Posts by doublelayer

BOFH: It's Friday, it's time to RTFM

Re: ACRONYM is NOT an acronym

While it's not amusing, I think that was put in there as an attempt by whatever person got the task of assembling that list to include something slightly interesting or humorous. The over-acronymization of things somehow manages to make everything sound stupid or unpleasant.

I worked at a company which was very dependent on acronyms without reason. They had at least three acronyms for "when will it be done": ETA, EDA, and ECD, though I wouldn't be surprised that they had more which I either didn't see or have managed to forget. But that wasn't enough, because they also had the acronyms EDD and DFAD ("expected date for date" and "date for a date", because they found saying "When will you know the timeline" too difficult as well. These were just some of the stupidest ones they had, but they had a list of several hundred acronyms on a wiki page just in case you wanted to bore yourself into a coma.

DoJ charges pair over China-linked attempt to build semi-autonomous crypto haven on nuked Pacific atoll

Re: Music to ears

He probably was considering that, but it's also one of a few languages that fits in that line. To fit, the language name in English would have to be two syllables with the second accented. The only ones I can think of that have that pattern are Chinese, Burmese, Maltese, and Malay. Not a lot of choices. I suppose you could also manage with a three-syllable one accented on the second (Korean, Marathi, Norwegian, Swahili), but those aren't great either.

Re: Team America!

The U.S. alleges that they committed the crime using U.S.-based organizations and inside the U.S. If they're wrong about that, then they don't get to charge them. If they're right, they do. That works for other countries as well.

Re: "offers to connect and secure small island nations"

All you have to do is build a few naval bases on such islands so that, if you need to send a ship to one that doesn't have a base, there's one nearby. Countries like that idea because it enables them to send ships to places they don't have agreements with just as quickly, which is why the largest countries or ones that used to have empires have large collections of bases in other people's countries and in some cases, islands with little or no native population whose entire purpose is to be naval and air bases far from the country itself.

Asus packs 12-core Intel i7 into a Raspberry Pi-sized board

Re: A "teaser"...with just the opposite effect.

I agree on the pricing. If you sell something to individuals, or even to businesses who might buy one of them at a time, post the prices. Don't make me email you to ask how much the thing costs. Even if you don't sell that many of them, it suggests there's a reason to hide the prices, which dissuades me from sending an email I expect to be pointless but add me to a spam list.

The only reason not to post prices is if they intend on negotiating with every perspective buyer, which only makes sense for bulk orders. That's not the case here, and I'm prepared to guess they already have a price list they send to anyone who wants to buy less than a hundred units.

Microsoft warns of bugs after nation pushes back DST switchover

Re: https://www.southsoftware.com

I can't find confirmation, but maybe Guatemala gave more notice so that article could get written? Otherwise, maybe they decided asking every user in a country to manually edit registry values, at that article does, isn't a functional solution.

Re: Canada uses tzdata files with American city names

It depends on whether they use a database with a lot of copied zones or a simplified one that doesn't use duplicates. If you're using the more basic one, then except for the Atlantic provinces and Newfoundland, they use the largest cities (New York, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles). Anything that has hard-coded these labels will need updating. Probably most Linux installations use the full TZ database. Many embedded ones use the smaller one to save on storage, so they won't be as lucky.

Re: Hmmm...

Be careful. It's labeled by largest city, so it doesn't mean only Chile is in there. I think it is this time, but that doesn't always hold. For example, if the U.S.'s proposal to go to permanent summer time goes in, the tzdata is going to have to change because right now, Canada uses tzdata files with American city names, so unless they do the same, they'll need to change files and everyone in Canada has to start using the new Canadian files. If other countries were included in the America/Santiago file, they didn't make this choice and would have been affected as well.

Re: Hard Coding Ahoy

Updating the time zone is just a file, well actually not quite, but someone else has pointed out that Chile shares time zone data with other regions that didn't do this. Even if it was just them, though, there'd be problems. So Microsoft rushes out an update which updates just that file. Now everyone in Chile needs to install it. In two weeks. You don't get that universal response when it's an actively-exploited zero day. You're not going to get it here either.

So some machines have the patch and others don't. Say hello to lots of computers disagreeing about what time it is, and therefore what time any other reference is talking about. Systems that work by sending times between them will end up with answers that are an hour apart, and that's if the programmers have been careful only to ever use UTC for internal storage. If they ever use local time, even temporarily, except when processing user input, they can have even more bugs. This also makes Microsoft and everyone else release an emergency patch just to get into this state, which takes time and effort.

Open source biz sick of FOSS community exploitation overhauls software rights

Re: "the need and moral obligation to contribute"

Yes, they've got bills. When you start a project, you decide what you'll do about them. One possible decision is to go proprietary, as many have before. You get paid as soon as you find someone who wants your product. Another way is to use a license that says people can use it or even sell it for free, and you won't get paid automatically. You'll have to solicit donations or find a different way to make money, but you'll probably get more users and contributors. Then there's this way, where you start with open source without thinking about the consequences, then change the terms and take all the code written by others for your own and make a profit off them. You're allowed to do that, and I'm allowed to dislike you if you do. Just because you have bills to pay doesn't mean I should pay them if you're not making as much as you thought your "give this away for free" plan would generate.

Sure, in this case, those who have to pay are not that sympathetic. Who cares if a large corporation has to pay more money. The problem comes when they change the license in other ways. They could put the bar anywhere. They can make the source unavailable for future updates. They can charge for any production use if they want. One benefit of open source software was that they were suggesting they weren't going to do those things. They've abandoned that.

Re: I wonder if Lightbend as a company depends on FOSS

They didn't say absolutely that they're hypocritical. They suggested it's possible. The chances are very high that they do use open source software; they're employing devs who are probably using open source tooling, they probably have many Linux servers, and unless they forged the record just to mess with me, they're definitely using Nginx as their HTTP server. We don't know if they donate to all of those things, but if, and only if, they don't donate to at least one of them, they can be seen as hypocritical. I don't claim to have proof that they are, but it is not only possible but also wouldn't be surprising.

Absolutely, and they do. They buy proprietary stuff when they want it. They donate to open source when it benefits them. They don't pay for stuff they're given for free unless they see a benefit in it, which is the risk in giving stuff away for free. Everyone knows there's a risk that, if you make code available, someone will make money off it and not give it to you, but that's intrinsic when you go for a free or open source license which explicitly says so. You want proprietary, go proprietary. Don't act surprised when you don't get an open source community building around your proprietary thing. If it's good enough, you will still turn a profit. Thousands of software companies have succeeded by making proprietary software.

Google CEO Pichai: We need to up productivity by a fifth

Re: My thoughts

"There is nothing worse than a "standup call" for five people that's scheduled in for an hour only for most of it to be trivial personal banter (usually a repeat biography of someone's kids and how they're ill yet again) and the actual work talk takes less than 20 minutes once you finally get round to it."

That's bad, but I think there is one thing worse than it. At least with unimportant banter, there's a chance it's about something of interest to you, so you can have a fun unproductive meeting. What is worse is a meeting where you have to be there or someone will complain, but you don't have to know what they're talking about (bonus points if you don't even understand what they're talking about). Now, you're wasting the same amount of time, but there's no chance you're enjoying any of it. If you're me, then I'm sorry for you, but you would also get mildly annoyed at everyone in the meeting and ponder whether they'd notice if you had network failures about twenty minutes into each of these meetings.

I think the correlation probably does go the other way at least somewhat, combined with the fact that, if you waste half of everyone's week in meetings, then you may not be able to rely on single points of contact anymore because the chances are high that they'll be unavailable because they're in a meeting or too busy to deal with your request. It probably also puts off some people, resulting in a more mixed set of people to work on the product. Managers who set up all those meetings may also be managing badly in other ways as well, leading to inefficient team organization which also harms communication.

California passes bill requiring salary ranges on job listings

Re: Women v men

That's not what I suggest. I was pointing out that the cited figure is already overstating the difference, and that if you want to get a better picture, you can isolate the level of discrimination by controlling for the factors you name. If two people really do have the same abilities, experience, and goals, then we'd expect them to earn similar amounts. If they average out to different numbers, then there may be other things we didn't control for.

I'm not asking for equality of outcome. I point out that existing comparisons are often flawed and contain a lot of differences averaged together. Some of those differences are due to discrimination. Some are due to unintentional differences that are worth studying, but not always modifying. Some are simply due to choice. If you average them all together, you may overstate or understate the ones that are due to discrimination, which is a problem for making any argument based on the statistics.

Re: What are the downsides?

Nothing stops them, but if they tried that on me, that would get a "no, and don't ask anything else like that" response. I think they are aware that the candidate isn't pleased with such tactics, and if they're negotiating salary, they at least kind of want that candidate to join.

A candidate can overstate their previous salary, but what it boils down to is "You must pay me at least this much for me to join". They could come out and say that, which is basically their attitude anyway, but the more overt negotiation might annoy the negotiator for the company.

Re: Women v men

That's not the only thing the number means. There is a job-specific salary difference, which varies by industry but in almost all cases exists, and a difference in occupations in each group. If you want the number you've quoted to be 100%, there are two questions you need to answer:

1. Why are women paid less than men when doing the same job? (The obvious question)

2. Why do women on average have jobs that pay less than the jobs chosen on average by men? This is a combination of women choosing different jobs and being considered less often for certain jobs.

If you only solve the first question, there will probably still be a disparity seen in the average income comparison you've cited. Asking the second question is very important because the answer to it can often reveal other difficulties, such as societal expectations of occupations, imbalance in family work leading to different choices in which job to take, or sexism seen in who gets hired but not how much the person who gets hired is paid. If we want there to be equality, we need to know all the reasons why there is inequality.

Re: Will this actually help ?

What I dislike even more, if that's possible, is the recruiter who has a job they think I would be a good fit for, and their second question (after how are you) is how much money I want to make. If I took your call, I want to hear about what the job involves just in case my reaction is to run away. Then, you can tell me how much they want to pay for the person who fits their needs. I'm not doing salary negotiation the wrong way, on the wrong end of the interview process, and with a person who isn't equipped to accept or suggest terms.

No, Apple, you may not sell iPhones without chargers

Re: Simple Compromise?

Apple already make those and ship them to stores. Nobody buys that when another one is just fine, but you can. They have already incurred the impact in order to sell it to someone who doesn't have a block that works with the included cable, so the only risk is if a lot more people ask for them when they're free.

Re: The rest

One thing that may be considered here is that Apple's including a USB-C to Lightning cable in the box now, which means that to use that, you'll need a charger with a USB-C port. I have ten blocks with USB-A ports, and I have a USB-A to Lightning cable (my iPhone is old enough that they were still shipping those, and although the one they sent was damaged long ago, I replaced it with another). I don't have any wall adapters with a USB-C port on it. I'm sure they exist, but I've not seen them used by anything. I do have a laptop with a USB-C port, so I suppose I'd have to use that to charge if I only had the cable Apple includes available. I'm not sure why they felt it necessary to go that way instead of using USB-A on the power source end as pretty much everything else does.

All they'd have to do to both comply with Brazil's request and keep their environmental record is to allow people to present a receipt, serial number, or some other single-use validator for an iPhone to receive a free charging block. Those who have one don't ask and are fine. They could probably also get away with it by using USB-A cables instead of USB-C ones, as arguing that USB chargers are ubiquitous is easier than making the same argument with USB-C ones. I think either approach would end up working for them and having similar results.

G7 countries beat UK in worldwide broadband speed test again

Re: Interesting looking at the bottom country speeds

And what's worse is that these countries also tend to have limited access to any connection at all, meaning that advances in technology can quickly be absorbed by adding new users, whereas at least in developed countries, we're unlikely to find millions who just didn't have any connection before. However, one possible benefit is that many less developed countries that have poor infrastructure for wired internet have mobile networks that are far more advanced than running services to homes. People may have access to more mobile internet than these statistics take into account.

Unhappy about excluding nation-state attacks from cyberinsurance? Get ready to pay

Re: Self-Insuring

I'm not sure how long that would last, because one company might find that large savings account to be too tempting. Oh no, looks like some employee machines got ransomware. Let's file a claim and see if we can't turn a profit from other people's funds. You'd need some kind of contract allowing the other participants to audit claims, and they might not want to hire the people needed to do it.

Re: Who's the hacker?

There are various people that study malware and attack methods to attempt to guess who did it. They're not always correct, but they're usually able to identify useful patterns and can often be trusted. I'm guessing the bar for the insurance companies is "If we can find someone speculating that it could have been a state actor, then it was an act of war and you're out of luck". That wouldn't necessarily stand up in court, but they have a lot more lawyers than you do.

Of course, not every way a government could harm you is an act of war, but insurance companies are in the business of selling you a contract that looks like it'll cover something, then finding a reason that it really doesn't. They find the vaguest language they can which can cover a lot of unexpected things, then include as many as they can without causing the signer to become suspicious. They got a lot of mileage from the "act of God" provision, despite it not meaning anything. They found lots of reasons why the pandemic didn't count, sometimes with reasons but mostly without them. They'll do it with this as well. If you get cyber insurance, be very careful what you sign before you rely on it.

Salesperson's tech dream delivered by ill-equipped consultant who charged for the inevitable fix

How would it do that if it was set to interpret any incoming email as a request and bounce those that weren't valid? To handle this, it would have to cache invalid requests and deduplicate identical ones, which would have stopped the loop after two of the autoreplies to invalid messages but wouldn't have accomplished any other goal, such as actually working or not filling the queues with bounced messages and autoreplies for each new incorrect request. It just wouldn't have gotten into an exponential loop, but things still wouldn't be fine. If anything, the system that should have handled things differently is the system that sent automatic replies to a bounced message, as that's easier to figure out from the headers.

Man wins competition with AI-generated artwork – and some people aren't happy

This contest didn't require hand-drawn art. The parallel is still appropriate, because it's only trying to answer two questions:

1. Does this count as art?

2. Given the lax requirements of the contest, which did include digitally modified photos, would this count?

The contest didn't specify any rules that clearly remove this from consideration. It was not required to draw by hand or even to avoid using digital editing techniques. You can still find arguments for why this tool shouldn't count, but to be applicable, they'll end up being smaller and more subjective.

Re: It may be AI generated, but it's pretty good.

I don't know what art is, but I think you can make a case for cookery having at least an artistic element, not including those people who make food, especially cakes, purely for their visual appeal. Those who are effectively making edible sculptures are definitely artists. I don't consider myself an artist even though I do artistic things on occasion, which is good because a lot of people who do consider themselves artists seem to spend a lot of time finding reasons why other people aren't.

Re: AI-Generated Artwork

That rule doesn't say it had to be his photographs that were manipulated. If someone took other photographs that were publicly available and used manual editing tools to stitch them into a fictional image that was distinct from the originals, would that not have counted? I'm not sure, but I think they would allow it. The software used to produce this example basically did that, but instead of making the user draw the connections between the aspects, it did it on its own (or possibly just at random) until the user accepted the result. If the first is allowed, I think the second should be also.

The crime against humanity that is the modern OS desktop, and how to kill it

Re: It does suck

I don't think that's the right approach. It should be optional, but I've seen enough devices that can do that that it makes sense to have a tablet UI which can be enabled. The problem with deeming it optional or even unused is that it's easy to assume your use case is everyone's, and it's not. For example, you've given this idea of the average computer user:

"Most computer users are sitting at their desk in front of 2-3 huge monitors and don't really care about touch and small screen usability."

That's not the average. That's you. It's also everyone in my office, because we're all programmers. A lot of others have one screen. Sometimes huge, sometimes medium sized. Then, we have a lot of people who really do just use a single laptop-sized screen, especially those who work from home and didn't get extra displays from their work. Many of them might like having lots of extra display real estate, but some don't see the advantages and many more just don't have that as their setup. Those people may not be using them as tablets, but they do care a lot about small screen usability. I can't tell you how large each group is, but I can tell you that they're larger than you make out.

DeFi venture OptiFi permanently locks up $661,000 of assets in code snafu

Re: DeFi

In fairness, that's not really a new term. Cryptocurrency is the underlying system that permits relatively basic transactions to occur and be tracked and verified. DeFi is the attempt to layer some kind of financial product on that infrastructure, usually without fixing the problems that product had when it was centralized, but adding in some extra bonus problems from the attempt to reimplement it. Cryptocurrency is like HTTP, and defi* like a specific website that eventually uses it. Well except for the fact that HTTP and websites generally work.

* A question for any grammarians out there, "defi" looks wrong, but it's not a proper noun, so I don't like writing it "DeFi" in the middle of a sentence. If we must write the term on occasion, how do others stand on capitalizing it?

EU proposes regulations for tablet battery life, spare parts

Re: Please do it.

Google has tons of power. They can prevent people from making phones with any other version of Android on them, thus killing competition with Google's software and services. They've used that to tremendous effect. They can and have forced manufacturers to include all of Google's crapware on devices. They can and have broken a lot of Android features, supposedly in the open source code, so they can come back and fix them in their proprietary stuff. They have redesigned the system layers of the OS several times to make updates even less dependent on anything custom. And yet, they can't do anything about security updates?

Here's how they do it if they ever start caring:

Licenses for Google Play Services will only be granted if you promise to update the licensed device on at least the following schedule. Security updates will be released monthly, at most fifteen days after the update is made available, for the first seven years of device life. After that point, they may be released every quarter, at most 45 days after being made available. Feature releases will be released within 180 days of availability for at least five years after device is released. Failure to follow these requirements will be a breech of contract and will result in a penalty of $35 per device sold. Also, you won't be getting licensed again until you comply.

Or, if they don't like the strong-arm tactics, they could make the security updates portable and cut out the manufacturer. After all, I don't need to go to Dell's website to install a Windows patch or get a new kernel version for Linux. I get those from the people who patched the problem, or at farthest, the package maintainers for my distribution who didn't have to go to the manufacturer either.

Re: Start with your own European Companies

I'm not sure what you're asking, given that this would cover everyone, including European companies. If you actually mean that it should start by only covering European companies and not others, then count me out. Cover everyone, and let the benefits spread.

Re: Please do it.

"How many Lenovo/Samsung tablets is a store going to sell for 200€ when another no-name landfill Android tablet is 50€ ?"

They're selling them now. They could have gone with the cheap landfill Chinese brands any time in the last decade, and they mostly chose not to. Why should they do so any more now? Of course, that hasn't stopped there being similarly landfill non-Chinese brands that end up in those stores, but if I want the cheapest, all-corners-cut options, I still have to go to a site like AliExpress.

Re: Please do it.

Or maybe it forces those legitimate manufacturers to put in a little effort in automating the security update lifecycle or going to Google and saying "If you don't fix the design that made this process difficult*, our business will get killed, so get moving or expect to lose a lot of OEM licenses". Either is fine with me.

* It's on both Google and the manufacturers here, and either can do the work it takes to push out those update packages. I don't care who does it, and if it doesn't happen, I'm happy if both parties get penalized for failing to do what every other operating system manages.

Lenovo launches face-mounted monitor

Re: Will they be like Googleglass?

It doesn't look like there's a camera in this, so no. Unless they've hidden it well and plan to announce that with the rest of the details when they start selling it, it doesn't have the same privacy concerns as AR glasses with cameras.

One man's battle to get patent rights for AI inventors in America may be over

I'm in favor of giving this machine, and this machine only, all the rights of a human. If we do that, we can immediately turn around and charge the guy clogging the courts with these pointless cases with having enslaved and stolen from the machine whose work he's selling, and reject any actions he's filed on the basis that the machine did not choose to file them, and as the machine owns any intellectual property that might exist, it will have to file suit. Then throw out all the patent claims on the basis that the machine didn't submit them, and when he edits the code to make the machine submit documents, charge him with illegal vivisection of a person. You want a machine to have rights, then it has to exercise them.

Arm sues Qualcomm over custom Nuvia CPU cores, wants designs destroyed

Re: Breach

That's not what this suit is about. Using mobile-grade processors in a server is not Qualcomm's problem. The license doesn't say what people may do with the chips they buy from Qualcomm; it says what kind of chips Qualcomm can design with ARM's information. ARM evidently has different license requirements for server-grade chips versus mobile or laptop-grade ones, and that's what they'll be fighting about for the next five years.

Inflation to kill growth prospects for smartphone sales

Re: 5G made everyone refresh already

This seems unlikely. They didn't shut down 4G, so anyone with a smartphone made after 2013 wouldn't have had to replace their devices. Someone still using an old 2G phone or who adopted smartphones early then never got a new one would have to, but most users had something new enough that they didn't have to swap it out. I think it is partially inflation, combined with the fact that a new phone doesn't really do anything the old phone couldn't do. The same thing restricts the demand for computers, which no longer need replacement to run new software, so they're kept around until there's some serious hardware problem (and longer if the owner knows someone who can fix that problem).

Goodbye, humans: Call centers 'could save $80b' switching to AI

Re: Conversational AI

Who knows, maybe some company will take a real AI* chatbot like the ever-popular GPT and attach that to the phone line. While it's busy not solving your problems, you can have nice philosophical conversations that start to get confusing about twenty seconds in. Or, given what's happened with many other attempts, you get something worse.

* AI in the sense that it's not using a script and its responses aren't supplied by the programmers, but created from intensive computations based on stuff it copied from someone else. Not AGI, so in case you were planning on calling me out using a definition I didn't mean, this is my disclaimer.

Woman forced to sell 4-bed house after crypto exchange wrongly refunded $7.2m

Re: an account number was accidentally entered into the payment amount field

And this causes a lot of problems. A common scam type involves gaining access to the email of a place that deals with large payments, real estate being popular, so they can change the numbers in an email before the customer is about to make a large payment. If the customer doesn't call to check the numbers, or if the scammers also put in a fake phone number, a large payment is sent to the scammers. One would think this is a thing that we can update, but the banking system often looks like some design features from the 1980s are still left in.

Re: If the transfer had been cryptocurrency

Quite far. If you have money that they say isn't yours, they can do lots of things to get it off you. Holding it in ways they can't break is another crime, and they can apply penalties until you give up the money. There's a reason the successful thieves run to another country and live in obscurity, because if law enforcement has the ability to penalize you, they can find ways to make you change your mind.

That 'clean' Google Translate app is actually Windows crypto-mining malware

Not necessarily. For one thing, having a program which makes web requests is not always a problem if, for example, it comes with an improved interface or other features that benefit from a local program. It could, for example, cache translation results and store them in a convenient local file which some users might value.

For another thing, Google Translate does work offline, but only on phones. You can download offline translation databases which work when the phone is disconnected, though I think the quality is probably different when not using the server's presumably much larger ones. Someone who knew that might expect there to be a desktop application using the same files for offline translation, and if anyone from Google (or a different company with translation software) is reading this, I'd like that, please.

Re: What is a "clean Windows app"?

I'm not sure if you're joking, but in case that's a serious question, it's not a single term. It's a Windows app that is clean, I.E. doesn't contain malware.

You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups

Re: a place in hell

"An understandable precaution, but surely it could present the name prefilled and ask for confirmation that's the patient you want so you don't have to type the whole name again?"

The risk is forming a habit that's hard to break. The user sees that box a few hundred times, and the name's always right. They get very fast at clicking through it so they can get to the important stuff. Then, on time 472, the name's not right, but they click through anyway and the data's misaligned. This gets even worse if the thing's running in a batch mode where it shows multiple patients in a row, because then they could have an off by one error that cascades through everyone else in the list.

This can still be improved by using a shorter identifier, E.G. first three letters of the name followed by the last three letters, although if you implement that, make sure you can handle a name like "Al Hu" somehow without confusing everyone.

Banks often get to assign whatever sequence of numbers they want (if you're lucky, it's just numbers), but if they want to, there are several methods for defending against transposed digits. The Luhn algorithm is popular and freely available, so it's more an issue of persuading those not using it to start doing so. That article does list a lot of places using it to protect against fumbling or misreading numbers.

77% of security leaders fear we’re in perpetual cyberwar from now on

Re: 77% ???

It's a prefix with plenty of annoying historical uses, but we don't have a different one when we're creating new words. If they said that we were in a state of perpetual "computer warfare", it would sound at least as silly and likely more so. Those of us who work in IT or another computer-centric field may not say "cybersecurity" much, but those who deal with lots of other things in the big category of security want a word for the computer-related parts of it. If it's not going to be cybersecurity, you find another short word for it and convince others to switch.

Re: MicroSerfdom

"Is it too much to ask for a commercial OS to come with maximal security as standard, not something that requires user/admin configuration."

Yes, it is. But fortunately for you, I have such a product available for purchase. It's guaranteed to make your computer unhackable, at least while it's running only this OS. You don't need to touch a single config file or even think at all about what you're doing with the machine to ensure the security. Sadly, in order to accomplish this, the following restrictions are present: you can't store or load any data in nonvolatile memory, you can't run more than one program at a time, and you can't communicate with any other system. I was originally not going to let you turn it on either, but I do like providing my customers with features when I can.

You're asking for a perfect solution, all on a system whose entire purpose is to be among the most versatile data processing equipment in the world. It's akin to demanding a lock that can never be opened, even when the perspective burglar has infinite time on their hands and access to high explosives, and oh yes you also want it to open in at most two seconds when and only when it's you who's entering. If you want physical security, you have to put some thought into what inefficiencies you'll accept, where you'll need security systems, and what processes you'll need to maintain them. Failing to do that is likely to give you a flawed system. It should be unsurprising that digital security has similar requirements.

Re: Wrong conclusion?

Were you not aware that a government can target its own citizens? Lots of them have, and dictatorships really like doing it although democracies are distressingly often willing to do the same. You can never attribute with perfect certainty a piece of malware to its creators, but there are lots of methods of doing so that produce better results than seeing that a few machines in Iran are affected and jumping to a conclusion without seeking any other evidence.

Meet the CrowPi-L – a clever, slightly rustic, Raspberry Pi laptop chassis

Re: Conflicted

In that case, I agree a bit more but I'm still not sure whether it's feasible. You can improve the keyboard, trackpad, case, and all that, but the Raspberry Pi just doesn't work very well with batteries. I've had many battery-powered Pis and, while you can do it, they lack power management features that let them save power and what makes the SoCs on the boards so cheap also makes them power hungry. This model doesn't have terrible battery life just because the battery's undersized (it's kind of small, but not laughably so), but because it's powering a Pi 4 along with the peripherals. I'm afraid that may always nag at the attempts to create a portable machine based around the Pi.

Shout-out to whoever went to Black Hat and had North Korean malware on their PC

Re: Malware at Black Hat?

I guess you hard-code the time that the conferences will happen and find the IP blocks used by hotels or conference locations likely to host them (if not already announced), and then you just check your host's address and clock against that list. I don't really think most malware authors are going to go to that effort when they would probably be better able to hide by finding a less identifiable C&C method. If you'd still like to try it, try putting your machines into a hotel in Las Vegas and mess with your clock so it always shows a time in mid August.