Posts by doublelayer

Publishers land killer punch on Internet Archive in book copyright court battle

Re: "Killer punch"? - no, gasoline for self-immolation by copyright 'rentiers'

"What better than to offer the Archive protection within Russia?"

Many things would be better than placing such a wonderful resource under the control of a dictatorship. I'm not particularly interested in watching Russia's censorship organizations loose on the IA.

"The transition from rentier (monopoly) economics to a proper market-driven set of business models truly compatible with market-capitalism, I have sketched elsewhere."

And when you have, I have objected to the unworkable dream you've sketched out. The dream where people continue to make stuff and give it away for free because a bunch of nice rich people pay for it out of the goodness of their hearts. If I can write any utopian idea and pretend it's a plan, it would be great, but it's usually better if we stick to the bounds of realism.

"Law lacking power to enforce is nothing more than recommendation."

This law has the power to enforce by massive fines with a government that has the ability to collect those fines. The Archive follows the laws; they're not about to go underground. I don't like the decision either, which is why I'm hoping that they can find a path out of the penalties.

"Just possibly, the Archive shall be obliged to close down. Yet, that would be a terrible outcome for the rentiers. Widely, they would be perceived as having destroyed a noble effort to share knowledge/culture fairly."

Maybe, but that wouldn't be a big blow to them. It would be a much bigger blow to me and a significantly larger one to the operators of the organization. The general public isn't going to stop buying books just because some publishers sued a site they haven't used. I get that you'd like this success to spell the death knell for copyright, but the facts don't work with that interpretation. I disagree with you that doing that would be a good thing, but regardless, this case will not get us closer to that world.

Re: Puzzled.

Most library ebook systems use a different mechanism where the libraries purchase ebook licenses from the publishers. Those licenses have a variety of terms and probably vary a lot by publisher and country. For example, the license can limit how long or how many times the library can lend the book before needing to buy a new license, how many copies can be lent simultaneously, and when the license becomes available. I have heard, for instance, that publishers sometimes don't agree to sell any ebook lending licenses for new releases until the book has been on the market for a while. Therefore, anyone who wanted a copy when it was new would have to buy one. Meanwhile, a library lending out copies on paper could just go and buy some as soon as they hit the shelves.

The Internet Archive is trying to lend out digital copies of the book without getting a license to do so first. The publishers are trying to argue that owning a paper book doesn't give them the right to do that. Unlike software, it's not as if the publishers put in a EULA before you could buy a book, so whether or not the right exists will depend on laws that were written well before this was conceived by publishers or libraries. The law doesn't say whether that's allowed or not, so both sides are resorting to legal arguments that are tangentially related to the case and hoping a judge will decide one sounds convincing. Maybe at some point a law will be passed to clarify what rights exist and what rights don't, but I wouldn't count on it being soon.

Re: History

"archive.org is useful to preserve things that might otherwise fall into the bit bucket. To keep things from being "erased from history" use archive.today or archive.is instead."

If you really want something archived, archive it on all of them. That way, if something happens to one of them, even something as basic as a database not syncing properly, there are backups. I don't know about how often the IA removes data, but they must face a lot of copyright claims and having seen some of the stuff that's uploaded there, some of those claims are entirely valid. I'm curious what examples you would provide that aren't legitimate copyright claims. Like it or not, even if it's being done to scrub something from the record, if it's the copyright holder who wants it scrubbed and they didn't use a license that explicitly waived that right, they have the right to have it taken down.

They're not responsible for ensuring you followed the law. The publishers are arguing here that, since it's hard to confirm that you're not breaking the law, therefore you shouldn't be allowed to do something that makes breaking the law possible. I don't think that particular argument is very strong. Sadly, neither was the Internet Archive's attempt to claim that copying a paper book into a digital file is a transformative activity covered under fair use, which normally involves much smaller uses like posting quotes in a review or making a parody. I'm not an expert in copyright law, and both sides are going to need one to have a chance of resolving this in the way they want. I'm hoping the IA can find a way to continue, or at least can escape large penalties, but they will probably need to drop some of their more expansive arguments to do that.

Fresh models of Framework modular laptops in the works

Re: Half-Sized Function Keys

I can't say I understand this. I would agree with you if they had taken the keys away, the way Apple did when they thought a strip of touchscreen would be better (I still don't get it). That has very little muscle memory potential, assuming that the touch positions are static and don't use the screen part. However, with half-height keys, there is still tactile indications where the keys are, they're still the same length across, and they work identically. I also can't think of any laptops that don't make those keys a bit shorter, so part of the problem may be that I've gotten used to that and don't notice any problem. I'm also a heavy user of keyboard commands and I don't find the shorter function keys causing any problem as I use them.

Since the keyboard is removable, it should be possible to make a different layout that also fits into the case. I'm not sure if you'd have to redesign the input cover (the part with the keyboard, power button, and trackpad, or if you'd accept a keyboard the same size as the original keyboard but with the keys positioned differently. Either way, it wouldn't require changing the computer to make this alternative keyboard. Unfortunately, you're the only person I've heard express this preference, so that is probably not enough demand to have Framework do it themselves.

RIP Gordon Moore: Intel co-founder dies, aged 94

Re: And I had just bought some more Xeons, too…

Might I suggest that you haven't done any calculations on this?

"In the UK the official year-on-year inflation rate is said to be around 10.4%. In reality it seems to have been a weekly 10% increase on food, sometimes 50% overnight."

Do you know what that would actually look like? People have really experienced that, but I can guarantee that you have not. If there was an average weekly inflation rate of 10%, then something that cost £1 a year ago would now cost £142.04. Has that happened? To anything?

"Supermarkets say it's because of inflation. I am more inclined to believe it's their price gouging which is driving inflation."

There's some of each, but you can see some of the causes in the increase of raw commodities. For example, at the beginning of 2022 wheat cost on average $7.58 US per bushel. When 2023 started, that had risen to $8.95, about 18% up. The destruction of Ukraine's wheat industry didn't help with this. That increases the price for items made from wheat without the retail outlets having to do it. Not to mention that, if you're in the mood to assume that every price increase is due to someone's greed, you are ignoring all the links in the chain at which a price increase can be inserted and putting it all on the one link you have direct contact with. It wouldn't be that hard to trace the price increases through the chain, but you need to acknowledge what the real increase has been before you can take that step.

Also, you don't appear to understand how such stores work:

"it looks more like they are doing everything possible to maximise profit": They would be, since they really like profit, but let's look at what you think they're doing to do so.

"removing own and 'no-name' brands,": Nope. The ones they make themselves mean they get to have a higher profit margin on them and they make more profit. The no-name brands they don't make also tend to be from places that cannot command customer demand and thus the stores get better profit margins from the sale of those as well. This change decreases their profitability, and it might have something to do with the fact that larger companies with their own brands may be better able to obtain resources when there is a shortage.

"keeping shelf stock low,": Sometimes this helps, but mostly when they would waste some by keeping more. If you would stock up if they had more available, they'd make more profit.

"limiting choice,": I can't argue with this one in general, but as we've already covered the choices they removed, I'm not sure I need to.

Re: Has anyone ever wondered

Even if the music was better and the people were kinder, why do you assume that it's the computer's fault? Maybe you're unhappy about changes that have happened during your lifetime, but people always have some changes they wish hadn't happened, and it's not the fault of every other change. For example, I'm guessing you're not old enough to have lived before cars, but some people were, and they blamed cars for the ills they saw when your generation was younger. Does that sound reasonable to you?

Computers have brought us a lot of positives. We can communicate over long distances much faster and cheaper than we ever could before. People have been raised from poverty with this global communication capability. Personal ties have been strengthened by simple changes like the fact that I can call my family or friends that live in a different country, time zone, or continent without getting a massive bill. People's lives have been improved because they can look up important information rather than hoping that their nearest library had a book on the topic (for those fortunate to have a local library at all). Some jobs of pointless drudgery have been replaced by twenty-line scripts. Computers gave us all that. They also gave us internet trolls to annoy us, but before they gave us those, they gave us internet communities where we can talk to one another, something we both appear to enjoy since we're posting here. Computers have not just given us good things, and there are places where their effect has caused problems, but before you jump to blaming every ill you see with the present on that change, account for all the things you take for granted now that you did not have back then and attribute to computers the positive and negative things they actually caused.

Re: I am not fan of corporate cultures...

his so-called "law" was in reality just used as a "licence to bloat" by his company, Micro$oft(sic)

He didn't make Microsoft, nor did he work there. I don't know what you have to do to somehow decide that Microsoft was his company. His "law" was about hardware improvements, whatever you choose to do with those improvements. You can use a doubling in processing speed to do your previous calculations twice as fast or to do twice as many things, including operating systems.

I'm guessing that, given the level of understanding you've demonstrated this far, that it's worthless explaining what that "bloat" actually means. I might point out that, for the extra CPU time operating systems use today compared to the 1970s, you get a lot of features that you count on every day. I might also point out that you're free to write your own operating system that ignores all of that and will run at impressive speeds, except it won't have such things as multiprocessing, which is probably for the best because it will also lack inter-process security. There's a reason that every operating system used today on general-purpose computers wouldn't run on a 1970s-era CPU: we value the features those operating systems provide more than the speed benefits of dropping them.

The most bizarre online replacement items in your delivered shopping?

Some cats will eat dog food. A cat I had as a child didn't complain when we spilled some extra dog food and she got to snack on it. However, it would not be healthy for the cat to eat only dog food because it has a lot less protein which is necessary for the feline digestive system. Even if you have a cat that isn't picky about what kind of food it eats, you should use food intended for cats to ensure it contains necessary nutrients.

How Arm aims to squeeze device makers for cash rather than pocket pennies for cores

Re: Licencing Per-Device

Those modules aren't standardized. You could build a socket into which you can place an RP2040, but it would only let you swap in a different RP2040 at the moment. Other chips could be designed with the same set of pins, but they'd have to make sure their chip had the same peripherals as the RP2040 or it wouldn't work. Since it's not a standardized socket, I'm not sure it would count for their complaint.

Re: Licencing Per-Device

I would think that they would recognize how much they'd lose if they did that to the people using microcontrollers. If I worked at ARM and was pushing this policy, I would have applied it to the Cortex A series but would leave the Cortex M one alone. It's a lot harder to change out the higher performance cores that have been optimized whereas swapping to a new ISA for a cheap microcontroller that doesn't have to be too fast or efficient is easier, especially because manufacturers can continue to use old chips that are covered by the previous license while they test on the new ones. This is one reason why I'm not sure we have all the details, including a possibility that they're not going to do all the things the rumor suggests they might. Then again, there are many choices I would make based on a programmer's understanding of what would make money which professional managers don't do, so just because something seems stupid to me doesn't mean they won't still do it.

Re: Let's see how strong Arm's ARM is... Will they have much power to strong arm?

"So it seems that Qualcomm were right about what Arm are intending to do."

This adds a bit more to suggest it's probably true, but it's not yet confirmed. Basically, it's another rumor that's effectively the same as the rumor Qualcomm alleged last year. If, for the sake of argument, Qualcomm made it up, then seeing it again from someone who could have just heard it from Qualcomm wouldn't confirm it. I don't have any reason to think that Qualcomm made it up from nothing; I used the unlikely statement to demonstrate that we couldn't disprove something as absolutely opposite as that.

The ARM employee's statement, similarly, doesn't confirm that this change will come. It could be their complaint about what they see as a lack of technical development and would apply just as well if ARM intended to ask for a higher per-core price rather than changing the model this radically.

These statements aren't to say that I think the rumors are false. I have no special knowledge that would confirm or refute the rumor. It's certainly possible and could generate more profit, so there's reason not to reject the rumor out of hand. Still, at the moment, it's a rumor, not a forgone conclusion.

Re: Licencing Per-Device

This only applies if Intel and AMD decide to adopt the same policy. It's not inconceivable that an ARM chip could be socketted, and I'm sure it's been done at some point in the past, but none of the boards with ARM processors in common use have that setup. I've not seen a single SBC, let alone phone, tablet, or device using an ARM microcontroller somewhere, that has it socketted like that. The closest that I've seen are SOMs like the Raspberry Pi's Compute Module. That wouldn't be prohibited by this design, since the SOM maker sells those modules directly and doesn't necessarily make the hardware they're installed in.

IT depts struggle with skills shortages despite Big Tech layoffs

Re: This is where you realise that knocking up a webpage in Dreamweaver*

If you're using PHP to do something local, such as a backend to a form that's only running on the content, you can set up a local HTTP server with PHP pretty easily. This gets more complex if you also have other components, such as a database which you'd have to clone or a cluster you have to interact with. Depending on your server, you could mount the directory on your local machine and do all the editing directly on the remote files such that saving is as good as uploading, but this depends on having enough access to set it up for the server concerned.

Russian developers blocked from contributing to FOSS tools

"What are you even talking about here?"

I'm saying that you made up a lot of suggestions. All your suggestions sound basically Nazi-ish, so clearly that's either the example or similar to the example you were going for. None of them came from what they said; you invented all of them. As such, you made up a fake story about what they wanted not based on anything they said and attempted to use that fake story to discredit them.

I can interpret this in two ways: you didn't like their views and resorted to making up a story to make them sound bad, or you really don't understand how what you said and what they said don't line up. Neither option is good.

Re: In a word...

But in the world we live in, that didn't happen why? If you're saying that domestic protests about the war prevented the military from being as effective as they could be, that's obviously wrong. If you're instead saying that, given more time, the war could have been won by the American military, that may be true but it proves the original point. The war might have gone longer if the protests had not happened, whatever the results of that longer war would have been. You can think that that war would have been better or worse if extended, but what's undeniable is that, without domestic protest, it would have been extended. Domestic protest against wars tends to end them faster, though a dictatorship tends to have more resistance to doing things just because most of their citizens think that's the best plan.

"Does this sound anything similar to another situation that has happened historically in the world that you may have learnt about in school?"

What? Making up a story about what someone wants that isn't backed up by anything they said and was written entirely by those who opposed them, then using that fake story to discredit them? Yes, I learned about that kind of thing. It's not great for you to use that tactic. More people will recognize when it's being employed so flagrantly. There are better propagandists out there. You might want to learn from them if actual debate is beneath you.

Re: Typical Russian whining

It would be very dangerous to put anti-Russia comments on your LinkedIn page if you were living in Russia. That is not what I or the person who originally checked it expect to see. However, what is not at all dangerous is to post nothing there, either nothing at all or nothing political. Nobody would be arrested for being silent on LinkedIn. Similarly, nobody would need to prove themselves by posting pro-war material there. The fact that he did suggests that he had a reason to, either he believes it himself or he wants others to believe he does. Well, no matter which of those it is, I believe he does, so objective achieved.

That depends where the code is being used. For example, they're blocking contributions that would add support for the hardware they produce in the mainline Linux kernel. That means that they can't sell the hardware as compatible with mainline and have to patch themselves. Fewer people will buy their hardware if it has that limitation. In other cases, there is probably much less effect on them, but it happens automatically because the people have been sanctioned. GitHub doesn't have an office of people discussing whether a certain person being banned will affect Russia's electronics industry. They have a list of sanctioned organizations and they push the button to ban people connected to them. They assume the people who made the sanctions list know what they're doing.

Re: Ridiculous

"these would-be FOSS contributors are not even living in a democracy. What would you do in their situation?"

I would do as thousands of their countrymen have done and leave the country. It's not fun for Russians who despise their government to pick up and live in one of the countries that still accepts them, but they do it. Some did it to save themselves from the draft, which I don't have any problem with because by doing so they also save the people their drafted selves would have to shoot. Some of them would never have been drafted and left before the draft intensified, but they left for their own consciences.

Now that I've said what I'd do, let's look at what he did:

"You may rest assured that this "sanctioned corporation" takes no part in this awful war,"

There's a reason it's on the sanctions list. No, it didn't send troops to Ukraine, but it manufactures electronics necessary to build weapons and as a precaution, it was added to the sanctions list. I don't have a problem punishing the company, which does not automatically extend to punishing its employees directly but they may be disadvantaged as a result. But he goes on:

"and even if making civilian server products can be viewed as somehow taking part, that part is definitely far less than what, say, BMW or Bosch took in WW2, yet nobody seems to have cancelled them or at least remembered what they've done, let alone their individual employees."

We remember what they did, but that was many decades ago and, you know, it ended. When the war was still ongoing, do you think people in the UK were importing a bunch of BMW cars? They were not. They were not allowed to.

"All this is stupid, xenophobic and racist. Especially you labelling me as a terrorist on the basis of my ethnicity."

And a completely incorrect statement of what happened. Nobody called him a terrorist and it wasn't about his ethnicity. They blocked his account in a sweep of sanctioned organizations and it's about his position. I know a person who is also Russian in ethnicity and contributes to open source software, but because she doesn't work for a sanctioned company or support Russia's invasion, she hasn't been banned anywhere. He knows all of this, and he's making this up because he doesn't have a response for the real reasons why he's been affected.

Tails 5.11: Secure-surfing 'amnesiac' live distro arrives

Re: I high tailed it out ...

I didn't just mean that you wouldn't be using Tails much in your life. Your points are good, but even if you use Tails every day, you'll still not experience that much of Gnome. You'll see it when you start up, you'll click on some icons to open the applications you're going to use, and that's basically the end of your interaction with the desktop. Since there aren't any files and few programs, the desktop is basically just a collection of icons for the few choices and most use time will be inside one of those applications.

Re: I high tailed it out ...

It's not really meant for your everyday use, so the choice of desktop is not as important. Unlike a system where you're going to run a lot of applications and store all your work, this system has a few included applications and, while you can install some others, they are reinstalled on each boot. If you object to Gnome because it makes your computer blow up, good to stay away. If it's just because you don't like the experience, you'll experience very little of it if you're using Tails the normal way.

Attackers hit Bitcoin ATMs to steal $1.5 million in crypto cash

Re: A more general cloud computing reminder

Of course there is. This isn't an indictment of cloud. It's an indictment of their security and their ability to build a system. Anyone run a VPN endpoint, including one that operates from on prem hardware? How about a public service? A server that accepts SSH connections without going through that VPN endpoint first? All these things are "a system granting access to multiple operators at the same time where some of them are bad actors", no matter who owns the box on which the service runs.

These operators screwed up their own security by insufficiently checking the authorization of people uploading code. It would not have mattered if they bought their own servers to run that code, because just by putting their insecure system on the public internet, they made the problem happen. There are two solutions to this problem: make a proper system that has security planned in and tested or operate the insecure junk in a closed network with no public access. Either could have worked. Both would probably be best for something this sensitive. They chose neither. Anyone who thinks this is a reflection on cloud, including the designers of the system themselves, does not understand cloud or security.

B-List celebs including Lindsay Lohan fined after crypto shill probe

Re: I can't wait till they hammer Brady and Matt Damon.

I know at least one of those was in an FTX advertisement, in which case they probably followed the rules which basically say that you can hire any actor to say that your company is great, but making them hide information as was done here is the problem. If the actor just read lines that the company wrote, then the company can be at fault for the lines but the actor isn't expected to check their legality, and if the company had the actor read the required lines while still conducting fraud elsewhere, then the actor's definitely not at fault for what the company did. I don't know if both of them did that or if the other one did something different, so this wouldn't always apply.

Unknown actors deploy malware to steal data in occupied regions of Ukraine

"In a war, i'd assume that ad-hoc hackers will be defacto working for the state and would be going for information with some form of useful application just based on "what would I do?"."

I had to think about what I would do, but assuming I turned to hacking systems as a way of helping out, I would not do it this way because, having obtained useful information, I wouldn't know who I could give that information to. If I've discovered useful information about Russian troop movements but I don't know someone high enough in military command that can use it, then what good is it that I know it? If I already had some, I'd try passing things around in the hopes that it gets somewhere useful, but if I had to pick a target, I would pick one that can be affected without having to have connections. The alternative is making the information public in the hope that the Ukrainian military will find and act on it before the Russian military found it and changed their plan, but the risk is that someone else would impersonate me and post false information, so that method has risks too.

Re: Powershell ?

They target Windows because the people they want to get information about are using Windows. If the people were all using Linux, they would target Linux. Malware that does target Linux has been successfully written and deployed against Linux systems, including many strains of ransomware. Did you also think that Macs don't get viruses a while ago? Do you think that now?

Stanford sends 'hallucinating' Alpaca AI model out to pasture over safety, cost

Re: "safety"

If those rude things consisted of "[Insert name of group] are murderous evil people who can never be trusted, here are some invented examples, why don't we oppress or kill them", that could lead to some unsafe conditions. Chatbots lack the filter that most humans have against saying things that extreme, but unfortunately there are humans who would have that filter about saying it but lack the filter about not believing it. Even if it hasn't said things of that nature as many other chatbots have, if they can't stop it from saying something more minor that they see as offensive or unwanted, should they have hope that it never will say something dangerous? I wouldn't.

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

Re: Seems pointless

Google may discourage it, but you'll find it everywhere. I have a collection of APKs from a system image for a device I was analyzing. I've checked about twenty packages. The small applications like the Latin IME and contacts app don't have any native libraries. All of the rest have them.

But Google says not to? Here are some of those:

com.android.chrome

com.google.android.apps.docs

com.google.android.apps.maps

com.google.android.apps.photos

com.google.android.gms (Nobody should be surprised with this one)

com.google.android.googlequicksearchbox

Everybody uses native libraries and for a good reason. Google can't pretend it's a bad idea when they do it all the time for the same reasons that others do, and you can't assume that Android is platform-agnostic when it uses so many things that would need recompiling even at the user-installed application level.

Re: long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

"To clarify, the "walled garden" I was referring to the operating system, where the core operating system, drivers and sub-systems can only be sourced from Apple."

You can install drivers and kernel extensions from third parties. By default, you will need to get a special certificate from Apple to do this, but they still allow you to build them and a user who is willing to deactivate their security checks can use unsigned ones. They have deprecated some interfaces used by kernel extensions and migrated behaviors to system extensions, but the ability to attach others' system modifications is still there. I don't think this qualifies for walled garden status as IOS does, where you cannot add something to the system unless it fits in narrow approved channels and Apple has approved every step of the process.

Re: Seems pointless

"Microsoft still haven't done it, despite the likes of iOS and Android demonstrating the virtues of not being tied to one architecture."

You might be surprised what would happen. IOS is on one architecture: ARM64, Apple chips only. They've switched once, from 32-bit ARM, and that might be termed a change, but it's not guaranteed that they could just push a button and have it all recompiled to X86 or something else. Android does use interpreted byte code in many places which makes porting easier, but a lot of applications use compiled components that are architecture-specific. Take apart an APK of an application you use sometime and check what's in the lib directory. There's a chance there isn't one and there's a chance you see a long list of architectures (if Google wrote it, there probably is), but for most apps, expect to see armeabi-v7a and maybe arm64-v8a if they've produced optimized code for 64-bit, and that's it. Those apps will need a recompile if the architecture changes and emulation isn't good enough.

Re: lovely machine

When you call it a "lovely machine", what are you referring to? So far, you've indicated you don't like the software, the processor, and the price. This seems mostly incompatible with calling it lovely unless you're particularly enamored of something else, like only having two ports or having non-replaceable batteries and RAM.

I'm not that impressed with it either. I'm glad they're using some open firmware for ARM, so maybe eventually we'll have more generic support for alternative operating systems, but since we don't have that, I'm not that interested. It's also expensive for something that's not a great machine. The only benefit I can see is the battery life if you don't use emulation, which is nice but I don't really need it at the moment.

Re: Now hand it to the FOSS desk....

It's probably useful to do, because I have seen at least once where Liam commented on someone else's story and several people assumed he wrote it and accused him of contradicting himself when what he really did was not entirely agree with the original author. Clarifying that he's the author makes it clear that it's not another person employed here, though looking at the username would confirm this.

Re: long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

I agree that Macs are not a walled garden and the original complaint is baseless. However, I have to disagree with "Apple even tell you how to [get around software they block]". No, they don't. I know how to do it, and one reason is that I've been called for assistance by everyone I know who got hit with the message that Mac OS gives when you try to run something untrusted. The message that makes it look like the file's been corrupted and does not tell you that you have to open the menu and select "Open", even though you just did that by clicking on the application, then possibly go into the settings to change a policy, then go through that menu again and then it will be trusted. They don't tell you how to do that. Still, because it is still supported, it would not be fair to call them a walled garden. Just a garden whose gate latches are weird and confuse people.

Re: long-term Windows users are used to this and will barely notice

I think it's a good option, but it's useful that, when updates are available, normal user-managed Windows installs give you the option to shut down without updating as well, an option that corporate-managed machines often ignore. The reason is that, if it's a laptop and it usually is, I might need to take it with me. Having it installing updates while closed in a bag and not plugged in is inconvenient because the machine can overheat or lose power. My solution to this would be to put it into sleep mode instead of shutting down until I'm ready to install the updates. I understand why companies do this, because I've seen enough people who would never install updates except when being threatened with violence so I'm aware that my acceptance and compliance is not universal.

Are you ready to go all-in, head-first, on a laptop? ASUS's Zenbook Pro 16X asks for that commitment

Re: Legacy

And every time a machine is reviewed, you post the same thing and praise Apple's processors as the only alternatives you accept, for some reason I don't really understand or care about. I might be able to save you some time in the future: if it's a review and Apple didn't make it, it doesn't have an Apple processor in it, so you don't have to read the article until you find that out.

The Shakespearian question of our age: To cloud or not to cloud

Re: The whole premise of this article is bullshit

"So are you saying that you agree that it is pretty much only people reselling cloud services that can benefit from the cloud?"

No, because I would disagree with calling them "reselling cloud services". I would call it using the cloud services. If I run a website that scales with demand, I'm not reselling their services because, by using my website, you don't get to set up anything of yours in the cloud. I am, however, relying on those services to conduct my business. For the same reason, if I decide I can run my site off on prem servers, I'm not reselling those either. I'm using them. Depending on how I use them, I might benefit from the cloud or on prem more.

Since you're posting here, I assume you have a technical background meaning you're well aware that some companies need a lot of servers to conduct their business and other companies don't need that many. The ones that need a lot of them tend to benefit more from the cloud, but most crucially the ones that need a lot of them but don't need that many all of the time are most likely to benefit.

Re: Shakespearian question?

I don't vote very often (I still haven't on your posts or anything in the thread), but I think the buttons make sense. There are many cases in which I disapprove of something but can't really argue against it. Here's a simple one. When a security event happens, there are often people who will post a comment like "They deserved it". I don't agree with this, but what should I say in response? If the person who said they deserved it didn't post reasons, I don't have anything to rebut. I could post "They didn't deserve it and I disapprove of your blaming them", but the downvote just shortens that. It will be equally divisive whether I post that message or press the button, because I'm still disagreeing. Instead of twenty copies of that useless rejoinder, we can see a simpler count and leave the wording of the response to anyone who feels they can respond to such a statement in a more useful way. This is why I don't mind the system as it exists today, but it's a subjective opinion so I don't expect you will agree with my reasons.

Re: The whole premise of this article is bullshit

The comment was intended to discuss the benefits of cloud servers, so it wouldn't relate much to manufacturing unrelated things. If your product is software that runs on servers you operate, a website that handles a bunch of visitors, or anything where your need for servers is related to the demand you have, then you can benefit from cloud's ability to scale and could consider that as a potential option.

If your business is making airframes, then your servers are likely not that important to you, because only a few people want airframes, they only want a few of them, and they won't care all that much if your order form makes them wait thirty seconds to confirm their request has been submitted. If you make software that thousands of people use daily, then it won't be acceptable to make them wait like that, so that company would care a lot more about their ability to scale than the airframe company. The same applies to people who use servers to present content to users. For instance, if I had to wait a long time every time I clicked on an article or posted a comment with the possibility that I'd get HTTP errors half the time, I would be less happy with this site. They use CloudFlare to help with some of that scaling problem in case they get a lot more readers than typical.

Re: Shakespearian question?

"At least have the guts to thumbs down and follow up with a reason why you're giving it."

I can generally summarize their reasons. Any time you see a thumbs down, it means "I don't agree with something in this". That's their reason. Why do they need to spam the forums with lots of copies of "I disagree with you"? When I disagree, I tend to post a response, but that's usually when I have counterarguments to your arguments that I feel are worth talking about. For the same reason that they don't have to post lots of "This!" comments when they agree with you and can just push that upvote button, the downvote button is the way to express disapproval without necessarily having to post a lengthy response.

I didn't vote either way on your comment or any other comment in this thread. However, I can probably explain why some of the people downvoted and didn't leave a comment. They might disagree with the idea that someone is bad for disagreeing with a company's decision to give a platform to someone else. They might agree with the disapproval of the person concerned, or they might think it's irrelevant. That is not a comment that needs a lot of explanation; one person says they care about this detail, and other people either don't care or feel the opposite way. Comments saying "I feel the opposite way" are content-free, so they use the button instead. Presumably some people avoided posting "I feel the same way", and they pushed the upvote button.

If you disagree with my explanation and you want me to understand why you think I'm wrong, post a reply. If you just think my approach is wrong, but it's a subjective thing that can't be defended either way, here are some quick vote buttons.

Re: But...

"If everything you need for your business is at the other end of a service that's down, you're stuffed."

That's true, but that's equally true with an on prem system. Unless the people are there to fix it whenever it breaks, you can have the same situation and it's just as bad. I've experienced this from the maintainer's and the user's sides. I maintain equipment for a charity that doesn't have a full-time person to do it. I have a full-time job as a developer at a different company, so my maintenance usually happens out of hours. When their on prem server (in my defense, not one I set up) failed during working hours, they had problems while they failed to get my attention because I was in meetings and then had to work with my instructions on what to do over the phone because I wasn't able to be there in person. Obviously, a company will probably have more than one part-time volunteer IT admin, but if the admins who know the system are unavailable, it can be broken.

The cloud can also be broken, but the admins are there to get it back up and generally do so quickly. I've used a cloud service that had an outage, and without having to do anything, it was back to normal in a matter of hours. Had we deployed services in multiple regions, we wouldn't have been affected anyway, but this was a test environment. That point is the most important one. If you can't withstand the service failure, you need to have redundant and backup systems, whether it's on the cloud or in the building. Neither one will prevent you having that dependency.

Ex-Meta security staffer accuses Greece of spying on her phone

Re: PMSL

"Shouldn't you be bowing your head in shame if you're a "security staffer" who allowed themselves to get pwned (if the allegation is even true)?"

No. As someone who works in security, one thing that you will find out if you don't already know it by working in security is that you are not impervious to attack and nor is anyone else. For the same reason, if you're an expert at self defense tactics and someone shoots you, that is not a cause of shame for you and it does not exonerate the shooter. Victim blaming doesn't help.

How the Internet Archive faces potential destruction at the hands of Big Four publishers

Re: Rearguard action by IP rentiers is fierce but destined to fail

You've made this argument before, and there's little chance I can do anything to convince you otherwise, but you can't do complex work on the hope of patronage. I make plenty of stuff which I give for free to anyone who wants it. In fact, I end up paying for that because it's using servers I set up and pay the bills for. That's great when I don't care about profit, and in many cases, I don't. The reason I don't care about profit is that I have a job elsewhere which makes me the money I need to live, so making the stuff I'm giving away can be a hobby. I don't tend to spend a lot of extra resources doing that, though. I've put a donation button on one such site for people to reward me for the work they're generating. Over the five years that's been there, it's been pressed exactly once. I could not live by doing that work, and if I found myself in a situation where I needed to get those expenses elsewhere, those free resources would lose my attention if that's what it took.

Copyright exists because there are people who value the production of ideas and intangible knowledge enough to pay for it, but they won't if you insist on everything intangible being free. If you destroy copyright, then you'll still get anything that a rich person wants enough to pay for someone to make it, and many things where a relatively rich person has free time and makes it just for the love of making it, but you'll lose anything where the creators created the work and needed money. From investigative journalism to good literature, it has often been created by people who needed payment to continue making it, and in the past they've been able to use copyright to get it. Your plan has side effects that you should stop ignoring.

Re: Best place on earth for radio recordings.

I don't want them to go away and I don't think the people expressing surprise want that either. I have donated to them in the past and I benefit from their services. Still, with the level of copyrighted work they're hosting, it doesn't surprise me that they've got people angry at them about it.

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Re: Peak China?

"Xi (I have heard) is obsessed with stability. Nothing must rock the boat."

Not unlike the history of Russian leadership, until they decided that now they were stable, they might start rocking someone else's boat. Before their invasions, they were focused on stability. Economic stability, improvement of Russian infrastructure, destruction of movements inside already-held territory that were opposed to them, making sure they'd never have to worry about elections. They had a lot of chaos from the 1980s and 1990s to sand down and it took a while to get that. After they started messing with their neighbors, they realized the risks of sanctions and therefore cooled down a bit between Syria and the 2022 full invasion of Ukraine to get a few more things stable, such as reducing their international debt and storing up money and resources for their domestic economy. Newly stabilized, they resumed the tactic of turning up the instability on others.

I'm sure Xi wants stability. That's going to cause enough problems for anyone unfortunate enough to live in China. The problems for people outside China will come (well, they're already here, so get worse) when he's comfortable that he has the stability he wants. At that point, he will have the insulation he needs to start playing with other people, generating chaos that he hopes won't affect him too much.

We read OpenAI's risk study. GPT-4 is not toxic ... if you add enough bleach

This whole article? Or just the input to ChatGPT? The rest of the article is about all the chatbots, and does not rely on ChatGPT to write it. Since it doesn't rely on any features of ChatGPT to provide information for the article or to prove a point, the article isn't invalidated.

As for that prompt, it demonstrates that ChatGPT is willing to assume what GPT4 is (if I anthropomorphize it) without understanding, which demonstrates something about the chatbots. It's also not a bad response to the query and somewhat correctly describes the risks even though there's a bit too much praise in it. Compared to some of the worse blather I've seen from ChatGPT, I found that quote to be pretty good.

One of its problems is that it doesn't behave like us. If someone asks a question here, I decide whether I know the answer to their question and whether I can write a good response to it. Maybe I'll only write something if one of those is true, but if both are false, I won't hit that reply button. GPT doesn't ask those questions, can't understand the answers, and always tries to make a reply. It's going to generate more wrong answers even with all the people who don't know what they're talking about simply because it lacks the ability to decide whether to respond.

The other problem is that when I have real filters, where I understand that something is wrong so I never claim it, GPT only has rough filters that understand that certain clusters of words are probably wrong so avoid those, but if it phrases the same concept in a different way, its filters don't work. Unfortunately, I don't think I can claim that humans generally have functioning filters for wrong (either factual wrong or moral wrong), so maybe that is more of a similarity with us than I'd like it to be.

IT phone home: How to run up a $20K bill in two days and get away with it by blaming Cisco

Re: Mobile dongle and ISDN

This is why I have roaming turned off on my phones. I'm not near enough to a border to set it off very often, but I figure it's much easier for me to manually enable that if I travel than to ever hit it by accident. I'm not sure how highly they would charge me if I did use roaming, but I can see the charges for international calls to countries they haven't zero-rated and if it's anything like that, I'll be avoiding roaming when I can.

Re: Isn't that Configured Backwards?

It could be either type of emergencies. For example, if there is damage to the wire bringing your phone connection to your house, which could be caused by a variety of things, then your mobile phone will still work in an emergency of that nature (yes, its wires can be damaged as well, but they likely have more backups than you do and if that tower fails, there's likely another one in range that can be used instead). If an emergency happens that involves both systems operating on backup power, then the landline can be the emergency option if the batteries run down as expected.

Google: Turn off Wi-Fi calling, VoLTE to protect your Android from Samsung hijack bugs

Re: Apple

Your attempt to put down Apple is showing your ignorance on the topic.

"Or even if it means buying new hardware because your current device can't install/run the update."

You're talking about Android, aren't you? Apple supports the latest operating system on most of their devices for about seven years. When an update is released, all those devices can install it on the first day. There is no delay. What if your device is too old to run it? They're also known to release security patches for the last supported operating system version as well. When the latest devices were running IOS 14 but some devices had been stuck on IOS 12, they released security patches for IOS 12. Those were also available at the same time. It's Android where there's doubt if a security patch will get to your hardware and how long it will take. By the time an iPhone doesn't get the feature updates anymore, security patches for an Android device released at the same time have stopped (unless you've installed a custom version that somehow manages to patch even though it was so hard for the manufacturers). That iPhone will get a few more years of security-only updates as well.

I'm happy to complain about it when Apple does something bad like this. In fact, I'll do it right now: they do cut off their Macs' security and operating system updates too early and for no good technical reason. Had you been talking about Macs, we could have agreed and had a fun time trashing their artificial obsolescence record. However, that record is bad because I'm comparing Macs to Windows and Linux computers. I have to compare iPhones to Android, and the iPhone's security update situation is better than the best Android devices out there and almost incomparably better than the average.

John Deere urged to surrender source code under GPL

Re: why is it so hard to follow a simple license?

It certainly happens at times, but in a lot of cases where people get involved, it's not. A good example concerns one of the projects that's done a lot to protect their GPL rights: BusyBox. BusyBox used to sue basically everybody that used it and didn't give the source. They were so prolific compared to everyone else that embedded Linux firmware users started making alternatives like Toybox, which is why Android doesn't use it.

We would hope that all this action by BusyBox gave us some useful code, but the developers who looked at all the source from companies they sued found otherwise. They found that most places had either not modified the code at all or had demonstrated their incompetence by patching in code something they could have accomplished by changing flags in the makefile. Rarely was any of the code the companies were hiding useful to the community; it was just hidden out of laziness.

Anyone who knows what the licenses mean wouldn't have a problem using GPLed utilities like an embedded Linux system, because they know they don't have to release anything secret. They would also understand that using a GPL library would require them to release code they want to keep internal, so they should be careful enough not to do so. This clearly won't apply to everybody, but so much GPLed code out there is part of a runtime means that you'll see that more often even for developers who don't understand licenses in the slightest.