Posts by doublelayer

FTX audit finds $415m in crypto mysteriously vanished

Re: So someone steals something that doesnt exactly exist

The inherent value of a lot of things are overstated. Sure, you can make jewelry out of gold, but if that's the only reason people were using gold, we'd do a lot less mining for gold. If everyone decided tomorrow that gold only has value for the stuff we're going to make out of it, like many other metals, the price would fall quickly. Gold wasn't used as a medium of exchange because there was a lot of demand for jewelry manufacture, but because it was hard to counterfeit, relatively portable, and barter got too complicated. Similarly, fiat currency's value isn't just taxes, but that you can use it to pay people for stuff that you want. In situations where you can't do that, it stops being valuable, even when you can still pay the taxes with it. Countries where the currency has collapsed see the use of other currencies because they're more useful in obtaining needed commodities even when taxes can't be paid in those currencies.

Bitcoin's not being used as a currency, but not because it doesn't have value. It's not being used as a currency because it's crap at being a currency. It is not accepted in many places, so you can't use it exclusively. Typical transactions are costly and slow, which doesn't apply to used payment methods. The value jumps around all the time, which while better than something that's always inflating, means that people can't be sure of price stability. For these reasons, those who have Bitcoin tend to treat it more as an investment commodity than as cash, which exacerbates a few of these problems.

Re: These massive loss figures just roll off the tongue

This is like saying that the Madoff scheme didn't put people off the stock market. There are a lot of reasons not to like cryptocurrency in general, but the FTX debacle doesn't prove it; it proves that investing in something that's even worse than a cryptocurrency (a centralized token that a company just makes up instead of a decentralized one that you can audit if you want to) is a bad idea. It also indicates that giving your money to people who are going to steal it is bad, but this one is less surprising. But for instance, it doesn't say much about Bitcoin, because FTX's crimes didn't rely on anything unusual about Bitcoin any more than it relied on peculiarities of dollars.

It's not hard to have real reasons to distrust or dislike cryptocurrency. Attempting to expand any event into an "all cryptocurrency is bad" message risks making arguments that are inaccurate or difficult to defend in detail.

Bringing the first native OS for Arm back from the brink

Re: Closed source private software to Open Source public software

There isn't much profit in Risc OS. You can't sell it to most people who want any level of app compatibility, and the people who understand its limitations and still like it also know that you can get it for free if it's open source. Some of the skills required to get it and maintain it are skills that someone would pay for, but they would be paying someone to use the skills on something unrelated, the same way that if all the developers currently working on Android ROMs for mobile phone manufacturers turned their attention to mobile Linux we'd have a great product that runs on everything, but those people are either not interested or too busy doing work that actually makes money.

If your DNS queries LoOk liKE tHIs, it's not a ransom note, it's a security improvement

Re: An end-run around DNS based ad blockers??

Any DNS filter worth using understood that domain names are case insensitive a long time ago, hopefully as of version 1, and blocks anyway. If yours doesn't, find a better one.

Re: Am I being Dense?

In this example, there are 17 characters that can be either case, so 2^17 or 131072 combinations you'd have to spam. For each of these, you have to send 65536 packets with different IDs to avoid being filtered, which comes to a total of 2^31 packets. Each DNS response packet will have at least 32 bytes and likely more like 50 depending on whether they compress the name, have multiple addresses, or use IPV4 or IPV6 addresses. Even if they managed to compress it to 32, which I don't think is possible, that's 64 GiB in spam packets that has to be sent to the resolver before the real result comes in. In order to manage that, you'll need a really fast network connection, and their firewall is going to start sending alarms about the DoS they think is going on. Compared to the 3.125 MiB needed to attempt the same attack on a resolver that always uses lowercase, it's much harder to pull off.

Wyoming's would-be ban on sale of electric vehicles veers off road

Re: Just a symptom...

The hypothetical appears to include a lot of being cut off, because the other states are not going to provide power or equipment and Wyoming isn't going to provide agricultural or mineral products, which is a bit stronger than sanctions placed on Russia these days. I don't see why the states that are refusing to power or supply the state would still provide transport, but as I say, it's not at all realistic that any of this would happen so maybe establishing the specific rules isn't very important.

Re: Just a symptom...

"They could sell their coal to China in return for batteries and solar panels."

If I'm being faithful to this crazy hypothetical where Wyoming is basically cut off by everything around it and vice versa, good luck shipping the coal to China without using the train lines that go to other parts of the US first. I don't think flying it there (assuming there's an exception for flights over the rest of the country) will be very efficient. Then again, it's a pretty ridiculous hypothetical, so I'm joining in just for fun.

Re: I just had to do it...

Admittedly, in the very hypothetical situation described, where all the Amish move to Wyoming, there would be changes. I'm not sure what they would be, but if you take 300k people and put them in a place that only has 500k people in it, there are going to be changes. Whether that's 500k people who decide they don't like the newcomers who take up plenty of space, the existing population deciding they really do like them and will start adopting more of their culture, or someone in the community who realizes that they now make up 37% of the state population and probably majorities in many places and can therefore wield a lot more political power than they could when they were more spread out, there would be some knock-on effects. With any realistic movement pattern, where smaller numbers take a long time to decide on a new location for a community, you're likely to be right about the level of change.

University of Texas latest US school to ban TikTok

Re: "School"

Because it's where people who used to be and sometimes still act like children are educated? The only leap you have to make is from "place of education for this specific group" to "place of education", which isn't very far. They do other things there, which is why they get to be called universities, but a rather important part of their existence is education.

Indian official reveals 'plan' to build a national mobile OS

You realize you're listing OSes that almost universally already tried being mobile OSes with the backing of large hardware manufacturers and failed? Maemo is the only one that you can argue wasn't tried enough because Nokia was bought to bolster Windows Phone, but Samsung tried several Tizen smartphones before sending it to watches and TVs before retiring their Tizen watches as well (they're back to the Android-based Wear OS now on those). QNX was tried repeatedly and it failed on each iteration to get people to switch over. Maybe because it took a long time to get Android compatibility, and incidentally I think it's likely they'd need a lot of updating to get the layer they eventually developed working well with modern apps again.

Sailfish exists, and they could use it if they wanted, but I doubt it's going to take anything over because it's had a while to gain general support and it hasn't accomplished that goal. You still need to use a Sony device, and it's not any Sony device but a particularly small list of compatible models. Could someone buy it and build it into something great? Yes, just as someone could build an OS from scratch and grow it to eclipse Android. Both are possible and both are fiendishly difficult. I don't think India or anybody else has the motivation, resources, and tenacity to make that happen. I have slightly higher hopes for the open-source mobile Linux projects because they allow people to drop out and be replaced by others and people who want something and can build it can be rather intense, but even that has a pretty steep climb to get anywhere.

That's quite likely. Even when Huawei wanted to indicate that they've invented a completely new OS, with a Harmony-specific app format and everything, it turned out to be Android with the labels in the UI but nothing else filed off. Their new app format turned out to be a different extension and a few changes to make the files incompatible. India's attempt, if it ever starts*, will also recognize that there are a lot of Android smartphones in India and that you need app compatibility with those. They'll consider this problem and come up with three solutions:

1. Convince every developer to port to their new OS. This will probably be the government's position, and either some person will inform them that it's never going to happen or just change the specs so they don't have to try to make it happen.

2. Make their own custom OS with an Android compatibility manager, perhaps building it off the mobile Linux projects and something like Waydroid. This would be my favorite because we could take chunks of their stuff and include it in the existing mobile Linuxes, which are not very good right now but I'd like to see improve. It is also a lot of work for an OS the people won't buy, so I doubt they're going to waste their time doing it.

3. Why reinvent the wheel? Just use Android and call it something else. You wouldn't be the first, second, or ninth group to do that. Nobody would know except the technical writers who would write a full description of the OS a week after the first beta was leaked, but only other tech people will read that.

* I think what is most likely is that India makes a lot of noise about doing this and contacts a few places to begin work on their new project. A few months from now, they drop it after being told what actually doing it would cost and what the product would be like, change the spec so that someone makes a mobile app for something they want, call it by the same name, and then try not to mention it again.

Time to buy a phone as shops use discounts to clear out inventories

Re: A maze of twisty little phones ... all alike

"but I can't justify the expense of a top-end model so if there's any recommendations for a phone I should look at, let me know."

I don't know your preferences, so it's hard to recommend something. I would need to know what features are important to you and what you're willing to compromise on. I can recommend this database to allow you to perform a detailed search on your own, but you could also clarify what would constitute the ideal feature set.

Tesla faked self-driving demo, Autopilot engineer testifies

Re: Everybody knew this is a tech demo

"It is a demo what their target is, what they want, not of what is possible"

We know what "car driving correctly without person operating it" looks like. We don't need a video to show us that, and if you wanted to make one, you could always cut out the driver in editing. The point of a tech demo is to demonstrate the technology, and they specifically failed to show what the technology is capable of to mislead people who would be paying for it. If I showed you a device doing something which turned out to be a faked demo of a feature that might be added in a decade or so if I get around to it, you'd return the product and demand a refund and you'd be right to do so.

Nearly 300 MSI motherboards will run any old code in Secure Boot, no questions asked

Re: devices boot only software trusted by the maker of the hardware.

"Who are MS to decide which OS gets keys?"

They're not. They don't have that authority and never had. The user of the hardware does though. The firmware wasn't written by them in the first place, though they do support it. But it's good to know you know what you're complaining about.

I was reasonable to ask to WFH in early days of COVID, says fired engineer

Re: I'm not torn at all

"The employer is placing unreasonable burdens on the employee, without any evidence of necessity."

From the limited details in the article, all of which comes from this guy's side of the argument, we don't have enough information to know whether they had necessity or not. In March of 2020, the danger level of the disease was less well-understood, and plenty of places thought that it was less dangerous than it turned out to be. Making a bad call in March with basically no data to go on is a lot more reasonable than making the same decision in August when things had become clearer.

I have no idea what the situation is, and therefore I can't decide who has the better argument. For example, there are people who can't do their job either at all or well outside the workplace, for example if it requires physically accessing certain equipment or facilities. I don't know if his job had such requirements. Whether it did or not is very important in determining whether the request was reasonable. I don't find it hard to believe that an employer would say WFH was impractical when it wasn't to get rid of someone they didn't like, and I wouldn't find it hard to believe that someone would ask for WFH when it actually was incompatible with their position, but only one of them can be true about this job. Do you have sufficient evidence to indicate which one it is, or are you just picking the one that seems more likely and assuming it must be true?

Sysadmin infected bank with 'alien virus' that sucked CPUs dry

Re: sitting idle means they are using less power

Doing it in winter is only beneficial if all of the following is true:

1. The place where the computer is generating heat would be heated to that level anyway (possibly not at night).

2. The electricity powering the computer is cheaper or the same cost as the way the room would be heated.

3. The same is true for any other systems involved, for example the networking systems that would also heat up if the task involves a lot of data transfer.

4. There are no other limited resources that are consumed (for instance a data cap on the network).

In most cases, cryptocurrency mining for heat production is not the most efficient method to do it unless the crypto is worth a lot to you.

The people doing the punishing weren't aware of any good deed, and there wasn't any benefit to them or to the business. They had every reason to question whether their production systems were going to be hit by something. I'll also note that they didn't punish anybody. No good deed and no punishment makes your statement a bit difficult to understand.

Apple just cut Tim Cook's pay by 40%. How ever will he get by on that $50m?

"Can you pick the next guy that can do it? With 100% certainty?"

No, but I can't say with 100% certainty that Cook won't break something in the next year. Any person is capable of making a stupid mistake, many of which seem plausible at the time. The history of companies doing something disastrous for them is long, and many of them don't look like guaranteed bad ideas when proposed. 100% certainty is impossible, but you know that already.

There's a difference between being a visionary who can successfully take a company from nothing to a moderate success, or even from a successful company to a behemoth, and someone who can avoid crashing an already successful company. Steve Jobs had to be the former twice, getting the initial Apple products sold and rescuing the weakened Apple in the 1990s. Even that wasn't all down to him, but he played an important role. Cook did not have that problem; Apple was massive in 2011 when he took control of it, and it's massive now. You're right that someone could pull a Musk and break anything, even something as successful as Apple, but it takes effort to be that bad, as we're seeing with each bad decision that Musk makes.

This isn't to say that Cook doesn't deserve the money he gets. I don't particularly care about that. Apple's got a bunch of cash and decides to give it at any level they choose. Nevertheless, Cook's neither a miracle-maker nor the only person who can operate Apple.

Admittedly, if you're in the mood to buy an island, such things are very expensive. You'll have to work for a few years on $40M a year to afford that. Why people want to buy islands is another question, but I don't know the answer to that one. I could think of stuff to do with hundreds of millions, but a lot of those things involve giving it away to people or organizations.

Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT

Re: Some things just never went away.

Sadly, sometimes the businesses who understand this correct sentence add on a second one: "If the code's still running then it's sensible not to keep a staff of 1980s programmers around". This leads to the multimillion system collapsing and nobody being around to fix it, which usually leads to finding someone who wrote code in the 1980s in the hope that their familiarity with the unusual environment will mean they can fix it fast. While this is good news for the person who can probably command a nice compensation package, it's not great for anyone else. By all means keep the old system around, but have a plan of how to maintain it and a plan of how to replace it and execute one of them with the other in reserve.

Russians say they can grab software from Intel again

Re: Warranty obligations ?

While that would be nice, it's hard to list every situation where you might want to cut off services. Some contracts will manage this with some kind of generic clause about complying with international sanctions or sanctions of some particular host country. Others might add in a "at our discretion we may cut off services" clause, but that's less common because customers can interpret that as "when we feel like it whether there's an external reason or we just want more money". If you don't do one of those, you have a hard time implementing that in a contract, and customers can sue you in countries that will enforce a contract as written.

EU plan to make big tech pay 'fair share' of telco fees reportedly weeks away

Re: Everyone should pay to get to the Internet backbone

Or in other words, people's desire for bandwidth has increased, and that requires them to upgrade hardware. It's not a tax on you; it's what happens when people want a better service than has been available. It doesn't much matter that they're using it to consume video. If users were all using their bandwidth for another purpose, such as remote work or hosting their own servers at home, you'd have the same situation.

Microsoft to offer unlimited time off for US staff

I tend to store up some paid leave days, using anything that's going to expire but otherwise keeping a buffer. I do that so that, in case of emergency, I have days I could use outside of work and I have evidence to show a manager that I don't use time off too often so they don't expect I'd take days at short notice unless I needed to. With "unlimited", this breaks entirely. I'm not sure how I'd actually use the days, but I'm certain it would be much worse for me if my employer switched to a policy like that.

AI-generated phishing emails just got much more convincing

Re: Just WOW!

I would think so, but it might help a scammer who isn't fluent in the target language (does GPT work in anything other than English? It doesn't look like it from a cursory search). Then again, you could just hire a proofreader for that, but GPT might be an alternative.

Re: "I hope this email finds you well."

"what about limiting access on "the supply side"?"

You can do it, and many email servers have done just that when spam got too bad, but if you do it too aggressively, email you expected to receive starts getting dropped. If there's a new requirement for outgoing mailservers every month, then you can pretty much guarantee that there will be some that don't get updated in time. Some of this won't be easily solved without a redesign, but since email is so widely used, it's unlikely we'll scrap it. We may be stuck with layer after layer of patches.

"In addition, I'm somewhat puzzled by the seemingly lack of control suggested. We live in a world where many are crawling over each other to monitor (and steer) the digital lives and actions of users all over the world. Telemetry build in by default, backdoors on wish lists for Christmas. And here we assume that world + dog can exhaust their (bad) creativity effortlessly without limits, and without anybody keeping track or noticing?"

Yes, both are true. Mostly because some of us are resisting the backdoors, so if someone announced a new version of email which gave total control to others, I would refuse to adopt it. In other cases, the people who want backdoors don't particularly care about solving security problems while they do it; an advertiser doesn't need to avoid spam or malicious messages while mining your data. The internet is a remarkably open place, and there are people taking advantage of it just as they do in real life.

Re: Rules would help

Theoretically, misleading spam emails that aren't overtly fraudulent are legal too, but they're unwanted by everybody who receives them and we therefore speak of them as undesirable and act to suppress them in our lives. The same applies to faked news stories. Not to mention that, depending on the content, such faked stories can be illegal if they involve libelous content or calls to illegal actions. Even if they don't, they're undesirable and we should treat them as we do spam: to be defended against even if their authors cannot be charged with a crime. If you're quibbling over the use of the word "crime", even though the article mentions several clear crimes which you've agreed with, we can supply a different word and continue on with the original approach.

Apple aims to replace Broadcom, Qualcomm wireless chips with its own

Re: I don't think I recall

Maybe you'd care to tell me what my lack of experience, to which I confess, has failed to teach me? If you've got tales of how everybody in component manufacturing expects to lose money when they sell their products, then I'm happy to learn. In my experience of other things, there are a few reasons companies might choose to sell at a loss, and all of them are risky to the company and require them to have planned a lot for it. History is full of examples of companies who thought that being cheap would win in the long term only to find that they don't have enough money to take that as far as they need to. Unless you have a foolproof plan for why selling at a loss is good for you, don't do it, and if you think you have one, it still might not be one.

Re: Don't make many products?

I'm not sure where you got your numbers, any of them, from. You say they have eight flavors of laptop. They have five models that they make, and one of those is an old version which they still manufacture. Likewise, they only have eight iPhone models that they still sell, three of which are older versions. In 1980, not only did they have three computer models (2 plus, 3, and 3 plus), but they also had a display and a printer. By 1990, they had lots of models of Macs and peripherals.

The distinction is between Apple and comparable companies. How many models of Mac laptop can you buy? Air, Pro 14 inch, and Pro 16 inch, with a new model of each one every year or so. How many models of Dell laptop can you buy? I don't know because they seem to have an infinite supply with names like Inspiron 15 5000 4I2SNZ7, but I can guarantee it's more than three. This can bring positives, such as it being easier for Apple to standardize on parts, and it can bring negatives, like not having a choice of laptop at any price level. This is something where Apple has taken a different approach to some other large computer manufacturers, though I know of a few small companies that similarly aim for a small set of models.

Re: I don't think I recall

"Apples model is to play competitors off against each other until they sell at, or often below cost."

Welcome to economics, where the method you use is to find the place that can give you what you want for the lowest cost to you. I'm not sure why you expected something else, but if you want to sell components and not below cost, stop turning the price down when Apple asks. You don't need a monopoly to avoid making stupid economic decisions with your own company, and many other component manufacturers manage to supply Apple or other large manufacturers and make a profit. If it turns out that your competitor can make a profit at a price where you can't, then that's your problem and you might want to do something about it.

Microsoft to move some Teams features to more costly 'Premium' edition

Re: "Another security feature lets admins control who has rights to record a meeting."

I've got one of those as well, and if yours is anything like mine, you can just use capture software which allows you to feed the recorded track into your headphones simultaneously, common in software geared for audio production as well as video. No other hardware is needed. This is why the lock on the record button won't do anything, and I'm sure the person who put it there knows that and was asked to do it by someone who doesn't.

Re: "Another security feature lets admins control who has rights to record a meeting."

There's basically nothing you can do to prevent someone with sufficient motivation from capturing the video. Even if you completely took over the OS so no video capture software would work, you could use hardware which copies as well as displays, and even if you prevented that as well, it won't stop a user pointing a camera at the screen. Since it's impossible to prevent, the feature isn't going to stop people but is probably there just to respond to people who don't understand that and think that blocking the record button is all they need to do to hide what they've said. I've dealt with those users who demand a feature even though it's not going to accomplish what they want, but if they're annoying enough, you add it anyway. If enough of those people have demanded a lock on that button, then a lock will be added, even though it doesn't accomplish much.

Haiku beta 4: BeOS rebuild / almost ready for release / A thing of beauty

"There's a gaping corner in the market for a wedge "bedroom computer" that just works, isn't too expensive, and runs games. Build it and we will come!"

I doubt that. This isn't the 1990s anymore. Cheap laptops and tablets are everywhere, and they meet a lot of those requirements. A cool OS like Haiku appears to be doesn't sell as many things as yet another iPad does, and there's basically no chance they'll get as cheap as landfill Android tablets which are surprisingly common. Mobile games are quite popular and the app stores are full of them. If you want something that's better at being a computer, cheap laptops are out there and run pretty well, with the original Windows or the OS of your choice for the more technically aware users.

I don't think there's that much of a gap in the market. Any new computer will have to compete against a laptop, tablet, or both, and I don't see how Haiku, even if it's UI is as great as everyone here says it is (I never used BeOS) will take over.

New software sells new hardware – but a threat to that symbiosis is coming

Re: Dropping Older Architectures

Testing is not the only problem. It is a problem, but another factor is that, any time something is added to the kernel, someone has to consider how it will affect the paths that are custom to the old hardware. For things that aren't supported by the hardware, the writer either has to implement a software shim to support it anyway or a bypass to disable the feature. That's extra work which slows development and can break things. Automated testing will not automatically detect it.

Even without that cost, testing isn't a simple task. You have to have a lot of examples of old hardware lying around. I have some old hardware, but I don't use it to test every patch to the kernel and I'm guessing you don't do so either. I'm also not about to maintain a museum of archaic technology which I have configured to run tests every time a patch comes out in the hopes that someone is still using it with the latest kernel and thus benefits from that effort, because it's a lot of work for almost no benefit. I'm prepared to guess that the older hardware you've got is A) not so old that they've dropped it yet and B) doesn't run the latest kernel version anyway. If I'm wrong about both those assumptions and you value that, maybe you should assist them with running the tests and verifying functionality on your platform.

64-bit not just for more RAM

The article's claims about the replacement of 32-bit by 64-bit is understating what we got from that switch. It's not just about addressing more than 4 GiB of memory. That was part of it, but the 64-bit instructions also help a lot. With 64-bit registers and operations, some things involving larger chunks of data can be done in orders of magnitude fewer instructions, which means much faster execution. We didn't adopt 64-bit processors to make OS vendors more money; they had 32-bit versions for over a decade after AMD64 parts became available. We didn't do it to make the hardware manufacturers more money; the existing 32-bit parts would keep working until mechanical failure, software support lasted enough that basically nothing would refuse to run, and although it has been dropped from some distributions, it's quite easy to compile many of them for 32-bit if you need it. We did it because it produced better processors, both for servers and for desktops. There's a reason why other 32-bit processors for non-embedded purposes have been superseded, including nearly all smartphones.

Second-hand and refurbished phone market takes flight amid inflation hike

I wouldn't ask anyone to get a smartphone if they don't want one, just to avoid making incorrect allegations about what the negatives are. As for your situation, I'm with you about the size of most modern phones; I'm still using an old phone because few new ones come anywhere close to its size.

By the way, most reviews don't talk that much about phone call quality because it's seen as a basic feature. They're all basically fine, so reviews only tend to mention it when it's markedly bad. It's like a laptop review discussing the quality of USB ports--if they're doing it, it probably means there's a big problem with the USB ports. Unless you need something unusual, such as an adjustment for a hearing disability, phone calls will probably be fine. I make lots of calls on mine with no complaints, and I've had similar experiences on other models.

Re: Wait on buying new

"I can envision a wily entrepreneur reloading Android phones, at least, with an AOSP build such as Lineage and then reselling them with an extended support or warranty plan, which would extend their lives even further."

I can imagine that too, but I've yet to see one that achieves these goals without compromising on others. I have seen, for example, some distributions funding themselves by selling phones with the distribution applied, but usually without any guarantees on the hardware and at prices similar, if not higher, to the phone's original price (because of compatibility issues, new devices are rarely sold there). It helps to fund the projects, so that's nice, but it doesn't help for people who want to save money.

"My point was, the "others" in your quote are using that data to make BILLIONS while your privacy disappears before your eyes."

And your point is so general as to become rubbish. Smartphones are small computers, and the privacy implications depends on what software you use and how you use it.

"Map GPS tracks where you go and what you do."

No, it doesn't. If you use a GPS application that has offline map data, it doesn't report where you went. You have many options, most of which use data from Open Street Map, and some of which are open source, which permit you to have navigation and privacy. Even if you use one that does report where you went, it doesn't automatically report what you do there.

"apps / photos / video are parsed by bots with facial recognition to determine who you hang out with and your social activities."

Nope. Some smartphone camera apps do facial recognition to organize photos, but that doesn't mean everything else is parsed or that the data is uploaded anywhere. Many phones lack the feature or can have it disabled. You can also install a different app for taking pictures if you don't like what the factory one does, and the factory one will no longer be able to run on that data.

"Your credit rating, insurance rates and even potential job prospects are impacted."

Now you're just making stuff up. That is a potential risk with the misuse of private data, but it doesn't automatically come from owning or using a smartphone and you know it.

"Smart phones do everything for you, making you dumber. Phone runs out of battery and kids can't operate today."

The ever-popular assumption of generational superiority with no evidence to back it up. Your parents might have had one about you too, whether that was about the stupidity-inducing power of computers, television, radio, electricity, telegraph, cheap oil lighting, easy availability of written content, general availability of written content, or existence of writing altogether. You know how that assumption about you being stupid is pathetic? It applies to this one too.

2002 video streaming patent holder sues Amazon and Twitch

Re: Patently

"For larger startups VCs often have as a requirement that the start up file for patents in order to get funding, solely because they hope if the adventure goes tits up, they can do some patent trolling to recoup their loses."

There are several problems in this. The first is that it's not the reason the VCs are asking for patents. They're hoping to make money from the idea, and if someone starts to copy it, they'd like to block them. Hence their attempt to get any patentable (or not) thing patented to set up roadblocks for the competition. Sometimes that's valid because the innovation is really a new invention, sometimes the applications will either be so obviously bad that they drop it or will be rejected, and sometimes they should be rejected but aren't, but that's the motivation.

Patent trolling is another issue. If you have a valid patent, then defending your patent rights isn't trolling. There are times when I dislike what can be done with a legitimate patent that's not being used well, but it's designed for a good reason. Trolling is a problem when the patents are invalid, but for the same reason that granting invalid patents in the first place is a problem. The solution is better oversight from the patent offices instead of approving anything.

Re: BSD

It tells me nothing. I even looked them up to try to find an explanation of why they called it that, and I've still got nothing. Their website lists four previous names, some of which suggests they're a computer-based company, and a different page suggests they're in the food distribution business and mentions no technology products.

Wiretap lawsuit accuses Apple of tracking iPhone users who opted out

Re: Share prices

At this point, whether someone was looking or it was just paranoia, I'd write a script to regularly collect thousands of prices of stocks chosen at random, including anything held by the investment, at regular intervals (every five minutes would do). The system can withstand the bandwidth, and the firm is likely paying for that system in any case, and it lets people look at recent data without leaking any information about what they're doing.

US Supremes deny Pegasus spyware maker's immunity claim

Re: NSO is an accomplice of every crime committed by its customers

"Pegasus is not harmful."

Yes, it is. Harmful doesn't just mean physical harm, and attacking someone's devices to steal their data is causing them harm. That's why it's a crime almost everywhere. If you don't think it's harmful, then would you be happy to give me total access to all your devices as long as I didn't use any data I took to cause physical injury to you? Seriously, nobody will come hurt you from it. I might take all your money and make public information you didn't want others to know. This would still be harming you.

"Owning a gun is illegal in many countries, but I don't see why that would have any bearing on gun manufactures, gun shops or owners in countries where it is legal."

It doesn't, but if those gun shops sell across the border into a country where it is illegal, that country can press charges.

"All because wiretapping is illegal in country Y doesn't mean that a firm in country I can't make a wiretapping system, especially if it is used by country X where wiretapping is legal."

Wrong. If the thing is illegal in country Y then building it in country Y is a crime. In this specific case, there is also no country X, as wiretapping is illegal in the countries against which it has been used.

Re: Hey, look over there

If Facebook avoided having a zero-day in the first place, that would be ideal. That doesn't stop the fact that there will be security vulnerabilities in any large system and that exploiting those is a crime. NSO built the exploits and launched them, so they share culpability with the people who used the access they paid for. Blaming the criminal isn't misdirection. An affected user can also choose to sue Facebook for this, but on allegations of negligence which may or may not get past the jury. Whether such a claim works or not, NSO is still culpable.

No more holidays for US telcos, FCC is cracking down

Re: Non-digital age tokens

That won't work very well. Such tokens would be very easily resold, meaning that unless it's tied in some way to the identification used to verify it, in which case the privacy purpose of the measure is ruined, anyone who wants one can probably get one. I don't really like the verification in the first place, so I'm fine if it goes that way, but with such an obvious method of breaking everything, I doubt you could get anyone who wants verification to agree to that method.

Cybercrooks are telling ChatGPT to create malicious code

Re: All invention can be used for good or bad

"Well, if the "AI" were AI, it'd pass a Turing test"

GPT has passed Turing tests, as have many other things like it. The original specification of the test wasn't clear on who gets to decide that it passed, but people have been looking at the chatbots of this nature and deciding that they look sentient, conscious, or whatever adjective they choose to apply. These people have set a higher bar (they judge it as sentient even though they know it's not a human), so for this to not count as a Turing test, these people need to be disqualified as judges.

I don't think it should be counted as AI, but I'm not convinced that I could always tell its output apart from a person. Depending on the test conditions, it may succeed in producing output that looks human, so unless they let me assail it for a while, I would probably have a lot of inconclusive results. This indicates to me that the Turing test isn't a great single method of determining whether something is intelligent or sentient. I'm happy to hear others' suggestions as to how we can tell this more reliably, but we will likely never find a test or set of tests that everyone accepts as valid challenges.

Re: All invention can be used for good or bad

"So in a way a positive side from a negative."

Rubbish. More people throwing more malware around doesn't mean any positives. Fortunately, for now a lot of it is going to be crap malware, but it's still noise that we have to deal with. That's like saying that more people going around stabbing people with knives has a positive side because they're not very good at stabbing accurately and maybe that will teach people better self-defense. We're going to have to deal with the mess this causes, but nothing about it is positive.

CES Worst in Show slams gummi gouging, money-wasting mugs, and other dubious kit

Re: JBL clarification

I can't see that much that makes them worse except that they cost a ridiculous amount (you can get everything else for a third of the cost and if you're willing to take out some of the features, for much less than that). The screen means extra hardware that will never get used because it's going to be a bad UI that takes up space and power.

Otherwise, they're basically the same as any other set of TWS headphones.

Tesla fails to push racial discrimination lawsuit into arbitration

If they used papers in a room with one person dealing with them manually, but most places don't do that so much these days, especially when they hire thousands of people. The last time I was hired, the agreements were presented and my consent collected electronically, so there wasn't any way to accidentally forget or modify a contract. I could have attempted to see if I could bypass the "Look at this and accept before you can see anything else" workflow the UI had, but there was probably something in the terms to prevent me and we've all heard the stories of what happens to the terrible hackers who try something as vicious and sophisticated as modifying parameters in a URL.

AI conference and NYC's educators ban papers done by ChatGPT

That cut and paste of a big block doesn't really go anywhere in answering the question of whether text you didn't write chopped up by a program you didn't right responding to a prompt you did write and information you did collate after researching it* is plagiarism or not. I think there's a case that it is, but you could make the easier case that it's low quality for anything that already has quality restrictions and be done.

*I'm assuming that people here are doing their own research on something and then asking GPT to do the part where they write a really boring summary of that research, in which case at least they did something even though their paper will be bad. If they're just throwing in prompts like a student that doesn't want to write their essay, then they may also be committing fraud and the people who gave them funding might have complaints.

Intel: Please buy these new 13th-Gen CPUs, now with 24 cores

No, most people would not be happy with five options, even if we assume that to be five mobile options with separate ones for desktops. There is a wide range of laptops, and a reason why some people want a laptop with a 55 W CPU with a ton of fast cores and some people want a 6 W processor with slow ones for something with a weedy battery that can still last a while.

Also, it's bad luck for your attempt to promote AMD that you posted this one day before they released five more lines of mobile products, and they haven't specified how many specific parts that will add or I haven't found it.

Twitter data dump: 200m+ account database now free to download

Re: What dump?

I'm not sure what URL you were using. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that it's been uploaded to a bunch of places recently and that all of them will eventually take it down following complaints, so unless you were using the original leak which is probably somewhere on a Tor hidden service, you're likely to have to hunt to find the database. Remember that it's not public information, and depending on where you are, it may be illegal for you to possess it.