Posts by doublelayer

More power for your Raspberry Pi: A new PoE+ HAT to sate power-hungry peripherals

Re: I want an RPi...

Assuming the dollars you are talking about are American, Adafruit is a good supplier of Pi-related equipment in the US. They seem to have all variants of the Pi 4B at the moment at the Pi's set prices.

Apple is happy to diss the desktop – it knows who's got the most to lose

Mobile to the enterprise: go away

"it is true that Win10 in a well-maintained enterprise environment is no more inherently vulnerable than Apple or Linux would be, were that ever to happen. But all three are the wrong answer to 21st century general business computing needs."

This argument is not a good one. Of course the complexity of a desktop OS means there's more work to do when a bunch of people are using them, but the reason that's still the case is that simpler mobile devices frequently come up short. Whether IOS, Android, or Chrome OS, these things will not be suitable for some users and some companies. You could still segregate the business into those people who can use something simple and those who can't, but that means you have twice the variety of systems to support for your users.

There are a few things that basically every desktop OS can do which basically every simple OS can't well. Multi-user is one thing. If you have a computer that multiple people may use, you can do that with Windows, Mac, or Linux but just try to do that well with an Android tablet. Yes, they do multiple users, but they don't easily handle the authentication process or sync preferences. Try that with an iPad and you'll find it's not capable of the task at all. How about using a full set of peripherals for someone who works better with some large screens, keyboard, mouse, etc. Some devices won't support multiple displays. Some weren't designed with mouse use in mind and will be painful.

Mobile devices can be used in some places, and they can even be superior for some tasks than a desktop. For most use cases, though, they'll be much worse than a desktop. If you have to have one standard, it should be a desktop.

This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook faced surprisingly tough questioning from judge

Re: Hardware Lockin and Appstore taxes

The software developer does not owe the hardware developer anything. The user buys the hardware, paying what the company charges for it. The user buys the software, paying what the software developer charges. If the software developer has to license something from the hardware developer, they've already done that.

If Microsoft spends a bunch of money developing something interesting, and you write a program which runs on Windows, it is not your responsibility to pay for their development time. If they want you to, they can charge you a license fee to use their interesting thing and you can decide whether to pay it or not use their thing. If it has nothing to do with you, then you don't pay for it and they'll have to get their revenue from somewhere else. If they choose to give it away for free, then you still have no responsibility to pay for it. The same applies to Apple. They choose to do R&D based on their own interests: selling new devices and keeping people on their platform. If it works for them, that's where the money comes from to pay for the work. If it fails, too bad for them. They choose to spend the money, they have to make the money. You cannot force software developers to pay for anything Apple does.

Re: Hardware Lockin and Appstore taxes

"As to obtaining customer details how can you make a financial transaction without giving personal details away,"

They get payment information from the customer, just like every other time you buy something. They would ask for that information from those who want to buy things, not from Apple. They are thus not demanding any of Apple's records and the original point is still wrong.

Re: Hardware Lockin and Appstore taxes

Most of this is wrong.

"For saying how many middle men have been removed during this period the price for softwarestrangely has not gone down, suggesting that software houses are taking that cut for themselves rather than passing on via lower purchase cost on to the customer."

This would be hard to get a study on, but anecdotally, I think prices have come down quite a lot. Software purchases in the 1990s were often more expensive for relatively simple software, whereas a lot of software today is free or cheap. I also remember the purchases of software upgrades, which were often rather expensive when you consider that they were usually fixing bugs in the thing I already bought. That still happens on occasion, but a lot of places now view that as maintenance of a product they've already sold and include bugfix updates. Is that because the commissions came down, maybe, but probably not. Is it because there are more people writing it, probably. Is it because they've expanded their business models so less comes via the original purchase price, definitely. But still, if you asked me, I would say that there is a lot more cheap software out there.

"I could talk about book publishing or the music and movie industry and say that they too have not dropped their prices even though they are now distributing direct to the customer."

Well, they're usually not distributing direct to the customer. Also, I think prices have come down. For example, you can watch a lot of movies on a streaming service for a price which would have gotten a small number of rentals, and rentals for a short period. Whether that's the way you choose to spend your movie budget is another story, but it is a price and it is lower.

"I would suggest that the price that people are willing to pay for these products is far in excess of what the products costs to make and that even after all the middle men have been remove the software houses continue to charge the same and keep the profits rather than reward their customer for their loyality."

Doesn't matter to me. I don't need to be rewarded for my loyalty. If I still want the product, I will still buy it. If they cut their prices, so much the better for me. If a competitor creates an alternative which is cheaper, I might go over to them to take advantage of those. You seem to expect that companies will just cut their prices for no reason and somehow you feel you are entitled to this whereas Apple don't have to cut their prices. I don't get it.

"Add in that Apple need money to keep their production going where EPIC have already paid all their costs for making this product and are still not satisfied and demand a reduction in overhead on their micro transactions."

Apple do not need money to pay for their production. They get that from sales. The product concerned is not theirs. It is Epic's, and the value to the customer comes from what Epic provides those who choose to pay. Also, they don't demand that Apple gives them more money on their transactions, since they're more than willing to use their own transaction system and relieve Apple both of the commission and the required labor in managing the transaction.

Re: Hardware Lockin and Appstore taxes

This is wrong:

"Instead EPIC has demanded that Apple give away access to their customers for free, name me one company willing to give up their client list and so their business because that is what EPIC is demanding."

No, they are not demanding anything of the kind. They have not requested Apple's customer list. They are demanding that they have the option to reach customers of Apple who choose to reach them without Apple interceding. The customers bought the devices, they're no longer Apple's property, and the customers already know Epic's existence and want to use their software. You act as if they want Apple's list of accounts, which they have never requested, and you act like Apple owns the iPhone owners and should have the exclusive right to control and sell access to them. Apple does not have that right.

It took 'over 80 different developers' to review and fix 'mess' made by students who sneaked bad code into Linux

"Which begs the question - if these now-rejected commits are bad enough to need removing now, what went wrong with the review process originally to allow them to be accepted? Which begs the follow-up question - what *else* has slipped through the review net and made it into the release branch?"

These are important questions, but not really new ones. We know that bad code gets into Linux all the time. They have to keep fixing bugs and security holes and each of those got in at some point. They have decided that speed takes precedence over a very long review sometimes. A useful study would look at the largest bugs and track back to the review which should have caught them. They could identify patterns where the reviews are insufficient. That would have made a lot of sense, but it would also have been a lot more work than committing buggy code to see if the process which has let in errors before lets in errors for the 2684th time.

Re: The only sane thing to do

You may have a few misconceptions about what happened.

"So the Linux patch validation infrastructure was so bad that a bunch of dippy college students was able to upload bad patches into the kernel."

No. They wanted to do that, but realized the risks before getting that far. From the original article on the subject, here's a statement from one of the researchers describing how far they actually got:

The buggy patches, he explained, were sent via email and did not ever become a Git commit in any Linux branch because maintainers were informed after the fact so they would not move forward with the bad code.

Who knows what would have happened if the code was in a real PR and got through the full review. It might have gotten through, but we don't know that. It also could have been detected and thrown out.

People here are assuming that it got into the next release and subsequently pulled (it didn't) that the Linux kernel devs used to accept anything as long as it came from a umn.edu address (they didn't), that the changes got the full review that others would (they didn't), and that blocking the umn.edu domains is intended as a security feature (it isn't).

"If this had been Microsoft that had punished the University everyone would be screaming bloody murder."

No. If this had in some way happened to Microsoft, the students involved would be facing criminal charges of computer misuse. It's open source, and thus not criminal, but if it was Windows source, that would be illegal. It would have been significantly worse for the students and I would not be taking their side. As it is, the students wanted to test the Linux kernel, and the test isn't exactly useless, but A) they didn't actually run a useful test and B) if you test on people you don't know without informing them, you can expect them not to like it.

Re: Student loan refunds?

There are not many people who will even know this happened, and most who do are smart enough to realize that you can still learn a bunch of valuable computer science stuff without having anything to do with the project. The really smart ones will just check if the applicants were on the paper, which they're almost certainly not, and treat the university as they would have already.

Re: not just umn.edu

They didn't do this for security. They do review all the PRs that get merged, so it's not a case of blindly trusting someone from a domain name. This is a method of indicating displeasure with the university. The university approved the study which they consider offensive, and they're hoping that the block on it will indicate to the interested parts of the university that the Linux kernel developers aren't pleased with what they did. Anyone at the university can still contribute by using a different email address. It's not in any way intended to be a security feature.

China announces ‘crackdown’ on Bitcoin mining and trading

"Go for an asset backed cryptocurrency and you're more of an investor but still high risk because those cryptocurrencies are still pretty niche and volatile."

If you want to invest in an asset, buy a fund that reflects that asset. They're regulated and have to verify they actually have that asset. Crypto doesn't add any benefits there. Crypto only has benefits in theory as a method of exchange, and an asset-backed one usually lacks that fluidity without doing much about the volatility problem.

All that Lego has a purpose: Researchers find that spatial memory improves kids' mathematical powers

How to use it best

Now we just have to study which approach is the more useful when building Lego structures. My brother preferred to follow the plans and build exactly what was on the kit. I constructed less sophisticated structures, usually some variation on large box which has to hold various items together, but that meant I had to pay more attention to the strength of my structures which were holding up other things. I wonder which of us was learning more from the experience. My brother's creations held together for years, whereas I would usually scrap mine for parts quickly, so he definitely gets the endurance advantage.

Apple's macOS is sub-par for security, Apple exec Craig Federighi tells Epic trial

Re: It is the 30%

Most of this is misleading or wrong.

"Apple has stated that not every company is charged 30%"

Now, but that's very recent. There's now a 15% category for small businesses, but until that, everyone was charged 30%. Now, pretty much everyone is still charged 30% but there's a second option. Not incorrect per se, but misleading.

"and not every transaction is the same."

It is, though. Every transaction goes through the same systems that Apple set up.

"An in-app purchase for $1 that costs Apple $.20 to process means they net $.10 or 10%."

It doesn't cost them 20 cents to process a transaction. They've processed small transactions for a long time. Their costs are very low.

"That's assuming that there are no problems such as when a parent rings up to nullify the $300 that little Johnny charged up in a game $1 at a time. It's Apple that has to deal with that, not Epic."

They have recently changed that to let developers handle it. It was their choice when it was only them who could do that.

"Epic also doesn't have a big cost in AR. Apple sends them a payment with a detailed accounting that can be merged into Epic account software rather than having their own people/systems to do it for them."

This is not true. They get receipt information, but it is Epic's responsibility to track who bought what and make that work on their system. They would already have all the necessary data to add to their accounting system because otherwise their in-app items wouldn't work. Their app decides how much the user is charged, their servers receive notification that the purchase was made. Only payment is handled by Apple.

Re: I'd be annoyed if the walled garden is opened up.

This is not a problem for you. Lots of OSes have a walled garden mode which you can activate or not as you choose. Mac OS has one. Windows has one. Android has one. If IOS had to allow app sideloading, you just have to turn that off (or likely just not turn it on), and you have the situation you have now. Just as you can ask Windows not to install things unless from the Windows store. Nobody does that, but it's right there in the settings.

If you actually have a million apps, sure. But most accounts don't. Just pointing out that they do have a revenue stream for free apps in addition to the benefits those apps provide to their user numbers.

About that ... no. You can't do that unless you have a bunch of knowledge and also bought a Mac. Compared to Android, where you can do it on any platform and you don't need to figure out the build process for every tool, or to a desktop OS, where you can compile it directly on your platform if you need to and can use it without restriction. It's not at all comparable and it's difficult for most people.

It's not the restrictions on apps that I mind. If Apple decides that apps should live in their own sandboxes and have no access to each others' files or system files, that's a security decision that makes sense. It's not always convenient, but it's definitely a feature. There is no reason they can't allow people to add apps that live in such sandboxes but didn't come through their store. Security by having security precautions, not security by hoping they'll catch things.

"Out of curiosity, how much does it cost to publish a free app with no revenue generating potential?"

All developers who want to publish apps must pay an annual fee to be part of the developer program. This fee is $99 US or its local equivalent. They also need to give Apple a reasonably good revenue stream by buying Macs, as you can't use any other OS to use their developer tools or publish things.

Hi, Congress. FTC here. It would be so wonderful if you could let us recover money stolen from victims by crooks

Re: What's going on?

"Possibly, they are looking at what happens when Police forces find they can increase their "budget" when they get to keep the "proceeds of crime" when they win a prosecution."

Force them to return the proceeds to the victims and that stops being a problem.

US Treasury wants to treat cryptocurrencies like cash – as in you need to report $10k+ transactions

Re: The government will shut down Bitcoin, just watch!

Your core points are disputable. I'm taking them out of order.

"What governments can do is make it more difficult to move between fiat and crypto. That means it is important to get your share of crypto today because tomorrow the door may not be open to you."

No, that's not what that means, assuming for the moment that they're going to do that. If they're going to cut the transfer mechanisms between crypto and fiat, then a lot of people who use crypto as an investment are going to sell then. Crypto will be much cheaper for me, as someone who wants to use it as a currency, once the investors get out. It would do me well to wait. In addition, having some crypto if I had to start using it as a currency will do me little good if I'm still being paid in fiat and can't convert them easily. Only if everyone agrees to use crypto would I get a lot of value from it, in which case I will get crypto in my paycheck. Under your system where the government is running a full-on assault on crypto, that seems unlikely.

"Cryptocurrencies are inherently a better store of wealth than any fiat currency. They are even better than precious metals."

On what basis? Current attempts are hideously volatile, which most fiat currencies and precious commodities avoid. They're also a lot harder to spend. Until those things get fixed, crypto is failing at both the store of value and medium of exchange parts. This isn't an intrinsic defect of the system, and I think a more stable cryptocurrency is possible, but that doesn't mean it exists now or that it ever will.

Singapore orders social media to correct Indian politician’s allegation of local COVID-19 variant

Re: So evolution is real then

"it is rather difficult to _prove_ that it is the mechanism by which it occurred without a time machine."

It's a good thing we have a time machine, then. It's called genetic paleontology unless you want to use the specific terms for each time period. Lots of preserved genetic material and the products thereof have been disinterred, sequenced, and compared both to other historical material and modern material. It tells us a lot.

India ponders why just three per cent of its broadband services are wired

Re: Take care of the poverty first.

I agree that connecting more people is an important benefit to them, but I don't think fixed broadband is the answer to that question just yet. At the moment, more basic lacks are probably hampering it more often. For example, people without any or consistent access to electricity. Statistics on how many people are covered are unclear, but a report from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water says that about 30 million people are entirely without electricity access and that the average person has 18-20 hours of access per day and has a power cut at least once a day. Given the large number of people in cities where electricity supply is likely better, that probably means the rural areas have very bad coverage and frequent long blackouts. Reports from other sources have higher numbers. The World Bank, for example, cites about 60 million people with no access.

If I was in either category, I might have a laptop but I certainly wouldn't have broadband. If my power dies for six hours each day, then it's likely my internet will not be available when I need it. If I use a phone, I can tether my laptop if it's urgent or just use the phone's browser. Why pay for something if it's going to be unavailable a lot and there's an alternative which you also need and doesn't go down as much?

Ex-Apple marketing bigwig tells Epic judge: Our revenue-sharing model is designed to stop money laundering

Re: Lets do some casual math

What does that have to do with anything? The discussion is about Microsoft's and Apple's approaches towards developers, not what their other products are capable of doing. Completely irrelevant.

Re: Lets do some casual math

"Microsoft uses a different model called "the first shot is free". They encourage you to develop on a platform you will not be able to walk away from once you've sunk enough into development"

What? Isn't that basically everybody? Unless you develop your program in a platform-independent way, then you might find that you have high sunk costs if you want to abandon a platform but keep the program. Windows is no more like that than Mac OS or Android; it's not a Microsoft decision or plot.

The solution to that is to develop in a platform-independent way. Most of the time, you can do that as long as you planned to do so at the beginning. There are only a few platforms which make it harder, and Windows isn't one of them. You can quite easily use cross-platform utilities for your program which will run perfectly well on Windows. It's often harder to use those on IOS. I think your complaint is not only almost meaningless, but also applies better to Apple than it does to Microsoft. Not that it's a problem with Apple either.

Re: Money laundering, sure

Giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming this wasn't made up a month ago, I wonder what money they're assuming people will launder? The only thing I can think of is that someone buys a gift card with stolen cash, then uses it on their account to buy a bunch of in-app items and collects the proceeds. That's not going to happen. What they do with the gift cards after stealing or scamming people out of the money for them is sell them to other people who assume they're legitimate. That way, there's no spike on specific accounts or purchases and they still get their money.

Throw anything at the wall approach

It's to prevent money laundering. Definitely. They said not to go lower but I suggested it. This proves I'm a good guy. And that we didn't need to take that high commission to equal costs I mean no, not that, actually we lose money on it and we need that income. But also it's to prevent low-quality apps because developers would make and sell them to the money laundering people and have a nice time at WWDC having paid us only a couple grand because that's what we charged them. And also there are chips in our phones, very good chips, that we built and that needed money which we got from all the people we sold phones to because most of the expensive stuff is hardware-dependent. But people used it, so this means developers should pay us for their user's hardware, and all this has to do with the App Store payment percentage, trust me.

GitLab tries to address crypto-mining abuse by requiring card details for free stuff

Re: Might not even be lawful

"As if MS actually cared about the legality of this though..."

Research failure. It's Gitlab, not Github. MS owns Github. Gitlab made the change.

Apple seeks to junk claim that iOS is an 'essential facility' in legal spat with Epic Games

Re: It is

Comparable platforms, not devices. There are basically two. IOS and Android. The market share of IOS is sufficient to make it an oligopoly situation by any definition and a monopoly under the terms of some competition laws. On that basis, it is large enough to have restrictions on how it can profit from its power.

China all but bans cryptocurrencies

Re: Re. Update

"I have it on good authority that Microsoft, Google AND Apple are about to block common Wallet apps via mandatory firmware update."

Nice try. This is the wrong place to make up stuff. We know how firmware updates work. If all three companies wanted to do that (they don't), only Apple has a chance of actually doing it. Windows and Android firmware updates aren't reliable enough to be made mandatory. Manufacturers would have to assist and they wouldn't bother. Nor would they somehow block access to the files used by the apps. You want to appeal to nonexistent authority, find people who don't know those things and try to bluff them.

Re: Bitcoin’s price has dropped around 1.5 per cent in the last 24 hours.

If they can still find someone outside the country who will buy it, then they can get money from it. I don't expect they will stop mining now since they've already incurred most of the fixed costs. I would expect them to stop investing in more mining hardware though. China could easily prevent mining, but they probably care a lot more about large groups of people having crypto which they could try to use for exchange than a few large places having a lot of it.

Linux laptop biz System76 makes its first foray into the mechanical keyboard world with dinky, hackable Launch

Re: Why?

That depends on the quality of the software and what you want to run the macros on. Two differences come to mind. First, if you want to use the keyboard to issue macros on something on which the software won't run, then this keyboard can do it but others can't. Second, most macros I've seen are rather basic, taking a (usually finite) sequence of key presses only. With the ability to write custom code, you could create macros which take parameters and act accordingly. Again, not sure why you would want to, but it's an option.

Re: Why?

The only benefit I can see is that you could write macros which would automatically press keys in order. You can't easily use it to add new symbols since it's still just reporting key states, but if the keys you want to press are already available, it can issue them without you having to do so yourself. That would allow you to establish a bunch of custom keystrokes. This sounded interesting when I first thought of it, but now I'm having trouble trying to figure out why as I've never had an interest in doing that before.

Open-source developers under corporate pressure to adopt less-permissive licenses, Percona CEO says

Re: The actual problem

"For open source to survive and thrive people have to be able to make money and earn a living from it"

This is going to depend on your definition of open and your proposal for how they're going to make money via license changes. If they change the license such that they can make a user pay or deny them the right to use the software, then I don't consider it open anymore. It would prohibit most of the things that can be done with open source today. It doesn't matter much whether the license used is old or new; it matters what is in it.

Re: "pressure from their boards"

Mostly because it's completely at odds with the ideals of open source. It's not really a hybrid approach, it's pulling the rug out from the users who assumed those freedoms would hold true. Take Elastic's decision. Theoretically, they're still open source since they have a license which is free of cost, doesn't restrict who can use it, and the code can be read. The problem is that their license has been rewritten so that users can't comply with it--it requires a user to license basically everything under that license which would violate nearly every other open license out there. They did that so the only remaining option was to pay them for the rights to ignore that license.

In Elastic's case, they took that step in order to make it more likely that users would pay them, but they didn't pay any of the outside contributors to the code. In fact, they're now including all of that free code in the product they're charging for. Both changes are legal, but from a moral perspective, those who change the licenses are doing the same thing they didn't like when the cloud companies did it.

Re: @karlkarl - Stupid question

The suggestion, AGPL, does require that source be distributed when code is used to provide a service, so it fixes that problem. It does not fix the problem which is most often described, because most cloud vendors aren't using the open source projects with a bunch of useful additions they won't give away. Instead, they're using the code almost exactly as you or I could but they make money and don't give that money away. I understand the complaints of the projects who have this happen, but they chose a license which explicitly allows it so I usually can't take their side.

Re: Stupid question

"is it not possible to create a new license that specifically forbids companies that meeting certain criteria from taking their software and reselling it as a could service without compensation? Companies with revenues >$1b or something?"

It's definitely possible and has been done before, but it does not meet the definition of open source or free software and wouldn't get approval from the FSF or OSI. Most licenses deemed not open or free won't get the support of others. Part of the requirements for open and free includes that there isn't a restriction on who can use the software--there must be one set of requirements which applies to all users. Therefore, licenses that say no commercial use, no governmental use, or no military use have already shown that that restriction is viewed as breaking the definition. So you can do it, but it likely means fewer users and contributors.

Apple sent my data to the FBI, says boss of controversial research paper trove Sci-Hub

You know that none of the points you said have anything to do with his statement, right? And that several don't even work together?

Cloudflare launches campaign to ‘end the madness’ of CAPTCHAs

I do have one already. They're great, as you've said, for authentication. Very key word, authentication. Where I wish to prove my identity to a service so they can identify that I'm me. That's their use case.

I don't want to authenticate to a bunch of random sites with a unique key which identifies me particularly. I can access them anonymously now. Most don't even have captchas, but since it's Cloudflare suggesting this and they provide hosting for a lot of sites, it's not unreasonable to expect they'll expand the use of it. Also, the key I have doesn't work with a phone, because I don't tend to log into sensitive pages on it, but I do browse from it so I'd have to buy another key for that. So the general complaints apply to my situation without my having to have any problem with the keys themselves.

Re: Hardware dongle

"OK, I need to check I'm not misunderstanding something here. Their proposal for humans to identify themselves as human and not a computer, is to get a computer to do it for them automatically. I'm really not clear on how this is supposed to help."

It's supposed to help because it's an expensive computer that does it for them. If users all have to buy these, then it is more expensive to run automated attacks through them. Also, individual users won't buy multiples so they won't have multiple identities, meaning it's really easy to track their activity. This works until somebody gets their devices trusted and sells a block of keys to a botfarm, which should take a long time, maybe even a whole month. But if that ever happens, the company that did it gets delisted from the service, which cuts off the botfarm. Oh and also the people who legitimately bought and used that company's devices, too bad for them. Now we just have to find a new provider of keys so there's sufficient supply. I'm sure they won't do the same.

Re: Hardware dongles?

I don't know if that's what it's attempting, but I don't think so. I think it has more to do with what Google knows about you by the time you click the box--if you're a known account, they just add the site and any information to your advertising profile and let you through. If you just did a captcha, then it's probably safe and they'll let you through this one too. If you don't have either of those, click on all the [insert subjective category here].

I don't think I'm doing anything mechanical in my input, but I don't browse with any Google accounts active and thus get asked for the captcha on every site that has one. It could be worse though. At one point, I was accused of spamming Google's captcha because I was on a crowded network. If that happens, you have no method of bypassing it and just have to wait an hour and hope for the best when you try again.

Your private data has been nabbed: Please update your life as soon as possible while we deflect responsibility

Re: Hope he doesn't try publishing this in The Register.....Oh Wait!

In his defense, how good do you think the Linux install on a USB device sold by someone who won't even admit that's what it is will be? I am willing to bet that the person starting that up (assuming they can figure out how) is going to be faced with a very restricted environment which doesn't have drivers preinstalled or packages updated because that would take time. Nor will any of that be automatic because installing new things will fill up the tiny USB drive and the user might return it in time. They need it to look like it works long enough for the return window to close.

Audacity's new management hits rewind on telemetry plans following community outrage

Re: Telemetry

There are cases where I don't mind the collection of telemetry, but most of the time, it's not valid. I'll admit to having written code on occasion which has the ability to report telemetry, but several caveats apply to every time I've done it:

1. It is opt in, and the page asking for the user's consent contains a thorough description of what is collected, how it will be collected, how their personal data is kept away from it, and that nothing bad happens if they say no.

2. It only concerns basic information about the application and doesn't include identifiers.

3. It gets sent to self-hosted infrastructure so only I can see it.

4. Users can see the reports as they are sent to check that I have told the truth.

Even then, there are concerns about the collection of such information. What if there is personal information involved? What if the system on which it is collected is restricted and shouldn't be originating any traffic? More importantly, what information does the telemetry provide that is needed? If you care about crash data, you can ask them to send it when the crash happens rather than sending lots of data when it's working properly. For all these reasons, most if not all software should have a no-telemetry-at-all option.

When software depends on a project thanklessly maintained by a random guy in Nebraska, is open source sustainable?

Re: opensource.com

"So you're a fan of free riders?"

Yes, I am. In fact, I donate to projects primarily because they're free for others. Free to use for those who can't afford it. Free to use for those who can afford it but should figure out how good it is before we ask them to donate. Free to me if I should decide I still want the software but don't agree with the developers anymore. Free to get the source and modify it. These free-of-cost and free-in-spirit aspects are important to me.

Blessed are the cryptographers, labelling them criminal enablers is just foolish

Re: Really ????

That's not new. People have been having verbal conversations to avoid leaving a trace since letter interception and wiretapping became things. They did it with paper, private phone systems, transient message systems on shared computers, and now transient message systems over the internet. It's not surprising that people will hide evidence that way, but it's also a part of how life works and can't really be prevented without extreme side-effects.

Re: Peer review

"Thanks to all the Anonynmous cowards, and others, for the advice, and the downvotes (last time I ask for advice on this forum)."

The advice you got was good. Not everything, sure, but if you're looking for somewhere to get your algorithm tested, you got some suggestions which will work, will get results fast, and will be free. What's your problem? If you're complaining that we didn't just assume it was perfect, then you'll be waiting a long time for that. I assumed from your original comment that you knew there was a possibility of error and wanted ideas, and you have gotten them.

Water's wet, the Pope's Catholic, and iOS is designed to stop folk switching to Android, Epic trial judge told

"And yet it's exactly what Epic want as well... buy Fortnite DLC from Apple and get to access it on [...]"

No, that's not what they want. They want to be able to run their app without their users buying it from Apple. They made it, and they want all the money from sales of it. They want to sell it to IOS users, rather than having Apple sell it to IOS users, but this they are not allowed to do, so they want Apple's monopoly position to require them to at least ease the terms.

Re: Computing 101 - one platform's software doesn't run on another

"And how would buying something from the Apple App Store and it working on all other stores for all other platforms work?"

Like this:

Please enter your username:

Please enter your password:

You would like to purchase the following in-game items, which will cost 12.99. Please confirm.

Thank you for your purchase. This will be stored in the account you just signed into. If you use the same account on another platform, it will still be there.

If a developer wants to implement this using their own account server system, which most of them do, then why shouldn't it work on multiple platforms?

Re: I thought this case was against Apple?

To some extent, it is relevant because they are trying to show that Apple frequently tries to use its market dominance to disadvantage competitors. It isn't core to their point, as they're talking about a different alleged anti-competitive step, but they want to indicate that it's a pattern of behavior by Apple which harms its customers (users and developers respectively). That is the purpose to their discussion.

Not keen on a 5G mast in your street? At least it'd be harder for crackpots to burn down 'a flying cell tower in orbit'

I wonder how much this will be

I am predicting that, should this become available, the price of the equipment necessary to transmit to it and the usage charges will make it impractical for most use cases, and that power requirements will eliminate most of the remaining ones. Most of the similar systems I have seen are very expensive and charged per device. A small place with a few devices will probably reject it because the base price is exorbitant, whereas a large place with many sensors would not use it because it requires purchasing thousands of connections, one per sensor. In order for this to be useful, they will have to do something to improve the cost and power usage over things like LoRa to a central station which relays it through a different mechanism.

Train operator phlunks phishing test by teasing employees with non-existent COVID bonus

Re: spelling mistakes, a really obviously bad url

"Having verified that it was actually from my company, I clicked the link - and they claimed I "fell for it" and automatically signed me up for remedial infosec training. Never mind that I *knew* it was from the company, and didn't provide any personal details, etc - apparently all it takes to compromise their entire corporate network is for a lowly employee to click a single link, so the employee must be at fault, right?"

Here's some more training. Don't click suspicious links. Clicking links and entering information is certainly worse, but just clicking the link can be a problem. It exposes you to whatever the page might have, including an attempt to steal an SSO token or even a possible (though very unlikely) zero-day in the browser. They were right to treat clicking the link as a partial failure.

Re: But isn't this what (real) criminals would do?

Just because someone did it doesn't make it the company's decision or authentic. If I decided to mess with my colleagues by sending them such an email, my company didn't agree to do what I made up. For the same reasons, the security test can involve things without requiring other parts of the company being obligated to do something that was clearly not intended.