Posts by doublelayer 9408 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Feb 2018
Nothing you said contradicts anything I said or read. I'll admit I don't work at Huawei, but here's what I read about the situation, and why it means that the workers don't own the company.
"Employees buy shares with their own money, and receive annual dividends based on the number of shares they hold."
If what I've read is correct, this does not mean what it looks like it means. In a normal company, you buy shares with your own money, they may pay you dividends, and you get to keep them and sell them. In Huawei's case, you buy shares, they pay you dividends, but A) they can't be sold and B) you forfeit them on leaving the company. You don't own that. It's a method of moving money around and functions a lot more like a bond or even a vested bonus than a normal stock share. As such, you have no legal ownership, because your shares don't entitle you to anything other than what Huawei itself has promised.
"They also elect members to form a Representatives' Commission on a one-vote-per-share basis. The Commission elects the company's Board of Directors."
Yes, I already said that. Again, if the internet is to be believed, the elections occur with candidates selected by the company, giving them the ability to remove any choice by giving you a limited pool of candidates.
"the rest is held by Huawei’s union, the platform through which employees own the company."
Right, as I've mentioned, that's not an employee-controlled union. It is a government-controlled union. I've already discussed what that means and that it's not a major concern above, but it doesn't mean you own anything.
Well, as Huawei has claimed to create a very new mobile OS, but the linked technical review has identified basically no differences apart from changing names, it's not really as slanted as you make it out to be. If I fork something but don't change it, then it's effectively the same as what it used to be. Only once I've changed the functionality does it become different. For instance, when Amazon forked Elastic, they made a thing which is just like Elastic just with the original license, so I would view a statement that it is effectively the same as correct. If Huawei eventually does make a new mobile OS, even retaining some of Android's components, then such a statement would be unfair. They have not done that yet.
First, that's not what those who distrust Huawei cite as their reason. Second, Huawei isn't owned by its workers in any sense. The closest you can get is that it might be directed by them, but from the methods used, this isn't really true either. Workers get the right to vote in an election which eventually gets to select people who eventually get to select the directors for the company, which looks promising, but their candidates are named by the existing leadership and not by the workers. Therefore, the leadership can prevent any disagreement by restricting available candidates. The actual ownership of the company is held by a holding company and its founder, and the holding company in turn is owned by a group supposedly representing a trade union, but a trade union of the type administered by the government. Some have argued that this makes Huawei owned by the Chinese government, and legally it's sort of true, but I don't think that makes them any more beholden to the CCP than they would be anyway merely by the CCP having a bunch of power.
I agree with the original poster, but your stated reason is not at all the reason that Huawei has detractors.
Yes, exactly right. If people wanted to force it to have a different license, it would be difficult to do. This does mean they can't update to GPL3 and apply new restrictions whenever they want, but also that nobody can switch it to proprietary and apply theirs. I don't think we have profound concerns about the Linux foundation descending into a proprietary software outfit, but certain things which originally looked like a completely trustworthy system have proved not to be. From Freenode to Nominet to ISOC to Elastic, this journal is full of stories of places which were once seen as open taking things away. Is it so bad that it's impossible to do that with Linux?
It's mostly common sense. Of course you can put a license statement at the top of all the code files, and that isn't a problem, but it's not really necessary. It removes some ambiguity, but ambiguity which doesn't really exist in practice. People know what it means when you have a bunch of code with a license statement at the root. They know what the license identifier means.
Consider a parallel. When I was at university, one of my textbooks was a draft which hadn't been published yet. The professor who wrote it and installed it in the required reading list sold copies to the students which contained a copyright statement and a prohibition on distribution on every page. Yet you'll notice most other books don't have such statements on every page, because everyone understands that stating that in one place applies it to all the other pages in the book. Similarly, putting a license file at the root applies that license to any copyrighted code in the repo by common sense, and a simple statement that the GPL applies makes this perfectly clear for each file. It doesn't matter if you understood that line, because you could look it up. It means what it has always meant, that the license for this file is the GPL.
"Without Stallman, we would not have an objective C compiler."
Wrong on many levels. The first objective C compiler wasn't the famous NeXT one. It didn't use GCC. So the statement is just wrong. Secondly, NeXT was very committed to that language. They used the core of GCC, probably because they were lazy enough to use a good C compiler if it was there, but if they hadn't had that, they probably would have written that part too or bought it in rather than giving up on their favorite language altogether. It would have been closed-source, but I'm sure someone would have implemented an open one since it got quite a lot of use. You can easily say that having the GPL improved the access to an open-source objective C compiler, or even argue that it produced a better compiler, but to argue that there would be no compiler without it is demonstrably incorrect.
These are good points, but a few of them are difficult or even infeasible. Keeping it sparse and brief are probably the hardest ones, because both weaken the stated credentials. By listing a bunch of things with which I have experience, not only am I likely to make it through a nontechnical scanning stage, but I can make a point to the person in your position that I have more than just what you need. If I'm applying for a job which wants C/C++ experience, then I'll be listing that, but it's also helpful to ensure they know that I know a variety of other languages. Not necessarily because they'll need them, but to prove that I have experience in useful things and didn't just take a C++ course.
Similarly, I've tried the tactic of condensing every relevant job I've done so I can shove them all onto the bottom of the page. It involves chopping a lot of detail about what I did there, which is part of what I hope will argue for my credentials. I can't start skipping things as then it will look like I have gaps in my history that I don't want to talk about.
Most of this is disputable or wrong.
"we’ve been sending our traffic over other peoples network kit since the internet began. In terms of security threat, it’s already solved by TLS."
No, that's not how this works. The threat is not the security of our data. The threat is the pathway to a potential attack. If someone can use the sidewalk system to access a device on my network, they could use it to gain information about my network and other devices on it. While we have been using others' equipment to send our traffic, we typically don't allow unknown devices to use our equipment.
"Finally doesn’t apple’s Find my device do the same thing?"
No. It doesn't. It uses the network information already known by the device, which works pretty well because a lot of them have cellular radios and have connected to WiFi before. It does not have a secret tunnel through others' devices.
"As does lorawan"
LoRa? No, that doesn't either. That's a radio protocol which doesn't even connect to the internet. If you want to bridge the LoRa network you've set up to the internet, you need the equipment which does it. Or someone might (might) have one already and agree that you can use it, but that's like asking your neighbor to let you use their WiFi. It is not required for the system and not expected by it either.
Well, sort of but why would you do that? If you're worried about a specific device broadcasting, then you can put it into a more convenient shielded thing. If you're worried about a device you don't know about, then it's probably not on your person, but instead in something that goes around with you such as a bag or a vehicle. A bag which blocks signals is likely more useful than trying to make clothing for the purpose.
You could always try packaging it up and mailing it to them without a return address. At least that's what the BOFH would do.
"I wonder if, should we have an outpost on Ganymede, would it be possible to view a TV broadcast, or even listen to a radio broadcast ?"
As they are broadcasted now, with technology like the kind we have now, no. We use a variety of transmission systems but none of them are designed to send radio or television into space. A lot of more common systems use wavelengths which don't travel very far (it's a function of frequency), which is why the local television signal can't be heard in another continent. There are a few things we use which cover much longer distances, but they do that by taking advantage of conditions on Earth which don't make it easy to receive it outside the planet. The most common of these are transmissions which reflect off the ionosphere and thereby bounce around the world for a longer range, but the same electrical conditions that allow the ionosphere to reflect the signal elsewhere make it very hard for the signal to get through it and out into space.
If we had such an outpost, we would set up a communication system which can reach it, just like the systems we have for communicating with spacecraft, but it would involve large changes to our current systems to deal with the transmission problems across such large distances. Or theoretically, someone could find a way to focus on a very weak signal without picking up all the static there would be, but people have been trying that for a very long time without getting it.
I don't think so. It's not private, as it's the thing all your customers download and run on their equipment. It doesn't contain any sensitive information, and if it does, that's the biggest of your problems. More than that, you have the code for that elsewhere, so it doesn't matter much where you run that code because you can stand it up elsewhere in a disaster.
The main difference is that race, religion, and national origin are all protected characteristics in civil rights legislation, where as hate speech or "You annoyed me" are not. There is a list for your country. Maybe you should read it.
"Private businesses apparently cannot discriminate against people, or so the courts ruled regarding the bakers."
You will find when you read about it that the bakers concerned objected to writing a message on the cake, refused to do so, and were upheld by the courts. Ergo it is legal for companies to refuse to write or publish when they do not want to do so, or to discriminate using certain nonprotected characteristics. These rules may not apply if a company has a monopoly position. Most social media companies do not have such a position in the relevant market, namely that of online publishing. Whatever your feelings about the companies themselves, the people they choose not to permit, or the things they do, the above are facts about the legal situation which you will need to factor into your argument.
"Sorry, no one and I mean no one would use the DMV receipt, which is what is claimed, to ID a perp. Not just at Apple stores, not even a liquor store security guard would do that. Thats how stupid the claim is."
Well, that leaves two options:
1. The Apple store security people were stupid and did so anyway, meaning your view is useful for the plaintiff because it proves they were not only harassing him after knowing their mistake but also should never have made that mistake in the first place. That could add a negligence charge.
2. The plaintiff is just lying, despite the records Apple and the police have provided which the article covered. These substantiate the use of a photoless card, height difference, and identification of a different person.
Which seems more likely?
Well, while we're discussing expectations and assumptions, I expected you to read the article before commenting and assume that you didn't. Here are a few of the things you've gotten wrong.
"So there is a thief. He is photographed, and he loses a forged library card with his photo and someone else’s name."
Nothing here is correct. Not a library card. No photo on the card, which is a permit for an as yet unlicensed driver. Card is not forged, but a true card. Thief and rightful owner of card are two different people.
"They conveniently deleted the picture” is also nonsense. Nobody claims it was his picture."
Except Apple and their security contractor, repeatedly, after being informed multiple times of their mistake. But nobody else, except sometimes the police. But nobody else.
"And I assume the thief had long been convicted, no reason ans possibly illegal to keep his picture after that."
No conviction has happened. Because in order to convict someone, you have to identify who they are, and when they tried to do that, they found out they were wrong about the identification.
Code of all kinds includes limits to prevent problems that were not found in production. It is why production software checks whether memory was allocated correctly and handles out of memory conditions even though their assessment indicated that this was unlikely. For the same reason, they should have the ability, especially when it's only running on their systems, to have a safety cutoff for various types of unexpected resource usage. Most software running on the backend already has a lot of things like this. For example, a system which checks individual jobs for ones that seem to be taking too long or too much processing and may therefore be malfunctioning. Such jobs can be investigated or killed to prevent them causing damage to the rest of the backend.
"30% sounds a lot until you look at the details. If the cost of a transaction is $.25 and the sale is $1, the net on the 30% is 5%."
You just made up those numbers and they're utterly ridiculous. The cost is nothing like that. It never was, and it certainly isn't now.
"Epic signed the contract and should have to live by it until the next time it comes up for renewal. If they are contributing so much to Apple's coffers, they should be in a good position to get some concessions."
Apple does not offer concessions. They won't, because they have a lot more power because they have a monopoly on IOS app distribution. That's what this case is about because that can be illegal.
"There is also the matter of data security compliance across many countries. That alone is a big cost in attorneys that any one developer may not be able to afford."
This is a rubbish argument. Apple does not assist developers with this compliance. Those costs are entirely the responsibility of developers and have always been. If you're using the throw anything at the wall defense, it's best not to throw outright lies up there. At least misstate the truth, come on.
"If Epic is so big, how come they haven't negotiated a better deal with Apple?"
Apple doesn't offer any deals. They recently changed from one option to two options to avoid more legal scrutiny. It didn't work. They feel that, because they have a platform and can prevent people from posting, that they have enough leverage to demand whatever price they want and the other side will have to pay.
What free stuff would they be giving you or anyone in that case? They would be allowing you to run code made by someone else, paid for by you, retrieved from the developers directly. Apple wouldn't be required to give you anything. If you chose to use third-party apps, only you and the developer would have value transferred.
You made an excellent example:
"Imagine what would happen if MS banned the Epic store app from Windows..."
This is great. Because MS can't ban them from Windows because they want money. Microsoft does not charge them for the right to have a Windows binary. They don't collect their transactions. They don't restrict who can run code on Windows. That's what Apple thinks it should have the right to do.
"That 30% also gets your product marketed to hundreds of millions of potential punters;"
I don't think it really does. Unless coming up when people search for the name counts as marketing. They don't include advertising with App Store publishing, so unless you show up in one of their lists of nice apps, then you don't really get anything related to marketing. I don't know if anyone ever reads those lists, nor do I know if Epic has ever appeared in them. I'd be curious whether people would take a deal which is "You may use other payment providers and you will never appear in any of our suggested app lists". I expect most would take that contract.
Apple's services are in providing a CDN for downloading the base package, and that's it. They don't host any of the other app-related services. That certainly doesn't cost 30%, and that isn't even used when doing in-app purchases.
This is tough for me, because you're partly right and partly wrong, each to a large degree.
You're absolutely right that he was not forced to concede anything of the kind. His statements about malware were made as part of his argument. Epic didn't need him to say that and he volunteered the statements.
You're wrong though because you're assuming the statements misconstrued here were about fraudulent payments. He made those statements too, but that's not what they were talking about. This is what they were talking about:
"There are multiple stores on the Mac," Judge Rogers told the exec according to reports. "So, if that can happen on the Mac, why should we not allow the same stores to exist on the phone?"
"It’s certainly how we’ve done it on the Mac," replied Federighi, "and it’s regularly exploited on the Mac. iOS has established a dramatically higher bar for customer protection. The Mac is not meeting that bar today.
[...]
"And as I say, today, we have a level of malware on the Mac that we don’t find acceptable and is much worse than iOS. Put that same situation in place for iOS and it would be a very bad situation for our customers."
Well, in my opinion, which has no legal value, Epic made the thing that someone wants to buy, meaning they're providing the value to the other side. Apple provided that value when the user wanted to buy an iPhone, so they keep that profit. Epic provide the value when a gamer wants to buy whatever useless thing they're selling (I don't know what they sell), so Epic should keep that profit. I don't think Apple should have the universal right to demand the exclusive right to payments their users make.
The big social media companies do not get your copyright rights. They get a right to use your uploaded images, but A) that doesn't give them ownership and B) it does not extend to others. Their terms of service will include statements to that effect. I've already confirmed the major ones have such clauses.
I like this idea. We could start by having any reader in a GDPR-covered country start submitting requests for erasure of their data. Here's a form letter which could be of use:
https://www.datarequests.org/blog/sample-letter-gdpr-erasure-request/
I'm guessing most of these will be ignored, and we also won't generate sufficient traffic to annoy them, but by doing this in a variety of EU countries, we could also get more documented incidents where the letters are ignored, which can be used in complaints to data protection authorities.
The problem is that you don't know for sure whether a given picture of you is in their database. They don't have that information available, and therefore you can't give them a reference to the data that violates. You could still make a case under some cases, but first you need a copy of the data they have on you, which you can only get if there's a law requiring that and they're obeying that law.
Some of us have larger residences and can easily work in a dedicated or comfortable room, or live alone so we don't have to move things as often, but lots of others aren't in that situation. Considering the number of people who live with family in a small place and may have two people working from home full time, there are many who won't have convenient dedicated locations to work and will use some other room. That is why some people (most people if we use the numbers from the article) still buy laptops even if they're not using them outside their homes very often.
"Are you trying to say that vaccines won't work in Australia?"
No, of course they're not. Here's what they said:
"Difference is, the UK is rapidly approaching the point of herd immunity (induced by mass vaccination), whereas Australia is a sitting duck if it starts getting a foothold and running out of control."
The degree to which they're at or near herd immunity is disputed, but the point about Australia is that the UK has given about 63 million jabs and Australia has given about 4 million. If the virus were to spread a lot in Australia, its people would have a lot less protection due to vaccinations. Fortunately, Australia has already gotten quarantines working pretty well, so that probably won't happen, but the point about differential vaccination rates is valid.
It depends how often you want to thrash those bits. If you flip them randomly every 0.5 seconds, that means the channel is corrupted once in every 512 KB transferred. If the applications use packets and checksum them, they can figure that out and retransmit. You would probably have to flip them a lot more often to block the channel, but then you might see some performance degradation.
Using two vaccines and the most dangerous variant makes sense. If you protect enough for a less dangerous variant, it will not be enough for the most dangerous one. So do the math on the most dangerous one both from vaccine resistance and health outcomes unless one of these situations apply:
1. There are so many different dangerous variants that protecting against the most dangerous will still result in a large risk from other ones, in which case the numbers are even worse.
2. The plan is to prevent that most dangerous variant from getting in at all. If that succeeds, then you don't need to create immunity to it, but that opportunity has already passed for the UK.
No, they're not. There are a bunch of tools that create PDFs and they do weird things to text layers. Sometimes they'll omit some characters because a font they used had a different glyph for a few combinations. Because their font didn't keep the characters apart, they're left out of the text. I've seen that repeatedly. Or there will be a table, and the text from the table will come out just as it went in, but the table's organization is completely destroyed. Row major, column major, sometimes completely random order, there's no way to tell. Whitespace sometimes indicates what it used to be, but it never lines up completely so if you try to split on whitespace you'll find the table is not easily parsed. There are lots of ways getting just the text out of a PDF won't work.
Plain text in which encoding? Does the line ending matter? How about long lines vs short lines? Mathematical formula in what format? Written as words or assume the reader knows LaTeX? Tables allowed or not? If written, use the Unicode box drawing characters; only _, |, and -; or no lines, just line up with whitespace? Unicode or ASCII quotation marks? Diagrams permitted as separate images referenced by filename?
Plain. Text. Lots. Of. Questions.
"At least with Lisp you don't have to worry whether the end brackets match the opening ones."
Which makes it much easier to miss one of the brackets and mess up the entire expression since there are now several places you could fix it, only one of which works. If the closing ones have to match, then the compiler can tell you where the mismatch occurred. If generated automatically, the readability problem isn't so bad.
"You do realise computers predate cars, right?"
That's a stretch. Conceptually, no they didn't, because cars are based on wheeled vehicles and just added the engine. As purchasable products, no they didn't, because general purpose computers, even those which broke down all the time, arrived a couple decades after cars that lots of people bought. The only method I can think of which allows it to work is if you're counting from first attempt to manufacture something of the kind, in which case the computer slightly predates the car, but then the computer got stuck and the car didn't.
No, they have to do what would actually happen. The person writes the script to brute force the password and outputs a mostly useless progress indicator which only serves to prove that the program is still running. I'd like to see them have a single terminal which looks like this (at least if I'm the one who wrote it).
Please wait...
10000
20000
30000
40000
50000
60000
That would be realistic, although if they're going for maximum realism, they have to throw in some useless warning output as well:
Please wait...
10000
20000
Password "z0\x94F%": Partially valid header, best candidate so far.
30000
40000
Really? Why? I get comparing Apple computers to others and not liking Apple's structure. Computers from others are usually more repairable and likely to last longer. Also they're sometimes less expensive. I don't view that as the only factor, but it definitely is one where Apple loses. But I don't see that factor applying to their phones. Android phones have much shorter software support lifetimes and are usually similarly unrepairable. There are only a few ones out there which are designed for users to repair them. For the vast majority of devices which weren't intended in that way, iPhones score in the middle whereas a lot of others score very low. So what argument do you have for disliking iPhones so much that you look down on those who use them?
The article suggests that it doesn't. Developers didn't have as much problem with those questions, and I think I would feel the same had I gotten questions like that. They're short, probably can wait until I want to click over and answer them, and they imply that the system asking them actually cares about what I'm feeling. Also, it's the chance to put more data behind the call for fewer meetings. So I think I wouldn't mind that kind of question popping up from time to time.
It's obviously a series of jokes. In my opinion, none of those jokes are funny, but they're clearly intended as such. The problem is that jokes which aren't funny and do sound like bragging can be interpreted as either just bragging or trying to hide bragging under a veneer of self-deprecation. He can do whatever he wants, but I wouldn't recommend such an attempt unless you want some people to express views as seen above.
No, it's true. It's not intended to replace the dollar. It isn't capable. It's designed to provide China with the ability to know what any citizen has purchased and to cut all money off at the push of a button in case they don't like someone. Also can plug into the social credit score system. It's a tool for maintaining their domestic dictatorship, not impinging on international money transfers.
Their plan for changing international money transfers already started last year. It hasn't started very quickly, but it's their tool for the job. This is unrelated.
Epic are arguing that the contract is illegal due to existing anti-monopoly law. That is a legitimate argument, and if the courts agree with it, then it is Apple who committed a violation. I don't like that Epic chose to break the contract, but the complexity of the legal system often requires a breech of contract in order to establish standing for a case that the contract violates the law. They could always change that to make such actions easier, but they haven't yet done so.
More importantly, the arguments for Epic and for Apple have a strange asymmetry. The argument for Epic is that Apple is using large market power, which they have, to constrain their customers in a way which has been seen repeatedly, whereas the argument for Apple is that Apple are owed things for [insert something Apple developed]. The law does not agree with you that Apple is owed merely for having decided to develop something, whereas it does have a place for recognizing abuse of market power. In that respect, Epic's argument makes more legal sense. Apple and those who think they are in the right would do well to counter that argument on its merits, namely whether they are actually constraining their customers and whether alternatives to their market exist to a reasonable extent. Sadly, they have also taken to throwing irrelevant arguments at the wall, including the argument that they are great people with an unusual right to get automatic rights of rent collection on anything at all related to their platform or its users. It is not helping their point.
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