Posts by doublelayer 9378 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
Your analogy fails. The point is that you can decide what people do with the stuff you own. You own the network, you decide who can use it and who can't. You own the data, you decide whether to make it public or not. You own the phone, so you decide what to run and what not to.
Apple thinks it should have the rights to decide what you are allowed to do with the phone you own. If Apple was renting them, I'd see their point. They are not.
If you're willing to do banking on your phone at all, using the app can have some advantages. For one thing, it may have features a site can't easily do, such as depositing via camera. It also allows the banking system to be isolated from any other things that might have access to the browser's data or integration with native security features. Either those benefits or the bank just doesn't let mobile users use their site because they wrote an app so if you can use it, you're going to.
Oh, isn't it so nice that Apple's method for keeping the NSA off the iPhone is to ... not allow them to publish apps to the App Store? Dream on. The NSA doesn't publish apps. If they want access to the iPhone, they go to the OS and break through that way. They don't care at all about app review because they don't publish apps.
When Apple has taken its famous stances against surveillance, they rely on the exemplary work of their OS developers, but they never rely on the reviewers. Keep that in mind.
"my mother in law definitely doesn’t. At the moment, her iPhone keeps her safe - with your suggestion she’s be open to attack by predatory phone calls and social engineering."
Right. The scammer on the other end will tell your mother-in-law to go into settings, down several levels, turn off a security feature, agree to the warning, go to a site, install an application, agree to a warning, launch the application, agree to a warning, agree to several permissions, and then they can do their evil deeds. That's not what they will do. They will get her to open up a website which has nice convincing logos and enter in her passwords and account details. The risk of social engineering is already there, and what they can already do is much stronger than anything this would gain them. Especially given that Apple wouldn't have to let sideloaded applications have extra powers--they could and almost certainly would live in the same sandboxes and have access to the same permissions that store-loaded apps do.
IOS is pretty secure already but it's not the App Store people who make it happen. It's the OS developers who make it happen.
What does that even mean? If Apple was wrong, Flash would still be here, except on Apple devices? Or maybe if Apple didn't block flash, flash would still be here, except on Apple devices?
We didn't need Apple to tell us Flash was crap. Everybody knew it. That's why HTML5 was made to remove most of what Flash was used for and they did a good job on that. Of course Flash had performance problems and basically nothing to say in favor of it except that there weren't good alternatives yet, but that's really not a good excuse for banning it. Lots of apps have performance problems and Apple still lets you run them if you want to.
Is it just me, or does Apple's insistence on the grammatical use of "iPhone" sound really weird every time? I'm thinking of a quote like this one from their paper: "Allowing sideloading would spur a flood of new investment into attacks on iPhone, incentivizing malicious actors [...]"
They do this all the time and it sounds weird to me. Yet if you switch iPhone for Linux or Windows, it doesn't sound as weird. I wonder where grammarians stand on using product names of separate devices as singular proper nouns.
What? You thought I was talking about the article's point? We've already covered this on about fifteen similar articles in the previous months. What more is there to say? Let's talk grammar instead.
I think a few of your compliments are a little generic.
"The form factor is perfect for travelling to school,": Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the form factor the same as a laptop running anything else? We're not comparing it to a gaming laptop or something. Most cheap and thin laptops are basically the same form factor.
"and having no spinning rust means they are robust.": Yeah, mechanical hard drives aren't very common on new laptop purchases anymore. Sure, there will be a few out there which think having a bigger disk looks better than a tiny SSD, but most laptops including the cheap ones have found cheap SSDs. It's not all that unique for Chromebooks.
"The OS starts instantly,": I'm not sure if that matters very much given that most OSes start pretty fast on modern CPUs and SSDs and a lot of people just put the machine to sleep instead of shutting it down, but it probably does start faster.
"and I don't have to worry about AV protection and constant updates.": This one is very true though.
Whether you trust cryptocurrencies or not, it's usually not a good idea to invest in places where people offer you massive increases and don't show you how it's done. I hope that those who were defrauded can get something back once the thieves are found, but it should also serve as a warning that investment opportunities need diligent investigation before you hand over any money (let alone large chunks of it).
"Why has nobody mentioned that cryptocurrencies are a blessing for organized crime."
Because you overestimate how useful it really is to them and also underestimate how useful its alternatives are. Let's take each adjective in turn:
"Untraceable,": Nope. The most popular ones, E.G. Bitcoin are very traceable and used so often that there are already automated programs specifically for tracing transactions. And it's not just law enforcement which has that. You can go trace it for fun if you like. Some other ones are much less traceable, but they're harder to exchange and spend. Now, compared to real currencies, a lot of crypto is more traceable. If I transfer cash, you probably won't find it again. Unless I stole an easily-numbered bunch, the chances of you knowing which notes are good and which are bad is low. Even if I did, I likely get to spend it before someone scans the numbers.
"easily transportable.": Crypto transaction fees make transport more expensive. Meanwhile, for most organized crime, the organization has already figured out the cheap way of moving money. It's core to their business. Given the large number of fraudulent bank transfers, banks willing to launder money for criminals, and similar structures, moving other currencies doesn't appear to be very hard.
"Can be used to launder money,": Not really. Crypto is like money in most respects, meaning if you suddenly have a bunch of it and make that known, people are going to ask how you got it. To launder money, you need a good excuse for the legal method you used, which is why a cash-based business works so well. "I got a hundred grand worth of Bitcoin yesterday" is not such a good one.
"transfer money cross borders,": Well yes, it does that, but you can already do that. See also easily transportable above.
"pay for contract killings, [list of crimes]": Right. Like everything else. It does not help your argument to list a bunch of criminal activity that you could pay for. If I said that the U.S. dollar was used to pay for all those things, plus government corruption, environmental destruction, [editor's note: this sentence would take about ten minutes to read. This list has been cut here], it still wouldn't be a reason to prohibit use of U.S. dollars unless your alternative was better.
"The Koran War was a stalemate and it took the U.S. 68 years(!) to achieve that."
You are ruining your credibility here. First, the Korean war, unless you're talking about something related to the central book of Islam. Second, it did not take 68 years. It took 3 (less, really). Fighting stopped in 1953. You act as if there were active hostilities from 1953 to 2018. There were not. Third, it's entirely normal that it was a stalemate and you should probably be glad they didn't try to make it an ultimate victory. China was fighting against them, and if they wanted to defeat China entirely, it would have certainly meant use of nuclear weapons. People had suggested that at the time. They prevented the invasion of South Korea and, when it became obvious that forcing both North Korea and China to surrender was going to involve a lot of dying, mostly of the people there, they decided not to.
This doesn't necessarily mean I disagree with your other points or take a position at all on this America vs Europe argument going on, but next time you want to talk about military history to make a point, please stick to what actually happened.
"They could instead used this power to fold DNAs or Seti analyzing or something, just not heat you need to cool down."
An interesting point. If they had expended the same energy on SETI calculations, I wouldn't find that worth the spend. If I was in a position to do so, should I have banned SETI because I don't think it's worth very much?
The environmental damage that crypto mining does is very real, but those who argue against it on that basis alone seem to say that using energy for that purpose is terrible, but using energy on other things they like more is fine. If the environmental impact of that energy use bothers you as it does me, the answer is to increase the restrictions on energy use, including taxing it more and regulating emissions. Not to pick someone you don't need and tell them they're not allowed to use any energy. If we're using the model where things we don't like don't get to use energy, then I'd like to deny any energy use to the people who make Chromebooks because I don't intend to buy one and I consider them a waste of resources. That doesn't make very much sense.
"Now, imagine what would happen to the price of a precious metal (gold, silver, palladium, etc.) if 90% of its mining capacity had been removed?"
Imagine what would happen to that metal if it was forbidden to buy or sell it in China. Now imagine that China has long liked it more than other countries. Because that happened too. Now imagine that the value for that metal outside of using it as money was zero. Now imagine that the mining capacity had been decreased but was expected to return in half a year. The price would fall.
A lot of metals have value for uses of that metal in industry. Gold is the largest exception because a lot of it is stored for monetary value only, but even it has some uses elsewhere. Cryptocurrency doesn't have any other uses. A ban on trading is going to radically affect its value.
"They merely observed that it hadn't risen when the supply fell by 90%."
The supply didn't fall. The same number of existing coins is around. The only thing to fall was the speed of creating new coins. That does restrict supply, but much less than you're saying. Consider a parallel:
Your savings, supply down 90%: I am taking away all but a tenth of your savings. I have already removed it from your bank and investment accounts and I'm selling your stuff as well.
Your savings, supply increase reduced by 90%: I am not going to pay you much for your job anymore. Probably you will have to get a new job.
Neither is fun, but one is a lot worse than the other.
"90% of mining capacity has been removed... price goes down. Proof if ever it was needed that VapuourCoin *really* isn't a commodity or currency."
You're missing a major point: China also blocked trading of it, destroying a large chunk of demand. Prices go down if you can't use it in a large country which previously had been quite involved in the process.
I can see that I have to post something like this several times.
You can get that by using a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, but that A) is useless and B) can still collapse when the people supposedly holding the dollars mess up or lie about having them. Many adherents of cryptocurrency want one which isn't controlled by central banks (or often by anyone), so letting the Federal Reserve control the value by their decisions about U.S. monetary policy is going to be an unpopular suggestion.
Most that I know about used one of two methods:
1. They would find a power plant which didn't always have full demand and use additional power generated. Hydroelectric plants were popular because they're also environmental, but nuclear plants also work well. If the plants were generating more power than consumers were requesting, the miners could use the remaining generation capacity at a cheap price because, if they weren't there, that generation would still happen and nobody would pay for it.
2. They would steal it. Usually, they would find a power plant and give the operators some bribes to run it a little above capacity, then use the excess generation to mine. As long as they weren't obvious, they could evade police investigations of the practice.
I consider cryptocurrency to be a very bad investment, but why exactly does that make it logical to ban it? Unless it is an active fraud which somebody can control, it's just a very volatile investment. We know from the source code for these currencies that nobody has a backdoor over them. Why should cryptocurrencies be illegal when investing in any number of other volatile things is allowed? Or should we also ban trading of things like very small companies, certain minerals, or futures contracts which can also have unreliable values?
There is already such a digital currency. It is your current currency. Transactions in it usually go over electronic means unless you decide to use cash. They don't need to reinvent each part of the digital transaction system which already exists. At most, they could build a government-backed system which allows those who do not like or cannot afford to use the electronic services of banks to do the same things, but that's all that is needed. A system similar to cryptocurrencies doesn't offer much that the existing electronic transaction system doesn't already do unless you want to avail yourself of the pseudonymity or lack of regulation that actual crypto does. If you want government backing, you don't want those things.
"I think you'll find that the Euro is backed by quite a number of armies, including one with nukes."
No, it's not. It is used by countries with armies but that's not the same thing. The original point, that it is not the power of an army which gives currency value, is still correct. Some of the world's worst economies have powerful armies. North Korea has had to reissue its currency, wiping out all their citizens' wealth (they don't care) because their currency isn't worth much. They have the strongest army by size of nation in the world, the fourth largest in absolute terms, and they also have nukes. It isn't doing their Won any favors. The power of a fiat currency is based on trust of the institutions which handle it. The central banks of the EU, UK, and U.S. are generally trusted, so their currencies are strong. The only connection to their army would be if they were being invaded, but most countries with weak currencies aren't experiencing that because of an active military threat.
"I think we may be looking at a hybrid situation, where employers will be renting out offices closer to workers or we may see more co-working spaces (shared with many companies) where employees would go instead of their company main office."
From all the times I've seen this idea, I think you're very right about what they will do. In my opinion, that is not a good idea, but they will still do it. I predict a completely disorganized setup where smallish offices are rented for the benefits of collaboration or other benefits of working in the office without ensuring that any of those benefits are still feasible. Collaboration, for example, is made very hard if you never know whether your colleagues are in the office or not, where they might be, or even if they go to a different local office now. Many work activities done in offices aren't as easy in a co-working space either because things you had available in the normal office won't be there or will be in use by somebody else.
"Just pick a random question from a large collection of general knowledge things. It would take spectacular effort to parse such things."
I hate captchas too, but it would be hard to parse the answer to that kind of question if it weren't easy to look up in a database. Questions with single answers could be easily answered automatically: "What is the capital city of Argentina", for example. More general knowledge questions might have multiple possible answers and/or regional variations "What is the food item produced by slicing potatoes and frying them". Also, if you don't have too many of them, someone can take the whole test and program bots with known answers.
"Because another thing that doesn't parse CSS is a screen reader for the blind. Such a system would auto-determine any such user is no longer Human & lock us out."
This is wrong. Screenreaders do parse CSS and obey it, or rather the browsers do and the screenreader obeys them. Mark something as display:none and the screenreader won't see it. It doesn't work for just making the font really small, but otherwise it will.
However, even if that wasn't the case, that doesn't doom the option. I've used such fields for basic spam protection before and I have a setup for those who don't use CSS. It just includes a warning that the box below should not have anything written in it if you expect me to read your submission. If people can see the box, they can also see the warning. It won't protect you against someone targeting your page, but for the casual bot, it works.
"Just wondering why we can't find desks and tables for people to drop in and do stuff. Perhaps charge a 'badge fee' towards insurance and costs &c."
Mostly because the owners of those buildings are hoping for long-term renters to return and put a business there, and they don't want to manage the complexities of lots of people who don't pay much. Not that that logic is perfect or ends well, but it's usually what they're thinking. I suppose someone else could try setting up that as a business and carry the risk if people don't show up, but I don't want to do it and I'm guessing you don't either.
Space is one of the hardest parts of certain startup-style experiments as it's the most expensive and can't be obtained cheaper by working hard. The good news for tech-related startups though is that, unlike a lot of others, the early steps don't have to be done in an expensive space. I've likewise seen plenty of spaces which would be optimal for very small businesses or community uses, but it's not going to happen without someone to handle the bill.
I find this quote the best of the ones posted:
“The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."--Edsger W. Dijkstra
Exactly. In that it's mostly about the definition of "think" or "swim". Submarines do go underwater and move through it, so does that count or not. Likewise, certain programs can do things which in a human require intelligence and using methods not expressly written by the programmer, but does that constitute thinking? It's a question best answered by philosophers, so before they come along let's run away.
"How can this possibly be legal?"
A good question, but the one which comes to my mind is how can this possibly be useful? Most illegal or unethical things that businesses do at least seem to have some benefit to somebody--more profitable, more profit right now and then it's someone else's problem, less regulation, etc. What is the expected benefit of the development funds thrown away on this? It seems to have no purpose whatsoever even if we assume somebody willing to make everyone else miserable.
For a vehicle which has a lot of maneuverability and a lot of warning about obstacles, two days is not a very long time. It's not like a car which needs to spend a lot of its time on correctly navigating and not hitting things. It's not the AI's fault that something mechanical broke, but there's one good reason to have engineers on ships whenever they're used.
My technique is to sort by review length. I have to do it manually, but I find that's the most useful way. Someone who writes a long review is either giving a great amount of detail about the product or repeating so much marketing sludge that it can be identified in five seconds. What is most annoying are the "Works great would buy again" reviews or the slightly longer version where they identify what the product is but still don't say anything.
Probably they are. It's not unusual for companies who handle billions of accounts and millions of fraud reports to operate automatically. Sometimes they'll have an automatic check before banning, sometimes they'll have a good appeal process. Sometimes they won't tell you how or why anything happened and there's nothing you can do about it.
Indeed it was, and I'm sure he did his best to ensure the FSF could enforce their license. When they instituted that policy, the license hadn't been thoroughly tested, and therefore they wanted to take every effort to make sure it would work. Among those was the assignment of copyright--if the FSF owned it all, then they could change to something else if the GPL proved flawed when the courts looked at it. I have no objection to that plan when it was instituted, nor do I object to continuing to assign copyrights to the FSF.
What I do object to is the idea that this is required for the GPL to have legal significance. Unlike 1990, the GPL has been tested in court and it works. Non-GNU projects have verified that it works without copyright assignment, with Linux being the most famous example. Hence my statement that, if the project leads choose to change the policy, it won't harm the freedoms allowed by the GPL. That doesn't mean I think it should happen, just that it can without collapsing. The responses to this have included a dearth of detail, yet are very vigorous. Perhaps the adherents of the FSF haven't considered what the GPL is for, but they seem to think it's a house of cards which will be useless without the FSF. The people who wrote it were smart enough that it isn't.
I am not an expert lawyer, but neither is Stallman. Maybe neither of us is worth anything.
Or maybe, since I do write code and license it, and I have read up on the licenses, and I might decide whether or not to use certain licenses or assign copyrights, my opinion and those of the people like me who also write the code involved has some value after all.
The license already does that. An author who releases something as GPL can't unilaterally change the license because they've already released it. They can release it under a different license if they wish, and they can refuse to send the code to you anymore under the GPL. If anyone else has a copy though, they can edit it or publish it without limitation.
The issue with the people who pulled packages wasn't that the code couldn't be resurrected. The issue was that people were downloading the package and the downloads broke. Similar to what would happen if you were pulling something from a public server I ran and I shut it down. All they had to do was change the download location to somewhere where the packages could be found and things worked again.
The point is that the FSF retains the ownership they already have, so they could enforce the copyright on that without having to own the rest. Diluting the copyright doesn't impact their ability to enforce the license because they own some. It also enables others should one of them choose to do it.
Developers pay $99 per year to be able to post apps. Even at the lowest price tier offered by public cloud, that's approximately 1.15 TB of bandwidth, and most apps are small and get compressed even more. Apple moves a lot of data and doesn't have to use public cloud, meaning their bandwidth is a lot cheaper. They're bandwidth bill will be fine.
That's completely unrelated and you know it. Firearms have the potential to hurt people and few other uses. The balance between defense uses and attack uses is the only argument involved in whether they should have them. Running code on your personal phone doesn't let you kill people. Please don't waste our time with that.
There are firewall apps for IOS. I use Lockdown Privacy, which is free, open source, but limited to blocking things (custom blocklists work). If you want more control, there are apps which allow it. As long as you're willing to grant the app VPN privilege, it can inspect and modify your traffic. I disagree with Apple on many things, but this critique isn't correct.
Three points about that possibility:
1. Privacy under Apple's system is optional. An app can request that a user give them permission to collect data and a user can say yes. It's defaulted to no, but nothing prevents Facebook from running a media campaign telling people to say yes. If such campaigns actually work, Facebook doesn't need this to continue tracking.
2. Apple can still enforce privacy by actual protection. Blocking identifiers, locking down permissions, etc. If they do that as they have done it with the existing permissions, then a sideloaded app won't be able to circumvent privacy protection any more than one signed by Apple. Once again, it will come down to asking the user to allow something, which already is an option. In addition, the OS can institute its own information campaign by way of warning messages at every step of the process: "If you enable external app installations, they may have security risks.", "You are installing an app known to track your activity and weaken your privacy", "The app you have installed could be dangerous, but you have one more chance to delete it before we launch it".
3. If a user wants to run something insecure or just unapproved by Apple, is there a reason we should deny them the right to do it? They bought the device. They own it. Why shouldn't they be allowed to run code on it without Apple's approval?
When I read the headline, I thought this would be a poor-spirited attempt at a joke. Having read the text of the petition, I'm not so sure anymore. Sure, it's the kind of thing a fifteen-year-old trying to be funny without watching what actually funny people do might write, but unfortunately there are people who say the same sort of thing in absolute seriousness.
Transfer of technology? There's none of that. Ransomware isn't high tech. It's just a lot of effort at breaking in, installing it, and getting the payment out. Writing the software isn't particularly complex.
Russia and Ukraine don't like one another, but Russians and Ukrainians could easily participate in a criminal group without earning the government's attention. As long as that group isn't helping Ukraine's government, Russia doesn't have a reason to want to hurt them. In fact, they do have a reason to like that as they can blame some of the cybercrime problem on Ukraine.
I partially disagree. Your core point is important and I've made a similar one, but I take exception to this part:
"The reason isn't to protect the privacy of the users - all of us, I am sure, would completely agree that that privacy should be breached (with appropriate court orders, of course) to investigate very serious crime."
In general, yes it should. With a mandatory tracking system, no it shouldn't. I wouldn't have agreed to have a mandatory tracking system forced on everybody by a court order before, and that reality doesn't change now that there is a system in existence. It would have been unacceptable in 2019 if they decided that, for public safety, they wanted a log of everyone's position. It is not acceptable in 2021 either.
It depends how many bits end up there. If enough junk was out there, it could make other activities in that orbit problematic. The orbit is small, so if there was enough debris from collisions, other satellites in the area might have to be repositioned frequently to avoid hitting some of it. It's not a long-term risk because the junk will eventually deorbit, but something which makes other activities untenable could still be a risk. That said, I think Spacex has proven to have the ability to perform the required maneuvers, so they can probably avoid collisions if they're held responsible for any failures.
Of course the complaint filed by a rival is intending to weaponize the law for commercial reasons, and of course a company cares more about the environmental problems caused by their competitors than caused by someone unrelated or themselves (note: Viasat operates geosynchronous satellites, so the same complaints don't apply to them). These things are unsurprising and unimportant.
The only important thing is whether the allegations made by Viasat while attempting to set up roadblocks are true. Did Spacex/the FCC manage to circumvent the required environmental approvals? If you sue me because you don't like me and want to make my life difficult, but I actually did something illegal, then I'm still at fault and the suit is still valid.
Yes they do. In fact one of their organizations used to identify itself as "having adherents all over the globe". I'm always wondering if the flat Earth people are running a massive joke which they take far too seriously or if they actually believe it. Nobody could really be this intense about something they can disprove themselves, right? Then I see the magnetic vaccine people and I guess they can.
I think they have a registration system which works kind of like Outlook does inside an organization but for everybody. That way you can schedule something without the email chain of "I'm available on Tuesday afternoons", "I'm not but how is Wednesday", "I could do any time on Wednesday except for 11:00", "How about 10:00", "That works", "Wait, did you mean 10:00 UK or western Europe time", "UK", "Sorry I'm an hour ahead so that's the 11:00 I couldn't make", etc. I don't know if they do anything else though.
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