, and a mobile app.

I stopped using Google a few years ago for privacy reasons, but now I'm thinking I might have won on quality too.

Re: Looks like the ISP wants 2 bites of the cherry

"Doesn't the ISP have a fiduciary duty to supply reliable service to customers who don't watch Netflix, but may need to remain connected with whoever provides service to Netflix for, say, work reasons?"

No, or at least not any more than they have a duty to let people watch Netflix. They decide what their duties are when they make a contract. They make two kinds of contract: subscriber contracts with their customers and peering contracts with other ISPs. If they decide to be one of the few ISPs that blocks part of the internet without government censorship, then they have the right to do that and they'll undoubtedly lose customers (subject to anticompetition laws depending on the government and market involved).

If customers requested the same amount of bandwidth, but it all went to different sites, the ISP would just have to figure out what they're going to do, be that decreasing speeds or putting in more capacity. It doesn't change anything that they're using one particular site this time. They can use their various peering arrangements to try to extract more money from the places sending them that data, and it might work, but if they fail to do so, their product suffers. That's like the fights between airlines for airport landing space--you can't cut off an airport without angering some people who want to fly there, so that's a business decision you have to make. The airline can't blame a customer for wanting to fly where they don't want to go, and SK can't blame Netflix for having data that people want to read. SK can only change the terms for people with whom they have contracts, and Netflix isn't one.

2FA? More like 2F-in-the-way: It seems no one wants me to pay for their services after all

Which is more work, so it is harder. If you want it to be even more secure, keep disabling the easiest method and adding another one, like this:

1. Don't use SMS, so SIM swapping won't work.

2. Make the user have a passcode on their phone, so simple theft won't work.

3. Make the authentication app have a custom unlock code, so stealing a phone after somehow extracting the device code from the user won't work.

4. Etc until you are happy with the level of difficulty and risk you're dealing with.

Having just a password is around -4 on this list.

A user id never was a security proposal. What it is is another detail the user needs to remember for almost always no reason. I have a username here to identify myself to you guys, and in fact I don't even know why I set it to what it is--I couldn't think of anything back when creating the account and went with this one. For other things where I don't need a pseudonym to label myself, there is no purpose in a custom username. It's another thing to memorize, and it doesn't secure anything.

Got enterprise workstations and hope to run Windows 11? Survey says: You lose. Over half the gear's not fit for it

Re: Windows 11 Beta

This argument mostly doesn't work for two reasons. First, if you get malware on your machine, it's probably not because you have old drivers. Yes, your hardware may have vulns which are a problem, but you could have that now and it's not Microsoft's problem. So new drivers will probably be a little better, but not as big a deal as you make it out to be. Second, their stated requirements do not exactly align with your driver plan. There are processors older than that generation with more modern drivers and there are components which don't have them but will still work under Windows 11, to say nothing of the TPM requirement which has a similar age effect but nothing to do with drivers. If that were the only reason, it really would make sense to say so and check for that.

One other problem: they're not just saying that they won't help with support. They're also actively putting stumbling blocks in the way whenever the hardware doesn't meet their requirements. Sure, for the insider builds, they're minor and can be circumvented with a few scripts or registry changes. I do not think it will stay that way as production builds run along, and in any case I wouldn't do that on others' machines. If Windows 11 becomes insecure on older hardware, it's almost certainly not due to outdated drivers. It's because Microsoft will have made the update process so convoluted that people don't patch the holes that will be there, and in that case Microsoft is entirely culpable for what will happen to the users.

Re: Immutable OS’s are the answer

Among other things, you'll find that installing things, changing OS configuration, and updating components for security are kind of hard when it's done that way. I assume you'll have a writable location where you put all your programs, and eventually all your utilities, until your immutable OS is just a kernel floating around with all the same problems that a mutable OS would have.

Re: market position

That argument would work quite well if it weren't for the many people running the beta builds on lots of hardware that doesn't meet the requirements. Old chips, and in some cases, chips that never were supposed to run Windows 10 have been made to run Windows 11 correctly. There is, therefore, no reason they can't use legacy drivers. If Windows 11 cannot do so on release, it is only because they've cut out that code intentionally to break them. Windows has always supported backward compatibility with most things, and that has been one of its strengths when scheduling the year of Linux on the desktop, at least in the office. This probably won't dethrone them, but it isn't helping their case.

Re: "an upgrade will have to happen in the coming months or years"

Yes, eventually, as in 2025. People will definitely be using 10 until then, likely later. So the predictions that lots of sales will start in 2022 are extremely optimistic on Dell's part. The problem is that nobody really wants any of the stuff in Windows 11. The only feature that interests me in the slightest is the Android app compatibility thing, and I know I'm going to test it out, play around for maybe two or three hours, then never use it again. The features to be had are not worth the upgrading.

What do iOS and Android have in common? Their apps suck at privacy, boffins say

Re: Two-fold problem

"Don't blame the developers, blame the accout managers and senior management."

As a dev myself, this is almost always my favorite course, and more often than not is the correct one when there is a problem. This case is one of the exceptions that proves that rule.

If I don't want to punch you in the face, but I do it anyway, I am still guilty of assault. I might be able to blame someone else for making me, and they too may face consequences, but the fact remains that I had the choice to do it or not and I chose to do so. Only the most extreme of circumstances (I.E. someone being threatened with much worse should I not do so) would justify that, and that only for a generous victim--a judge wouldn't agree. The same is true of tracking users in an unlawful or unethical manner.

You are very right that people may not have the ability to instantly change jobs, and there is a price for those who refuse to act unethically when the person employing them wants them to. You will find, however, that there are a lot of those people, and the devs being asked to track people are not at all the worst off in that situation. Plenty of people have fewer opportunities and more restrictions, and yet obey the laws and act ethically. When they do not, they go to prison or I dislike them, respectively. Devs do not deserve more sympathy than the rest in that situation, and it does not exonerate them in the slightest.

Fairphone makes wireless earbuds less foul, by charging batteries carefully

Re: Which is greener?

I suppose that depends on the difference in lifetimes between the two. I've had a lot of cheap earphone cables break, meaning I've just discarded the strand of copper. If the earphones concerned were cheap, I likely discarded the audio bit at the end because it couldn't be replaced. If the cable was removable, things are probably better, but the jack can also sustain damage and it's harder to deal with that. If Bluetooth ones break less, then that could lessen the environmental difference. I do not have statistics to prove whether that happens.

Unpatched flaw 'weaponises' Apple AirTags to turn them into the phisherman's friend

Re: "We did not copy Tile"

"the Tile app uses literally every trick in the book (or iOS) to stay running, even if you don't want it to."

I need some help here. If you've installed the Tile app so you can track things like your phone from a unit or participate in the network, why don't you want it to run? That renders both functions useless, and if you didn't want them, you could turn them off. Apple, meanwhile, supports both things because they have their app running all the time, which they can do without hacking because their hacks are written directly into IOS. How is that any different?

When you say that Tile left a hole in the market, what exactly is that hole? The only difference I can see is that Apple's can use UWB which makes them easier to find if close to them, but Tile didn't leave that open, Apple forbade them from using that functionality despite Tile requesting it and protesting the double standard. If that's not the hole you saw, what is?

I don't use either, so you are probably right about reselling them (though they're cheap enough that I don't know how often you would try).

Re: "We did not copy Tile"

"As far as I know, iPhone users can't opt their phones out of being part of the network."

If they fix this flaw, I don't think there are many problems being part of the network. If you still want to opt out, Settings -> Apple ID (at the top) -> Find My -> Find My iPhone -> Find My Network -> switch to off. At least that's the path on IOS 14. I don't know if it has changed with IOS 15. It means you can't use the network yourself and you won't be part of it for others.

Anonymous: We've leaked disk images stolen from far-right-friendly web host Epik

"So hacking is OK if you disagree with the political stance of the target? Is that the message we're supposed to take from this exercise in flummery?"

Did the article say it was acceptable? No, it didn't. It just reported that it had been done and reported the facts. It never said the action was morally valid, legally acceptable (it wasn't, it's a crime), or condoned by the paper. Just as it would have reported a different kind of data breech, the article covered whose data was taken, by whom, what was claimed by those who took it, and the findings of people looking at the dump.

As for your assumption that dissent isn't being tolerated by the register, I note that your comment was not removed by the moderators who are undoubtedly reading this topic closely, nor have they prevented the upvotes you have received. They are allowing your views, negative to them though they are.

US school districts blame Amazon for nationwide bus driver shortage

Re: similar

Oh no. I've seen the amount of extra space they use when delivering SD cards, which do not have to go in separate boxes in case the packing machine is reading. To contain an entire child, they're likely to have boxes the size of houses.

tz database community up in arms over proposals to merge certain time zones

Re: Is the database really that big

"A slider that has one end labelled DST isn’t a complex interface"

I don't know about that. I remember distinctly a device which had time zone settings in two menus. The first required you to select your UTC offset. That for me was easy, but I doubt the general public who would also be using this device would automatically know that. The second: daylight saving time disable/enable. When I first saw that, I assumed that meant that I should select whether my country did DST. As far as I knew, my time zone contained some countries doing DST and some countries not, with all those observing it starting on the same date. I quickly realized how that was a stupid assumption, as there are time zones that don't have just two categories. I then assumed that the switch would change the clock by an hour, so I should just switch it when the clocks change. I tested it and it didn't.

Only later did I discover that there was an NTP update running, and I was supposed to switch it whenever the clock changed then wait for NTP to get UTC again, reflect my switch,and update the clock accordingly. By the way, that's skipping the part for many non-developers who aren't paranoid about getting DST wrong (XKCD) and don't know whether "enable" means summer or winter. Those who get it wrong have the clock wrong by an hour all year long. Is a "select your location" thing really so tricky? I ended up disabling NTP and just remembering to change the clock.

Re: Is the database really that big

The software the router runs all has to know about that. If you set up a filter, then:

1. The interface must know your time zone so you set it at local time.

2. The filter program, which is likely a different process, needs to know about your time zone.

3. The log the user sees has to know about the time zone.

Given that most of the routers out there are running something with a Linux core which can handle time zones and has sufficient storage to store the relatively small database, why not have the OS handle time zones like any software on a normal computer would do?

Re: Wow, just wow

We didn't lose any information. A program stopped containing it. You can look up historical time information in many places. The question is whether the TZ database needs to contain all of what it currently contains. For the same reason, the TZ database won't correctly handle the calendar switch before the Gregorian became nearly universal, but if you want to see how each country did it at different times making a big mess, you can still look that up. People tracking historical events do this frequently. It's like asking whether a textbook should contain the full text of a historical speech--if it is decided that it's not needed for the educational experience, one can still look the speech up and read it elsewhere.

If we throw out daylight saving time, which we can and probably should. We also have to deal with the countries that decided to have fractional time zones, among them Australia (some states at UTC+9:30), India (UTC+05:30) Canada (one province at UTC-3:30) and the weirdest Nepal at UTC+5:45. Also China's insistence on using one time zone when they're big enough to need three, and it's not even the middle one. Here's what currently happens to the map when you use the time zones as they currently exist: https://xkcd.com/1799.

Re: Is the database really that big

"I suppose there might be a few things like thermostats which have local interaction with a clock involved, but... Have a "DST" toggle button?"

No, please don't do that. Such things confuse a lot of people (I.E. which position should this switch be set to now? Was it set right the last time?). If it's smart enough to know what date and time zone it is, it can switch that automatically unless configured not to. Having to change a dumb clock is fine, but having to change something which is smarter and probably not obvious that it has a clock is just a pain. If we have to do DST (and we really don't), then the computer should do the adding and subtracting.

REvil customers complain ransomware gang uses backdoors to filch ransoms

I expect they take ransoms from a few victims, telling the partners that those victims simply chose not to pay up. That way, they get more of the profit while still giving the partners a few successes to keep them working. Likely one partner noticed people decrypting after being informed that the victim didn't choose to pay.

Amazon's AI chips find their way into Astro butler bot, latest wall-hanging display

Re: Ruining my entertainment

I don't think "dated" is the word you're looking for. I'd go with "better product designers".

Take the camera-on-wheels with its capability of carrying two kilograms of something. A perfectly useful method of retrieving items, is it not? Well, I think the science fiction writers have realized that such a device also needs an arm which can retrieve an item so it can be carried over, which this one just doesn't have. All this brings is a tiny motorized cart with limited range. You still have to have a person on both ends to move things in to and out of the thing, and I'm also guessing this moves slower than standard walking speed. So what good is that?

Amazon delivery staff 'denied bonus' pay by AI cameras misjudging their driving

Re: Too soon

As for time limits, testers definitely shouldn't work as long as drivers because they're doing different jobs. The testers are there to make sure that, if it turns out the cars are not safe enough to drive on their own, nobody gets hurt or as few as possible. If they're successful, they eventually leave and the cars drive alone with more public confidence in their safety. That takes a slightly different skill set than a normal driver who already knows that they have to control everything all the way through.

The AI-specific lanes would work, but I don't think that's going to happen. It's too expensive to install those in most places.

Re: Too soon

It's being pushed by people who build such things and hope to sell them, just like every other product. That's what companies do, and this isn't unusual. In addition, though the companies want it to succeed for their own profit, those things you mentioned are actually possible benefits we would get from having it done.

As for "it has happened before", yes it has and it was really the same. You could make arguments like this for literally any technological advancement and people did. That is what progress looks like, and pain is inevitable in it. When computers automated lots of administrative actions, some people lost their jobs. Yet we still benefited quite a lot from them and, since you're posting here, I suspect you have benefited more than most. Whether the drivers of delivery vehicles lose their jobs to self-driving vehicles, more train transport, or drones, it's going to happen if the technology is efficient enough. Instead of trying to hold it back in the hopes that nothing changes and we don't have to care about the negatives of the current situation, we should plan for what we're going to do when progress happens.

Re: Too soon

So, in your view, when they've had the car driving without people on their testing location and tried various ways of making it crash and it's working, what is the next step? I realize that your options are possible, but the only options I see are to try this, ban self-driving vehicles permanently, or allow them without testing. Which one is your plan?

As for the boredom possibility, I think it can be solved by reducing the hours that the testers are driving the cars. If they've worked 300 hours by day 32, that's a very long day (even assuming it's 32 days of working not 32 calendar days). Testing for two hours per day and swapping out people to do something else means they're less likely to be bored and faster on reaction time.

Indian state cuts off internet for millions to stop cheating in exams

Re: Are they really cheating?

Yes, because in the job they're going to get, they need memorization. They are going to be teachers. If you're teaching chemistry, you need to know chemistry. You can refer to the periodic table to find the numbers you've forgotten, but if you have to use the internet to know what a covalent bond does, then you're no use teaching that to the students because you'll spend half the time looking stuff up. The same is true of most other subjects. You may not need to be a genius, but you do need to understand the topic.

I generally think a lot of tests are unnecessarily restrictive, but successful searching does not mean you know what you're doing. The tests can allow the use of those resources most of the time, but only if the time limit means someone has to use them only in the important cases.

Metro Bank techies placed at risk of redundancy, severance terms criticised

Re: Agile isn't nebulous

Well, the Agile Manifesto principles list says that the business people and the techs should be working together, and they weren't doing that, and it said to trust each other and give them what they need. I'd say it disagrees on two points. Why I'm being asked to support a manifesto I mainly opposed in the original post is beyond me though.

As for this circumstance, I don't know the organization and I don't know what the IT department was doing. From your tone, it sounds like the external vendor provided a product which accomplished the goal, so the business got what it needed. I must also caution you that it can and does frequently go the other way--the vendor sells a product, IT is told to install it, it takes forever, breaks a lot, doesn't do what the business needs, and the business people have lost their purchase price. That's one place where the manifesto is actually correct: the business people and the techs should work together in the meetings in order to test out the products being offered to ensure the first option happens and the second is avoided.

Re: Agile isn't nebulous

"The thing is, argue against the statement?"

Sure. Let's try that.

"Would your customers prefer exquisite documentation about the project and the code base, or actual working software?"

Both, usually. In a project where documentation is weighted as heavily, then things take longer, but the documentation matches. Compared to the many projects I've seen where the documentation has problems, that is usually better. What happens there is that documentation is patchy, sometimes out of date, and you get more support requests. That's taking up your time and theirs because the docs were incorrect or missing. If I leave a job with documentation in place, someone can pick it up later. If I leave with patchy docs, they will either read those and come to hate me the second or third time the code doesn't match what they read or will have to call me to ask for help.

"Would your customer prefer working software now, with continual updates to improve it, or wait a lot longer and then have to wait another lengthy period for any changes?"

This one is easy: yes, they would prefer the agile method in most cases. However, I generally wouldn't. If the customer wants something, they should mention it at the start so I can plan for it. If they request a change 80% of the way through their original request which requires a redesign, they've wasted a bunch of my time. If they don't care how long I spend working on it and they pay me for it, that's fine with me. They do care about both things, so it's not. I'm fine with change requests that are minor, but nontechnical people rarely understand what is a minor change and what is massive.

"Would you adopt a development methodology that doesn't support changing requirements, even late in development? Have you ever had the luxury of an implementation project that didn't have those?"

Of course not. However, my methodology is to try to gather enough information so that there are likely to be few major changes at the end, not to embrace the chaos and let anybody change whatever they want.

"They're not vague statements, they're basic positions and principles."

Which get constantly redefined and which don't actually tell you anything.

"They're not prescriptive, they trust you to be a professional and take ownership of your own methodology. They don't tell you to do this or that, they encourage a mindset."

They encourage a mindset of basic platitudes. "Trust [the workers] and give them what they need" isn't original and it doesn't tell people anything. It's like telling people to be nice; it's better if they are, but exactly how that gets implemented and what benefits it brings need more elucidation.

"the Agile Manifesto merely articulates the approach that a very large group of experienced professionals have found to be the most effective."

Except the only thing I can understand clearly from their proposal is "accept change all the time". Everything else has multiple possible meanings.

"Disclosure: I've successfully delivered software into a production environment at a bank using Extreme Programming, and worked in and alongside teams using agile methods and methodologies for two decades. They deliver."

And I work on an agile team as well. It's fine. If we're actually agile, though how could I know? Our documentation does have the patchy problem, so maybe that's a good sign.

I think a lot of companies that do internal coding already did a lot of the agile process. Probably less in contracting or consulting, though I am young enough that I haven't seen a lot of what things were like before the manifesto. Accepting change didn't have to be written into the requirements if managers were still demanding things get changed, and knowing managers like I do, I don't think they just started doing that.

Re: Agile isn't nebulous

That depends who we let define it. If we all agree that the only true agile is the agile that can be agiled from the manifesto people, assuming we can actually arrive at a factual definition from their list of rather vague principles, then the statement can work. Otherwise, we end up with about ten things all called agile which basically boil down to "whatever we used to do in this company, but now we call it agile and use some words that came either from the agile manifesto or some other people who also liked it". To me, this morass of definitions is a great case for using the word nebulous.

But let's assume that we can throw out the many companies who use agile only as a buzzword. They're using it incorrectly. That still leaves us with the manifesto and principles list as you have linked it. Which I still think is incredibly nebulous. Starting with the manifesto itself, we get lines like this:

"Through this work we have come to value: Working software over comprehensive documentation"

I've debated this with people before. We cannot agree whether this means that documentation can be ignored (a lot of people take it this way and I think that's bad) or calling for a balance (essentially saying nothing). The manifesto has several things like this, where the comparison either leads to harmful absolutism or provides no information whatsoever about how to do both things.

The principles have more instructions. Maybe they will be clearer. Let's look at the first two (numbers mine):

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

So deliver early, then accept changes late. Have a development timeline which has a late, but deliver continuously. These aren't entirely contradictory, but it doesn't really answer anything. It ends up meaning "do whatever the customer tells you to do when they tell you to do it, whether or not it's reasonable". I can guarantee that while an employer might occasionally "[g]ive [the workers] the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done", the customer will never do the former unless informed about the needs at the beginning and the latter can't be guaranteed either. So how does one balance the desires of a nontechnical and demanding customer (or manager) with all these lovely sentiments? I certainly don't know, and the manifesto doesn't really say. That is why it is nebulous.

If your head's not in the cloud, you're not in the right place

Re: Sounds like a cry for help.

Maybe you're thinking of the OVH fire? France instead of the US but most of the rest of the facts match. They didn't move anybody and took a month to recover most of it.

The multiple DCs isn't so the cloud provider automatically moves you in case of problems, though in the case of smallish long-term problems they probably would. It is so you can have a multi-region setup which fails over without having to build multiple DCs. Having duplicate infrastructure in different countries when you're on prem takes months of planning and finding colocation facilities if not building or buying your own. Doing it on cloud can be a selection from a list box (warning, your bill will increase). Even doing it manually is a lot faster. Your company might already have computer rooms in multiple countries for you to do it, but a lot of them don't.

One difference is all the connections that go into such a system. If you need to know how to set up a distributed database which survives nodes going down, you will need to actually distribute a database and fail some test nodes. If the nodes are VMs, you can learn something. If your only fail test is unplugging half of your cluster and seeing what the other half does, you don't get to test that particular use case very well. And that's just one case where something needs a lot more hardware. Whenever there is a multi-system interaction, it's not something you can simulate on a couple Pis unless you're really dedicated to creating virtual networks which match the real ones and using containers or something like that so they're running all the systems which would be in separate VMs or servers in a real deployment.

Re: Sounds like a cry for help.

"Is an internal cloud really a cloud?"

In most respects, no. You don't get the scalability or redundancy of running on a much larger set of DCs, which is one major benefit of cloud infrastructure. Often what the "internal cloud" label means is one of two things. It could just mean more virtualization of things so they're not as tied to the specific hardware. A lot of people are doing that. The second option is using an existing cloud provider's software on hardware you own, which probably shouldn't get that label, as buying software from Microsoft which gets the Azure brand attached and could run on Azure is not really much different from buying other software from them when you're running on your own hardware.

Don't touch that dial – the new guy just closed the application that no one is meant to close

Re: Its the worst

I think that particular one is no longer a thing. With ACPI and equivalents, it's more likely that holding the button will force a shutdown whereas pressing it quickly will do an orderly one (or, we can hope, do nothing). That cuts off the last second of abort opportunity, but at least it doesn't leave that painful moment or the despair of having missed that too.

Re: the words "DO NOT CLOSE DOWN THIS APPLICATION"

I don't think so. Idiot proofing is also making things easier for every user, including the knowledgeable ones. Things meant to simplify the common tasks for someone who would mess something up if asked are also useful for people who just don't want to take the risks or who want to get things done faster. You may be one of those people who take pride in using the smallest number of tools to get the job done, posting your comments via telnet and manually entering the HTTP headers, but if you're not, you're benefiting from years of others' idiot-proofing of the software you use.

Re: the words "DO NOT CLOSE DOWN THIS APPLICATION"

"Certainly "bigger" and "idiot-proof" don't fit together very well."

Oh, they do some of the time. A small set of utilities likely don't include a lot of automatic recovery, warnings, etc. Very convenient for the knowledgeable, terrible for someone with more power than they should have. A bigger system created with the goal of idiot-proofing will have more ability to recover from a user doing something stupid, and that can be one of the most important things. You're probably thinking of systems made bigger not for idiot-proofing, but merely because of feature creep, which indeed doesn't help at all.

For the nth time, China bans cryptocurrencies

Re: Charles Ponzi would be proud

Of how many people don't know how his scheme worked, probably he would be. Cryptocurrency can be a poor investment, there are many crypto-themed scams, and it's also frequently failed at its own goal, but A) the popular ones aren't schemes at all, bubble is closer to the truth and B) some of the time when it is a scheme it's not a Ponzi-style one. Ponzi schemes are not a generic term for something where you lose money. It's a rather specific kind of deliberate fraud which requires several things a lot of crypto schemes don't have.

Texas law banning platforms from social media moderation challenged in lawsuit

Re: Forced speech

"For that matter, if they are not the press, then do they have a first amendment right to freedom of the press?"

Yes. Freedom of the press applies to everybody, because you can go out and buy a press.

"And that begs the question, is the 1996 act itself contrary to the first amendment?"

No, that's ridiculous. It does not in any way restrict the freedoms set forth there.

If you're Intel, self-driving cars look an awful lot like PCs

Re: Trickle-down effect?

The regulations must have something like this in them:

A car must be able to drive itself safely without using any technology or services located outside the car. It must have the ability to disconnect from any external services without special permission or equipment, and the method to do so must be made public so the safety testing can verify that it is safe without those connections. Any defect resulting in safety risks in this mode requires an immediate recall.

If it doesn't have that, the products will end up being unsafe or someone will have to take them off the users to prevent that. Either way, that's not acceptable.

Court of Appeal says AI software cannot be listed as patent inventor

Re: @Big_Boomer - Too soon

That depends. Real inventions of the kind that would advance the society of them and/or other sentient creatures, no. But they do use a lot of tools which we didn't give them, and given the quality of a lot of patent systems, I think they probably could get a patent accepted for the various rock and stick-based tools that they know how to make. We don't know how to make them as well because we don't have much use for them and we can build a better one with electronics, so probably no competing patents have yet been filed.

His approach is not the only thing that's flawed. His idea is also flawed, as the program isn't sentient and he knows it. In some ways, I'd like him to win if only for the law to now conclude that his not-a-person program, having been declared a person to own a patent, has been illegally enslaved for which he will now be charged. Until that aspect makes sense, the other ones don't either.

Re: The same DOOFUS (sorry DABUS) software...

"It's somewhat stupid, yes, but far more stupid patents have been granted."

That is if we're all ignoring whatever a "neural flame" is and why it's in here. With my astute understanding of none of this, it sounds to me as if this feature is a light which you notice as particularly associated with this container, so that if you forget that the container with the light on is the one sending the signal, you will remember that the one that flashes three times a second is the third from the left. Why a container that doesn't, according to its patent, contain any sensors or other technology to register events needs to send a signal to the user is an exercise left to the patent examiner.

Calling a LED anything with "neural" in it is one of those things that instantly tells me that the person who wrote it is scamming me, clueless, or both. I'll give this guy a special exemption as it's his software who wrote it, but that doesn't help the case at all.

Lithuania tells its citizens to throw Xiaomi mobile devices in the bin

Re: CHaaS

Of course they're different, in the sense that one of the things most attempts to define fascism can agree upon is that, if you're going to be fascist, you have to dislike communism. In execution, they're also different--one allows private corporations, one doesn't. In many other respects, they're very similar in their authoritarian governing methods. These differences are clear, but they don't change the fact that both are very bad, nor do they change the fact that defining fascism as corporate control is completely wrong. Corporate-controlled states are possible, undesirable, and different from fascist ones.

Re: CHaaS

"In Fascism, the corporations control the govt"

Incorrect. Fascism is tricky to define, but an easy method to start is to look at those countries which undoubtedly represented it: Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In each case, corporations did hold more power than in Communist countries, as they continued to exist. They did not control the government. The government got its power through its own force and it used that force to control the nation as it wished, including limiting, changing, or destroying corporations if they didn't do what the government wanted. You have demonstrated a lack of knowledge of what Fascism is, and therefore the rest of your comments do not need further rebuttal.

Re: Free Tibet!

Or, since the Chinese Tibet has many of those things but with different people getting the rewards, you could have a Tibet where the citizens decide what they wanted. A democratic one with liberty, or maybe it could be called free. Advocating for freedom doesn't mean we want to return to a situation which occurred several decades ago, nor do many Tibetans want that either. A feudal dictatorship and a modern dictatorship are both unacceptable.

Re: CHaaS

Yes, the situations are different. I don't like either, but one which Apple did because China required it of them is different from Xiaomi doing it despite there being no legal requirement to do so. In Apple's case, they're distressingly willing to do what China says, but if China stopped saying it, Apple would turn it off.

Better approach

Instead of banning a specific manufacturer or just asking people to throw away equipment that they're not going to trash, make software like this illegal, big fines for selling it. Then they will either remove it or your government gets a big fine and they stop selling it. That also helps when you find some other manufacturer has started to include that.

Re: CHaaS

Great proof that China isn't alone in censorship: an article talking about an American company censoring for and only in China. Maybe you could try proving the original claim instead?

Apple tried to patch this security hole in macOS Finder but didn't consider upper and lowercase characters

Re: Slash happy

This error message also known as the "Arrgh Apple error", because it's the thing that goes through my head whenever I see it. They use that message for anything they don't like in Finder. This means, for example, that they give you the same message for applications that they don't want to run for certificate reasons (you can bypass that by changing a setting and using the menu to open it, but it doesn't say that). People complain about Microsoft's "Something went wrong and here's a 32-bit hex value, have fun" messages, but as unhelpful as those are, they're at least truthful. "X can't be opened because it's damaged" is quite often an outright lie, but because they also give you that when something is really malformed, you can never know until doing your own investigation.

Google experiments with user-choice-defying Android search box

Re: without their knowledge or consent

From the article, they started testing it over a year ago, so <-1 years.

Did you mean "How long until this becomes a GDPR issue that someone with the power is actually looking at"? That might be a higher number as Ireland is in control and doesn't run fast on these things. It could be worth checking if you're in the "small number of users" and filing complaints.